What is micro management and macro management?

Answer 1

Micromanagement

I think micromanagement is very overrated these days. That being said I don't mean that it's less valuable than macro management. What is micro then? I think micro means doing relatively small things manually in the map/game which gain you the advantage over your opponent. Micron is about doing small things as fast and accurate as possible. I don't want to go very deep in this issue since I want to concentrate more in practical thins than theory. Here are few examples of micro:

• Trying to maximize the amount of damage your units do and minimizing the amount of damage your units take. For example using hills to gain advantage over your enemy army.
• Abusing counter units to your advantage. For example keeping skirmishers in front of your archers against pure archer scout army. Relates to first example.
• Taking care of idle villagers and early game not letting them get killed.

As you see micromanagement can be both economical and combat based. Although the micromanagement will be/should be relatively small in late game with big economy since the achieved advantage is too small compared to time used and lost elsewhere. Here we come to the point that I want to stress a lot.

Macro management

Well, it's the opposite of micro. You concentrate in big steps in the game especially economically and map wise. It's more like general gameplay for that particular game. How you plan on expanding and working the enemy. How you plan to balance your economy and where. Here are few examples:

• Balancing your economy to produce more food than other resources.
• Placing a castle in strategically position to protect your early imperial age advancing.
• Walling your farm economy to avoid being raided and get constant food flow to raid yourself.
• Planning how to build and wall your map to not get devastated by your enemy.

Speed play key role in macro. If you have the speed then you are able to have more time in your hands. If you have speed you are able to do things like: fix your economy and produce army just by setting gather points, queuing units and moving through your economy to make sure there aren't much of idle villagers, without spending enormous time. All that's left after that you can use to micro and even more important -plan what you do next and how you will crush your opponent.

Daunt is a good example of a player who have the speed and use the time he got left in macro. I think that one of good player primary goals in late game should be putting yourself in a position where you put a lot of stress in your opponent and use the time advantage to macro. Note that this doesn't close away options like aggressive push since you put your enemy in bad position where he need to have concern about taking care of his economy while defending your push, keeping his economy working while your is usually almost untouched. You have put yourself in a position where you have great advantage regarding macro.