EPTGoal for End of Season: Platinum, world rank above 5,000
Goal for This Week: First in my gold division
Day 2
Starting Points: 69
Division Rank: 12
Overall Record: 9-6
Starting Points: 69
Division Rank: 12
Overall Record: 9-6
I was feeling pretty productive yesterday, so I thought my laddering session would be just that. I had just finished watching the daily, and was ready to go for some laddering. I didn't start laddering until around Saturday, Apr 02 3:30am GMT (GMT+00:00). I think that had some effect in my play, but not too much.
+ Show Spoiler +
I managed to fix up some of the issues I was seeing when using the stat spreadsheet, mostly due to some of the cells not displaying properly because they had no data! The graphs showing points are off as well, as the y axis is displaying 600 as its lowest benchmark for points, and since the season just started..well I'll just assume that's why for now.
I finally got sc2gears saving replays as well, which after taking a look last night before I went to bed, I don't see myself using aside from the naming convention of saving replays...at least for right now. I definitely want to experiment with the build order tracker it has, and while I'm on the subject I want to talk about build orders for a bit.
I get it, build order are extremely beneficial. I think the problem I've always had with them is why I needed to use them when much of playing seems to be reactionary anyway. The way I've come to understand it is that a build order should be used as an outline for YOUR plan to a specific game. Now obviously we will have people with 1 BO for every MU on every map, and others who just stick to 1 or 2. As far as myself using build orders goes, I have a terrible practice. I tend to have a basic plan (4 gate, 3 gate robo, 2 gate robo stargate), but I never really sat down and looked at the early game BO for these builds, or even tried to flesh it out myself. I've learned through watching so many games I try to mimic the timings, but after my cyber core goes down, I'm pretty much winging it. I'll touch on build order again later after I do my replay analysis for the day.
Daily Record: 3-4
Race MU: 1-1(P), 1-1(T), 0-2(Z), 1-0(R)
Vs. Leagues: 2-2 (Gold), 1-2 (Plat)
Maps: 0-3 on Shattered Temple
Once again, those damned zergs! I don't know what to say, 0-4 against Zerg thus far, and I really hope that changes. Despite the amount of Zergs I'm playing being even with T and P, I still feel like I hit Zerg much less on the ladder. Maybe it would be a good idea after all to try and find a practice partner for the ladder
Should note that one of my losses vs. Z was a 6 pool..scouted late, tried to sim city some cannons and such, didn't work out 
Like I said at the top of the post, last night overall didn't feel too productive. I'm hoping the replay analysis will prove me wrong, but I really can't be so sure. I found myself being evenly matched with most of my opponents last night, and that speaks to the matchmaker I suppose. Now I have read that the matchmaker isn't great, but I'll leave that for speculation.
Before I go into replays, I was thinking about releasing replay packs of games I think are pretty cool once I move to weekly posts. Could be both wins and losses, but I think I'll end up just showing off wins. For any readers, let me know if you think this could be a good idea.
Looking at my replays, I wanted to see if anything I noted yesterday was different. As I said in my intro, I'm fairly new to RTS games in comparison, I was curious to see if I managed to take anything away from my analysis yesterday. What I am noticing right away is that I'm going to need to make a conscious effort to improve on things. Interestingly, that seems pretty obvious to say, but much less obvious to actually follow through with. Part of anyone making progress is finding the strategy that works for them, and I'm glad I'm taking the time to discover this stuff now so I can hopefully remedy it to make my season that much more enjoyable.
Here on out, I'd like to specify a plan, or at least some sort of benchmark I'd like to reach in my play. For instance, one of the problems I noticed yesterday was that my chrono was getting to high, so I'd like to spend at least 1 or 2 days focusing solely on making sure my chrono is as low as possible for the situation. I'm hoping with this in mind I can eventually patch the holes in my play. Something I've also picked on is other players suggesting to only watch loses, and I don't know if I agree. I think it makes sense for higher level players simply because you're making less mistakes, and identifying the one mistake that led to the loss is important. For myself, I think it could be even more beneficial to see where errors occur in both wins AND losses. I think for now, it's these holes in my play, the mistakes during wins and losses, that could be the difference in the games I lose.
+ Show Spoiler +
Side note: I'm going to go back and watch those couple dailies where Day9 went over mechanics and such, since I think that's where I think I need to start. No sense in worrying about micro and apm if I don't use the hotkeys needed to execute properly right?
So going off yesterday, I'll just note if I can see any differences in my play, and from there I'd like to figure out what I want to work on.
- Probe Production - Pretty good actually. There were a few times in battles where I slacked on probes, seems pretty common for my level, and I've never been significantly behind in probe count (save harassment), so I don't think I'm going to worry about that as much.
- Saturation - Again, pretty good, not too far off from yesterday. I definitely think I need to get my first expansion down sooner, but aside from that I don't think I need to focus too heavily on that either.
- APM - I notice for all my games yesterday, my average APM was around 40. Just with yesterday, times where it was very low, but also times where I'd be over 100 for quite awhile. sc2gears has me at an average of 57, I'm assuming because it's set to not include the first 90 seconds of game time, which I feel is a good benchmark for when to start recording APM. With that said, I think I'm gonna tune sc2gears back a bit on my APM alert and set it to 50. I think the alert is helping at some points, but at others I really don't notice because of my music or whatever. I don't see this as a problem to focus on either, as I think learning to use more hotkeys would be time better spent.
- Engagements - For the time being, I think my choices of when to engage are pretty good. I think I have a pretty good idea of what units I'll need based on my opponents composition, and when I don't have a good mix knowing when to retreat. One of the more glaring issues I've noticed with some of the players I beat is that their decision making is not great. Engaging 9 marauders against 3 zealots, 7 stalkers and 3 sentries isn't the best idea, especially considering my sentries had plenty of energy ^_^ Don't see engagement or army management as an issue right now either.
- Keeping Chrono Low - So, in most of my games I was able to keep my chrono low in the beginning stages of the game. Around the 8-10 min mark once warpgate was done I seemed to forget quite a bit about it. This did come in handy a bit later in the game when I wanted to chrono out an upgrade from start to finish, but I definitely had spots where my nexus sat at 100 energy. Although I don't think this is a big deal, ironing this out now would certainly be beneficial to my play. I also don't think it's an issue that needs to be solely focused on, so I'm looking to improve this steadily while I focus on more important issues.
- Tower Control - So the thing about my tower control, is that I seem to only want to use it when I'm trying to be aggressive. I don't think it's a bad thing, but I have to get in my head that it's FREE VISION. Even on a map like Slag Pits where I may never actually go through the middle at any time during the game, controlling the tower will at least help identify where my opponent's units are NOT. Let's be honest though, sometimes you can't control every tower, or even any, so I'm not so worried about this. What I think is interesting to note is how this aspect of my play ties in so closely with my final observation.
- Forward Pylon - So whenever I went to make a forward pylon, it was at the Xel'Naga tower, and whenever I went to scout the tower, I ended up making a pylon at some point. The concept of the forward pylon itself is quite debatable, however I don't think any player would deny being able to reinforce your army from anywhere on the map is a great thing. I haven't found myself being too high on money, so in spots where you could throw pylons all over the map because you have the money is just not the case. I'm leaving pylon/tower issues as something to be worked on soon, but I don't want to work on it right now since I see an even larger issue in my play.
- Hotkeys - Although I didn't mention it last post, I will be mentioning it now since this is the aspect of my play I'd like to focus on for day 3. I only use 3-4 hotkeys, so I'd like to extend in hopes that it will improve my APM. I also think my small hands could play into the fact that I don't use higher numbers, especially considering my keyboard is slightly larger then others I've seen.
Ending Points: 81
Division Rank: 13
Gold Region Rank: (sc2ranks didn't update at time of post)
Gold Global Rank: (sc2ranks didn't update at time of post)
Division Rank: 13
Gold Region Rank: (sc2ranks didn't update at time of post)
Gold Global Rank: (sc2ranks didn't update at time of post)
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