Mechanics... Or? - fourth entry

Yo peeps!

Fourth post - the game I found for today was just epic! I have already mentioned my friend ZuQi in the recent post - also this time he will be the evil villain crushing my hopes of ever winning a Starcraft match against him

Intro
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ZuQi and I have literally played hundreds of games together! He was the one that really motivated me to get better. To understand why that is so you have to know a bit about him. In general he is a great dude irl and online! But because be brags and talks trash over skype when I make mistakes (I have to admit that I too tend to trash talk a bit when he fails - who doesn't!?

), he can be a pain in the ass... Especially if the end result is 14 - 0.... me losing.. ofc

At first, losing so much to him made me a bit sad

and I started to consider playing less, or at least less against him - and when he started switching races just because he could, while still beating me it really got om my nerves!

Think about it. If you and a friend was duking it out with some custom games and you both in the beginning went standard builds and he just outplayed you it would be okay. But ZuQi.... no... standard play is for #¤%&! - so he decided to humiliate me with every strategy possible because he could

In base barracks, proxy reapers, planetary fortress-rush, nuke-rush, battle cruisers, pure ghost armies, pure viking armies... you just name it and he has probably done it against me

But you know what? You should play for fun, and he clearly did that :D

Well... All these losses would normally make someone stop playing the game, but since I hold grudges, not that it is a good thing, but I do it naturally when it concerns something I enjoy or put lots of time and effort into, I continued with only one goal in mind - to smash him!

Actually, if you where in my position I would almost bet you would feel the same. Losing 14-0 is normally not that motivating... in general very demotivating! But when you really want to succeed at it you have to keep on going - NEVER GIVE UP NEVER SURRENDER!!! :D

When in the bronze league everything is a valid strategy. No build sucks and you can win against any player! As long as he does not go banshee, ghosts or dark templars

(I lost a lot to those builds) That is a statement I would also like to take to silver - no offense to all the silver players out there, but I seriously do not recall any progress when I moved up in silver... Some would say it sounds pretty sad, but all it took was a some more games with more 2 gate openings into late cybernetics core and 8.30 min warp gate research done. If i remember correctly it took a bit under a week for me to get into silver. I was very happy about it though! But nothing had changed with my play. My mechanics still sucked.

Hotkeys!? Screen capture?! mini-map!? What is that!?

On the picture you can see that i only use 1 hotkey, which in bronze and silver league is sufficient!

As you can see my mechanics actually did not suck, they were not even there! From Brood War I knew about constant worker production, using hotkeys and the mini-map,but there is a big difference between knowing and doing. And i did not really do any of those things - which is illustrated very nicely in some of the games I already have shown you guys, but very much in this game against ZuQi. Sometimes I wonder why I did not use any of the things I knew from Brood war? Well... What is done is done and whatever is eaten is eaten^^

This match is from the 03-09-2010 23.00 on lost temple cross positions. The game opens up pretty standard. No proxies or insane pressure, just chill'd play.

Or is it ?!?!??!
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#¤%& him that sneaky bastard

As every other gosu protoss I got out my robotics facility after my second gateway for that key early observer to spot if something fishy was going on. I do not know if this was a thing that normally only happened in the low leagues - but I seriously feel that ZuQi sometimes was a bit to lucky against me -.-

This is just so................

And yes. This is what happens when you only have 22 average apm

Here it is again - and I really do not get how he just keeps on going

(later in the game)

Moving on with the game! After the first nuke had landed we were now even in supply - me slightly ahead. I know that sounds weird, but he apparently was not that much better than me^^
ZuQi was gearing up to take one of the islands and the main to my sneaky expansion

while I had got my own expansion up and running.

MULE POWER!

As you can see both ZuQi and I transitioned nicely out of the early game. He went mass marauder which is very potent against gateway units, and he must have known that I could not build Immortals because I needed more observers to scout for ghosts! ^^ The game continued and after some nice scouting I found his islands expansion = I went for a warp prism. The problem with this is that you have to have multitasking abilities and look at the mini-map - something a player with bad mechanics does not have -__-

Which means that he loses his whole army while looking at his observer on the island.....

Continuing with the important things in the match! ZuQi had mustered up a big force and was now ready to attack my hidden natural (It can be discussed whether it was hidden when he knew of it, but that is not the important thing right now ;P ). Since he had just cleared out a big part of my forces doing anything else than attacking would make no sense, and he certainly agreed with that. This is perhaps the turning point of the game, a stroke of a genius I would say! Remember the second nuke? That was what took away my focus, because as you can see I was clearly gearing up to attack from two sides at once

After holding of this push I discovered his "ninja-main-natural" - expansion

Hmm.. What is that doing there!??!

Two zealots easily cleared it up, pushing the game a bit back in my favor. Since I had also scouted his "ninja-island" - expansion It was now time to use the warp prism! :D

But then something weird happened... Do not really know the exact details of this decision making, because nothing else was happening in the game :S

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First of all I believe it is important to note that be panicked and started building millions of turrets!

But then I started to panic?!?! :S

Not just a little but very much!!! I wanted to make another run for it! - I just HAD TO MAKE IT!

But faith would not as I...

ZuQi now had the clear advantage, and I knew the only thing I could do was to get vision off the map so I could not be caught off guard. I made some more observers, now up to a total of six, three in my base to in case of drops or nukes, one in ZuQi's natural and two at my hidden base. But as I figured vision could not win me the game at this point

GG

This is just one of many games like this. It did take some time for me to realize, but some time later things actually started improving.

next post: Starting out with hotkeys

Mechanics... Or? - fourth entry

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