EPTFor my first match, I chose zerg, not because I planned to play as zerg later (in fact at the time zerg was the race I was the least likely to play), but to make use of the rocks blocking the way as part of my defense for a fast expansion. The map was steppes of war, and my opponent was terran. From watching the replay, I could determine that he also knew a bit about Starcraft, but wasn’t familiar about the mechanics of practice league. Even though I knew many strategies, I had problems incorporating any of them. For example is a spawning pool around 20 supply is never a good idea, even if you have rocks to protect you. Luckily for me, it was the first time playing for my opponent; otherwise it might have ended badly. With my early expansion I soon gained the economic advantage, and after a bit of tech I went mass mutas. The first engagement in this match was the last. My opponent had around 50 total supply when I had around 120. My mutas overwhelmed him in a matter of seconds, and I had won my first Starcraft match ever.
My second match progressed in pretty much the same way, only this time I met an even worse opponent (his first building was an engineering bay). For most of the game, my income was 4 times higher than his, and by the time I attacked with my mutas and speedlings, I could overwhelm him without much of an effort. His four bunkers in the middle of his base complicated things, though…
After winning my first 2 matches rather easily, I decided to mix things up. This time I was going to play as terran, the race which I planned to use later, and do a reaper rush. Once again the map was steppes of war and my opponent was terran. Apart from the very sloppy execution of the build order, I also faced another problem; there aren’t really that many places where you can jump your reapers up into the opponent’s base. Partly due to my poor planning and bad execution, and partly to the fact that for the first time, I faced an opponent that knew how to play, I jumped my reapers right into his small army, and lost all but one in an instant. From there on everything went downhill. By the time i was ready to attack his base, I felt pretty good, but before I could break through his rocks, he had dropped his entire army in my expansion’s mineral line. By the time my troops got back, all that was left were the charred corpses of my dead SCVs, and the burning wreckage of a once glorious command centre. When my own army was annihilated due to my awful micro, there was nothing left to do, but to call gg, and move on to the next match.
My ambition crushed, I decided that I would rather be safe than sorry, and once again went for a zerg fast expand build. I had practiced some against a friend who plays terran and was getting better at executing my build order, so even though I lost the previous game, I was still pretty confident before my next game. As usual in my practice league games, I went for mass mutas, however my plans were thwarted by an early attack from my terran opponent, luckily I managed to hold my ground using a zerglings and a few roaches with backup from a queen. Thereafter I went for mass roaches, but seeing how my opponent countered that with marauders, I decided to go for a roach/hydra combo. After massing up a pretty big army of roaches and hydras, I didn’t really have any problems dispatching of the small remainder of his army. Once again my economic advantage won me the game.
My last practice game was once again on steppes of war against, yep, you guessed it, yet another terran. Seeing how well my roach/hydra combo worked in the last game, I quickly decided that was the way to go. This time, however, I got reaper rushed and lost all the drones in my expansion, although at the time there were only 5-6 workers there. I then managed to intercept the reapers in my main and kill them off using a few zerglings and a queen. I macroed up and focused on increasing my income and gathering my army. Just as I was about to move out I got attacked, but my army was way bigger and overwhelmed the enemy quickly. This was the time to strike! However, being a gunshy noob, I waited for more reinforcements to arrive before I attacked, allowing the enemy to rebuild some of what he lost. However the majority of his force was still in his main, and I managed to take out his expansion without any resistance. Since he was almost mined out in his main, he realized he had no hope of winning and gged out.
The uplifting results of my practice matches was 4 wins and 1 loss, which resulted in me choosing zerg as my main race.
