This week is crunch time. I need to finish my thesis by the end of spring break. Hopefully the ladder reset will hit by the time I get around to playing again. It's long overdue IMO.

Onto the analysis:

1v1 analysis:

Zerg(39 games)
(18)ZvZ: 7-11 38.8%
( 8)ZvP: 4- 4 50.0%
(13)ZvT: 9- 4 69.2%

18-19 48.6%

This Season:
Zerg(281 games)
(109)ZvZ: 47-62 43.1%
( 82)ZvP: 54-28 65.8%
( 90)ZvT: 52-38 57.7%

153-128 54.4%

This set of games was a ZvZ gauntlet, and it wasn't so great. More on that below. I feel like the limited amount of time that I play is really affecting my winrate now, as I've played quite a few close games that I feel I should have won.

New maps are "meh." I've got Delta Quadrant, Slag Pits, and Backwater Gulch thumbed down. I played a couple games on Slag Pits before I thumbed it down, and the close spawn distances are absurd.

ZvZ:
Well, my ZvZ is still complete shit. Well, it was at least. I really couldn't figure out what was going wrong. When it was a macro game, they had more roaches; I think I was playing too safe early and falling behind economically. When I try to be aggressive with roaches, they always have just enough to defend and a superior economy. If I drone up, I get walked over by roaches. I dunno, I just suck with roaches in ZvZ I guess.

So I decided to completely retool my ZvZ. I got the inspiration from a game where my slow lings got owned by speedlings. I knew all along that ling speed is really important, but I never realized how strong a position I can be in if I have ling speed and my opponent doesn't. And if he has a smaller army at the time ling speed finishes, it's often game.

So my thought was to get ling speed as quickly as possible, and make nothing but lings as soon as my pool was done, which will either
a) win me the game outright if he's unprepared or just droned too hard, or
b) give me complete map control to expo.

So right now I'm going back to basics, with an overpool with quick speed. One thing to note is that I'm not getting my queen right as my pool finishes; I get the queen a bit later instead. It seemed unintuitive at first, but the goal of the build is map control first and foremost, since I tend to do better in those games. Also, if my opponent gets a "standard" 13pool or so, and gets a queen, I'll be moving in with speedlings before those larva can actually help him.

Honestly, I have no idea if the build is horrible or what, but that's what I'm going with right now until I find something better. I've just been so lost in ZvZ that I'm trying to keep it simple: make lings, get speed, kill or expo.

Coincidentally, after I worked out the build I decided to go with, I saw this thread, which outlines a build with a similar goal. My build is a slightly more economic one, with a couple more drones and a few less lings, but similar.


ZvP:
I still have no trouble holding off one-base protoss, but protoss who go sentry-expand and can actually macro are giving me a run for my money. I think I may have to forego the usual roach/hydra/corruptor in favor of muta/ling/bling in some cases, because on some maps (Typhon Peaks?) it seems like it's tough to find a good place to engage the deathball.

P.S. Voidrays are a pain in the ass.


ZvT:
My record is better than I expected for this set of ZvTs. I started going for infestors instead of mutas as suggested by MrBitter and others, with positive results. If my infestor micro didn't suck so much, my wins would be rollovers instead of hardfought. I had the same problem with defiler micro in BW. I'll get better with more practice, but some of these games I was forced to get mutas to deal with viking or banshee harass.

I've been following up the infestor/ling/bling with fast tech to broodlords. Ling/bling/infestor/broodlord is pretty strong . Especially with 3/3 cracklings and 3/3 broodlings coming out of the broodlords.

Questions:
ZvZ:
1. Any thoughts on the build idea I outlined above? Do roaches stop this completely? Does this get owned by banelings? I've only played a few games with this build so far (and went 3-1, losing to a 6pool that I mismicro'd against) and so I don't have much experience against a variety of builds here. My intuition says that a 3 roach wall into some sort of big roach timing attack will own this, but again, I haven't had the chance to try to survive that using this open.

ZvP:
Honestly I just need to play better here. I've been tricked a couple times by those sneaky tosses, wherein I got a bit lazy scouting, and just sent lings to see their army composition, rather than flying my overseer in to see his production and tech. The tosses had left their colossus and voidray in their main, only exposing ZSS to my lazy scouting. So, no corruptors, and I lose.

ZvT:
1. When I open infestor, how do I properly predict and deal with blue flame hellions? Factory + tech lab looks like tanks, but when they come out with 6+ blue flame hellions I'm in deep shit. So the question is, how do I correctly identify blue flame hellions before they're killing all my lings? And second, how do I react? Should I just be getting a roach warren and maybe a few roaches every game to deal with this possibility?
2. I lost one game to a quick hellion/marauder attack into banshee rush. I held the hellion/marauder attack, though I took some damage, but then was completely unprepared for the banshee. It seems the Terran's idea is to open hellion to prompt roaches from me, which get owned by marauder, AND delay my tech, making it unlikely I'll be able to deal with banshee. The Terran's goal is to do as much damage as possible with the hellion/marauder, but there's a bit more emphasis on taking out the queens so that the banshee is instant gg. Really scary build for me, and honestly if I played Terran, I'd be doing this all the time. So, any suggestions? My best guess is to respond to the hellions with speedlings and good micro, and to take out the first hellion/marauder attack with only mass speedling while teching to muta with 3 queens, but I'm really not sure how well speedling will do against hellion/marauder that is micro'd even remotely well. So, yeah, any advice on this?

Reps:
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/146443-1v1-terran-zerg-metalopolis
ZvT infestor/ling opening. Kinda sloppy as I mentioned above.

No good replays really this time.


As always, comments and constructive criticism welcome.