What's so bad about queuing units in Starcraft 2?
I've read several times to make sure you never queue units, cause it's the devil. However, I find it very convenient that right before I start a battle, I hit my hotkey to barracks and fill each up with 2-3 marines/marauders each.
I find battles can be too frantic to remember to build from every building while battling. Is the answer simply going to be "get your mental checklist down even while frantically battling?"
Solution 1:
Queuing is bad because you want to make the best use of your resources as possible, and having them sit there waiting for a unit to build is not good. Additionally, your production rate should generally match your income.
The problem in your case doesn't sound like it is necessarily the queuing so much as the fact that you have the money to queue the units to begin with. If you are starting a battle with enough money to have 2-3 units in every barracks, if you had spent down better you would have every barracks only making a single unit and you would have the extra 1-2 units per building in your army right now. The problem likely lies in one of the following areas:
- You are getting supply blocked at times and therefore building up money
- You don't have enough production buildings for your income
- You are forgetting to continuously build units out of your production buildings
All of these are things you should be trying to improve and are a large part of why queuing is bad. The act of queuing isn't too bad, but the problems it is indicative of are worse. The only time you should have the extra money is if you are already maxed.
Solution 2:
Queueing is the perfect example of easy-to-learn / hard-to-master being applied. If you are a new player it helps keep production going constantly, but experienced players can rely on it less in order to use resources sooner.
A new player will see they have 200 minerals, queue 3 marines, decide to build a barracks, and wait for 100 more minerals before starting it. A better player will see they have 200 minerals, queue 1 marine, and start that second barracks immediately (giving them an early production advantage over the new player). An even better player won't hit 200 minerals because they started the barracks at 150 minerals.
Solution 3:
I'm going to go slightly against the grain and say that queuing isn't always bad. Others already explained why it's bad, so I won't bother repeating that.
Queuing should be minimized, and if you have the mental capacity to keep building units without ever queuing you should do so.
But if you're like me and just do not have the capacity to keep track of so many things at once, then queuing is a lesser evil than forgetting to build and producing nothing.
Some examples of where I queue up units:
When I make an expo I'll often queue up workers because I know I always forget otherwise. It'd be better if I didn't, but queuing workers is a lesser evil than building no workers.
When I'm in the middle of a battle. I'll usually be distracted the whole time and forget to build units otherwise. I'll queue up 2-3 per building (if I can afford to queue more, I made a bigger mistake elsewhere and I should've had another building). A better solution is having more buildings so I can make more without queuing, but before the battle I keep up with production and I can't afford another building.
All of this is just compensating for weakness though, and you'll never make it to the top by queuing. I have about 50 APM (up to 75 if I'm trying really hard at it), but I can't remember and keep track of very much. Knowing this I use a little queuing judiciously to compensate. I tried the technique of clicking each mineral patch to try to work on APM and aside from resulting in forgetting to do actual important stuff, it was exhausting. So if you're like me, it may not be practical to never queue at all, but it should be something you try to avoid if you can.