Hello, Mr. GOH!, and welcome to FLD's School of Hard Knocks StarCraft II!
It's possible you already know some of this. But in the interest of thoroughness, I'm assuming you are playing as unoptimally as humanly possible. Disclaimer: I am absolutely shit at this game. I can't and won't advise you on anything even remotely strategic. That would be of no help to you at all because I suck.
"Should I be building tanks or vikings?" I DON'T FUCKING KNOW SO DON'T ASK!!
I play Terran, so I'll be using Terran terminology. But this all applies to whichever race you choose to play. Now, with that out of the way. Let us begin. While playing, do you ever find yourself clicking on your buildings to select them? Or, worse, clicking on the bottom-right corner menu to select stuff to build? If the answer to either of those questions was yes, then STOP THAT SHIT RIGHT NOW YOU STUPID SON OF A BITCH! Hotkeys. Learn to love them. They are your very best friends. First, the numerical keys. Pressing ctrl + any number will bind whatever you've currently got selected to that number key. Then you just press that number again to reselect them instantly. Those are called control groups. They are crucial to your survival. It is essential that you train yourself to use them. Find a configuration you're comfortable with and stick to it. For example, I put my Command Centers on 6, my Barracks on 5 and use 1-3 for my army. As soon as the game begins, you should hotkey your Command Center/Hatchery/Nexus to whichever key you prefer. This is important because it allows you to reselect it at any time without having to look for it or move your mouse or take your eyes off of whatever you're currently doing. You just press that number. Double-tapping will instantly bring you to its location. Next, letter shortcuts. These, you'll have to learn. Don't stress about it too much, though. At the low level, you don't need to be building half of this shit anyway. So you really don't need to know them all at this point. Now, here's why this is so very important. Say you're in the middle of the map fighting your opponent. Your army is getting massively raped. Your numbers are dwindling. You need to reinforce but you can't leave your units alone or they'll all die! Oh shit! Oh shit! OH SHIT!! CALM. THE. FUCK. DOWN! If you're using your hotkeys, there is no problem here! Press 5, your barracks are now selected. Press a-a-a-a, you're now training 4 marines. Press 1, you've just re-selected your army and can carry on getting them all slaughtered like the sorry excuse for a commander that you are!. It took you all of one second and you didn't move an inch. Once again. 5-a-a-a-a. It's that simple! If you have multiple Barracks on your hotkey (as you should), production will be divided up evenly between them. That's one marine per Barrack if you have 4 of them. So all those marines will be coming out at the same time. That's pretty much the gist of it. If you haven't been doing this already (and if your APM really is at 54, then I seriously doubt that you have), your APM is going to skyrocket once you start playing this way. Other than that, there are only three other things I can advise you to do with complete confidence. 1. NEVER STOP MAKING SCVs! You should have about 30 of those fuckers per base. That's roughly 24 on your minerals and 3 on each gas. That's called base saturation. If you reach 30, then you probably should've expanded to a second base a while ago. And when you do expand, grab a bunch of SCVs off of your main and send them there right away. And once again, you don't need to look for your Command Center. It's hotkeyed to 6, remember? 6-s-s-s. That's three SCVs that just entered production. 2. SPEND YOUR MONEY! If at any point over the course of the game you find yourself having hundreds upon hundreds of minerals or gas, then YOU'RE WAY BEHIND AND YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE LIKE THE FAILURE YOU ARE!! Spend. Your. Money. But it's also very important you don't spend your money idiotically, either! Which brings us to... 3. DON'T QUEUE STUFF UP. EVER. It's the worst possible way to waste your money. You need to spend it on shit that will help you RIGHT. THE. FUCK. NOW! Not in 5 minutes. NOW! If you queue up 5 marines, that's 250 minerals you just spent but you're only getting them one at a time. It's not a catastrophe if you queue up one or two every now and then. It saves time and at first you'll probably keep forgetting to maintain constant production anyway. But any more than that and you're wasting precious money better spent elsewhere. Maintaining and managing your economy is a HUGE part of this game.
So, all your Barracks are training marines, you say, but you still got 500 minerals piled up. What then? Well, that's three additional Barracks right there! Grab three SCVs from your mineral line, press B-B (that's Build - Barracks! Hotkeys!), hold shift (you can queue up actions that way) and place the three Barracks WHEREVER THE HELL YOU LIKE! It's important you select as many SCVs as buildings you are making because otherwise you're violating rule #3: DON'T QUEUE STUFF UP! Not only will it take longer but you'll also be spending money on something that won't be of any use to you for a long time! One additional note about action queueing: holding shift with three SCVs selected will allow you to put down three buildings and send all three of them to build in a single action. And for maximum efficiency, keep shift held and right-click back on your minerals. That way, as soon as they're done building, they'll go right back to gathering more minerals for you to waste! I think that about covers it. To sum this all up in one word: macro. This is what you should be focusing on right now. Efficiently managing your economy and production without tripping over yourself. Later, you can worry about micro, which covers unit placement, movements, abilities, etc. You really don't need to think about this for now. At this point, you can basically just attack-move to win. Oh, right. There's one thing you should know about micro. With your units selected, press A and then left-click where you want to go. That's called Attack-moving. It's important you do NOT left click to move. If your units run into enemies and you left-click moved, they won't attack or defend themselves. If you A-move, they'll react. If I think of anything else, I'll edit or make another post. But these are all the basics you need to practice. StarCraft is a game of efficiency as much (if not more) as it is one of strategy. You have no idea how many games I lost to utterly pathetic forces simply because I was taking my sweet-ass time and didn't have enough units out. 5 minutes into the game. "Oh, what's that? 6 marines?! I only have three... and they're dead now." There is no coming back from that. At a higher level, you can start worrying about build orders and unit counters and scouting and reading your opponent and army composition and whether you should be going bio or mech. But for now you don't need to worry about any of that shit. If you play Terran, here's your build: Marines, Marauders, Medivacs. Seriously. That's all you need to win in Bronze League. Hell, some people simplify it even more to "pick one unit you like and build that".
If you find yourself developing a passion for the game and wanting to improve and climb up to the higher leagues, then are tons of great ressources online. Liquipedia is a pretty comprehensive wiki. You can also pick up pretty good stuff from watching casted pro matches (it's more fun to watch than you realize, I promise!). Then there's youtube channels that specialize in improvement, like dignitasApollo's tutorial series or day[9]'s newbie tuesdays. But for now, just learn how to be fast enough to avoid getting hopelessly crushed in the first few minutes and just try to have fun. I realize this is kind of a wall of text so it might seem like a lot to take in, but these are the very simple basics and if you stick to them and practice, practice, practice until you can do it all in your sleep, then I promise you before long you'll get the sweet taste of...
