Daily Ladder-age #17: Harass Counts

The game is on WhirlWind, with me spawning in the top-left position and my opponent spawning in the bottom-left position. Both of us scout each other very late, and both of us run 2gas at 15 for our openers.


Lets go stargate!

While I go for a fast stargate and phoenixes, my opponent goes for fast blink. Facing blink with a phoenix opening is honestly one of the hardest situations to be put in, although only because it makes harassment so much harder. I always make a robotics facility and pump out immortals, so I never do have trouble with countering the stalkers in a mid game fight.



Like many players who scout a phoenix opening, my opponents drops an expansion ASAP. Although I can't exactly punish this fast expo, it does give me the cue that he'll be playing passively for a while and that I can also now expand.


Minerals in mah mouth om nom nom.

The phoenixes are fairly well thwarted throughout the early game, and they only get a couple of probes here and there.


Strategic retreat.

The only noteworthy action until he comes at me with a small push is the pick off of a full energy sentry.


Jajaja, even speedy gonzales couldn't out run us!

Around 11 minutes my opponent starts to look into applying some pressure to me with his blink stalkers.



Utilizing his blink, my enemy makes many repeated hit-and-run attacks. My immortal count is high enough that he probably takes more damage than I do, but it was none the less quite annoying.


Phantom spiders, attack!

While his stalkers are out on the field, my phoenixes get large openings to just sweep in and pick off many of his probes.



The engagements start becoming more and more in my favor, I begin to push back out a little bit. Looking back, this point in the game (as he tried to secure his 3rd) probably was when my prime opportunity for victory was. I had dt tech, and if I had a proxy pylon planted earlier I might have been able to tak e him down. Instead, I looked to take the macro game.



The first big fight goes down by the xel'naga tower, controlled by me.


Boom to the face!!!

As I move in, I try to run my phoenix in to disable his HT, but sadly they are able to throw down their storms before I disable them. While my enemy had HT tech, however, I had my DTs up, for which he didn't seem to have an observer.


Nice weather today.

The storms eat down at my immortals pretty badly, cutting down their survivability by quite a bit.


I'm tired of the weather now.

Once my wall of zealots die, however, the immortals are left quite alone and I lose far more than I should have. Not a great engagement, although far from the end of the world.

The thing that really got me to lose this game was annoying little zealot harassments into my bases. Although only about 3 or 4 came in at a time, I was far behind my opponnent in upgrades, so my probes took heavy damage.


Wield the rectangle of doom!

Another engagement goes down, and although I end up "victorious", the storms eliminated most of my precious immortals, and zealots further harass my probe count at home.


Ewwww.

The harassments just keep getting me screwed over, while my enemy even gets up his 3rd and comfortably is macroing.



Being widdled down so much, I decide to just go for a bum rush all in to see if I could manage a miracle, but no miracle came down on me.