Ladder Blog #3

I haven't actually played much ZvT lately. I played this one awesome game against a meching Terran on XelNaga. It was really my first actual experience against this playstyle.

He opens up with hellions. And keeps on sending hellions. Every 30 seconds, he sends two more to my base. At first, it was pretty tough keeping up with them, but eventually, I stabalized without taking any serious damage. My initial plan was to go roach/muta until he gets lots of thor/marine up, but he had a bunch of turrets up to defend his bases so I cut out the mutas and just used them for scouting and general map awareness.

The hellion harass continued throughout the game. It eventually got pretty annoying as he was harassing my third from the highground ledge above. From that position, it can only reach a few mineral patches so the damage was usually minimal. During the mid-game, I had a maxed army of roach/infestor with a ton of larva and a lot banked, so I decided to go for his gold base. I was on 3 base with a fourth base done but not saturated, and he'd had his gold base for about a minute. I pushed from either flank, and neural parasited a bunch of stuff, but I think I should've gone from the side paths too. My units got stuck and I almost broke him, but the plaentary pushed my back. Some of my infestors survived.

Later, he had his gold saturated with at least 30+ SCVs and mules. Two infestors with full energy put an end to that. Damn, it felt good.

I transitioned into broodlords pretty late. I had a bunch of infestors since I had a gas excess so it was infestor broodlord. My first actual experience with that composition. My 10 or so broodlords killed his gold and pushed his army back to his natural, but he managed to kill it off with vikings eventually, despite me popping down volleyballs to defend.

He never really recovered after that. Despite the fact that I remained below 1k minerals and 2k gas for the rest of the game, and had no real production, he had less. I eventually broodlorded him to death.

In other news, I really do need to get burrow upgrade asap. I got hit with a timing just before burrow and was rolled completely.

I've experienced a breakthrough, I thought about the 14/14 lingbane unit composition and thought, "Why do I actually need speed for this?" So I cut out the ling speed and got a faster bane nest and holy shit, it's good. The banes now come out before the queen block in hatch first, and well before roaches in a 1 base roach build. It also gives me a big advantage in lingbane vs lingbane. Because I can get my banes out faster than him, I get to rally closer to his base and he's forced to stay closer to his base. This means I'm constantly on the agressive and he's forced to defend. This is a great position and I haven't lost yet.

I'm not sure if this is effective in the long term. I might need to grab one of my practice buddies and have him test it out various ways. Still, for the moment, it might be my favourite build.

I also tried out a few things with the spine crawler queen build against FE. Just a note, expanding yourself DOES NOT WORK. He can outproduce you in lings because of his earlier 2 hatcheries. I think the only real option is to block your ramp with the queens and spine crawler, and transition into roaches with lair tech, since the tech is the only advantage you have. Don't feel like it could do much though.

I still like the matchup.

Ling/bane is glorious.

I've had to make an adjustment to the 11 pool. Instead of 1 pair of zerglings, I go for two. Early pylon block against my expo is just too good, especially when he's going for an expansion himself.
As idra says, when Toss gets up his nexus before you get your hatchery up, it's never a good position.

I kinda get disappointed when people overreact to the early pool and go 2 gate. I've perfected how to defend the zealot pressure and it puts me ahead. I'd rather play a standard game than get a free win. (The person I perfected the defense against proceeded to 6 gate me. I almost died but he retreated to the watchtower for a second, giving me time to burrow my banes at the choke. Killed all his sentries, pulled out the win).