An aim trainer for RTS games

The idea

Aim trainers changed how shooter players practise: take one skill, drill it in short runs, see a score, come back and beat it. Microscend does the same for RTS games. A whole game teaches mechanics badly, since a lost fight can be a bad build as much as a bad click; a drill takes one mechanic and measures it alone: how cleanly you kite, how fast you split, whether production stops while you fight.

It is free and runs in the browser, with nothing to download. You need a computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

Five skills, eleven drills

Each drill lasts one to three minutes and is rated in one skill, though some use others too: each drill's page says which. A skill is rated on all its drills together.

A drill, start to finish

A drill opens on a short briefing: what it is, your best, and Start; how it plays and how it scores are one click away. Then a countdown, the run, and the results: your score, the rank it reaches, the numbers behind it and a tip or two. Retry with one key.

Luck counts as little as it can. Where a drill has to choose something that could help or hurt you, such as which base a raid lands at, it picks what is worst for you as you stand, and chance only decides between cases that are equally bad. Learning a drill by heart buys nothing; playing it well does.

Routines play several drills back to back, with one rating for the whole run: the Warmup before you queue for a real game, the Micro Pack, Macro and Multitask, and the Full Circuit of every drill.

Real RTS controls

The drills are played with the controls of the big RTS games, not simplified ones: box selection, right-click to move and attack, attack-move, stop and hold position, control groups, Shift to add and to queue, double-click to take every unit of a type, camera hotkeys and the minimap, and a command card with keys for building and training.

There are two hotkey presets: Standard, with letter keys by name (A attack, S stop, H hold), as in StarCraft II and Warcraft III; and Grid, which maps the command card to QWER, ASDF and ZXCV by position. Every key can be changed, control groups and their modifiers included, and you can save a set for each game you play. Even a click on empty ground can work as it does in Age of Empires or as in StarCraft. All of it is under Hotkeys and settings.

Nine ranks

Your best score on a drill gives you a rank on it, set against how all players score: the middle player stands where Gold ends and Platinum begins.

Each drill measures the ranks it can tell apart. Stutter Step comes in three versions and Macro Cycle in two, each named by the ranks it measures, such as Bronze – Platinum or Obsidian – Pro.

A drill counts once, by your best version of it. Each skill is the harmonic mean of its drills, and your overall rating the harmonic mean of the five skills. Both lean on the weakest, so one brilliant drill cannot carry a skill, nor one brilliant skill four weak ones; a drill at the top of the ranks it measures never pulls its skill down. Until you have played every drill, you are unranked.

The leaderboard

Signing in is optional, with Discord or Google. Signed in, your progress follows you to other computers and your runs are ranked: each one is played on a seed the server picks, recorded move by move, and played again by the server, which keeps the score only if it comes out the same. The boards list the best verified score of every player who chooses a leaderboard name; nobody else is shown.

1v1

Army against army, against the computer or another player. Both sides get the same army, worth 1,200 minerals and drawn by lot, a new one each round; or, if you choose, two different armies that change hands in the next round. Either way the better player wins, not the better draw. A round ends when one army is gone, or after 90 seconds, and each side scores the share of its army still standing.

The computer plays at five levels, each one technique better than the last: holding its lines, stepping out of shells, kiting, aiming its artillery. Before every round you see both armies and what beats what; after it, what decided the round and the drill that trains it. To play a person, find an opponent online or send a friend a link to your match.

Or a full game: a Town Hall, ten workers and fifty minerals each, on a map with room for five more bases, under fog of war. You mine, build, train and expand as in Macro Cycle, and the game is won by destroying every unit and building of the other side. The computer plays it at five levels of its own, from one slow base to three bases at 260 actions a minute. After the game, charts of both sides' workers, armies and minerals, and what to work on.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes, and there are no ads.

Which games does it help with?

Any RTS played with a mouse and a keyboard: StarCraft II, Age of Empires II and IV, Warcraft III, Stormgate and the rest. The drills train the mechanics these games share, on keys you can set up the way your game has them.

Do I need an account?

No. Everything works as a guest, with your progress kept in your browser, a 1v1 against another player included. An account keeps your progress safe across computers and puts your runs on the leaderboard.

Does it work on a phone?

No: the drills need a mouse and a keyboard.

How long does it take?

A drill takes one to three minutes, a routine about eight to twenty.

What happens to my data?

The privacy page says what is stored, where, and for how long.