[BR] TvT - Battle of Noobs

For some reason, the incredible amounts of hype behind this game caused the screenshots to become blurry. Actually, I have no idea why this happened.

We see here that burnout has rallied his SCVs to the side, relying on amazing Brood War micro to send the SCVs straight to the minerals. This is most peculiar, because he has never had to split his workers. I guess the technology wasn't there yet.




Meanwhile, TimeTraveler has sent his SCV to patrol between the bottom left base and his main base. This is an effective tactic of scouting every three minutes, provided your opponent doesn't bother to kill your worker first. Vetharest laments that he can not hotkey stuff as an observer.




Vetharest explains that he'd like to keep tabs on things as an observer. I tell him that observing is easy and that he can use his mouse to find stuff since he doesn't have to actually play the game. Meanwhile, TimeTraveler climbs up the tech tree at a rapid pace, getting a factory on 14 workers before even making a marine.




TimeTraveler gets an SCV into burnout's base, and burnout does the only sensible thing. He sends almost all of his workers towards the SCV. Meanwhile, Vetharest is ranting and raving about floating 20,000 minerals, which is ridiculous because only Zirk has the ability to play that well.




There was a heated argument about the worker counts. Vetharest has difficulty with math, or something. I felt obligated to correct him. Meanwhile, TimeTraveler is getting a widow mine, which is probably a great idea against a player that has not played this game much. In fact, burnout had never seen a widow mine in his SCII career (which consisted of a few silly FFAs and a 1v1 against Vetharest. Vetharest killed him with mass battlecruisers).



Suddenly, I realized the power of the widow mine. TimeTraveler seemed to understand too, as he moved out with a terrifying 1 mine, 1 marine army.



The marine charged into the main and died to four marines.

Actually, I think TimeTraveler was trying to get vision in order to hit burnout with his mine. Look at the positioning. If you don't look carefully, that looks like it could hit marines on top of the ramp.




While this glorious, epic, terrifying, legendary, massive battle of amazing tactics and glorious macro, multitasking, and usage of high ground as well as unit abilities raged on, Vetharest was still trying to count the workers... unsuccessfully.




Suddenly, the players' grand plan is revealed. Through extensive strategical insight, both players determined that the best strategy in this game was to go ghosts on one base. This is an effective strategy that I often use in 3v3, but my variant generally requires three ghost academies so that nonstop nuclear missiles can be launched. Clearly, both of them have cooked up a more economical version of the opening.




TimeTraveler has, however, gone for a very safe opening, getting two seiged tanks at his wall before doing anything else. The accuracy of this build is apparent as he is is floating almost no money, meaning his macro skill is GM.



TimeTraveler has a medivac and a widow mine. Since he seems to be going for a tank based build, this is clearly either mech or mass tank with a widow mine drop. Since TimeTraveler is a protoss player at heart, he should know that mech is extremely weak, so this can only be one thing.

However, the observers, who are really talkative, do not think that TimeTraveler has the sheer efficiency and APM required to execute this brilliant strategy.



However, TimeTraveler seems perfectly content to go with a 5 marine drop. Burnout's units are all the way on the other side of the main base, so this strategy should do an amazing amount of damage, crippling the burnout's massive one base economy on 18 workers.



Perhaps anticipating that burnout was going to set up defenses in normal drop areas, TimeTraveler dropped his units in front of the main in an amazing tactical move. However, burnout was already in position with a tank and the drop was deflected.




TimeTraveler drew blood with a nuke that killed a tank and a large group of burnout's marines. Even though burnout had a turret at his ramp, TimeTraveler somehow managed to position his ghost on the other side of the ramp, using amazing strategical thinking, placing himself outside of the turret's detection range.




Unfortunately, the resulting damage of the nuke involved too much gore to appeal to the general audience of young children. Even TimeTraveler, who is a manly nine years old, had to temporarily look away while the nuke decimated the lives of people that are probably not fathers or husbands.

TimeTraveler, upon looking at his screen, saw that there was an opening in the wall and the turret was dead, so he snuck inside. Burnout had just finished a thor, and TimeTraveler immediately started shooting at its thick armor with a sniper rifle. However, he was unsatisfied, and EMPd the thor.




Burnout tries scanning to find the ghost, but it runs out of range and burnout becomes eternally frustrated.




Burnout responds to this nuke strategy by going mass vikings. This actually works out fairly well when, upon moving out with two vikings, he found a tank + 2 ghost drop.




TimeTraveler lands his units immediately and sieges the tank because ESPORTS. The vikings, upon killing the medivac, attempts to land to kill the tank. However, the ghosts manage to out DPS the vikings so the tank survives.



As if by magic (I forgot about it), the tank disappears, and the one of the ghosts goes in to attempt to nuke burnout's base again. However, burnout immediately scans and sees the ghost, forcing it back.



TimeTraveler executed a miraculous piece of strategy and ran his ghost back into scan range in order to attempt a nuke.




TimeTraveler unveils the next stage in his plan, going BCs. Meanwhile, burnout still hasn't seen the mine outside of his base, only managing to damage it due to friendly tank fire.



TimeTraveler makes it into the main base on his next nuke attempt, but burnout is once more aware and runs his units away. The nuke is therefore cancelled (!)





The ghost somehow evades several scans despite being right next to the entire army of burnout.




However, it died to the entire army of burnout. In death, it never said die.



Burnout decided that enough was enough. No longer would he, with his amazing army of thors and vikings, be sitting at home. No, he would bring down the hammer, mostly by using Norse mythology. Although, I do not believe that Vikings had tanks or marines, so this analogy fails somewhat.

However, he was slightly lacking in micro, and he accidentally sent all of his vikings into a bunker. The rest of the army hardly fared any better than that.






A viking gets into the mineral line of TimeTraveler. There's not a whole lot to kill, though.



Meanwhile, burnout's 3 thors magically become BW dragoons as soon as they reach the ramp, and they barely kill a bunker. This marked the end of burnout's tragic attack.




Vetharest was unable to contain his laughter at the events, leading to a poker face comment. Meanwhile, I note that neither player expanded and we're at the point that they should be on about 5 bases each. While this isn't terribly uncommon in PvP, both of them have actually mined out their main bases, meaning there are a lot of workers sitting there idle.

This is ok though, because TimeTraveler made a battlecruiser.



However, TimeTraveler proves to be the smarter macro player in this extremely tense situation, as he manages to construct an entirely new base. This doubling of his economy is probably nothing you've ever seen since you started reading this battle report.




Burnout tries a different tack, lifting his command center to a random corner of the map. This plan nearly backfires when a banshee nearly misses it.



After relocating his CC and landing four MULEs, burnout launches a nuke in TimeTraveler's base!




Eventually, it is no longer the ghost's time. Battlecruisers defeat it as its last traces of power slip away.

Could TimeTraveler actually win the game? He had never won a single 1v1 before, previously losing to Vetharest at 50% health, and he had never actually made units of a higher tech than marauders before. This was truly a game of firsts.



TimeTraveler does a sweep of the bottom left to determine how victorious he might be in the near future.





The battlecruiser force moves out, immediately intercepting the command center of burnout. This leaves him with fewer and fewer options. For one thing, he actually has to build a second base.





The second command center does not do much better.



While staring in the face of death, burnout sees only one option besides gg. He quickly lifts all of his buildings and sends them at the battlecruisers.



However, since flying buildings can not attack, he decides that landing them will be more effective, in the hope that they may transform into planetary fortresses that shoot air.



This is not very effective.



In desperation, burnout pulls workers and goes for an all-out attack right into siege tanks.



Reduced to one SCV and no command center, as well as no money, burnout makes an epic journey across the world of Typhon. He sees peaks. However, TimeTraveler stealthily sieges a tank next to the SCV and destroys it.



Things look grim for burnout.



But even with no units, he refused to give up, at least until the battlecruisers eliminated his buildings.



The humiliation of losing to TimeTraveler, who was normally way worse than he was here, was too much for burnout to handle. He immediately jumped into the 1v1 ladder and lost a 53 minute game that was almost very similar this one before rage quitting.

Meanwhile, TimeTraveler played as protoss against computers and cannon rushed.

And thus concludes another epic chapter in ESPORTS history.