Phalanx's Daily #79: Zealot/Archon/Immo

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.

Not really enough interesting stuff in the early game, so I'm just going to go ahead and skip over that stuff for today.

The match up is PvP, the map is Neo Planet S. Both of us basically leave each other alone and mind our own business for a long time.

at about 11:40 I move out with 3 sentries/zealots/immortals/archons, as well as a warp prism on the side for a attack into the mineral line at the same time. I was extremely sloppy in this attack, letting him see me move out, and he got a few zealots up to my constructing 3rd base to deal some damage once I started attacking.


Actually now that I think of it I always have exactly 3/3/3/3 of the units... hehe, I gotta make this a thing.

My enemy actually did pretty well with this multipronged zealot harrass that hit me while i was trying to attack... I lost at leat 10 zealots, not to mention my actual 3rd base. That was a pretty hard hit to my future economy.


Ok maybe this was really the reason why I lost rather than unit comp. I'm going to contemplate the unit composition none the less!

As for my attack, it was .... Ehhhh, at best. it killed a couple of probes, but that was it. The attack hit a bit later than I would have wanted to hit, and to add on to that I didn't actually have the production to support my income (before the lack-there-of income).


...meh.

Well this turns out as yet another daily where I write something before I actually write the battle report, and then it turns out that watching the replay basically answers all of my questions. I guess it's good that I can tell my own mistakes, ya know. If I hadn't lost my 3rd base this early, I'm sure that I would have been able to get out my colossi en-mass in time to defeat his super zealot heavy army.

Anyways, on with what happened... I try to continue harassment with my warp prism, but it's success is extremely limited.


Extremely limited now is a synonym with "not at all".

Aaaand then my enemy builds up an army and wins.

My zealot count during the fight was about 8-10 less than it could have been because I was favoring massing up more archons and colossi, disliking getting excess army supply in zealots. If I had actually kept vision on his army, I should have been able to tell that he was going to attack, in which case i could have made a bit more of a meat shield. I was behind on upgrades (+3 vs +1) but since I had colossi, a good fight with better macro might have been able to win me the game.


Also looks like I had m-moved my army for a few seconds there, allowing his zealots to engage my archons...

Sigh, now that I look back at this game it has very little to do with unit composition (in fact mine was probably better) but I was simply out macro'ed and made a small micro mistake as well.

HOWEVER, since I had mentioned it, I feel like I want to talk about the zealot/archon/immortal composition, favoring a faster attack and archons over getting out colossi. Of course getting colossi isn't the only way to play PvP, especially now that tempests exist, but it seems that getting colossi has become very popular again in PvP (at least at my level).

I imagine that getting out immortals is stronger than colossi until the colossi actually out in sufficient numbers. You can get a whole lot more immortals out than your enemy if you focus on that instead of colossus production, and I think that since archons can be built a few at a time, more AoE can be created against zealots. I suppose that this could make for more powerful pre-maxed attacks.

I don't have too much more info to go off of than this, anyone who reads these have any input on that composition in PvP? Is it only good up to a certain point/against specific builds? Is it pretty standard even at higher levels of play to favor immortals/archons over colossus?