Game 1 - Crabarms (Z) on Shattered Temple
I hate ZvZ.
This is something that is very important, so I am going to say it again. In bold.
I. Hate. ZvZ.
So, on to this game.
Pretty boring, standard opening; I got my pool on 13, he got his gas before his pool (which I didn't scout; I need to work on keeping my scouting going a lot longer, it's probably worth sacrificing my scouting drone to get that info). I kept getting distracted by something shiny on yonder horizon and forgetting to do things like actually build drones, he kept fairly on task.
His pool went down a bit later than mine, but that didn't really matter because they were close enough that by the time anything I could pump out would get there, he would have had his lings out already and it would've been repelled fairly easily. I pushed to expand reasonably early on, he did not; this should have given me an advantage, but...
I build a total of 4 lings to defend with. Not gonna lie to myself, but this is really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really,
really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, REALLY retarded of me to do. He began pumping lings like a bastard.
And he got speed. This is important because if he hadn't had speed, he wouldn't have been able to reinforce quite as quickly and I would have held it at the cost of my expansion.
And I got flattened.
The only other highlight of the game is when I got myself supply blocked and got annoyed enough by this that I built 3 overlords. At once.
Bitchin'. -8 points!
Game 2 - Tspite (T) on Shattered Temple
Everyone seems to like Shattered Temple for some reason. I don't quite get why. It's like Metalopolis but I can't scout them out as quickly. Maybe that's why. I like Scrap Station but I'm pretty sure every single person who plays on the ladder has it on their veto list except for the cool people who in general tend to play like flaming twats. (As a quick, completely unrelated aside, sal***er aquarium is the best auto-censor ever)
I think I said yesterday that muta play is the way to go against the idiot Terrans I'm matched against. This time, muta play didn't come in all that handy until much, much later.
I shouldn't have really won this one; I played really, really sloppily and made a lot of simple mistakes, I could have spread my creep much much better, I could have expanded sooner, I wasn't spending my minerals effectively enough, etc.
It's funny because I decided this time that since every terran I'm matched up ever ever ever goes for quick cloaked banshees backed up by an army of marines or isn't allowed outside without a helmet, I'd go for banelings backed up by an extra queen for support against cloaked banshees (which I've learned to build stuff against now because nothing sucks more than losing every single game to fucking cloaked banshees). I may have forgotten the extra queen bit.
Well, let me back up a bit actually. I had planned on 10 pooling him (I even did the extractor trick. I feel dirty inside now) until I noticed that not only is the rush distance on Shattered Temple insane anyways, but that we'd drawn far positions. My lings got halfway to his base and then turned around and ran back home because my scouting drone showed that his wall was up.
This presented a small problem because I couldn't figure out whether he was one of the bio ball n' banshee terrans or one of the helmet terrans. The answer, as I would soon find out, is a bit of both.
I plopped down my baneling next, he went for 3 barracks and a factory, which was both for seige tanks and so that he could get a starport for medivacs. He was going for marines only, no marauders. People going marines only when I'm going for banelings and eventually mutas make me very very happy and very very sad at the same time. People then building seige tanks when I'm eventually going mutas make me very very happier.
As I found out while watching the replay, he'd sent an SCV ahead to build a bunker in hopes of I'm guessing slowly leapfrogging his way up the bunkers because he is a prick. Unfortunately for him, my creep was spread too far out for him to be able to build said bunkers.
Sensing the rush coming (and it was, 40 marines, 2 seige tanks, and 2 medivacs), I build some more lings and morphed some more banes. My 7 banelings and 17 lings would have to hold off the rush.
Have you ever seen 7 banelings hit a really, really tightly compacted bio ball? I have now.
The marines stimmed.
40 marines down in an instant by 5 banes. In the span of 4 seconds, he went from leading by 15 supply (75-60) to being behind by 22 (57-35). The seige tanks soon followed against the lings, because they were of course not seiged.
So let's recap that battle 1 more time. I took down 40 marines, 1 SCV, and 2 seige tanks. He took down 7 banes and 2 speedlings. I lost 5 supply, he lost 48.
I made my tech transition into mutas, he made his into banshees. Here's where things got a little bit tricky. You see, he'd built a sensor tower out by where his gold expansion was. I took this to mean he'd taken the gold, and so flew my mutas over there. Had I flown them straight to his main instead, I probably would have both taken out his first banshee, and probably taken down a good number of SCVs. Instead, I went for the gold thinking he had an expo there, but instead he just had the sensor tower.
My 9 mutas met a good number of stimmed marines, and I didn't retreat quickly enough. I took my third on his gold base at the same time he started massing banshees. Take a step back and think about that. Mass banshees vs the guy who you should know is going mutas.
He stopped at 7 banshees and began building a raven, after which he build 2 more banshees. I massed a huge baneling/speedling ball, not knowing he was going air. This was a boon. He scanned my ball, at which point I decided to shove it down his throat before he could react and try to counter it.
131-112 in his favor going in because I took too long to take my 3rd, missed a lot of injects, and got outproduced. I had more drones than he had SCVs, so my army was way behind his in terms of strength. My banelings swooped in and took out his marines and seige tanks. He swooped in with his banshees, I pushed more banelings into his SCV line at his expansion and took a good number of them down. My speedlings took out the orbital at his expo, and with that down, I ran them home. It was now 79-78 in my favor, noting that his army was at 64 supply to my army's 27, but I had 51 drones to his 14 SCVs. Things were in my favor if I could hold on just long enough.
Having seen the banshees, I reacted by building first more lings to hold off any ground army he may have had that I didn't know about (and eventually bust down his front door and rip him to shreds). This was a mistake, but...
He waited to push his banshees. He got 19 of them. 19 is excessive; you can't effectively even use 19 banshees unless you split them up massively, and there is no bronze league terran I know of who can actually effectively micro more than 1 group of units at a time (usually all of which are tightly clumped together allowing my 5 banes to take down 40 marines in 4 seconds. I will never shut up about this one).
I pushed my ball across the map, took out a small group he had holding the watchtower. This is when he pushed his banshees, and when I finally took the lead in army supply.
I knew that when he pushed his banshees, I needed to keep as many drones alive as humanly possible because I could remake my speedling/baneling army in an instant (although it would be a massive waste of gas). I brought my banelings and speedlings along with my mutas on the attack on the banshees in the hopes that they'd tank some of the hits that would otherwise be killing drones. They did this very effectively.
I'm not going to lie (mostly because I plan on uploading these replays and I can't lie). I lost pretty much my entire ground army. I also lost about 28 drones. But I held it with my entire lead intact. He was going for his last resort.
Remember that raven? He flew it over to my gold and started planting autoturrets. I went lolwut and blew it up with my mutas. He then tried to push some marines to my gold base in a bit of a last stand. Mutas killed those off real quick too. At this point I just flew across the map and started to eat his face off, at which point he just quit. +24 points!
Game 3 - Rhythmz (Z) on Typhon Peaks
His 7 pool vs my 10 pool generally means that he gets quicker lings that I do, and I don't get a chance to press the economic advantage that I get. I actually really, really liked this guy. We seemed fairly similar. The issue is that he was quicker than I was. Kind of anti-climactic in the end. -12 points!
Summary
Went 1-2 today, rather obviously. Learned quite a bit, will probably improve a good deal on the backs of these sort of lessons I learned today. Those of you asking for replays: I plan on uploading them in 3 day packs, so expect the first one of those tomorrow. With that in mind, I am now 54th in my division, but up 4 points.
Stats so far:
vs Protoss - 1-1
vs Terran - 2-0
vs Zerg - 0-2
Shakuras Plateau - 0-1
Shattered Temple - 2-1
Typhon Peaks - 1-1
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Day 1 - Knowing my place!
Game 1 - RHYNO (P) on The Shattered Temple
"Bad, really bad" is unfortunately the only way I can describe this guy. This was my placement match for the new season, and as is such was expecting to get paired against a REALLY REALLY EVEN MATCH, but unfortunately I did not. But let's march onwards.
His entire strategy seemed to be to build fucking everything at once, since apparently the one base 5 gate robo build is all das rage amongst the toss hardcore nowadays. He seemed to hinge solely on cheesy shit that in the end didn't work. Let's get an account of it.
First of all, my standard build against toss has been lately to open with speedlings + roaches, and pump out a shitload of hydras and a few mutas for support against colossi. This has worked out incredibly well, since the mutas also have the fun side effect of ripping probes to complete shreds in mere moments.
The first real action after a sleepy opening came when he took his dreaded warp prism and used it to warp exactly 3 stalkers into my base. Unfortunately, I don't think he meant to attack with that, but one of the stalkers started firing on my extractor which popped up that lovely OUR BASE IS UNDER ATTACK warning (and thankfully not the OUR DRONES ARE UNDER ATTACK one, because the queen voice saying drones is about as bad as Day9 saying "Dr. Seuss"), which kind of gave him away. Up marched my hydras + roaches + lings, down went warp prism + 3 stalkers.
A bit before this point, I began what is easily the best creep spread I have ever accomplished in my SC2 career to date. This will come in handy later.
I began building my spire, deciding that my best bet would be to max out and eat him alive since he'd obviously wrecked himself trying to get that up. I took my third at the gold base, then proceeded to pump out mutas + hydras + a couple more roaches and a few more lings.
Soon enough, having cut drones fairly hardcore knowing that at any time I really could just stomp him into dust but deciding to wait until it would be the most hilarious to do so, we hit my push. You know that beautiful creep spread? The hydras got there near-instantly despite their reputation for being "slow as shit" due to it, and I proceeded with my 153 supply worth of army to crush his 56 supply army. (This does not include workers, but for those who are inclined to see I had almost double his.)
Which consisted of a mothership, a colossus, 4 immortals, 3 zealots, 4 void rays, and a couple other things that died too quickly for me to notice. Eesh. Placement done, I found that I ended up in the same division as one of my e-friends, pickemgenius.
The war is fucking on.
Game 2 - starvty (T) on Typhon Peaks
Let me give you a bit of background information before I even start telling you about this game.
When I first started playing, I started playing as Zerg for two main reasons.
1. Amongst my group of e-friends that play SC2, the two best players of them are/were Zerg players (although I believe one of them plays random more often than Zerg nowadays).
2. Zerg is fucking cool. Like, literally. The Terrans are fucking America IN SPAAAAACE and the Protoss are a bunch of uppity psychic dickheads. The Zergs have banelings, It is impossible to hate banelings.
Unless you play Terran.
You see, I know this firsthand because my noob mind decided immediately upon getting repeatedly roflstomped by every person I was matched up against that the real problem wasn't that I was a poor player (nay, I was clearly a candidate for at least GSL Code A). I instead decided that the problem was the race I was playing as.
I tried playing as Protoss once, and quickly developed the only necessary skill one needs to play Protoss which is resisting the desire to throw one's computer out a fucking window every time pylons and the construction thereof is mentioned.
So instead I switched to be the TERRANS! YAY TERRANS! A lifetime of dull grey and machine guns for me, then.
So I quickly noticed a pattern. Vs Terran? I'd win about 60% of the time. Vs Protoss? Oh hi oh shit. Vs Zerg?
FUCKING. MUTAS.
So by the time I'd switched back to Zerg, I made the deduction that every low-level Terran I'd play against would be just as ill-equipped as I was to deal with said mutas. I hatched a brilliant strategy.
I would rush to mutas as quickly as humanly fucking possible.
So, with that in mind, on to the match!
The first thing that sticks out on the replay is the overlord timing. I usually try to get my overlord out on 9 (as I vaguely recalled somewhere reading that popping your o-lord out on 9 is a net gain over popping it out on 10 and using the extractor trick, which always made me feel kind of douchey anyways), but in this game my inability to read got the better of me and I built it on 8 instead. Whoops!
I as is usual took the early worker lead, scouting that he had no gas, which meant DUN DUN DUN BIO BALL almost certainly. Or he is a massive tool, which is better. I had just started building my pool, so knew my best bet for my short-term defense was to get a few banelings.
Nothing really happened for quite a while, I maintained my worker lead and expanded once. I did get myself supply blocked on 26, however.
There was a point where he had 1 marauder and 14 marines to my 3 zerglings and 3 banelings. Defense defense hurf durf. Glad he didn't decide to push. Here's where the funny part happened.
I decided to pump out 6 more lings to go along with my 6 mutas that were building. He took his marine + marauder ball and promptly walked right into my 3 banelings. Then the 6 more speedlings ran in and cleaned up. He lost almost his entire army in one push.
While he was sitting there in complete and utter shock, my mutas swooped in from behind. He proceeded to stim without medivacs, and proceeded to die quickly. +20 points!
Game 3 - Brandon (P) on Shakuras Plateau
I can sum this up in one sentence, really, cause it's all you need to hear:
"Everything he's doing points to a robo build. I SHALL BUILD MANY HYDRAS"
And so I built many hydras.
The end. -12 points!
Summary
So by going 2-1 today, I ended the first laddering day of the new season with 8 points in 44th in my bronze division. PEG has 32 points and is somewhere up where I should be.
Fuck him.
Stats so far:
vs Protoss - 1-1
vs Terran - 1-0
Shakuras Plateau - 0-1
Shattered Temple - 1-0
Typhon Peaks - 1-0
"Bad, really bad" is unfortunately the only way I can describe this guy. This was my placement match for the new season, and as is such was expecting to get paired against a REALLY REALLY EVEN MATCH, but unfortunately I did not. But let's march onwards.
His entire strategy seemed to be to build fucking everything at once, since apparently the one base 5 gate robo build is all das rage amongst the toss hardcore nowadays. He seemed to hinge solely on cheesy shit that in the end didn't work. Let's get an account of it.
First of all, my standard build against toss has been lately to open with speedlings + roaches, and pump out a shitload of hydras and a few mutas for support against colossi. This has worked out incredibly well, since the mutas also have the fun side effect of ripping probes to complete shreds in mere moments.
The first real action after a sleepy opening came when he took his dreaded warp prism and used it to warp exactly 3 stalkers into my base. Unfortunately, I don't think he meant to attack with that, but one of the stalkers started firing on my extractor which popped up that lovely OUR BASE IS UNDER ATTACK warning (and thankfully not the OUR DRONES ARE UNDER ATTACK one, because the queen voice saying drones is about as bad as Day9 saying "Dr. Seuss"), which kind of gave him away. Up marched my hydras + roaches + lings, down went warp prism + 3 stalkers.
A bit before this point, I began what is easily the best creep spread I have ever accomplished in my SC2 career to date. This will come in handy later.
I began building my spire, deciding that my best bet would be to max out and eat him alive since he'd obviously wrecked himself trying to get that up. I took my third at the gold base, then proceeded to pump out mutas + hydras + a couple more roaches and a few more lings.
Soon enough, having cut drones fairly hardcore knowing that at any time I really could just stomp him into dust but deciding to wait until it would be the most hilarious to do so, we hit my push. You know that beautiful creep spread? The hydras got there near-instantly despite their reputation for being "slow as shit" due to it, and I proceeded with my 153 supply worth of army to crush his 56 supply army. (This does not include workers, but for those who are inclined to see I had almost double his.)
Which consisted of a mothership, a colossus, 4 immortals, 3 zealots, 4 void rays, and a couple other things that died too quickly for me to notice. Eesh. Placement done, I found that I ended up in the same division as one of my e-friends, pickemgenius.
The war is fucking on.
Game 2 - starvty (T) on Typhon Peaks
Let me give you a bit of background information before I even start telling you about this game.
When I first started playing, I started playing as Zerg for two main reasons.
1. Amongst my group of e-friends that play SC2, the two best players of them are/were Zerg players (although I believe one of them plays random more often than Zerg nowadays).
2. Zerg is fucking cool. Like, literally. The Terrans are fucking America IN SPAAAAACE and the Protoss are a bunch of uppity psychic dickheads. The Zergs have banelings, It is impossible to hate banelings.
Unless you play Terran.
You see, I know this firsthand because my noob mind decided immediately upon getting repeatedly roflstomped by every person I was matched up against that the real problem wasn't that I was a poor player (nay, I was clearly a candidate for at least GSL Code A). I instead decided that the problem was the race I was playing as.
I tried playing as Protoss once, and quickly developed the only necessary skill one needs to play Protoss which is resisting the desire to throw one's computer out a fucking window every time pylons and the construction thereof is mentioned.
So instead I switched to be the TERRANS! YAY TERRANS! A lifetime of dull grey and machine guns for me, then.
So I quickly noticed a pattern. Vs Terran? I'd win about 60% of the time. Vs Protoss? Oh hi oh shit. Vs Zerg?
FUCKING. MUTAS.
So by the time I'd switched back to Zerg, I made the deduction that every low-level Terran I'd play against would be just as ill-equipped as I was to deal with said mutas. I hatched a brilliant strategy.
I would rush to mutas as quickly as humanly fucking possible.
So, with that in mind, on to the match!
The first thing that sticks out on the replay is the overlord timing. I usually try to get my overlord out on 9 (as I vaguely recalled somewhere reading that popping your o-lord out on 9 is a net gain over popping it out on 10 and using the extractor trick, which always made me feel kind of douchey anyways), but in this game my inability to read got the better of me and I built it on 8 instead. Whoops!
I as is usual took the early worker lead, scouting that he had no gas, which meant DUN DUN DUN BIO BALL almost certainly. Or he is a massive tool, which is better. I had just started building my pool, so knew my best bet for my short-term defense was to get a few banelings.
Nothing really happened for quite a while, I maintained my worker lead and expanded once. I did get myself supply blocked on 26, however.
There was a point where he had 1 marauder and 14 marines to my 3 zerglings and 3 banelings. Defense defense hurf durf. Glad he didn't decide to push. Here's where the funny part happened.
I decided to pump out 6 more lings to go along with my 6 mutas that were building. He took his marine + marauder ball and promptly walked right into my 3 banelings. Then the 6 more speedlings ran in and cleaned up. He lost almost his entire army in one push.
While he was sitting there in complete and utter shock, my mutas swooped in from behind. He proceeded to stim without medivacs, and proceeded to die quickly. +20 points!
Game 3 - Brandon (P) on Shakuras Plateau
I can sum this up in one sentence, really, cause it's all you need to hear:
"Everything he's doing points to a robo build. I SHALL BUILD MANY HYDRAS"
And so I built many hydras.
The end. -12 points!
Summary
So by going 2-1 today, I ended the first laddering day of the new season with 8 points in 44th in my bronze division. PEG has 32 points and is somewhere up where I should be.
Fuck him.
Stats so far:
vs Protoss - 1-1
vs Terran - 1-0
Shakuras Plateau - 0-1
Shattered Temple - 1-0
Typhon Peaks - 1-0
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
How This Crap Works
Figured it'd be best to start off with a quick description of what I'm doing here.
The idea is that if I force myself to play enough, I will eventually somehow (probably through magic) become a competent and reasonably good player. I began this experiment a bit over a week ago with some success. What I've been doing is dragging myself to my tired, haggard computer and forcing myself to play 3 (and no fewer) ladder matches per day. This gives me a chance to experience such things as getting matched up against cannon rushing tosses thrice as often, as well as measure my worth based on league and rank like a proper person should.
Phase two of this project is starting a blog in order to publicly shame myself on my poor plays, and hopefully glean a few tips from the SC2 coolpeople. This will also force me to do more in-depth analysis of what exactly I did wrong in the hopes that writing it out here will drill it hard into my head.
To give a bit of introduction, prior to SC2 I had almost 0 RTS experience as a whole, limited to a bit of dabbling in LoL (although I never played any actual real matches, scared off by tales of a community most charitably described as a bunch of douche-and-a-halfnozzles) and some Age of Empires way back in the days when Windows 98 was the cool new OS.
I started playing over Christmas (and sucked), sort of fell out of practice and started ignoring it for the longest time. Then I eventually became one of those people who wakes up at ungodly hours to watch a bunch of Korean nerds mash keyboards and mouse buttons. Having given up on such former luxuries as sleep and real people food for a few days, I decided it would be great to devote my time to trying to become a better player instead of trying not to fall face-first into a concrete walkway or trying not to fall asleep at the wheel of my car and crash into a cypress tree.
Keep in mind that part of that account is fictional as there are no cypress trees around here, and it was actually one of those massive live oaks.
So for the last bit of my introductory hoopla and bullshittin' which should probably be at the start of the post, my name is JD, I'm one o' them useless major undergrad students, I play Zerg, prior to the ladder reset I was ranked 54th or so in my Bronze league division, I suck against Protoss, I suck against other Zerg, I suck against any Terran players that have a counter for me shoving a shitload of mutas down their throat.
And this is my chronicle.
The idea is that if I force myself to play enough, I will eventually somehow (probably through magic) become a competent and reasonably good player. I began this experiment a bit over a week ago with some success. What I've been doing is dragging myself to my tired, haggard computer and forcing myself to play 3 (and no fewer) ladder matches per day. This gives me a chance to experience such things as getting matched up against cannon rushing tosses thrice as often, as well as measure my worth based on league and rank like a proper person should.
Phase two of this project is starting a blog in order to publicly shame myself on my poor plays, and hopefully glean a few tips from the SC2 coolpeople. This will also force me to do more in-depth analysis of what exactly I did wrong in the hopes that writing it out here will drill it hard into my head.
To give a bit of introduction, prior to SC2 I had almost 0 RTS experience as a whole, limited to a bit of dabbling in LoL (although I never played any actual real matches, scared off by tales of a community most charitably described as a bunch of douche-and-a-halfnozzles) and some Age of Empires way back in the days when Windows 98 was the cool new OS.
I started playing over Christmas (and sucked), sort of fell out of practice and started ignoring it for the longest time. Then I eventually became one of those people who wakes up at ungodly hours to watch a bunch of Korean nerds mash keyboards and mouse buttons. Having given up on such former luxuries as sleep and real people food for a few days, I decided it would be great to devote my time to trying to become a better player instead of trying not to fall face-first into a concrete walkway or trying not to fall asleep at the wheel of my car and crash into a cypress tree.
Keep in mind that part of that account is fictional as there are no cypress trees around here, and it was actually one of those massive live oaks.
So for the last bit of my introductory hoopla and bullshittin' which should probably be at the start of the post, my name is JD, I'm one o' them useless major undergrad students, I play Zerg, prior to the ladder reset I was ranked 54th or so in my Bronze league division, I suck against Protoss, I suck against other Zerg, I suck against any Terran players that have a counter for me shoving a shitload of mutas down their throat.
And this is my chronicle.
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