StarCraft 2 Pro Strategy

Antoan Vasilev | 2017-01-04 |

StarCraft 2 is undoubtedly one of the most strategically challenging games available today. It requires focus, patience, and tactical thought. Players are often guilty of under-utilizing key abilities and are forced into tricky situations.

These tips will help inform players of the many ways they can use the races to their advantage and utilize the core abilities that players may be neglecting. This guide will also point out some of the flawed decision making done by players that often causes them to waste their important resources, thus making their gameplay inefficient. If executed as directed, these tips may help snowball players to victory.

Top 5 Protoss Tips

Protoss are highly skilled and intelligent beings. When played strategically, they can devastate their opponents by blindsiding and flanking them. Here are some of the top tricks to keep in mind while playing with their race.

1. Probes are Your Best Friends

The Protoss race is known for its proficiency in scouting and harassing. Players should thus utilize these Probes to their advantage. Once they’ve dropped their pylons, they should be sure to deploy the Probes to scout the enemies.

This tip is particularly useful when facing enemies like Terran, who are very easily antagonized by a Protoss player. Utilize the Probes’ range, even though it is short, and use it to attack the SCV while it is building its barracks. Players can also utilize their Probes to antagonize the enemy drones as well. This will serve to considerably slow down enemies and give players a chance to advance.

2. Don’t Forget to Hallucinate

Hallucinate is an ability that is often underutilized and it enables a sentry to create an illusion of a given unit. The hallucinations have full health, deal no real damage, show attack animations for trickery, and are thus very useful tools to confuse the opponents. It is important to note that Hallucinate is also very susceptible to enemy attacks and the hallucinated units sustain double the damage per attack.

Hallucinations can be easy to spot by seasoned players as they can notice that a certain unit may be dealing no damage but is being dealt extra damage than usual. Detection may get trickier and observations will be more obscure if the hallucinations are dispersed among a few numbers within a unit. A detector is thus used in that circumstance to combat the ambiguity.

Enemy players usually don’t expect the use of this ability by Protoss players and thus proceed without detecting it. Using Hallucinate can serve as a good strategic plan to surprise the enemy. Players should Hallucinate the Colossi, thereby doubling its count, before proceeding to attack. This will blindside the enemy and may cause them to retreat in the early phase of the game.

3. Use Pylons as Proxies

The use of pylons is imperative as a Protoss player. Pylons are important units that can serve as a useful tool to wipe out dozens of harvesters if used strategically. Ideally, a proxy should be set up via a Pylon or Warp Prism in the enemy team’s base. The players should then send the majority of the units to attack the front of the base to distract the opponent. Next, players should warp a couple of units at the Pylon or Warp Prism and have them attack the mineral line. This will enable the players to take the enemy by surprise and knock out a significant chunk of their units.

Pylons serve a key defensive role as well. Therefore, a couple of them should be placed within Home Bases, to avoid enemy flanks.

4. Apply Pressure Early and Frequently

Protoss players have one challenge: establishing expansions. The units have slow mobility and thus it becomes difficult to establish the expansions without dissipating great quantities of resources such as those from Photon Cannons.

To counter this disability, Protoss players are advised to build an army of Sentries, Zealots, and Stalkers. Players should push forward and attack the enemy team. Whilst they are jousting, players are expected to establish their expansion during that period. Afterwards, they should then quickly return to the expansion and defend while their Nexus is up, courtesy of the Photon Overcharge.

When confronted by early aggression from the opposing team, players are advised to build an army of Stalkers and Sentries. They are expected to be defending the base by employing force fields and after a successful defensive attempt, they should counter with an expansion rather than an abrupt push back.

Getting small leads, particularly in mirror matchups, is key to establishing an expansion. Players should ideally destroy a couple of enemy units without squandering their own in order to safely grab an expansion. The minerals gained can be added to the Nexus, resulting in 4 less Zealots. Winning these small battles is pivotal, as it will allow the game to swing in the player’s favor.

One of the hardest things to achieve in StarCraft 2 is the application of pressure. Players should ensure that they’re forcing their opponents to go on the defensive, even if they aren’t carrying out mass executions of enemy units. If they are successfully trapping enemy units within their bases and not allowing them to advance to the Home Base, then the players are on the right track.

5. Losing? Use a Dark Shrine

There is a famous rhyme that has caught on among seasoned StarCraft players and it is:

‘When behind, use a Dark shrine.’

Dark Shrines move from behind and can be a useful tool when a player is behind in the game.

Using a Dark Shrine can totally turn a losing game around if the player is lucky. There is a high chance of failure but it is definitely a move worth trying instead of giving up completely. In a losing game, the player is advised to get a Dark Shrine and use Dark Templar. The Dark Templars can be warped and split so that they can be used to flank the enemy bases and catch them by surprise. If the Dark Templars manage to deal significant damage to the enemies after their infiltration, the players then gain another chance to get back in the game and maybe even change its course. As mentioned earlier, there is a considerably high chance of failure as the enemy team may counter. Regardless, it is a strategy that is still worth trying.