How do you set your control groups?

I have found that I have no problem setting my buildings as control groups, but I rarely set my army as control groups. Some people have suggested that you set your whole army as one group, and then individual unit types as others, but I never get around to this because it's so labor-intensive and I feel like I never have time because I'm always doing something else, and always creating new units so my groups are never really accurate. I never really had this problem in WC3 because the units were less expendable (granted they're not expendable in SC2, but they are MORE so than in WC3. I think this is because of "upkeep") so creating groups made more sense.

I know that if I'm going to get better at this game I need to learn to use control groups for units, but I'm just having issues creating/maintaining them.

How do I effectively set, and add to, control groups?

Select Quickly

First thing to do is remember how to change what you have selected quickly, so that you don't spend any extra time trying to get a box around just the right guys to set to your group. You might already know all of these but:

• Ctrl-Click = Select all units of the same type
• Double-Click = Select all units of the same type
• Shift-Box = Add all boxed units to the current group
• Shift-Click = Add or remove the clicked unit from the current group
• Shift-Num = Adds selected unit to control group dictated by num

Shift-Click and Ctrl-Click work on portraits too. And these work together: "Remove all units of that type from my group" is Shift-Ctrl-Portrait Click.

Group By Role

You will always want to group by units that you will be giving the same orders to, so you don't have to alter the group any after you select it. I find my groups work out like this:

• Attack that way
• Kill that scary ground unit
• Kill that scary air unit
• Detectors

I sometimes group by move speed as well, because sometimes you just need any troops here right now!

Almost is good enough

Finally, remember that its ok to miss a couple guys because new guys were built, just go pick them up immediately after. (I find Shift-Box to be the most useful for adding the new guys to the group.) All the guys in a group won't arrive at the same time anyway, and having MOST of the group start moving toward where they are needed is better than none. Just update your groups before you move away from your base, or whenever you give them new orders, but AFTER the order.

I usually set my army to control group 1 and when new units arrive you can ctrl-click the new units then shift-1 will add them to group 1 even if you don't have group 1 selected.

To use the different abilities on the different units in group 1 I just tab through them. Same applies to buildings. So for instance if I were playing as terran and had my factory and starport set to group 5. I can tab between selecting the factory or the starport.

Its a good idea if you are attacking in two places at once to have both groups hot keyed differently.

another example of having different units assigned to one group and to their individual group is when you have a group of stalkers, immortals, zealots together. Stalkers move faster so naturally they always end up in the front attacking, taking damage which is not their ideal location, and they're also blocking your melee zealots. So if you had immortals and zealots hot keyed to 2, you can attack with them first.

There are really too many different play styles to list though.