EPTBuilding a strong early game is important in my leagues. If you have a weak and slow build order the first 5 minutes you'll find that too often you'll be overrun quickly. There's little to no RNG in this game so everything comes down to speed. Creating drones too slowly can cost you to have a slower pool, and slower hive, ect... Making too many extractors early without the workers to support it and you'll end up having wasted a drone mining, or perhaps having too much gas to work with. Usually my solution for this is just to say fuck it and go for the high yield to even out, but that's a pretty risky move. Then again, you're backpedaling.
So what'll separate a stronger army from a weak one? Speed in early game! This isn't a teaching blog, more of a reflection one. I also want to point out how useful distractions are. Just had a match vs terran on Xel'Naga caverns that really showed me how important it was when fighting in these non pro leagues. Just a big ball of zerglings may not seem imposing to a walled off terran base, but it's a scary thing to deal with when they're upgraded to speedlings. I usually feel pretty safe expanding fast against terran. They don't have much that'll wipe me out too fast. I feel that a lot of terran are expecting zerg to go roaches so they build a ton of marauders and hellion. Unfortunately for him I only went speedling->mutalisk. Every once and awhile I'd poke my head around his ramp and a marine or two might get a few shots off on a ling before I pulled him back. This kept the terran holed up in his base for too long and cost him a lot of eye time being put on the front of his base. I had lair up so I could conceal a baneling nest if I needed to, but I didn't bother and went straight to mutalisks when I saw how many hellions he was making to deal with my lings. I still feel like my zerglings with speed upgrade are more powerful than hellions. I could easily circle around his level of micro and overpower him without losing more than one or two lings. Lings don't last long and aren't a huge force to repel (unless incredibly early) so keeping him walled up in his base is essential until I could get some mutalisks up.
Hell, if you just ran 1 ling or something up to their base so they hear "base is under attack" and see some red on their minimap, you'd be doing yourself a great service in scaring them a bit. Also good to scout with it :D. If you've evolved burrow keep borrowing the little bastard up and down on their ramp to get a limited view of their base and force them to build stealth detection or if you're really lucky, waste minerals on a scan.
Current Ranking
Rank 3 in gold now, feels pretty good. I'm not expecting a platinum push any time soon, but it shows progress for me. Or maybe that there's so many people laddering now that it's easier to get a higher rank. I was able to get rank 1 in my silver bracket in beta and I was happy enough with that. I won like 6-8 games in a row 2v2 just because I 8 pooled and nobody could handle it, and it took <2 hours. They'd just leave when they saw the lings break the ramp. Pathetic...
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This blog is a few weeks old. I'm actually in Platinum now both 2v2 and 1v1. Mid rankings though, but an improvement from rank 3 gold now I think.
I still am in dire need of practice partners. Add tomeeeo#506 to your list and we can play some if I get back on.+ Show Spoiler +
