Mental Strategy

Mental Strategy:

Title: Mentally Preparing Yourself For An Attack In Starcraft

    Hey, I haven't written a Mental Strategy in a long time! I think it's time for me to get back into the habit of this because School's out for the Summer! =) Anyways, you guys don't really want to know about that it's time to learn about your mental habits again with Dr. SpaceDominator, a male medic from the "Terran Union Army." Today's topic of order is how to prepare for your next strike against your opponent. Now it's a mental challenge throughout the game and I'm going to make some analogies to other things along the way so stay with me.

    An Attack. Your offensive efforts in the game of Starcraft. It's what's going to determine whether you win or lose a game of Starcraft. Not necessarily one attack but throughout the game the multiple attacks you do could end up wearing out your opponent allowing for you to take advantage of a weak point in him. If you are to be mentally prepared you need to begin by concentrating on the attack. You will need to be the general of the army attempting to pick away at any weak points in your opponent's base. If you see a hole in an opponent's defense attack it! That's a huge factor to anyone winning the game of Starcraft. You need to take advantage of a person's weaknesses. For a simple comparison let's assume we are having a boxing match.(I personally hate them) You have Joe in one corner who is strong but slow, and you have Bob in the other corner who is fast, but weak. Now, would you have Joe try to run around the ring biding his time to knock out a quicker person? No. He would be going in straight ahead going for the Knockout. Bob on the other hand would probably be running for his dear life and jab, jab, jab.(blah, blah, blah). Now, the point in this analogy is that if in the game of Starcraft you notice that they don't have anything to protect themselves from Air Units. Why would you attack him with only ground units? If you understand that this is a weakness you will use this to your advantage and build a few air units and attack this region of land with them. It is the most logical course of action.

    Mentally. You need to be thinking about all of these ideas inside. Look at your minimap and analyze the situation mentally. It's an important aspect to the game. Again the attack you are working for is to either cripple or totally destroy an opponent's base. If you are mentally preparing for an attack you will want to be sure that your opponent cannot do a lot to stop what you are after. Also mentally relax in this situation because you'd be on the attack, they would generally not attack while being attacked. It is a possibility but it is very unlikely for a Starcraft player to risk his life on these feeble responses. You will be concentrating your energy on his base, he or she will be concentrating his energy on keeping his base alive. It will be a battle here until the end. He will usually have the advantage of having the option of building reinforcements to help keep his core troops healthy and alive. The Attacker then if is worried about this possibility should back out of the attack for a few moments to give himself reinforcements. This will allow for you to reconstruct an attack that will be a ton more effective. Let's go to the Civil War picture this time. You are General Lee(General of the Confederates), and I am General Meade(General of the Union Army). Now, let's assume that you decided to attack against my left flank of my base, what would you generally do on the battle field? If this was the Union Army you would probably sweep around and attack them from the outside surrounding them on the inside. Why not try attempting to do this with an Attack? You can attack from the center, and then sweep three portions of your army around three different locations to attack your opponent. Where will he concentrate his defenses, should then be asked to yourself. Once you see this, send your other two groups of units to the region that is not defended and pound away at it. These are all things that you should mentally think about.

    You kind of get the idea of an attack? Well, there's still more that I'm going to discuss about. How you mentally go into the attack is also a very important idea. You need to be thinking about what you want to accomplish by attacking your opponents base. Do you want to try to cripple their defenses, so you can bring in your Reaver to finish off their peasant supply? Do you want to try to destroy an opponent's economy so while you are advancing up the Tech-Tree they are still trying to recover from their losses? Do you want to just attack them straight out trying to cripple them a little at a time? The whole idea is up to you. That's what makes Starcraft a game of Strategy. You are going to come up with your own possibilities mentally and your going to come up with some more new ideas on how to try to do things. Trust me, every game of Starcraft is a testing experience for me. I play by how I feel(like I say). If I feel like being agressive I'll do my darndest(thanks Joy for the word) to be aggressive. The whole point of this paragraph is simple: "Know mentally what your going to do before you attack." If you do this your attack's chance of being successful has gone up by 10% already. True.. 10% is only 1/10 of 100%.... =)

    Now let's get back to the idea of "Pickett's Charge" for a moment here to demonstrate another point about attacking and it's mental relationship to it. Pickett's Charge was a last ditch attempt for the Confederate Army to attempt to attack the Union and to hopefully keep the Union from doing a huge attack on the south. This move ended up being very futile to the Confederates because the charge only delayed the Union for a while before the Union just charged right through the South. You see Lee could have chosen to play it safe and keep his communication open, but instead he attacked. This prooved to be very unwise for the confederates. This will be the last point I'm going to make about Mental relationships to Attacking. Attack using intelligence. It is a great way to be! Don't do a stupid attack because all it will give you is a bunch of casualities for what? A bloodbash? Anyways. These are all important points that you should understand, and remember this as I leave you for now: "The Union won the Civil War"

Thanks

-SpaceDominator