EPT
A Bo9, Upcoming Blog Posts, and Community Maps
Table of Contents
Thoughts on the Bo9 with Yoshi
Upcoming Blog Posts
An Aside on Community Maps
Thoughts on the Bo9 with Yoshi top
VoDs:
+ Show Spoiler +
As a note, the VoD for the first game is pretty choppy (the audio is fine, but the video is craptacular), but the rest of the games should be fine. Here's a link to the playlist, starting at game 1, watch the series in sequence: (link).
If you don't feel like going to youtube, in spoilers here is the series in embedded videos. Watch these in order to relive the experience of the series.
+ Show Spoiler [Baller Match 1 VoDs] +
As some of you may know from the calling-out post or the LR thread, I recently played a showmatch against forum regular Yoshi Kirishima. It was a Bo9, and on the line was pride, getting BMed by SeeKeR, and of course, the forced writing of a girl blog (a process which I am currently undertaking, having gotten back my laptop from the shop). Having lost 4-5 (in an enormously riveting series-- I was down 3 games and only barely forced game 9-- I thought I'd take a moment to speculate on the nature series play, and this series in particular.
Although some commenters decided that both Yoshi and I were high Master Terran players, I can only assume they inferred that based on the advice I give on the forums. I'm certainly in Master League, and Yoshi is definitely nowhere near the bottom of Master League, but he's still a step away from being a top master player, and I still play Diamond League players occasionally, especially if I lose several games in a row.
Preparing for the showmatch, I quickly realized I was rather outmatched. Reviewing the replays I could find of him on drop.sc, and watching his stream, I learned that aside from a little defensive sloppiness and a little greediness, Yoshi was a remarkably skilled Terran player. He played around with all the units, and would often eschew bio in all matchs for air or mech builds. He was quicker than me, used more control groups, had stronger macro and multitask, and a better ability to both control a large army and make intelligent decisions about infrastructure, upgrades, and compositions on multiple bases. For some of these areas (multitask especially) he outclassed by quite a bit. In others, such as familiarity with different playstyles, he outclassed me only by a modest amount.
It was rather clear that in a straight-up game with no large advantages taken by either side in the early phase, he'd more often than not be able to outplay me as things sped up. I played some practice TvTs, got back in shape, doubled my number of ladder games for the season, but it was fairly clear that I'd need to do some out-of-the-box thinking if I wanted to beat him.
My first thoughts were compositional. A common mistake of TvT mech players is to overcommit to tanks in Mech vs Mech. For those rare TvTs in which both players go Mech, there's a brief period in the early game that's analagous to the ling/bane openers of ZvZ. Obviously, both Terran players are making scvs at full speed, but an early Mech vs Mech composition typically won't feature too many tanks. Tanks are slow, not great against hellions in small numbers and before siege, are vulnerable to landed viking attacks and banshees if unsupported, and are generally bad in the very beginning.
On maps with the proper architecture, and if you have AA, maybe a bunker, and walling to back them up, early tanks can defend just fine. Most of the time, though, it takes 2-3 tanks with siege to be able to really hold off some sort of hellion/viking nonsense, and that takes time, and gas, and leaves you vulnerable to losing air control or falling behind in the ludicrous blue flame hellion vs blue flame hellion fights that scour the land between the bases. However, Mech vs Mech is rare enough, and this kind of attack is unlikely enough, that many players at my level simply crumble before a wave of hellions and vikings, finding their 1 or 2 unsieged tanks utterly unsuitable to defend the earlier blue flame and extra vikings.
Yoshi was probably going to be better than that, but I held that attack in my back pocket, an ace in the hole, so to speak. After a bit of refinement, it came to life as a 2-base air build, based on the original Sky Terran TvT principles laid out by iEchoic, but expanded upon and enhanced to make for a transition to full mech on 3 bases. A semiEchoic build, if you would.
A sky terran attack on 2 base was liable to only work once, however. I'd need more than that if I wanted to take down a superior player, so I took some time to examine the map pool. Drawn from the most recent MotM winners and the active map pool of Crux, TPW, and ESV, it had more 2 player maps than 4-- and that meant more opportunities for cheese. Yoshi was a lazy scouter, and I might be able to catch him off guard with a cheese or two if I was careful. 2 maps immediately struck my as ideal for cheese.
Crux Whirlwind seems like an unlikely choice for an all-in, but if you went for some sort of late proxy attack (proxy thor and proxy stim both come to mind), it was ideal. You only need to scout 1 base, then proxy the structures between the third and fourth base of the other 2 locations-- you'll be close to his natural either way, and completely out of the path of normal scout paths. I hadn't executed a 3 rax stim attack in a long time, but this map with its wide-ramped nats and seemingly large rush distance would do well.
TPW Silver Sands immedately jumped out at me as the perfect map to 3 rax marine/scv all-in on. The top of the main ramps has a feature kind of like Backwater Gulch, where the ramp is curving outwards towards the edge of the base, constricting buildable area at the top. Unlike Backwater Gulch, it constricted buildable area suffeciently that it might be walled with just a depot and a rax. Geiko's 3 rax marine/scv attack would do perfectly-- so perfectly it might seem too obvious. I couldn't deny it, though.
With these three strategies-- surprise sky terran, proxy 3 rax stim on Whirlwind, and Geiko's 3 rax on Silver Sands, I thought I might be able to throw enough loops at Yoshi to squeeze the series out of him. I certainly got close, and I think it helped me better understand series play. As a player who has never made a deep enough tourney run to reach a Bo5 round, I've never had to have more than 2 builds prepared.
Despite all my preparation, Yoshi did eventually beat me in game 9, but I like to think that, even against me, a slower, less skilled player, he really felt the thrill of danger going into that final game. I also think that it sort of shows that series play is pretty different that a player of my caliber could take 4 games off a player of his skill. I could kind of sense myself getting fatigued, even with the short games, as the series dragged on. With a bit of technical difficulties, plus the wait time in between games for map selection etc, it was easily a 4 hour deal. As game 9 began, I wondered if my adversary was as tired as I was. It's only a taste of what people must deal with at LAN events, and I can't possibly imagine the fatigue that would be inflicted on people at MLG or other live events.
Blog Projects top
So, if my blog has been less loud and boisterous than usual recently, that is not due to lack of writing on my part. I've got 4 major blog posts in the works, and as a result am about 1/4th finished with each of them rather than actually finishing any of them. Here's what I've got on the way, and I'm mostly writing this down so that I feel more motivated to write now that my computer's back:
- Massive Girl Blog-- Having lost my showmatch vs Yoshi, this is my sad punishment. It'll be more of a telling story type of thing than an advice thing given my current circumstances. I've got a half-written blog post I meant to publish long ago on this topic that I'm refurbishing.
- On the Verge (SuperNoVa)-- In the past couple weeks I've become a pretty big SuperNoVa fan. In the style of my hype blog for the IM champions I'll be talking a bit about him. This one has only an outline plus some images but I'm very excited about it.
- Country Profile on Iran-- This is also half-written, and I keep on putting it off because it's dense writing. I'll be talking about Iran's demographics, political institutions and system of government, since we may be invading them soon.
- Book Review: The Blade Itself-- A good book review for one of my favorite Low Fantasy novels. The Blade Itself (and the rest of the First Law books) could be compared to A Song of Ice and Fire with similarly morally ambiguous and unrelated protagonists but a somewhat less complex plot. Haven't started this one yet.
An Aside on Community Maps top
Some commenters wondered about the choice of using entirely community maps, almost none of which had seen tournament use, for the Baller Match. As the guy who basically picked out the map pool, I thought I should at least explain myself. I'm firmly of the belief that Battle.net 2.0 is strangling the mapmaking community. I don't have any solutions from Blizzard's end, but watching more and more MLG or IPL games on freaking Terminus or Tal'Darim Altar or some other map that's been in the pool for like 9 years is annoying. GSL innovates, sure, but every other tournament and event organizer just keeps on feeding us the same dry overused maps. I'll be damned if I didn't like daybreak the first 90 games I watched on it, but man, it's getting dry.
The fact of the matter is, our community is actually flooded with sexy maps. Check out MotM May (results) or the maps forum as a whole (link) and you'll find a ridiculous diversity of awesome maps. Sometime, a long time ago, I promised myself that if I ever had a say in the map pool of any broadcasted event, that I'd do everything in my power to make that map pool interesting, innovative, and fun, and promote the mapmaking community. I thought I'd never get the chance, until last week.
Given the opportunity to use cool new maps instead of dusty ladder maps (half of which are designed by blizz rather than real mapmakers), I think the choice is clear.
What's Next? top
My computer is back, and I'm ready to do some serious writing. I've got a lot to do for both the girl blog and getting together another showmatch. PM me if you'd like to play in the showmatch, by the way (and include your bnet name and ID). Sorry for a somewhat dry blog post, guys, it's been a dry weekend for me too ;_;
If nothing else, check out the next BALLER MATCH, where I'm certain we won't have as many technical difficulties
