[Delraich]

from http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/1827252863

Edited by yaegz on 1/13/11 11:55 AM (PST)

ok so since the protoss is a micro orientated race, I thought it would be useful to expose some of the micro tips protoss should utilize.Note: If you are a bronze or silver player, macro is still much more important than micro. Focus on just having more units than your enemy, rather than controlling the few units you have.

General Micro Tips:
1. Are your zealots in front of your stalkers?
2. Are your low-health units in the back of your army before you attack?
3. Are your immortals attacking armored units?
4. Are your colossus attacking clumped up units? If the entire enemy army is clumped, than focus on attacking light units (marines, hydras, zealots)
5. When defending your ramp, A. Are you units in a concave at the top of your ramp? B. Are you cutting his army into bite-size pieces? C. Are your zealots on hold so they arent attacked by the units beneath your forcefield? D. Are your stalks far back enough to not get hit by the units beneath the forcefield?
6. Are you moving units under fire to the back of your army?
7. You can somewhat kite-attack marines, roaches (assuming they dont have movement speed yet), and zealots with stalkers
8. You can forcefield the enemy ramp to prevent him from reinforcing the units that are at his natural expansion.
9. When chasing down an enemy, pull your zealots back to prevent kiting (from maruaders, roaches, hydras)
10. In order to bunker, cannon, or spine crawler bust move your army just outside the range of the static defense and put them on hold, then, attack move your colossus (with the range upgrade) into the static defense.
11. Put health bars on, so you can see which units are low health.
12. Psionic Storm does not stack, so do not throw down more than 1 storm in the same place.
13. Before an attack, put your units in a quick concave with zealots in front to help get a concave sooner when the attack begins.
14. Colossus can abuse high ground by attacking units on the low ground and then moving back once the units move in to attack the colossus.
15. Against fleeing units, stalkers can shoot, move closer, then shoot again, move closer, shoot again, etc.
16. Do you have functional control groups? (For example, I have 1 as my army, 2 as my sentries, 3 for HTs or collosus, 4 for nexuses, 5 for building probe, 6 for observer, 7 for robo bay, 8 for stargate)
17. Remember to move your HTs back once they have stormed to prevent them from running into the enemy army.
18. Make sure your sentries aren't tanking damage for stalkers. Your sentries are spellcasters, not dps dealers or tanks, so once your zealots are dead, MOVE THEM BACK.
19. With the interceptor upgrade, carriers can launch their interceptors and move away from the enemy. Rinse and repeat.
20. Spread out your dark templar to force the enemy to react to different locations. Also, the enemy will need multiple sources of detection in order to counter your harass.
21. Blink can be used to blink back the stalkers with lowest health to the back of the army. Also, Blink can be used to get a faster concave against the enemy. Additionally, You can ensure that all your stalkers will blink to high ground or low ground by right clicking to the point where you want to blink FROM, hold shift and click B at the place where you want your stalkers to blink TO, then right click past that point which will make the stalkers move thus giving the other stalkers room to blink.
22. Moving your sentry forward with guardian shield popped can cover your zealots with guardian shield, which will help them last a lot longer against ranged units and especially marine armies.
23. You can keep your charge on your v rays by quickly attacking your own units then moving closer to the target you want to kill. Also, you can pre-charge your void rays on your own nexus if an enemy attack is imminent.
24.Morph your HTs into archons if they are out of energy or just got EMPed. You can also do this with DTs, if they have mobile detection.

Protoss versus Zerg Micro Tips
The goal of micro versus zerg is to allow the majority of your units to attack while only a few zerg units can attack.
1. Are you keeping your units in a ball to prevent speedling surround?
2. Are you attacking through constricted pathways? (attacking in the open makes it harder to forcefield and you need more forcefields)
3. Are you cutting his roach army and hydra army into bite size chunks with ffs to prevent most of them from attacking?
4. Sometimes it makes sense to not allow your zealots to attack because otherwise all the zerg's units can attack the zealots (if you pull off a nice ff, and the zerg has a lot of units running around doing nothing)
5. Make sure your colossus are attacking lings or hydras.
6. Make sure your army is not attacking broodlings, but actual units.
7. Against Mutas: A. Is your army split in half? (One half in one mineral line, the other half in the other mineral line) B. When attacking mutas, Is guardian shield up? (very important) C. Try to make your stalkers attack the mutas and let your zealots handle the zerglings D. Phoenix can be microed away from mutas and still fire at them. I. When microing away from mutas with phoenix, pull the damaged phoenix to the back when their shields are gone
8. Keep your stalkers near your zealots when speedlings are near (the zealots can easily run back to the stalkers, to prevent them from getting surrounded)
9. In retreat, throw down ffs behind you because your sentries are going to die anyways, and you might be able to save them.
10. You can ff over burrowed roaches to prevent them from unborrowing. (if they don't have tunneling claws)
11. Running your probe around at the natural of the zerg can delay an expansion from going down. Once your probe is low on health, throw up a pylon which you can later cancel or let it finish.
12. If you are pressuring the zerg in the early game (with one or two zeals) you can position your zealots between mineral fields so only 2 or 3 zerglings can attack a zealot at a time. This can delay the zerg from mining off of his expansion for a bit.

Protoss versus Terran Micro Tips
1. Stalkers are laughable against maruaders
2. A stim + concave army= death for protoss so do not let this happen with forcefields.
3. GUARDIAN SHIELD IS SO GOOD AGAINST MARINES
4. If no medivacs are present, forcing a stim and backing off is a great idea. Attacking a terran army after it has already stimmed a few times helps a lot in battle.
5. SPREAD YOUR HIGH TEMPLAR AND SENTRIES . If you are just macroing up, make sure your spellcasters are spread to prevent 1 ghost with cloak to land a money emp on all your HTs and sentries.
6. Have an observer parked in front of your army to prevent cloak emps from going off.
7. Before attacking, A. Move your zealots in front of your army. B. Move an immortal in front of your zealots if tanks are in siege mode. C. Right before you engage, pop guardian shield D. Stagger your high templar, so when the battle commences you have HTs arriving in like one second intervals (to prevent one money emp).
8. If he is dropping in your base, keep a few zeals plus one or two high temps in each of your bases
9. You can ff behind bunkers and Planetary Fortresses (I think you can to PFs) to prevent mass repairing from scvs.
10. Chargelots are awesome.
11. Do not attack a planetary fortress without sentries for ffs or HTs for storms or else mass repair will ruin your day.Protoss versus Protoss Micro Tips1. See general tips2. Spread out your colossus to prevent colossus-to-colossus splash damage.3. Spread out your units to prevent devastating colossus splash damage.

Ok so this is all I could come up with off the top of my head, post new tips and I will add them to this list.+1 if any of these tips helped you and try to keep this thread alive to help incoming toss players, or current toss players to up their game.