Patrol Micro Guide

Patrol Micro to Avoid Clumping

The aim of this thread is to introduce a form of patrol micro to avoid units clumping. I haven’t read about it in the forums or the TL wiki before, but I thought it would be something that’s worth discussing.

Clumping

Firstly, I believe it would behoove me to define clumping in the context of StarCraft(SC). Essentially a clump is a cluster of tightly packed units which minimizes the surface area of said units. Clumping occurs naturally in SCii due to improved path finding and AI as suggested by sluggaslamoo (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=132171). There are instances in which it would benefit a player to clump their units. For example: a clustered ranged army (e.g. terran bio-ball) is more effective against melee army (e.g. zealots or zerglings) for the following reasons:

- Melee units cannot effectively surround units (i.e. have multiple units attacking a single unit)

- Units at the core of the clump can still shoot, whereas melee units will queue up. In other words the ranged army will be more effective because more of their units can attack at any given moment.

On the other hand clumping could also be detrimental to an army. One such example is a clustered army versus any unit which causes splash damage (e.g. templars, tanks, banelings). The reason is simply because a clustered army is so tightly packed that the splash damage from the aforementioned units will likely hit more targets than ideal. Having said that, I think we're good to discuss the meat of the thread...

Patrol Micro

It is known that if a unit is commanded to patrol a nearby position it would begin to move very rapidly between its current position and the patrol position, i.e. the units will enter an ‘epileptic seizure’ as described by Day[9].

And here’s a few example of such behavior by Husky,

Now if a similar command is given to a control group of unit a fascinating unit behavior emerges. Instead of having epileptic seizures the units begin to draw themselves away from each other in what seems to be a random pattern, which effectively scatters or disperses them.

Now, is there a practical application of this? Well to be honest I’m not sure… But I can think of a few scenarios on top of my head where it would be handy.

Typical clumped army

Scattered army using the patrol micro

Another interesting aspect of this technique is that you are able to do it while moving. Again, I’m not sure if there is any practical aspect to it, but it allows an army to scatter and clump on the move.

To finish off, I did a few tests using zealots vs tanks in the Unit Tester by XGDragon (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=124763).

15 Zealots(Clumped) vs 12 Tanks

15 Zealots(Scattered) vs 12 Tanks

Execution wise it's actually not hard at all, though doing the patrol micro on the move is a bit tricky because you have to patrol click a certain distance away from your units otherwise they'll still clump up. So I dunno… do you think we’ll see any of this in high level play or is it one of those funny things people do like making an overlord dance over your opponent’s hatchery.

Patrol Micro Guide

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