Day 12 (May 14): Well it has been a couple days now hasn't it? A few days ago I trained with Tagada, and he showed me some problems I had been overlooking (as well as some problems I hadn't been working to fix hard enough).
It is hard to summarize everything in a short post, and I am sure @Tagada can weigh in if I missed anything, but the few of the main points are as follows:
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My rally points are inneficient, often leading units to the wrong parts of the map or even suiciding them into enemy tanks. Tagada mentioned that rally points should typically be just behind the front lines (where your map control ends). This seems obvious in hindsight but I suppose I had been manually correcting where each unit goes all along, wasting precious time and apm.
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My unit queues have also been suboptimal, as I have found myself not removing labs and t1 transports. In most of my factories I have been building a mix of tanks, engineers, etc which can be somewhat difficult to manage. Tagada suggested having some factories for only tanks and scouts, and some producing engineers. I have tried this, and found it quite a bit more convenient. He suggested having factories assist other factories to copy the unit mixes and rally points. This saves time and allows me to change the mix and rally points for all of them at once.
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I react very slowly to things: Quite often when watching replays I see myself stalling for minutes on end without correcting it, or allowing my opponent to take out my expanding engies for free.. There isn't any magic solution to this other than to try and plan out things to be more effective ahead of time. I have been trying to have more game awareness for a while and will update you guys on the results.
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Eco management and decision making needs some work. Often I find my mistakes and bad decisions compounding on each other. For example, making less build power than I need will cause me to spend less mass than I should, building up a large bar of unneeded resources. With nothing else to put it into I absentmindedly put the mass into mex upgrades when I need tanks. Another basic thing Tagada had to explain to me was how to tech transition. T2 units are generally more efficient than t1 and so once you upgrade you generally want to scale back t1. In my games I found myself upgrading to T2 land while also building new t1 factories to spam tanks. This is a somewhat unfocused and conflicted plan. Tagada explained that I should either push for T2 and not make any new t1 spam factories or I should stay on T1 for slightly longer and try to gain an advantage there before heading to T2.
There are many other points he touched on, which will hopefully be displayed in video format soon. As for today's games, I tried to apply the lessons, however they were somewhat anticlimactic. In game 1, (replay 17038956), my opponent raided me and then after a brief fight overextended with his ACU. I made more of an attempt to catch stalls/overflows (I'm also starting to learn when I stall the most and why). I tried to make more of an effort to protect my engis although I still lost 2 of them to a single selen, which is not exactly optimal, but oh well.
In game 2 (replay 17040925) I pretty much doomed myself from the start. It was on a large 20x20 water mapgen. I went for a first transport which was promptly scouted, locked, and shot down. I got 4 engis off and quickly laid down a factory, however, building a mex first combined with a bad powerstall prevented me from completing it in time, and although I tried to spread out my engis, evidently it was not enough as I stll lost them all in one pass, right before the factory was completed. Combined with losing air the game was lost as long as my opponent didn't make a major blunder. I somehow took the main central island back and won a ton of reclaim, but even with that there was pretty much nothing I could do, and in the end I ctrl-k'ed.
I've decided to dedicate some time to practicing and learning some basic build-orders, as well as doing some sandboxing to figure out where and when I make decisions that lead to stalls or overflows. Fortunately there is tons of new interesting content from various other players, so I have a lot of resources to help me. I'll update you guys on how it goes.