Late Game Macro

Bringing Macro from early game to late game

In between early game and late game is mid game. This is where pressure really starts to fall on your bases, and when attacks are started to ramp up to bigger and bigger assaults. This is where what strategy you picked really starts to affect what you do here, and whether you will hold into the late game. For example it is not a good idea to use "turtling" or Fast Expand because this allows them to control the whole map, unless you start applying pressure as soon as you finish your expansion. A strategy that is pretty much universally good is a 1/1/1, where you can adapt what units you need to protect your expansion, before you start sending in units to pressure their base, and weaken any control they have gained. After This point the game is turning the corner into late game, where you have to possible main strategies, each of which can be very successful.

Once in the late game there are two main choices of either Building another expansion, and overwhelming your opponent with Expensive units, or building enough production buildings to be able to maximize you use of resources. Production is one of the most important parts of StarCraft 2, along with making SCV's. This stays the same into the late game, but since you will have produced a bunch of SCV's early game, you don't need to produce many by the time you are in late game. If you choose to build a third base you should have between five-nine Barracks, and depending if you want to move to a mechanical build or not an additional two Factories or Starports. I haven't worked much with a late game strategy yet, because where I am in the game I do not need it, but will start to practice in preparation for hard and very hard AI's. I have found that you want to keep your Minerals below 500 in stock. When watching my videos you will see that by this time I have about two Barracks, one Starport, one Factory, and around 3000 minerals stored up. To move from rookie to pro you really need to keep your resources constantly flowing, and learn it is okay to have 60 SCV's and 5 Barracks. Even if it seems like overkill to have that many, bunches of people just think, "oh I can just put five marines in the queue and then I will have them in a couple minutes," but this trap is where they will always get stuck. If I have instead five Barracks' I can build five marines in the time a rookie builds one. Needless to say I will quickly demolish the rookie, and it is only because it seems redundant to have many copies of one building. Late game is completely based in how massive an army you can create, and how long it takes you to reinforce it upon its destruction.

The Third Expansion

This is a part of the game where a lot of people have trouble. The Third expansion  is often quite hard to defend, because it can be far away from your original, and your natural expansion. There are two different kinds of third expansions: close and far. A close expansion is as it seems, is located close to you original and natural, whereas a far expansion is not near either of these. Taking a close expansion is relatively easy, because you can use your other bases to keep it protected. These are easy to take and usually have little risk involved. A far expansion is hard to take over, because you lose the ability to keep your enemy at bay due to your inability to reinforce your army. These must be taken very carefully, and the best way to do so is to build the Command Center in your original base, and then fly it over to your waiting troops at your third expansion. Another way to help is to upgrade it to a Planetary Fortress which allows it to defend itself, meaning you can spend less resources defending it. One final thing to do to help the effectiveness of your third expansion is to attack your opponent as you are placing your third expansion. This allows you to keep them focused on defending, and could even give you another advantage if you can aggro their base enough to disrupt their production. Even if you are on a map that offers a far expansion, these tips will make securing it a breeze.