RA Pro Training Guide
Purpose
This training guide is intended to help players who are so called “average” to become better players, possibly even as good as pros. This is aimed at players who are familiar with the modern post MP, post WW, GS and Kali era of RA history. This guide does not attempt to give information, rather it tries to explain what to practice and how to practice it.
Principles
If you are reading this guide then you have surely asked yourself the question, “What separates the elite from the best and the best from the rest?” While giving a good explanation of what separates the elite from the best may be rather difficult, as I see it what separates the best from the rest is very clear. Two things very easily separate out the good players from the “average” players:
One very simple statement sums this up. Whoever makes the most the fastest wins. I will now try to explain clearly exactly what I mean when I say speed and knowledge.
Speed is a physical aspect of the game. Most simply put it is how fast you click and how well you use your hot keys. Clicking speed and mouse control are the biggest factors in determining the best players. Unlike the new games which have options to make large numbers of units in RA you must click each and every tank. How fast and consistently you press the make tank button has a huge impact. The same goes for buildings, however with buildings you also have to scroll through the building list and place. If you have never used your arrow keys to do this before you must start now. Arrow keys scroll through the building list much faster than clicking, in fact you can preemptively scroll through the list with your arrow keys while placing the building. You must be obsessive about placing all of your buildings ASAP and then instantly clicking on the next building. Doing this fast really shows in long games.
Along with the speed required to produce is the speed required to manage your units. This involves hotkeys more than producing but still relies heavily on your mouse speed. You must practice scrolling across the map and sending scouts at top speed. In theory it is possible to send your scouts and guards the instant they come out of the barracks, and in practice this is less difficult than you might imagine. If you cannot send out your scouts and guards as fast as they come out of the barracks then you must continue practicing. If you do not use bookmarks yet you must learn to use them now. Read the bookmarks section on the main page and make sure you understand them and how to use them. Bookmarks make scouting faster because you no longer have to rely on H and then scroll to your barracks to get your infantry. Also you can set bookmarks where you want to place guards and send scouts and this cuts down on time too.
The place where outstanding speed and mouse control shines brightest is in how well you use your tanks. The most distinctive thing about pros is how well they use their tanks. Tank control involves many things. Qing is entirely about mouse control and ability to click accurately. Shifting tanks is about how well you use your hot keys and bookmarks. The best tankers can focus on all aspects of tank fighting at once and still manage to place their buildings with no delay. If you cannot do this yet, which is probably why you are reading this guide, then you need to practice tanking maps like hjk6. If you have not already done so it is imperative that you remap your bookmarks and begin learning how to use them. I can imagine that for people who are not fast typists that learning how to use your bookmarks and more hot keys is hard, but this game is physical and I have seen people who can’t even type 30 wpm still play RA decently.
Now that I feel speed is sufficiently explained, I will elaborate on what knowledge separates the pros from the average players. Truth be told, RA is very simple. There just really isn’t that much to learn about the game. This website may contain pages and pages of information, but beyond the specific details of build orders from map to map there just isn’t that much special knowledge. So the knowledge that separates pros is experience. Pros have played many games with many opponents on many different maps. They have been in lots of varied situations many times from defending a rush on path to fighting Qing on nxnw to infantry wars on KOTG to crate wars on shallow to cying on hjk6 just to name a few. Pros play a lot and for long periods of time. They can last through many games and long series of games. And one of the last things that separates pros is that they have been in competition all the time and they have performed well. Pros do not play games to just mess around. They play to dominate every game and get displeased if they play badly. You don’t think pros were told information or read it on a website like this and instantly remembered it. No, they learned it from experience and they committed it to heart through experience.
I would now like to compare how well pros know build orders and how they think about them with how average players think about them. Ask me what my hjk6 order is. I’ll tell you it is p p b o w s w w w a o w w o a 2 truck. I’ll type it in 2 seconds. Then you’ll watch me play and see me execute it EXACTLY as I said. You’ll even watch me play more games of hjk6 and I will use the exact same build order and the same placement. Ask an average player what his build order is. He’ll think about it for a little bit, then qualify his order with some statement such as “basically like this” then he’ll type it out and put comments in there. He’ll get the first p b o right then he’ll stop and think after each building. He may miss out on where to throw in powers or silos, and may finish it with don’t forget to throw in a silo or truck somewhere. Then watch him play. See how closely he actually executes his order. He may forget that he needed the power at one point, forget his ore truck, or randomly place a building stupidly. He may decide he needs a second silo or barracks that he didn’t think to put in the order he gave you. Then watch him play again. His deploy, his placement, his order almost certainly will be different. And if he is playing a pro take notice of how far behind the pro he is in time. If he is doing alright he may be only 4-5 seconds and 1-2 tanks behind, but does he get as far as 10 seconds or even 3-5 tanks behind? Believe it or not I have played lots of people that I am more than 10 seconds faster by the 4th war who consider themselves “average.”
I would say that the average player doesn’t really know his build. In order to take your game to a higher level you must know exactly what to build, when to build it, and know to build it when it is time to build it. This can only come through practice. The other thing you must do is learn the builds for every map, and learn them at this same high level. Lastly you must know the right order. This is no small point since many of the average players I have watched used very bad orders. I strongly recommend every order I have listed on this site and you should master them regardless of whether or not you intend to use them long term.
Now I feel I have put a good start at explaining the difference between pros and average players. The next thing to examine is how you can improve these aspects of your play.
Improving
Getting fast at RA is hard, but it is not impossible. Being able to focus on all aspects of the game from scouting and placing buildings to Qing, shifting, and cying at once is difficult and requires practice. While it is hard, I think it is entirely doable through systematic practice.
The first and most important thing to do in order to improve is to play games. I’m not talking about let’s have a fun 4v4 and sit around and make v2s and shit on wide open all night game, or a I feel like doing a p4s 2v2 game and I think I’m in the mood to cy immediately this game. I’m talking about serious 1v1 games with a good opponent, preferably with a pro or at least an opponent who is better than you which should help motivate you to work harder. So now that you have found a training partner you can play 20 games a day with, what should you be playing?
You should have a goal of learning every map. This is your goal because every new map you learn will give you new ideas about scouting patterns, attack patterns, money management, and build orders. I think that mastering hjk6 and path first is the best approach. Hjk6 and path are both highly involved maps and learning how to play them like the best players ever will be a constant challenge. I recommend you thoroughly read my hjk6 and path pages and attempt to learn the builds listed exactly as they are shown in the pictures and map files for download. Practice executing the build orders absolutely as fast as possible. Make sure you do all of the scouting. The same applies to path. Path is much more complicated than hjk6 and it will force you to learn new skills. So will all standards.
In addition to path and hjk6 you should play plenty of Q master max speed and slow speed. Focusing on Qing, shifting, and pure clicking speed is very helpful. If you can’t match your opponent in clicking speed and shifting speed then you just aren’t working hard enough. I often wonder why “average players” hate playing Q master max speed. I find it is relaxing and good practice. If you lose easily on it and can’t keep up your speed then you simply suck at pressing the make tank button and if newfound focus and more practice doesn’t help you with it then you might as well just give up.
For the sake of practice I do not recommend playing p4 or any infinite money maps. Infinite money maps are much easier to play and while they do need to be learned they are of relatively little importance in competitive RA.
The main thing that pros are clearly better at than average players is using their tanks. Average players seem view cys as essential. Average players and especially newbies consistently cy on any map. While knowing how to effectively use your cys is important it is far more important for you to master use of your tanks, Q, and shifting. This will bring you through almost every 1v1 you ever play. Rarely do 1v1s require cying. But more important using tanks well requires far more speed and focus than cying. Of course cying well requires tremendous amounts of focus, for average players it seems to them like cying is more effective. You have to break out of this trend and force yourself to master use of tanks. The main reason I think that average players make cys all the time is that they simply aren’t good enough at using their tanks. They are so ineffective with their tanks that they just don’t bother. You must break out of this and learn to tank. You must learn to tank and Q as well as how to stack. Stacking may seem to have a negative connotation but there is absolutely nothing wrong with it and it is even easier and more effective than Qing in many situations.
I don’t know how to sufficiently emphasize the importance of hotkeys so I will just say:
YOU MUST MASTER USE OF ALL HOTKEYS
Most players know to use H and groups. Some use shift, not all use shift. You absolutely must bring yourself beyond this inefficient keyboard use and use the other hot keys. This is a physical thing and it will take time, but there is no way around it. Two hot keys are particularly important that you learn to use. The first is the arrow keys. Arrow keys are infinitely faster than clicking through the building list. They also affect your unit list and not just the building list so keep this in mind as you practice using them. I constantly scroll through the building list at all points in the game. I use my arrow keys to scroll through the building list while I am placing buildings in order to see the next building clearly and be able to instantly click on it rather than place, scroll, then click. If you want to be able to make tanks and infantry at the same time you need to use your arrow keys too. There is no other way to go through the unit list fast enough as allies or soviets.
The other set of hot keys that must be mastered is bookmarks. If you haven’t already, you need to go read the section of the main page which explains how to remap your bookmarks. I strongly recommend the W R setup if you have never used bookmarks before. You need to spend time practicing using your bookmarks on Q master max speed. The ability to add tanks to an attack group is very important. You need to master all three shifting sequences listed on the main page. There is no reason that anyone should not be able to at least park their tanks south on Q master, maintain production speed, and keep shifting across the map. This is a very simple task and it must be learned along with shifting and Qing.
So how do you improve your knowledge? You can improve your knowledge by reading the rest of this website. That will help. However doing the above described practice will help far more. Forcing yourself to truly learn the builds, committing them to your memory and to your understanding will teach you a lot.
In summary I basically spent this entire guide telling you to practice being faster and tried to provide some useful suggestions for how to practice and focus on it. For those of you who are wondering this basically summarizes everything I ever did with any of my students. If you really want improve I am willing to train you but only if you will take it seriously. My only requirement for students is that they download AIM to talk to me since this is the easiest way to get in contact I think.
Summary
I wish to post a high quality video of myself playing in order to try to give some idea of how important speed is so you can see how fast I am, rusty or not. Also I think a video may give you some ideas that you may not already have thought of or that I may not have thought to write here.