Well, I'm not sure which RTS game you're actually asking about, but: Replays. Watching good players play against other good players is a great way to get better. Obviously I don't know to what extent SC2 will have this feature, but WC3 replays were small files that opened in the game and allowed you to see just about everything going on.

I know Warcraft 3 also had an "audio commentary" community - players would record audio to go along with replays of matches they played, and would explain the game as it went along. My experience was that a *lot* of these people weren't that good at playing the game, or didn't really illuminate anything through explanation. Every now and then though, someone would explain something that would really help my game. Probably none of us could watch Kasparov play a game of chess and really understand what's going on well enough to improve. If Kasparov were sitting next to us and saying "here's what I'm doing, here's why I'm doing it, here's what I think he's doing, oh and by the way here's how I map out my hotkeys, I find this works for me", we'd probably get a lot more out of it.

Besides that, I think it's just a matter of practice. Watching replays gives you something to shoot for - knowing that it's possible to build up your base at a certain speed, for example - and practice will help you move towards realizing that goal.

It helps to have friends to play with (not necessarily against, but sometimes that can be helpful too). It's really hard to keep excited about the game (especially when you suck, and lose a lot) when you're playing by yourself.

That seems a little over the top, those seem like steps to take your game past the "decent" stage. If you're just getting into it I'd recommend just playing online against people and with people. Pick a race, get a good starting build order and then its just practice and playing around with things. Start off with some 2v2s with a friend and play. You'll see what units you lose to and you'll see what other people do. Try your best to adapt and think of new things to do.

You can look at some replays for build orders and counters to things, but chances are that the people you'll be seeing replays of are really good and the game really does change a lot from the decent environment to the top of the competitive environment.

The biggest thing you need is the desire to improve. If you want to get better, you enjoy the game and you're willing to spend the time you will get better.

Avair's advice is very good for anyone who wishes to improve their game by any amount; I followed a similar strategy to bring myself from a casual, campaign-only player to a ranked Orc soloist on USEast in a fairly short time. If you don't really want to go over the top, you can simply watch fewer replays or analyze them less, but what I found was that I could watch replay after replay and note the different characteristics of the various gosus (Grubby and CADx2 were my heroes), and that watching them was actually *fun*; it was very interesting to open up a replay and see a strategy used which I had never thought to try before (for example, TC + double rax hh/zerk + witch doctors against NE) and then going into battle.net and applying them successfully.

The thing about jumping right into playing is that, while you may improve somewhat, you will learn far more from watching the people who have sat down and figured out exactly what to build and when. You will see them using units in ways that you wouldn't have figured would be effective, you will see what combinations of units they use, etc. It's not so much an issue of actually *learning* the builds and counters as it is an issue of *saving time* in the process. It is much easier to mimick a high-caliber player as you start and figure out from there what works best for you as an individual player than start from scratch and learn everything by hard trial and error.

I've tried watching replays but often fair amount of what's going on is over my head still. Let's set a simpler task, learning to crush the computer on the easier difficulty levels. Ideally, strats/guides I could browse at work would be great - much like this forum in general, it's nice to use time you can't be playing the game to still learn about it.

Is it fair to assume that anyone who is halfway decent would crush the campaigns no matter what difficulty level? Or are those just not comparable skills?

I mostly equate campaigns to puzzles. You need to figure out the right way to build and use units in order to tear down an already built up base. Almost every campaign mission I have ever done starts with the enemy base in place, so essentially the computer is already 'ahead' of you. Apples to oranges as far as execution goes compared to the parity you get in a multiplier or skimish game.

Regarding readable strats for WC3, I haven't found to many good strategy articles. DoTA (Defense of The Ancients) a very popular WC3 custom map/game has a metric ton of guides here: http://forums.dota-allstars.com/ but I have yet to find a compariable resource for vanilla WC3.

http://www.wcreplays.com/ is about the best I've ever been able to find for War3 strategy. Most of the strategy I learned back in the day [and I do mean back in the day TiLLerMaN, Grrr... (aka every other name ever), ShowTime et. al.] was from discussion in various BNet channels.

Having watched the gameplay video now, what really strikes me is how familiar everything looks. I mean that in a good way: despite the graphics and mechanics upgrades, the whole thing looks very much like Starcraft. The fight between zealots and marines looked like a fight between zealots and marines. Even the new units look like they belong in the old familiar setting. It's really impressive how they preserved the distinct visual flair of the original game.