microing/macroing advice por favor?

I use limited hotkeys. I know they are very effective, and I always meant to practice, but I never seem to implement them in real games. Are there any hotkeys that allow me to keep building units while I control my force in my enemy's base? Oftentimes I will attack someone w/o building more units, then get destroyed on a counterpunch. Any further advice is welcomed.

 

I usually have my Nexus/CommandCenter/Hatcheries binded to #4
my production buildings (barracks/gateways/factories etc...) to #3
my air army/and range army to #2
my melee army to #1

when i fight i send my #1 first then #2 (i use #2 to attack all the important units to kill)
while i am fighting i just press #3 ONCE! not twice otherwise your screen will jump to the buildings, and i will press the hotkeys to build the units i want.

A for marines
S for stalkers
Z for zealots
D for marauders
etc...

depending of how the battle is going, if for example, i am winning the battle but i need some reinforcements
I press #3 and right click to where the battle is occuring, this will tell my buildings to send all my newly produced army to where the fight is.

if I am losing a battle, i press #3 and right click at the entrance of my base, so that i am ready for the counter push.

 

Using Ctrl Hotkeys will help you out here. A Ctrl Hotkey is when you select a group of units or buildings and hit Ctrl+(a number), then whenever you hit that number the same selection will come up again. I don't know which race you play, but say you are a Terran player. You can select all of your Command Centers (or just one if you only have one), then hit Ctrl+5. Now, whenever you hit 5 you will be selecting all of those Command Centers again. This allows you to simply hit 5 and then S (the hotkey for making an SCV) multiple times to queue up an SCV at each command center, all without ever taking your eyes off of the battle.

The same applies for production buildings as well. You can set all of your barracks with tech labs to one group or all of your starports with reactors to one group, then just hit the hotkey for whatever unit you want and you're good. If you want to cut down the amount of groups you have set, you can set all of your production buildings with a reactor to one group and all of the production buildings with tech labs to another group. Once you hit the assigned number for one of them, you hit tab to cycle through the different buildings with tech labs/reactors.

Hope that helped.

 

Both very helpful. Appreciate the feedback. Sounds confusing, but at least I know where tostart now. I can see how helpful these things are too. Thanks much.

 

Another good effective macro strategy especially when you are sending troops in as a group with other players is to forget about the micro on cheap units. Just set them to attack in the back corner of their base and forget about them. The idea here is to let your opponent loose his macro rhythm as he is trying to fend off your attack. Meanwhile you never skip a beat back at your base so by the time they get rid of your forces and starts back with their macro guess what? You have another group of troops already there again. This works especially well when you start on it first thing in a game. I'll send my first 3 zealots at someone and sometimes they will never fully recover from that small little rush alone. This of course assumes that you follow up the initial rush with steadily bigger ones, once you decide to play pressure you need to be able to keep it up.

You can't get everything done quickly enough without using hotkeys as far as how you should use them it would be best if you figure out your plan for that and what’s best for you. It doesn’t matter how you assign things just as long as you do. You have to force yourself to do this, take a sheet of paper and right down all of the structures and their units and next to that right down the hotkey for them. Then play against the AI until you can beat it effectively ONLY using hot keys. Once you can do this on hard and very hard you probably won’t even have to think about what keys to push, you'll have them committed to memory.