|
Hi TL,
I (low level toss) am kind of torn concerning my ladder play atm, and I would like to hear some opinions. I'm in the following situation: After ~200 BSG ladder games in bronze+silver I got tired of close-call, nerve-racking 40 min matches in which I would either win, because my opponent made one more mistake than I did, or have awkward losses due to misrallies, getting criminally often supply blocked, having mental black-outs, [!tl;dr-ERROR; virtually endless list. Aborting..!] and generally being a rather bad player I decided to take a long-ish break from laddering and decided to take a slow, methodical approach to rework my play from ground up, playing tons of customs, and vs my trusty macro practice partner, the very hard ai.
I watched a ton of replays of high level players, learned about timings, the defining mechanics of each race (played both Zerg and Terran for a while), counters, the importance of aggression etc. At first all those aspects seemed overwhelmingly complex to me, but after investing quite a lot of time and nerves, my persistence and hard "work" seemed to pay off (from my pov that is): I hardly get supply-blocked anymore, my macro runs more or less on auto-pilot, my apm got from 40-50 to 110-130 and i generally feel I do have a way better game sense than before i started working on my play. I picked 2 build orders vs each race (1 for 2-player maps, 1 for 4-player maps/long rush distances) and tried to perfect them as much as possible (PvT: dual-stalker/vr and 1gate fe; PvP: 3gate robo and 2gate fe; PvZ: 3gate expand and 3 gate-stargate).
Now I am feeling almost confident enough to hit the ladder again, but the thing is I am still only in Silver (got promoted from Bronze 100 games before I stopped laddering).
From my experience getting promoted is quite a crawl and I would like to hit the Diamond League quickly now, which was eventually my goal when I started playing online. Now from the time I played Terran I learned to execute the 3Rax Timing Push quite well, which is imo a simple but relatively powerful build, especially in the lower leagues.
My question is now, if you want to get to Diamond quickly, is it viable to just power through with a semi all-in build, or would it be worth it to just meticulously use the more macro-oriented builds even though they may not be really necessary at that level of play?
|
4 gate works at 2700 diamond
|
well it seems you already have a quickish win build ready for PvT and PvZ (dual stalker/vr and 3gate-stargate). Practicing those while moving up seems to be a better use of your time than just 4gating.
|
Canada2480 Posts
do you want to become a good player or hit diamond
if you want to become good then practice macro builds, otherwise cheesing is am uch better use of your time
|
You can get very far on a strict diet of all-ins. (Just look at TSL-Rain)
But, eventually, you're going to start running into players that know how to stop your cheese.
When you get there, if you don't have any sort of macro experience, you're going to find yourself in a position where you have to relearn how to play the game...
So is it worth it, to falsely inflate your rank just so you can ask yourself a similar question a few weeks from now? I'd say no, but different people have different opinions on the matter.
|
Ver's BW improvement guide talked about all-in vs. macro play, but it more or less mirrors what has already been said.
All-ins will result in in a lot more wins, so if your goal is to increase your rank and see a precious gem next to your league name, then this is the quickest way to do it. As has been mentioned you hit a wall at some point where your all-ins aren't nearly as affective. Even failing to transition from a very damaging all-in can be punished by a higher-level opponent.
Macro-oriented play is the opposite - you lose a whole ton of games at the beginning. I placed Plat and was demoted to Gold since almost all my games were against all-ins. I've only had time for 60 games (a lot more coming in a week before school kicks back in), which isn't quite enough to get a good feel for what kind of all-ins are coming and how to defend them. Of course, then you have to learn the macro play-style which is a tad more complicated than "build a ton of workers and then a shit-ton of units", so you get to experience the joys of build order responses, unit compositions, and faking out an opponent playing the "I'll build whatever counters you" game.
The strategy forums also tell us that you can simply macro a player to death without learning much strategy until diamond. Maybe this was the case four months ago but simply building a ton of units (especially as zerg) isn't going to win you the game (especially against those who play the "I'll build whatever counters you" game!).
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
