No platinum

It's no longer fun, I've noticed I hate the game by now and feel positively much better when I don't play it. Maybe it's time to quit?

On December 31 2011 22:33 NewbieOne wrote:
@Grndr101: Yes, I don't go marine tank. I don't like WW1 style games that take 1 hour and are all about positioning, and if you mess up one simple or accidental thing, your 40 invested minutes go out the window. It can be fun at times (e.g. when you sit on the opposing plateau but within tank range and use a cloaked banshee for vision, or just scan) but not in every game. I don't like having to hold marines in place or hold them back, I don't particularly enjoy the viking business, and getting mules dropped on my tanks or dying to a gamble drop by the enemy is not my type of fun. And I hate playing against turtling players. Nor do I particularly enjoy the immobility of an army that relies on tanks, or the getting cheesed if I don't keep getting excellent intel.

On January 01 2012 06:14 Grndr101 wrote:
My TvT style is heavily marine based so I can break tank lines if my opponent is being too greedy or too tech heavy. I actually don't make vikings until 3+ bases(or unless my opponent is going for 2port banshee or cloackshee, then you need vikings).

Polt and MMA also have those kind of mobile, agressive styles. Or if you want to be more air based there's tons of other players like Happy and Ghanzi you can learn from.

I guess if you're not breaking your opponent early in the gold leagues then you're doing something wrong. Those leagues make tons of mistakes, take advantage of them, be more agressive.

On January 01 2012 03:45 NewbieOne wrote:
Guys, here are some replays I've promised, especially for eXigent. TvT only so far because that's what I've got today on ladder. There are three and they are representative of what happens in my TvT, even though they aren't representative of what I technically have done every game.

Game first: Antiga Shipyards, duration 12:06, file

This guy is making 2 rax (react, tlab), one tech fact, one react port and e-bay and a turret right in the middle of his mineral line. One base. I remember wrecking such builds with only banshees in silver but this is gold. Not much better but better enough that this wouldn't have worked, I guess. Anyway, I went for reapers. I cleared his attack but meanwhile he's got an army out and enough troops and medivacs to fly a siege push over without need to knock at the front. He actually expanded around 10 minutes, flying over a simple CC (not OC). He actually built turrets at the edge of his plateau even though I didn't have any ports, so I suppose he was executing a built learnt by heart. Typically of me, I had nothing with which to counter two tanks and a heckload of marines, and I lost. Judging by my resources, I slipped very hard and my macro was way subpar in the end but this wasn't very obvious. From my point of view then in game, something was happening all the time and I have trouble imagining at which point I would have been able to get a second factory down. I possibly could have flied over to my nat with whatever I could, then pumped out a tank or two more, filled the bunkers, fought my way back on top of the plateau but I think there was no way for me to win that game from that point (would have required a very unexperienced opponent to allow me to come back from that point), so I quit.

Game second: Metalopolis, duration 15:33, file

I opened reapers and I was nasty. In fact, the way he executed the fast expand, I possibly would have killed him outright with banshees if I had opened that way (there was no e-bay, second OC wasn't there way before I'd have had some 2-4 banshees there). He was literally scared but I focused on harass and didn't get a normal army despite having the resources. While I had both of his sets of scvs running in a two-prong banshee harass on turretless mineral lines, he simply moved marines and tanks over and killed me the way Day9 says (essentially: if they're doing some fancy stuff, just go and kill them). Since this is gold and not silver, I wasn't able to kill marine tank off with banshees alone. End of story.

...And I actually make blunders like these two on ladder all the time. At least in TvT.

Now the win:

Game third: Xel'Naga Caverns, duration 27:35, file

(Disclaimer: this is not a big style win, nor anything pro.)

Reapers followed by banshees, got some tanks in the meantime and sat in my base with the expo for a longer while to be safe, to the point of oversaturation. I finally expanded, got my additional gas, continued harrassing him, denied him his natural expo, made sure he didn't have one in some other place on the map, then I just got two armouries, third port and took as many expansions as I could with PFs in them and just made battlecruisers until full supply, with upgrades, and I was content to see him invest in turrets around his base. The game was probably won long before, but I remember losing such games anyway. I didn't feel like taking any risks with that marine ball he had there. At the end, I just a-moved the battlecruisers and that was it.

So, basically, in TvT I win only if I manage to harass the opponent into turtling on one base, expand, get a big econ and put together a strike force on the side, with upgrades. And typically that's battlecruisers, yeah. 3/3 battlecruisers are cool, actually, one 3/3 battlecruiser kills three 0/0 battlecruisers (tested on a unit testing map) and people don't make 40 3/3 vikings in the blind (one yamato per viking at the beginning of the engagement btw). My TvP wins occasionally resemble this one, depending on the map (I sometimes go bio and I sometimes go marine banshee thor raven).

On January 01 2012 23:27 Grndr101 wrote:


okay, I'm going to reply to this one now I've watched the replays.

First off, what the thell is that BO? Reapers with nitro packs, are we in the beta yet? Joking aside, before you try fancy stuff, try to macro with a simple BO. 3rax only marines will work fine, a simple 111 with marine tank viking or marine tank medivac will do as well or even MMM. I see you going for banshees with no real micro or map control to speak of and then you're surprised about losing to a tank push.

The thing about those fancy harass openings like hellion drop, banshee, reaper or whatever, is that you need to be active with those units. The advantage of building an early banshee is for putting on pressure before your opponent gets adequate ant-air up. If your banshee or reapers are just sitting around, it means it's dead weight, something that could've been invested in economy or upgrades or real units like marines or tanks.

Secondly, macro. I don't need to point out a specific game because you're consistently floating 500+ minerals at the 9 minute mark. Your expanding could happen earlier, when you build a CC the goal is to float it to your natural ASAP, or you're just 1basing with an extra mule.
It's easy, there's no need for a trust fund in SC2, so when you have money spend it, doesn't even matter what you spend it on, as long as it sits nice and low.

Moving on, the last thing I'd like to point out is map awareness. The thing that's most disconcerting in all of your games is that you have no presence on the map whatsoever. You know when the caster says "This player seems to be everywhere at once!" ? Well that's map control, it's what wins you games once you have units.
Grab the watchtowers, when you have an army let it be active. This is what I was talking about when I was saying you don't exploit mistakes. How can you exploit them in the first place if you don't know if your opponent's making them.
This brings me to scouting, it seems scouting information doesn't help you too much, but that's quite ok, keep scouting often, it'll pay out. It takes a while before you can translate what your opponent is doing into useful information.

As a last note I'd like to say that the real problem probably lies in your mechanics. Don't get me wrong, you don't need to be a virtuoso to play SC2 at a high level. But you need to REMEMBER to do things, remember to scout, take the watchtowers, build workers, supply depots, infrastructure. Remember to use your army once you have it. Hotkey your shit!!! Remember that a cloackshee will hit around the 7 min mark. In fact you don't have to know it, you have to feel it.
This is experience, speed, whatever.

My advice to you? Pick a solid build for your matchups, stick to them until you're used to execute them accurately. Watch some pro streams, don't focus on what they're doing, but HOW they're doing it.

Oh and finally, please GG at the end of your games. Being BM never helped anyone, if you get baneling busted say thank you, because you know the next time he might not get away with it.
Have fun playing SC2 FFS.

On January 01 2012 07:12 NewbieOne wrote:


Interesting. I generally want vikings ASAP if I go tank at all unless I can be confident that the opponent has fewer tanks then I do (or in fact doesn't have vikings), in which case I'd scan or float a rax. I've got some bad scars from early pushes with no more than 3 tanks and as little as a single viking for range sometimes. For this reason I badly don't want to have fewer vikings than my opponent.



There was a time I actually did Polt push vs Protoss and sometimes other races. I don't remember why I stopped. Might have had to do with them going straight for my base in retaliation or with getting outmicroed or with port openings being so easily readable by any opponent on ladder by now. I also have a bit of my own style in which I first dropped (leaving just as the first medivac finished, generally 6 rines and 1 hellion) and then proceeded with banshees in an immediate follow-up. It was effective initially but I stopped doing it for some reason. Possibly accidental deaths to lucky turrets connected with very thin base defences, or bad luck in base racing.



I suspect in most of the games either the opponent is or I am effectively broken or at least crippled before late game starts, it just isn't always clearly visible while still playing that game.