How to increase actions per minute

Question

Whats a good way to increase my actions per minute (apm)? Please note I don't want Starcraft 2 to become my life either, so reasonable strategies would be much appreciated, but please provide any solution :p.

Answer 1

Don't APM spam useless actions.

While lots of people on youtube will do this to appear better, no professional player does this. Often times jitters at the start of a match will cause them to select between multiple units but Starcraft does not register this as actions. During the course of battle you will see professional players microing units with a large number of clicks for a given move, or swap between a dozen different buildings to keep track of queues, or send new workers to mineral patches (no auto rally in SC1). This is not spam, every one of the actions has a directed purpose.

Additionally, Splitting your workers (having them divide to different patches at the beginning of a match) was necessary in Starcraft 1 as the AI was less intelligent. There have been studies in Starcraft 2 to show that the effects of this are below the margin for error. While many pro Starcraft 2 players still do this, it is hold over from Starcraft 1, not a necessary strategy.

There are a number of resources you can use to help your apm. My favorite is the SC2 Multitasking trainer map by Stet_TCL. You can find information on it here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=124983

The design is to build an army to assault an enemy base while keeping a probe on an island alive through micromanagement and picking up a stranded high templar all in a time limit. It is VERY hard, but an excellent training resource.

Answer 2

I wouldn't worry about APM. Focus on build order, keeping your resources spent, scouting, harassing, and micro (There's already several custom maps focused on this). If you can keep all that juggled then your APM will be improving as a matter of course. Training AMP is just a way to free up your brain so you can focus on the actual strategy of the game.

Answer 3

Practice. Practice. Practice!

One thing the pros do is they maximize their APM, even during the first couple minutes of the game when there isn't much to do. Right when the match starts, and you're moving workers to the minerals, send all of them to one mineral patch, but then divide into smaller groups while they're moving, and manually send them to other patches.

Watch some videos of what pros with high APM are doing. A lot of their actions aren't entirely necessary, but it gets them in a high-APM mode.

Answer 4

Blizzard has a sticky poll titled, "APM Racing" which focuses on APM.

Some key takeaways from the comments

• Its more about strategy then how many times you can click the mouse
• Harass with your worker scout. Will definitely get that early-ish APM up with good reason.
• Lot of APM buffing I've seen is just mindless repeats of basic commands and I'm just not into that. I've seen my APM spike around 170 but thats just me needing to cast FG or use Inject Larva after morphing a bunch of units.
• The people going "APM is for noobs that spam", it keeps your hand warm during the early games. its difficult to go from 30 at the start to 200+ later, when you really need it. Cold hands= slower reactions and it gets harder to click stuff properly, resulting in misclicks.