Phalanx's Daily #73: Burning off the bonus pool

Johnson, the lovable 1-st scouting probe! Dream profession is Aiur Head Chef.


Mike the stalker. Hardest working of them all, and single-handedly preventing scouting and pressure, while receiving the least credit.


Emily, the mothership core. Has a secret love for education, but quickly gets out of hand and fires photons all over the place if pissed off.


Snowden, the sneaky observer, watching out for the protoss race. He checks your computer history too.


Clyde, the zealot. Often times forgotten about due to cutting corners in the early game, and is always brought around in clutch situations.

The game is a PvT on Derelict Watcher... I'm actually sad to admit that until I watched some recent WCS games I thought this map was "Derelict Watchtower"... I don't even know why, it made sense. That thing in the middle's kinda like a watchtower right? But yeah, once you have something set in your mind even if it's really stupid you just can't unsee it .
Also I tried out one of the new observer interfaces today, I think I like it more. It might be a bit more crowded, but then again we also have zoom out at our disposal now >:D.


Also, someone who recognized my name! <3

Johnson scouts about, seeing a critical lack of gasses. Since I see his barracks building it's obviously not a proxy, but his expansion is also not so fast so I get a bit suspicious... maybe an engineering bay block.


Hmmm, the power of educated guesses...

It turns out that my hunch was correct... what it also turns out is that I brainfarted pretty hard. In my mind I though "ok start making a zealot, check with the probe, and cancel the zealot if there isn't an engibay. easy!". What my hands did were "ok lets start a zealot, immediately cancel it without properly checking for the engibay, and then just make a stalker like an idiot!".
(w.w)
Turns out that my enemy also slipped up a bit though, since he actually finished his engineering bay instead of getting it right on the brink of finishing.


Sometimes I fantasize about being a pro. Then I remember that I'm bad at sc2.

I mentally facepalm for a while... and since my whole plan (fast storm, rather than the usual fast colossus :3) is messed up by the super-delayed nexus, I decide to just go bull-shit out a strategy and pray to the flying spaghetti monster that it works. Since minerals were floating, I threw down 3 gates, and since I knew that I would have trouble with the terran bunker, I decided to just make a fast warp prism. Hell maybe I should have even invested in a forge while I was at it to make some proxy cannons from the prism.


Bull-shit build, loading...

To skip ahead to the drop, it went... well... I guess it was ok. His marines took a bit to get to my stalkers and zealots and so I killed off a fair deal of SCVs (12) but I lost every since unit that i dropped, even needlessly the warp prism. Were I smarter with the drop, I could have picked up the stalkers and kept dropping them afterwards for more kills... but I was panicked, and all in all I did pull ahead in the worker count thanks to the drop.


Retreat is not an option!

Oh boy the mid game, time to get to enjoy some agression from the terran! Nothing out of the ordinary of course. I had started to tech to colossi, giving up my fast storm idea since I didn't think I had the moneys for it. As the first marines march across the map, Snowden snags some sight on them to give me a heads up.


Don't worry, this is legal.

As he runs up my ramp with his 2 medivac push, Emily casts up Photon Overcharge and my colossus pops out, effectively giving me quite enough units to defend. I also was so close to getting some awesome forcefields down... if I had placed my 2nd ff 1 hex to the left, I think that I would have trapped roughly 8 more marines in their death . Too bad that close doesn't count in SC2.


Close doesn't count unless you're a melee unit.

As it was, quite a few of his units ran themselves into their deaths. He took a risk to kill my colossus, and it did not pay off.
His next step in aggression was, of course, to drop... god I still hate drops. Drops are the bane of protoss's existence. I did, however, have the power of guessing at my disposal, and I did kind of expect a drop to come. His first drop didn't really have enough units to be able to preform a multipronged harass, which was very lucky for me since I didn't have the units to defend it either.


Doomdrop, kill off a pylon, retreat. All in a day's work.

Next came a true twoproned attack - marauders at the front, knocking at the nexus. I shot off the photon overcharge but it was obvious that I needed to bring units to defend too. I clicked 1, and a-moved over to the natural... but then, something magical happened. A miracle. I split off units to go back and defend against the 4 medivacs that would soon-to-be dropping my base. WHAT!? Phalanx using some logical thinking and splitting up units from his deathball?
Obviously I had some sort of magical fairie grace during this game, since that's probably the first time I've ever made such a good decision.


*mystical and divine chorus sings at Phalanx's mediocre achievement*

From the successful defense of the drops, I somehow managed to take back the supply lead, and as per usual, we both got into macromode <3.

Since there's really not much that I can talk about while 2 players in PvT just are macroing, I'll give a general sense of the upgrades and unit composition as we engaged.
Terran - 2/2 bio, +1 air weapons, ghost energy (idk what that's called), conc.shells, combat shields, stim
Me - 2/2, storm, thermal lance, charge
Pretty even fight... although I have 200/200 while he's at 180/200. Up until the fight he has a cute little concave going on too, even with a few bunkers sprinkled in...


Nice concave, it'd be a shame is... something happened to it...

I get a warp prism, hoping to get a few zealots into his 3rd base. I couldn't quite get any warpins though since his WHOLE ARMY CAME TO DEFEND THE PRISM. Yeah, that concave? not anymore, and my units were right at his throat too. After warping in a few at my proxy I decided to go for the jump while he was still out of position.


GET THAT FUCKING WARP PRISM!!!

As I move my army in, his army is still extremely clumped up from the recent move command - perfect place for some AoE damage. It sure didn't help him that he wasn't maxed either. The ghosts move out of range before I can feedback them, but they don't manage to get off any EMPs on my templar so I was quite fine with that. Rolling in with blades and weather ablaze, I go in for the kill.
Some splitting was attempted by the terran, but a bit too late.


Today's weather - stormy with a change of gg.

And for the big plot twist as for why i was able to stomp to hard.
Because of going over to scare off the warp prism, his fleet of 12 vikings were chilling by his 3rd the whole fight.


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