A Gentleman's Guide to The Queen

The Queen, not only is she an egg laying , creep spreading powerhouse since the latest update, she's also the very core to Zerg gameplay. The Queen is the sole component that controls the flow of your game and how well you'll do. You're probably thinking “But Splash you handsome rascal! That's not true at all! By the way I'm an ostrich!”

Pictured an ostrich a Queen

Well Mr.Ostrich, I welcome you to the internet, furthermore allow me to elaborate on my thesis- you see; your Queen is responsible for spreading your creep, injecting your larvae and being a general badass. I'll be spending quite some time going through each of these aspects; elaborating on what they do and how to do it.

Spreading creep

Spreading creep is something a lot of folks forget entirely about or they do it very sloppily. Now, what are the advantages of having good creepspread?

You'll get an awesome, albeit slimy view of the map while your units move a lot faster; with the exception of drones and air units for obvious reasons. So, what is the optimal way to spread creep? Well, creep spreads faster the more tumors are placed in close proximity of each other. Which is to say; if you place two creep tumors at roughly the same spot the creep there will spread twice as fast which I've concluded using science(!) is faster than normal.

A popular approach to spreading your creep in the same fashion pandas spread cuddlyness is to get one or two additional queens in the early game, as this will allow you inject all the time whilst spreading your sludge around like a sloth on a flowerbed. With the recent buffs to the queen doing this will also help you deal with early aggression. We'll be going into managing your queens later in the guide.

Injecting larvae

Using the inject ability on a hatchery will spawn 4 larvae after 40 seconds, now this is the most powerful ability in the Queen's arsenal as this is directly responsible for your unit production and thus your macro. Now injecting larvae is the easy part- keeping track of all your queens and injections whilst maintaining low energy on them is the more difficult part though there are a number of techniques to help you out with this. I'll be going through and explaining some of them below; in a manly 'Go punch some spacebears' kinda way.

If you're feeling courageous and love tapping buttons like a raging squirrel, I'd recommend hotkeying all of your Queens 5 through 9. Simply doubletap the hotkey to said queen and inject. Now this is really easy to do although it leaves you with a load of control groups with can be frustrating at a later point in the game when you need more those groups for juggling chainsaws.

Now if you're even braver (at this point, feel free to consider yourself Conan the Barbarian of injecting) you could use the minimap method, that is to say; being too hardcore to even look at your queens or your hatcheries perhaps you consider them to be too ugly to be gazed upon by your eyes, perhaps that's not it at all – perhaps that's just me.

Now, this method means having all your queens on one hotkey, hitting the hotkey followed by hitting the V key and simply click on the hatcheries on the minimap. The Queens are awesome so they'll inject the closest hatch, although there are times when they don't. If you master this method keeping your macro up while engaging in combat will be so much easier however it's easy to missclick on the minimap which could cause things to go bonkers. Needless to say there are more ways to do injections.

The Queen as a defensive unit.

As stated earlier your queen can be used to help deal with early aggression. It's particularly effective against hellions and reapers, even more so with the recent patch which increased the range by 2, making it a total of 5. Five's a pretty badass number. They're also a good counter to banshee's if you're the one to fire the first dart  bullet sludgeball  thingy- what I'm trying to say is that the unit which initiates the attack will win in a straight up fight.

Concluding words – What does the new changes to the Queen imply

With the additional range, the Queen is a much more potent unit early on; it practically nullifies terran openings such as a 4Hellion opening as the added range will allow the Queen to easily defend the creep. Building a few additional Queens early will secure your expands from most early aggression if coupled with lings or roaches. So what am I trying to say? Everybody walk the dinosaur. But other than that, build Queens damnit, they're great.

-Splash