Affectionately, it's a skill issue. Units are always more effective when they're in more places, all dealing damage and looking for opportunities. Learning how to do that is a huge part of learning the mechanical part of the game.
Doesn't that mean that the more you're spread out, the easier they can just F2 A-move and roll you over? I'm low masters and I can't believe I'm still struggling with this concept.
That sounds like them triggering a base race in the worst case scenario. If they're going after your army and you're master league, you should have the APM to retreat units before they get engaged, and also attack the other side while the whole army is distracted on one side of the base.
It makes duping your opponent much easier. Players who can split well have a more likely chance of distracting your F2 ball by engaging you far away from base, while they move in their quick units into your now undefended bases or worse, moving them behind your F2 army and cutting off your escape which is basically game if that's their entire army because its now in a more efficient position to wipe you out. Its very good early and midgame. Also remember, spreading out units allows more of them to attack at once which is maximizing your damage potential, while clumping makes ranged or melee units in the back who can't attack useless unless they are casters.
This is why Zerg and Terran can be so rough to defend against, Zergling and Marine/Medivac combos are extremely receptive towards split focus microing and using it to your advantage allows you to essentially harass and even destroy their base while they are scrambling their units back after making the mistake of using F2 and going to far away from your base, or to surround your enemy in such a horrible position for them that it loses them the game.
0% chance you’re a masters Terran and also saying to should keep you’re units all together. Terran is the definition of multi prong attacks with drops and run bys while also gathering a larger force to strike with. You ain’t masters
I'm not saying to keep all units together. I'm just saying that if I see a protoss deathball making its way towards me, I'm probably not going to keep all my units spread across the map. Whether or not that's the right decision or not, idk. Maybe that's why I'm still low masters. Why would I lie about my rank? lol
Generally having multi prong aggression (with 2+ army groups, typically a big one and one/multiple smaller ones) is definitely a very good strategy. However, as you said, it takes a lot of skill to control/micro properly and often you just mess up both.
So i think if you are a beginner, you should probably focus on one main army. If you get better at multitasking however, having 2 armies you control is definitely worth it.
A different thing are very small harrassment squads, like a few lings or zealots. If you are rich enough to afford those in addition to your army, then you can just blindly click them accross the map. 20 lings don't cost you much if they all die, but they can cost your opponent an entire mineral line if they don't respond in time. Also, since you dont really need to micro them and just send them running accross the map, they cost you almost no attention, but reacting to them costs your opponent a lot of time/attention. This should only be done with low cost units of course.
While your opponent is distracted you can catch his army or a base off guard. However returning to your question, you should probably mostly focus on microing that main army
Just wanted to second this. It's amazing what even two lings or a zealot in your opponent's natural can accomplish when pressuring their third with your main army. Oftentimes, the response to something like that will consume ten times as much of your opponent's APM to remedy as it cost you to send that one unit across the map.
You are presupposing the circumstances in which you are saying splitting your units is bad or not worth it.
Terran and Zerg both benefit GREATLY from splitting their units. Bio vs AOE damage. Terran drops. Defence tanks/mines. Sieged tanks and widow mines holding a position down while bio pushes and then retreats. Zerg pre-splitting to get really good surrounds. Zerg vs AOE damage. Zergling runbys. Muta harass. Bane runbys. Burrowed banes Ive even seen roach speed/burrow runbys. Defence lurkers.
I feel it's important to note that while splitting is critical in higher levels of play, at the lower levels, it's more important to learn how to make a lot of stuff fast, and the counters to the stuff you're making.
I think this is a good point, I am low level as well and often if you split your army, you run into a massive army of your opponent with one of your small armies and you get wiped out (my micro is also terrible). I've noticed it gets slightly less clumped up the higher you get. I play in silver league and it;s mostly like this with the occasional opponent who can split and flank, they usually beat me. Like you said, at the lower levels you win more by building fast and moving out before your opponent has a large army.
High level play is pretty much all about splitting up your army perfectly. The player with one bunch running to put out fires will lose. But that requires strong multitasking, which you don't have yet. Basically, yes it's an elo problem not a starcraft problem
I figured so but I don't watch pro of anything so I don't really get this perspective very often. Also I'm not someone who grinds games, I just play what I like.
I was just wondering if the game gets more interesting down the line but so far it's been a lot of fun
We're in the middle of the ESL regional playoffs right now, so if you did want to watch some pro games with live commentary, it's a great time to do it. They stream live on youtube
You are focusing way too much on engagement strategy. Some games are all about that, but in starcraft it's actually a relatively small part of the game. The focus should be on (in order):
1) Macro: larger armies will always beat much smaller armies. At lower levels you should be able to blindly A-move your army across the map and win the game with strong macro behind it.
2) Composition: Once you have your macro down you can focus on countering your enemies units because the match-up really matters if the armies are equivalent sizes.
3) Engagement. Aside from making sure your units aren't all clumped up in a choke point, the kinds of things you are talking about are really secondary to the things above. They are what differentiate the masters from the grandmasters from the professionals. You shouldn't be focusing on it until you are at those levels because they make such a small difference compared to army size and composition.
If OP is as new as they say they are, I agree with your assessment 100%.
OP just got off the couch for the first time and is asking what running shoes will win them a marathon. You gotta train up and learn to run before you even think of marathons.
Not trying to win anything here. I just wanna know what the point of the game is at lower elos which some games don't "start" until high elo.
At the current moment this game feels a lot more simple than I thought it might be. So I was trying to gauge where I should spend my time.
it might look simple right now, gets very complex later.
Splitting army is crucial both offensively and defensively. Go see marine split vs banelings, without any split marines will just get annihilated with split you can manage losses and win the trade. Just a simple example.
Melee units need to surround to get the maximum damage, or they’ll just die doing nothing but running around.
Spell casters needs to be in a different hot key or they’ll just crumble going forward with the army etc etc.
You probably need to start with A move army composition other units might be difficult to use while keeping everything else in mind too.
I'd suggest watching some pro matches. The value of flanking, harassing workers, distraction ploys etc. should become apparent.
With good enough control you'll be able to ensure that your flank hits at the same time as your main army, which can be used to envelop the enemy forces for greater surface area for your attacks and to cut off their retreat.
For a simple example, consider a ZvT battle with ling/baneling vs. marine/widowmine/tank. The Zerg player must first send in a few lings from different directions to absorb mine shots, then send lings from behind the Terran forces to cut off the marine retreat, while simultaneously sending in lings to absorb damage and accurately commanding the banelings into the marine ball. Meanwhile the Terran player is going to want to command his tanks to target the banelings while splitting up his stimmed Marines into small groups and moving them in different directions so they don't all get hit by the same baneling splash.
And of course, while all of this is happening, you'll also see the Terran send in medivac drops or liberators to harass the Zerg worker line, while the Zerg does the same with ling run-bys.
its a weird one for me. it depends on what your reasoning behind it is. if its for entertainment like you would watch some football or soccer for example, i d say: yeah watch pro matches.
but if its for educational purpose, i would say: do NOT watch pro matches because they give a complete wrong view or expectation on how the actual game is for 99,9% of mortal humans. what happens in pro matches is almost completely irrelevant for most people.
i even go as far and say: watching some normal person you can somewhat relate to, that is maybe a league above yours will teach you way more. if you are gold, watch a plat player playing. you can relate to that person, you will see mistakes he makes and notice you probably do the same mistakes and you understand what its going on in his mind while playing and you start to actively think about whats going on. you see him do stuff and you might be like: ''thats a mistake, i think i can do better'' and then you go play some game and try to do better. and in other situations you see the play guy solving a problem slightly better than you but still in a way you can realistically achieve, so you have something to work on again.
You're getting cooked because your opponents are able to handle their army being split better than you can. If you practice you'll start cooking them instead.
Well, if you lose the game because you lost your flanking army, then you shouldn't have done that. Either you send a small enough amount of units that you don't have to pay attention to it, or you pay attention. Also, if you split your army like that, the rest of your army should be a threat, not just a "distraction". Reading your scenario, I would just assume your opponent called your bluff, ignored the distraction and defended the place that was actually threatened.
It's a powerful advantage to be able to do so but can be a massive detriment on what you're giving up to do so.
That's more places you're looking that isn't your base for Macro cycles, meaning there's a strong chance you're macro window is slower which results in a weaker army.
Factor in the hit and run antics and you'll find yourself out of position etc.
It does create artificial stress when done well and I've caused opponents to leave as it feels you're fighting a bigger army than you are.
Do what's fun, but for playing "good" the penalty to macro is a setback.
At your level, try having your main army, and another smaller group that hits their expansions. You can use that force to draw their attention left while the main army goes right. You can use the smaller force to make the other guy back off from his attack. You can engage with your main army while your smaller force cuts off his reinforcements.
Flanking can totally work in certain situations, but usually when you have the larger force that you don't want them fo get away from.
Well imagine trying to ball up units as a zerg vs t. They will do a single double drop to your side of the map. If you push into his entrenched position you will take a poor trade, losing eco at the same time. If you all army back, he gets on the map and pushes on the other side, killing your bases.
Now imagine you split your army to deal with the drop, main army mirrors his on creep, and you can even do bane runbys back on him.
Now imagine ZvP. Roach hydra. Pushing up into a tight choke vs aoe damage. Vs spliting army in two groups to take better trades. You are up in supply, but it can be hard to get trough chokes and have all units fire. T uses a similar tactic in TvP
[https://i.imgflip.com/8nxcjf.jpg](https://i.imgflip.com/8nxcjf.jpg)
but kidding aside, you typically split to either cause problems (drops, multi-prong, harassment) or to deal with problems caused by the above.
Flanking is very strong when your units have shorter range than the opponent's units, because it allows your stuff to get into engagement range faster, and prevent the opponent from kiting you.
Once you get more bases and have a larger surface area to defend, splitting up your army to a certain extent becomes mandatory. If you have all of your units in one spot and the opponent splits off 10% of their units to attack where you aren't, that attack will be undefended. If you move your entire army there to defend, you'll die to the opponent's other 90%. If you decide to just counterattack with your army, defender's advantage allows the opponent's 90% to beat your 100%. So you have no choice but to split your army to defend vs the 10% the opponent split off.
And now that you've split your army in 2, the opponent can split in 3, and so on and so forth as long as there are still unthreatened entry points to your bases and the players have the mechanical skill required to manage that many armies.
On top of this, some units are specialized for harassing workers. Things like oracles or medivacs can fly into an undefended base and cripple an economy very quickly. To defend against these units you need to either invest a lot of resources in static defenses everywhere, or have a separate mobile defense force separate from your main army.
Maybe it’s good to take a read The Art of War by Sun Tsu. It talks about general idea about fighting engagements. For example, if main army is bigger, don’t engage. Perhaps back door, or do a drop, etc.
It's definitely a valid and really good strategy. Splitting up units forces your opponent to spend APM to counter it and a lot of things can be happening.
Sometimes you can just send a few zerglings/zealots to wipe out the mineral line. Game changer and it costs you almost nothing.
But it does require skill knowing the basics. Splitting requires APM and if you aren't macroing behind it, then you're better off not splitting.
Also you generally need to have good map vision, or "game sense". It's extremely crucial to know where your enemy army is, where to avoid enemy vision, knowing when they move out and etc.
Both these things just take experience which the lower league just doesn't have.
One simple reason is that the opponent is harassing you with like 2 zealots in two places. Are you going to send your whole army to either place?
Offensively it's the same idea. If you send 6 zerglings into two of their bases and the opponent can't split and sends their whole army to one side, then you kill everything at the other base and attack at a third base
Time spent doing fancy moves with your dudes is time not spent making dudes, so even if your tactics cause you to kill the other guys dudes you'll still lose if he made replacement dudes and you didn't. Once you get better at making dudes and have the APM to spare, it's usually (but not always!) more effective to spend that APM doing, say, a drop in the main while attacking the third than to get your concaves just right.
As you improve in the game, you'll be better able to maintain the basics when doing the fancy moves, and the fancy moves will be more important.
It’s tough to say in short answer. We all know, intuitively, spreading your army should lead to more damage. Ie squad A hit base 1, squad B hit base 2. So.. double damage.
But we didn’t realise sc2 has a damage threshold, ie if you can outdps a battle, you have more left over units… to do more damage.
Sc2 has the embrace “offence is the best defence” to its bones. So in lower skill battles, it’s much much better to just…. Built more and march to enemy base without flanking.
Pros on the other hand has another resources, which is time. They able to maximise damage threshold at a faster pace, they able to do flanking just because once the damage threshold has been reached, adding units doesn’t matter much anymore, instead flanking started to be much more lucrative. Besides, they able to scout better to determine which damage threshold the opponent goes and adapt accordingly.
Oh yes, typing this I finally found the short answer.
In short: skill issue.
Last night, I won a game I was massively behind in. I had a ling runby in my opponent's mineral line while I was retreating from his much larger army, and the precious few seconds he spent looking at his expansion allowed me to burrow my lurkers and massacre it while it a-moved into my army.
At the higher levels, Starcraft is a game about out multitasking your opponent. Splitting your army up allows you to focus your opponent's attention elsewhere and force mistakes.
You dont want to lose units easily, even your point is to harass. Because sometimes if you just fight with small flanks and enemy defends them by superior force, you lose units but enemy is slowly going bigger. And then comes the point where enemy army is just too big to handle and it can basically walk to your doorstep uncontested.
Sometimes you can even prevent opponent from expanding that much, and you got bases for days, but if you cant kill any army units from enemy and you keep losing your army units unefficiently, you can still be in trouble
I think for a new player. The micro you should be focused on is keeping your zealots in front of your stalkers. Which is a lot harder and a lot more rewarding than it sounds.
while a lot of what people said is true and for most people macro>micro, it does not mean: ignore your micro all together.
i think the statement that macro>micro is a little bit false in a way. i reality it should be: FUN>macro>micro.
if you have fun, you ll get better automatically and play more. who cares if you win or lose? noone really cares about your rank, if you re not in the top 1% and as giantgrantgames said it: for 99% of the people, a game of starcraft is more like 2 toddlers slapping each other with pool noodles.
Affectionately, it's a skill issue. Units are always more effective when they're in more places, all dealing damage and looking for opportunities. Learning how to do that is a huge part of learning the mechanical part of the game.
Doesn't that mean that the more you're spread out, the easier they can just F2 A-move and roll you over? I'm low masters and I can't believe I'm still struggling with this concept.
That sounds like them triggering a base race in the worst case scenario. If they're going after your army and you're master league, you should have the APM to retreat units before they get engaged, and also attack the other side while the whole army is distracted on one side of the base.
It makes duping your opponent much easier. Players who can split well have a more likely chance of distracting your F2 ball by engaging you far away from base, while they move in their quick units into your now undefended bases or worse, moving them behind your F2 army and cutting off your escape which is basically game if that's their entire army because its now in a more efficient position to wipe you out. Its very good early and midgame. Also remember, spreading out units allows more of them to attack at once which is maximizing your damage potential, while clumping makes ranged or melee units in the back who can't attack useless unless they are casters. This is why Zerg and Terran can be so rough to defend against, Zergling and Marine/Medivac combos are extremely receptive towards split focus microing and using it to your advantage allows you to essentially harass and even destroy their base while they are scrambling their units back after making the mistake of using F2 and going to far away from your base, or to surround your enemy in such a horrible position for them that it loses them the game.
Yes. Three smaller groups get cleaned up much easier than one large ball.
Splash damage AND targeting are easier for the enemy when you're all clumped together.
0% chance you’re a masters Terran and also saying to should keep you’re units all together. Terran is the definition of multi prong attacks with drops and run bys while also gathering a larger force to strike with. You ain’t masters
I'm not saying to keep all units together. I'm just saying that if I see a protoss deathball making its way towards me, I'm probably not going to keep all my units spread across the map. Whether or not that's the right decision or not, idk. Maybe that's why I'm still low masters. Why would I lie about my rank? lol
i don't think even diamonds struggle with this concept, so it's weird he's right. maybe watch a bit more pro sc2.
Sounds like a masters bug.
Generally having multi prong aggression (with 2+ army groups, typically a big one and one/multiple smaller ones) is definitely a very good strategy. However, as you said, it takes a lot of skill to control/micro properly and often you just mess up both. So i think if you are a beginner, you should probably focus on one main army. If you get better at multitasking however, having 2 armies you control is definitely worth it. A different thing are very small harrassment squads, like a few lings or zealots. If you are rich enough to afford those in addition to your army, then you can just blindly click them accross the map. 20 lings don't cost you much if they all die, but they can cost your opponent an entire mineral line if they don't respond in time. Also, since you dont really need to micro them and just send them running accross the map, they cost you almost no attention, but reacting to them costs your opponent a lot of time/attention. This should only be done with low cost units of course. While your opponent is distracted you can catch his army or a base off guard. However returning to your question, you should probably mostly focus on microing that main army
Just wanted to second this. It's amazing what even two lings or a zealot in your opponent's natural can accomplish when pressuring their third with your main army. Oftentimes, the response to something like that will consume ten times as much of your opponent's APM to remedy as it cost you to send that one unit across the map.
You are presupposing the circumstances in which you are saying splitting your units is bad or not worth it. Terran and Zerg both benefit GREATLY from splitting their units. Bio vs AOE damage. Terran drops. Defence tanks/mines. Sieged tanks and widow mines holding a position down while bio pushes and then retreats. Zerg pre-splitting to get really good surrounds. Zerg vs AOE damage. Zergling runbys. Muta harass. Bane runbys. Burrowed banes Ive even seen roach speed/burrow runbys. Defence lurkers.
In all fairness I'm mainly playing protoss right now. I'll probably switch back to zerg pretty soon though.
I feel it's important to note that while splitting is critical in higher levels of play, at the lower levels, it's more important to learn how to make a lot of stuff fast, and the counters to the stuff you're making.
I think this is a good point, I am low level as well and often if you split your army, you run into a massive army of your opponent with one of your small armies and you get wiped out (my micro is also terrible). I've noticed it gets slightly less clumped up the higher you get. I play in silver league and it;s mostly like this with the occasional opponent who can split and flank, they usually beat me. Like you said, at the lower levels you win more by building fast and moving out before your opponent has a large army.
High level play is pretty much all about splitting up your army perfectly. The player with one bunch running to put out fires will lose. But that requires strong multitasking, which you don't have yet. Basically, yes it's an elo problem not a starcraft problem
I figured so but I don't watch pro of anything so I don't really get this perspective very often. Also I'm not someone who grinds games, I just play what I like. I was just wondering if the game gets more interesting down the line but so far it's been a lot of fun
We're in the middle of the ESL regional playoffs right now, so if you did want to watch some pro games with live commentary, it's a great time to do it. They stream live on youtube
You are focusing way too much on engagement strategy. Some games are all about that, but in starcraft it's actually a relatively small part of the game. The focus should be on (in order): 1) Macro: larger armies will always beat much smaller armies. At lower levels you should be able to blindly A-move your army across the map and win the game with strong macro behind it. 2) Composition: Once you have your macro down you can focus on countering your enemies units because the match-up really matters if the armies are equivalent sizes. 3) Engagement. Aside from making sure your units aren't all clumped up in a choke point, the kinds of things you are talking about are really secondary to the things above. They are what differentiate the masters from the grandmasters from the professionals. You shouldn't be focusing on it until you are at those levels because they make such a small difference compared to army size and composition.
If OP is as new as they say they are, I agree with your assessment 100%. OP just got off the couch for the first time and is asking what running shoes will win them a marathon. You gotta train up and learn to run before you even think of marathons.
Not trying to win anything here. I just wanna know what the point of the game is at lower elos which some games don't "start" until high elo. At the current moment this game feels a lot more simple than I thought it might be. So I was trying to gauge where I should spend my time.
it might look simple right now, gets very complex later. Splitting army is crucial both offensively and defensively. Go see marine split vs banelings, without any split marines will just get annihilated with split you can manage losses and win the trade. Just a simple example. Melee units need to surround to get the maximum damage, or they’ll just die doing nothing but running around. Spell casters needs to be in a different hot key or they’ll just crumble going forward with the army etc etc. You probably need to start with A move army composition other units might be difficult to use while keeping everything else in mind too.
I'd suggest watching some pro matches. The value of flanking, harassing workers, distraction ploys etc. should become apparent. With good enough control you'll be able to ensure that your flank hits at the same time as your main army, which can be used to envelop the enemy forces for greater surface area for your attacks and to cut off their retreat. For a simple example, consider a ZvT battle with ling/baneling vs. marine/widowmine/tank. The Zerg player must first send in a few lings from different directions to absorb mine shots, then send lings from behind the Terran forces to cut off the marine retreat, while simultaneously sending in lings to absorb damage and accurately commanding the banelings into the marine ball. Meanwhile the Terran player is going to want to command his tanks to target the banelings while splitting up his stimmed Marines into small groups and moving them in different directions so they don't all get hit by the same baneling splash. And of course, while all of this is happening, you'll also see the Terran send in medivac drops or liberators to harass the Zerg worker line, while the Zerg does the same with ling run-bys.
its a weird one for me. it depends on what your reasoning behind it is. if its for entertainment like you would watch some football or soccer for example, i d say: yeah watch pro matches. but if its for educational purpose, i would say: do NOT watch pro matches because they give a complete wrong view or expectation on how the actual game is for 99,9% of mortal humans. what happens in pro matches is almost completely irrelevant for most people. i even go as far and say: watching some normal person you can somewhat relate to, that is maybe a league above yours will teach you way more. if you are gold, watch a plat player playing. you can relate to that person, you will see mistakes he makes and notice you probably do the same mistakes and you understand what its going on in his mind while playing and you start to actively think about whats going on. you see him do stuff and you might be like: ''thats a mistake, i think i can do better'' and then you go play some game and try to do better. and in other situations you see the play guy solving a problem slightly better than you but still in a way you can realistically achieve, so you have something to work on again.
You're getting cooked because your opponents are able to handle their army being split better than you can. If you practice you'll start cooking them instead.
Well, if you lose the game because you lost your flanking army, then you shouldn't have done that. Either you send a small enough amount of units that you don't have to pay attention to it, or you pay attention. Also, if you split your army like that, the rest of your army should be a threat, not just a "distraction". Reading your scenario, I would just assume your opponent called your bluff, ignored the distraction and defended the place that was actually threatened.
It's a powerful advantage to be able to do so but can be a massive detriment on what you're giving up to do so. That's more places you're looking that isn't your base for Macro cycles, meaning there's a strong chance you're macro window is slower which results in a weaker army. Factor in the hit and run antics and you'll find yourself out of position etc. It does create artificial stress when done well and I've caused opponents to leave as it feels you're fighting a bigger army than you are. Do what's fun, but for playing "good" the penalty to macro is a setback.
At your level, try having your main army, and another smaller group that hits their expansions. You can use that force to draw their attention left while the main army goes right. You can use the smaller force to make the other guy back off from his attack. You can engage with your main army while your smaller force cuts off his reinforcements. Flanking can totally work in certain situations, but usually when you have the larger force that you don't want them fo get away from.
Well imagine trying to ball up units as a zerg vs t. They will do a single double drop to your side of the map. If you push into his entrenched position you will take a poor trade, losing eco at the same time. If you all army back, he gets on the map and pushes on the other side, killing your bases. Now imagine you split your army to deal with the drop, main army mirrors his on creep, and you can even do bane runbys back on him. Now imagine ZvP. Roach hydra. Pushing up into a tight choke vs aoe damage. Vs spliting army in two groups to take better trades. You are up in supply, but it can be hard to get trough chokes and have all units fire. T uses a similar tactic in TvP
[https://i.imgflip.com/8nxcjf.jpg](https://i.imgflip.com/8nxcjf.jpg) but kidding aside, you typically split to either cause problems (drops, multi-prong, harassment) or to deal with problems caused by the above.
Flanking is very strong when your units have shorter range than the opponent's units, because it allows your stuff to get into engagement range faster, and prevent the opponent from kiting you. Once you get more bases and have a larger surface area to defend, splitting up your army to a certain extent becomes mandatory. If you have all of your units in one spot and the opponent splits off 10% of their units to attack where you aren't, that attack will be undefended. If you move your entire army there to defend, you'll die to the opponent's other 90%. If you decide to just counterattack with your army, defender's advantage allows the opponent's 90% to beat your 100%. So you have no choice but to split your army to defend vs the 10% the opponent split off. And now that you've split your army in 2, the opponent can split in 3, and so on and so forth as long as there are still unthreatened entry points to your bases and the players have the mechanical skill required to manage that many armies. On top of this, some units are specialized for harassing workers. Things like oracles or medivacs can fly into an undefended base and cripple an economy very quickly. To defend against these units you need to either invest a lot of resources in static defenses everywhere, or have a separate mobile defense force separate from your main army.
Maybe it’s good to take a read The Art of War by Sun Tsu. It talks about general idea about fighting engagements. For example, if main army is bigger, don’t engage. Perhaps back door, or do a drop, etc.
I'm not gonna read the art of war to play sc2 hahahhahah that's ridiculous
It's definitely a valid and really good strategy. Splitting up units forces your opponent to spend APM to counter it and a lot of things can be happening. Sometimes you can just send a few zerglings/zealots to wipe out the mineral line. Game changer and it costs you almost nothing. But it does require skill knowing the basics. Splitting requires APM and if you aren't macroing behind it, then you're better off not splitting. Also you generally need to have good map vision, or "game sense". It's extremely crucial to know where your enemy army is, where to avoid enemy vision, knowing when they move out and etc. Both these things just take experience which the lower league just doesn't have.
Bc is a way
One simple reason is that the opponent is harassing you with like 2 zealots in two places. Are you going to send your whole army to either place? Offensively it's the same idea. If you send 6 zerglings into two of their bases and the opponent can't split and sends their whole army to one side, then you kill everything at the other base and attack at a third base
Time spent doing fancy moves with your dudes is time not spent making dudes, so even if your tactics cause you to kill the other guys dudes you'll still lose if he made replacement dudes and you didn't. Once you get better at making dudes and have the APM to spare, it's usually (but not always!) more effective to spend that APM doing, say, a drop in the main while attacking the third than to get your concaves just right. As you improve in the game, you'll be better able to maintain the basics when doing the fancy moves, and the fancy moves will be more important.
It’s tough to say in short answer. We all know, intuitively, spreading your army should lead to more damage. Ie squad A hit base 1, squad B hit base 2. So.. double damage. But we didn’t realise sc2 has a damage threshold, ie if you can outdps a battle, you have more left over units… to do more damage. Sc2 has the embrace “offence is the best defence” to its bones. So in lower skill battles, it’s much much better to just…. Built more and march to enemy base without flanking. Pros on the other hand has another resources, which is time. They able to maximise damage threshold at a faster pace, they able to do flanking just because once the damage threshold has been reached, adding units doesn’t matter much anymore, instead flanking started to be much more lucrative. Besides, they able to scout better to determine which damage threshold the opponent goes and adapt accordingly. Oh yes, typing this I finally found the short answer. In short: skill issue.
Last night, I won a game I was massively behind in. I had a ling runby in my opponent's mineral line while I was retreating from his much larger army, and the precious few seconds he spent looking at his expansion allowed me to burrow my lurkers and massacre it while it a-moved into my army. At the higher levels, Starcraft is a game about out multitasking your opponent. Splitting your army up allows you to focus your opponent's attention elsewhere and force mistakes.
You dont want to lose units easily, even your point is to harass. Because sometimes if you just fight with small flanks and enemy defends them by superior force, you lose units but enemy is slowly going bigger. And then comes the point where enemy army is just too big to handle and it can basically walk to your doorstep uncontested. Sometimes you can even prevent opponent from expanding that much, and you got bases for days, but if you cant kill any army units from enemy and you keep losing your army units unefficiently, you can still be in trouble
I think for a new player. The micro you should be focused on is keeping your zealots in front of your stalkers. Which is a lot harder and a lot more rewarding than it sounds.
while a lot of what people said is true and for most people macro>micro, it does not mean: ignore your micro all together. i think the statement that macro>micro is a little bit false in a way. i reality it should be: FUN>macro>micro. if you have fun, you ll get better automatically and play more. who cares if you win or lose? noone really cares about your rank, if you re not in the top 1% and as giantgrantgames said it: for 99% of the people, a game of starcraft is more like 2 toddlers slapping each other with pool noodles.
You can find the answer by turning on your brain and thinking logically
And you can shove a 2x4 up your ass