Phalanx's Daily #85: New season, new PvZ

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 match up was PvZ, the map was Yeonsu. Since it was a new map, I still was quite far from understanding the best way to play on it. I generally feel uncomfortable when there's backdoor rocks, even though most of the time they probably don't make much of a difference. I start off with my usual 1gate expand/walloff.


From now on you're gonna be back in my base, you gateway!

I'd like to point out here that right as this match started, I felt like I didn't want to play. Maybe it was because it was VS zerg, but as soon as the game loaded up I wished that I had canceled match search. My heart didn't feel too into this game. Anyhow, Johnson scouts around like the good probe he is, checking the 15 pool, and delays the zerg's natural by a tiny bit of time.


Every second counts <3.

The zerg takes his first extractor at around 3:30. A pretty early timing to get it against protoss.I hate it when they get early gas... it means they're not going for standard ol' fast 3base play .



His gas is used primarily to get speed... with his 3rd delayed past the 6 minute mark, I can't help but wonder if getting speed this fast without a 3rd is really worth it. Of course I lost to him so it worked out for him, but it still seems like his macro wasn't as good as it could have bene.


Pool party!

Still with no 3rd in sight, the zerg gets up all 4 of his extractors now at 6:30. I wish that I had checked for all those gasses earlier, it might have made me more alerted to the fact that he was definitely not going to be rushing out some mass tech *cough* mutas *cough*... My oracle poked in a little bit, but since he got up spore crawlers in time I wasn't able to kill anything nor scout much.


Aye mate, lets try actually scouting next time.

I try to go about with my build, just getting only 3 bases fast... and suddenly a ton of speedlings come and attack the 3rd! My oracles were out of position, and i also had less oracles than I normally would (my initial reaction to the scouting was a huge allin) and they were able to force the cancel quite handily.


All I wanted were nice things.

Most of his lings that came around attacking earlier on in the game were cleaned off by my oracles plus a few force fields, and only now did the zerg actually start droning up and surpassing me in worker count. My macro got a bit off after losing the first attempt at my 3rd, so I decided to actually build up some gateways this game. I also got my 2nd stargate, primarily making voidrays out of it (I was still afraid of an allin).



My oracles finally manage to get some economic damage done after they laser a queen to the face, tag team style. I also picked off a couple of drones, but his spore crawlers still were coming up and i could only do a bit of damage. Meanwhile, unscouted by me, his spire was being thrown down... Sigh. A spire. Of course.


TAG TEAM LASER-AGE!!!

All of his agression earlier on in the game had been costing him indirect damage, sitting at a mere 60 drones to my 43 probes 10 minutes in... the more I watch this replay the more I have second thoughts about giving up this strategy. I really do think that the theory of it works, it's just my execution that fails... although perhaps being so hard-counterable at the slightly mistake in scouting can be considered a fatal weakness to the build.


Ohhh mutalisks, so skillfull. Almost as much as mass skillrays.

Once the mutalisks came out it was basically over for me. Although i had 2 stargates created I didn't actually see the mutalisks until they were on top of my units. Stalkers and voidrays can't do shit against mass muta, and my army was torn to shreds.


That zerg really wasn't better than me... stupid mutas.

It's a painful death losing to mutalisks when you have 2 stargates. I tried to get phoenixes out in desparation, but of course it's too late now. I really do hate mutas.