For my first replay from the Silver league, I post a ZvT (I’m Zerg), and I get a great early mineral line harass in, in which I destroy all the SCVs at this natural. However, instead of taking advantage of this economic blow, I sit back, expand a little, tech up a little, build the beginnings of an army, and basically just let the other guy catch back up. This is a problem I tend to have — a lack of aggression. Then when I decide to do some more harassing, I spend almost twice as many resources on my harassing units (mutalisks) as I should have, leaving my main army ill-prepared for the marine attack I knew was coming — so ill-prepared, in fact, that his first attack resulted in gg.
Check out the replay with commentary below. In my commentary, I basically conclude that this wasn’t a great replay to showcase, but I actually take that back now. It demonstrates how easy it is for someone to come back from an early economic setback if you let them do so (i.e. if you fail to apply more pressure in the meantime). Seriously, what was I even doing?
Lessons learned:
1. Use successful harassments to your advantage. I decimated his economy and then just let him build back up. If I had quickly followed up by massing roaches and then sending in a constant wave of units, it may have been game over.
2. Pressure your opponent. Even if I hadn’t had that successful early SCV massacre, I should have kept some pressure on. Keep the other guy worried, take out some units when possible. If nothing else, you’ll keep him from massing an army that stomps you in one swoop.
3. Don’t spend tons of money on harassment groups. My first harass was great: about ten or twelve speedlings taking out an equal number of SCVs plus a couple marines. However, I spent way too many resources on harassment round 2, in which I got about 9 mutalisks. The problem with this is that those mutas faired poorly against his army proper, and I had spent so many resources on them that I didn’t have much leftover with which to reinforce my main army. So, a slaughter ensued.
4. Make use of banelings! I even had a baneling nest and didn’t use it. They would have worked beautifully against this 100%-marine army.
EPT
