Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

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>In Starcraft, nearly everything has a keyboard shortcut, and can be accessed in milliseconds. Professional players have average APM's of around 300. During intense battles, with their careers on the line, they can get up to 500 or 600. That's almost 10 separate moves per second!

EAPM (Effective APM) is more pertinent than raw APM. APM arguments have raged on for more than a decade (since Broodware at the very least), and there have been many top players with low apm (300 vs 100).

For HNers, an appropriate analogy would be typing speed for coding. We have ongoing (pointless) arguments about the importance of typing speed for programmers. Whatever one's opinion/preference for this subject may be, we've seen plenty of programmers be successful with high typing speeds but many mistypes, and other with relatively low typing speeds but very accurate. There's a pretty wide range in which one can be successful.

>The Starcraft equivalent of a boilerplate template is a build order, which informs which buildings to construct in the beginning of the game.

Build orders need to be informed by the map choice and opponent. I think similar considerations would apply in the template selection in photoshop as well, though not covered in OP. I wonder what the equivalent of such meta considerations would be in design.

>Rush / Macro

Is this the common terminology in SC2 these days? It's strange since the standard counterpoint to "Macro" (economy and production) has been "Micro" (unit control).

Yes, you are correct about "Macro" and "Micro" being antonyms but they are used differently here.

He's talking about a style of play. Generally, "macro" play is going to for the long-game with many bases and huge armies. He calls the opposite of this as "rush." Other synonyms for "rush" are something like "timing attack" or "all-in."

Yes, so I would have called it "Macro-style", "200/200 style", "late-game oriented play", "turtle-style" or any number of expression that would distinguish playstyle and gameplan from the specific terminology: Macro. "Macro" on its own is a misnomer imo.

Also, I don't think "timing attack" is an appropriate synonym for "rush", since timing attacks tend to occur in the early-mid game (typically off of two bases) whereas "rushes" happen within the first few minutes of the game: 7-pool, 2-rax proxy, etc.

In that vain, "all-ins" can occur at any stage in the game (though typically when a cheesy rush or committed early mid-game timing attack occurs at a heavy expense on economy) so it's not an appropriate counter-term either.

But macro is what it's called in the community.

"macro" != "macro-style"

If context makes clear what is meant by “macro” then it will often be used without any further explanation, i.e. “macro” can mean both just “macro” and “macro style”, depending on context.

I would argue that is the case here, though your (honestly baffling) confusion might be a reasonable point against that.

The way I like to think of it is, "macro" play is attempting to win through advantages in macro. In the same way as "micro" play would be attempting to win through advantages in micro.

There is a difference between EAPM, and effective EAPM, in the sense that if you have a high EAPM but do the wrong thing, you still lose the game. SC2 has a way of training you to actually think and make decisions faster, in addition to typing faster, and this is something that I have found to be valuable for increasing my productivity as a programmer.

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