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General tips

These tips are for multiplayer games on large maps.  Many of them don't apply to two-player ladder-type games, where the map is small and/or you know exactly where your enemy is; for those games you need a tight rush order.  I almost always play on an 8-way map with one or more teammates or in multiway FFA, and these tips reflect that bias.

• First thing: make a drone with your initial 50 minerals.
• Scout with your initial overlord, but be careful with it.  If it finds a Terran base, run it away, perhaps to your preferred expansion spot.  If it finds Zerg, park it over the base until you see a hydra den building.  If it finds Protoss, park it there until you see a cybernetics core (dragoons) or forge (photon cannons).  Also remember that the player you scout will usually be able to figure out where you are by the direction from which your overlord comes.  You may want to turn the overlord back before the opponent sees it, attempt to come in from a different direction, or not scout at all (especially if you are trying to climb the tech tree instead of going mass zerglings).
• Hotkey your initial hatchery to number 1, and subsequent hatcheries to 2, 3, 4, etc.   Then later you can type 1sh2sh3sh4sh5sh to make 15 hydralisks, all while you're watching the front line battle.  Except in very special cases, don't bother hotkeying groups of units.  If you're like me, you make so many units so fast that you'll need to reform the groups every 30 seconds -- it's not worth the time.  People want to believe otherwise, but Starcraft is a game of production; combat is important, but secondary.
• Try to make new overlords a little bit before you run out of control points.   Depending on the stage of the game, this could be 2 points in advance (early game) or 10 points (late game with several hatcheries going).  If you make a mistake and run out of control points, make some more overlords; but while they are incubating, make a building or two (perhaps some sunken colonies or an extra evolution chamber, or new hatchery).  This will free up a couple of control points and let you get back to making units.  Also, since you'll have money sitting around that you can't spend on troops, check on the status of your upgrades and expansions.  Another thing to do during this lull is launch an attack; this will free up control points and kill the enemy at the same time.
• Don't bunch your overlords in a corner.  Spread them out over your base, your expansions, and the surrounding area.  They will give you advance warning of an incoming attack, they will totally nullify cloakers anywhere near your base (no nukes!), and they will not be as vulnerable (only one or two will die if they are attacked, because they are spread out).  They will also draw fire from attacking anti-air troops like marines and hydras, delaying their attack on your base and splitting them away from ground troops like zealots and tanks.
• Make a spawning pool as your first building. When? That depends on the build order you are using.  See the build orders page.
• Sunken colonies are a great defensive tool.  Sunkens absolutely own marines and zerglings (but die to tanks and reavers).  Make a few in each of your towns.   YOU MUST PLACE YOUR SUNKENS CORRECTLY OR THEY WILL DO YOU NO GOOD.  Put your sunkens right up against your hatchery and surround them with other buildings (this looks ugly but you'll learn to love it).  Make sure all of your drones are covered by the sunkens.  Don't just put a sunken or two at the entrance to your town -- the enemy will run right by and kill your drones.  If your sunken-protected town gets attacked, keep your forces out of the way until the enemy goes for the sunkens; then swoop in with your troops.  This method ensures that all the fighting takes place inside the range of the sunkens, thus giving you more free hits.
• Make a second hatchery early on (according to your build order).  You need this second hatchery to increase your unit-building capacity. Hotkey the new hatchery as number 2.
• Don't make your extractor too early.  If you are going mass zerglings, you can delay the extractor for quite a while (though you will need gas for burrowing and zergling speed).  If you are going for hydras or mutalisks, you will need to make the extractor earlier.
• Drones make good scouts, because you can get them so early (and you can expand with them if they find an empty resource location).  However, once you have a spawning pool, use zerglings to scout the enemy.  Use the 'move' command (or right-click) for scouting.  You want your scout zerglings to go to the start locations as quickly as possible; you don't want them to waste time chasing down whatever stray units they run across.
• Burrowing costs 100 minerals and 100 gas to research, but its many uses make it a most valuable upgrade.  The best recon technique in the game is to burrow a zergling at every mine.  Prosecute expansion attempts vigorously!  If you are attacked, the best way to protect your workers is to burrow them and let the enemy beat on your hatchery while you gather your troops to repulse the attack.  You can also use burrowing to save a doomed attack group until the next wave arrives.
• If your drones are getting hit and you have no troops and can't burrow, you have two choices.  If your attackers are few or weak, you can fight back with your drones.   This is hard to do because drones do not have an attack-move action; you have to target the attackers individually.  The other alternative is to run away.  Running works surprisingly well, especially against melee units such as zerglings and zealots, because the attackers 'acquire' individual drones as targets and then have a hard time hitting them when the drones are running away in a big stampede.   Running your drones out of town and into your allies' troops is a good way to save your skin.
• Expand when it no longer makes sense to keep building drones at your original mine (keeping your build order in mind).  Hotkey the new hatchery as number 3.  Make sure you have enough troops to protect the expansion, or make sunken colonies.  Once the new hatchery is up, make drones there as fast as you can -- you already spent 300 and a drone on the hatchery, so don't let it sit idle.  Sacrifice troop production to get the drone count up as fast as possible.
• You should generally wait until you have an expansion before going to lair.  Don't do it too quickly -- those minerals and gas might be needed for troops to save your hide.   But when you see that you will soon need the lair's benefits (queen's nest, spire, overlord upgrades, etc), go for it.
• Choose your upgrades wisely, as they are expensive, in both resources and 'click time'.   Don't get an upgrade if few of your troops benefit from it -- don't upgrade melee attacks if you are making only hydras and don't waste money on flyer attack upgrades if you don't have very many mutalisks or guardians.  Get the attack and carapace upgrades that help the troops you use the most.  Burrowing is essential for recon and drone defense.  Zergling speed is great for large maps, mass-zergling strategies, and hit-and-run.  Hydras are dangerously slow until their speed is upgraded, and their range upgrade really helps their flexibility on both offense and defense.  Overlord speed is a must for medium or long games.  Broodling helps against entrenched Terrans.  You'll need ventral sacs if you plan to do any transporting.  Adrenal glands make zerglings into a formidable weapon.
• Expand again.  Mine three or more mines at a time (hotkey each new hatchery!).   Make workers until you have 1.5 drones per mineral patch plus 3 or 4 drones per geyser.  Then switch the hatchery over to troop production.  1sh2sh3sh4sh5sh!!
• Spore colonies are useful for detection (die observers!) and late game defense from aerial attacks.  Spores are also useful in island games.
• If you don't have spores and sunkens, keep a group of hydras (numbers depend on the stage of the game, from three to twelve) plus at least two overlords at each base.   The overlords are for detection (cloaked wraiths make great expansion-busters).  This force can't fend off a full-scale attack, but it's not meant to.  Its role is to protect the expansion from a small scouting force, and delay a larger force until you can send an army to deal with it.  Hydras have some advantages over towers: they can hit both air and land, they can move around to cover all areas of the base, and they can go attack the enemy later on.
• When attacking with ranged troops (such as hydras or mutas), attack-move the swarm toward the target.   Once there and fighting, select a group of 12 and sequentially target one enemy at a time by shift-right-clicking on the enemy units in succession.   Once you've queued up a number of enemies, select another 12 of your troops and repeat the process.  This kind of fighting gives you a great advantage, especially against tough units like zealots, scouts and battlecruisers.  Remember to make reinforcements while you are fighting (1sh2sh3sh).
• If at some point you find yourself needing more gas for the hydras, mutas or whatever, make a gas-mining expansion.  While the expansion is coming on line, make zerglings -- you don't want ANY larva to sit around.  Zerglings can be quite effective as support for a mostly-ranged-attack army (such as a hydra or muta swarm), especially if upgraded.  They die fast but they draw fire away from your hydras. :)
• Midgame and later, always take overlords along on any attack, because you need cloak detection. Upgrade overlord speed (very important, so they can keep up with the troops) and sight range.
• The best way to bust up a well-defended Terran base is with guardians, backed up with overlords (for detection), scourge (for air defense) and mutalisks (for versatile ranged air/ground defense and replenishment of your guardian force). Let the guardians do the damage; keep the other units just behind the guardians to protect them. Don't send in the hydralisks until the seige tanks are dead; a row of seige-mode tanks with bunkers in front can stop just about any hydralisk charge.
• Set rally points for your hatcheries.  You may want to wait until the hatchery has finished making drones (i.e., there are enough drones at that hatch to fully use the surrounding resources).  Once it has finished making drones, set the rally point to a position just outside your main base (or some other convenient spot, like a choke point).  Do the same for expansions, so troops made there will show up at your main rally area.  If a hatchery is attacked, turn off the rally point, so that the enemy won't get free hits on your newly-made units.
• In many games you may need to use overlords as transports.  Four hydras fit inside one overlord.  So select a group of 12 hydras (double click at the rally point), then shift-right-click on three overlords in succession.  The overlords and hydras will move toward each other and the hydras will get in.  When all twelve are inside, select the overlords, hit 'u' and click the destination, then shift-right-click near the rally point.  This unloads the hydras and brings the overlords back home for another load.  The speed upgrade is very important for overlords to be effective transports.
• In a deadlocked battle versus Terrans, use queens to parasite the enemy bases.   Make a queen or two and parasite the worker fields (expansions too) plus the forces near the base entrance, such as seige tanks.

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