SC2 Tips - Queen Larva On Multiple Bases : Starcraft 2 Submissions

Missing a vomit larva early game can cost any Zerg player the game. Unlike Terran and Protoss; the queens “macro” abilities are not forgiving, so it is important you master this ability. The number of ways to do this are endless, however both myself(Ipp) and Stropheum will explain our method for controlling the bulimic queen. I suggest you try them both out and see what you like; however I feel like I have to mention that I am a heavy Terran player with the occasional random and Stropheum is a true zerg player.

Method 1 (Shift Queuing All Hatcheries) [Ipp's Way]

This tip will take advantage of:

* The Queens Smart AI. The closest queen with energy will always be the one to Vomit Larva.
* The queue action. This will prevent you from having to hit V multiple times
* Backspace, this key will rotate the camera around each of your hatcheries.

Have all your queens on a single hot key and with your left hand hold the right shift with your thumb and hit the “v” with your pinky. While still holding shift rotate your hand, so you can hit backspace with your index and then click on your hatchery with your right hand. To move to the next hatchery just simply hit backspace again, it is important you hold shift through this entire process as if you let go of it you will need to press V again.

The downside to doing it this way over the “norm” is the funky hand positioning but with this way you simplify “V,Backspace,Click” which involves movement of your hand to just backspace and click. This lets you puke on every hatchery in under a second.

Method 2 (Hatcheries on Different Keys) [Stropheum's Way]

This method has a much different feel to it and some players may not have a taste for it, as it doesn’t hotkey any of the queens. Rather than this being a “technique”, it’s more appropriate to refer to it as a hotkey setup, which looks as follows:

* 1-4: Unit Hotkeys
* 5-0: Hatcheries, 5 being main, 6 Natural, etc.
* 9-0: Extraneous buildings (Nydus, Evo Chambers, based on preference)

To vomit larva, just hit your hatchery key twice, click on your queen, press V and then click on the hatchery. So it would go something like this 55 (click) v (click), 66…. While some players may find the lack of queens in this hotkey setup a bit disconcerting, it does allow for several benefits that method 1 lacks:

* Allows for easily vomiting larvae on hatches that are not in sync (ie, allowing you to macro more efficiently without stacking queen energy)
* Player has more control over where units are created, rather than having all hatcheries on a single hotkey.
* Allows the player to be able to deliberately jump between specific bases, rather than being forced to either run through them one-by-one with the backspace command, or being forced to click on the mini map.

Both of these methods are valid and have their own strengths as well as weaknesses. Also variations of these two “main” concepts are possible. For example, having all of your queens on one hotkey, while having all of your hatcheries on individual hotkeys. While this setup has benefits of both method 1 and 2, it lacks in that the rest of the players’ hotkeys may seem a bit cluttered, only allowing for say 1-3 as unit hotkeys or pushing your hatchery hotkeys farther to the right and forcing that player to stretch their hand more while jumping between bases.