[BR] Battle of Noobs Part 2

TimeTraveler has been brushing up on his builds, and decides to go gas first for a tech-heavy opening. He also wants to play economically, so he gets two pylons up quickly so that he can build continuous probes.




TimeTraveler is conscious of the possibility of a "macro" game, so he gets a quick forge with his cybernetics core. He also skips a zealot.



Meanwhile, burnout followed his gasless barracks opening up with two refineries and an engineering bay. What is he planning? Clearly he wants to do something with that engineering bay, right? ...Right? Maybe not...



Burnout is cleverly not getting supply blocked by building extra supply depots ahead of time. Meanwhile, he techs to factory.



Here, TimeTraveler unveils the first piece of interest in the game. He got a stargate and a twilight council before building an oracle. If a pro was playing this game, he might be going for some sort of oracle + blink play off of one base.




TimeTraveler does something pretty smart here. He knows that his plan for this game will require a lot of gas and not a whole lot of minerals, so when he builds his assimilator, he immediately assigns three probes to stare at it maliciously until it finishes construction. This is an intelligent plan because bad players will always forget to put probes in gas, or put the wrong number in. In fact, burnout actually spent a lot of time with one worker mining in each refinery earlier.




His next move is to build four more gateways. And eight pylons. And a dark shrine.




You may ask at this point, "But Templar! I don't want to read the entire battle report from the viewpoint of some terrible Protoss player! I want to see what's happening on the Terran end of things, I want to know both sides of this horribly executed game." This is reasonable, and in fact you can see that the Terran player is floating 1500/500 on one base before the ten minute mark in the previous picture. However, there IS a reason. Burnout decided to open one base BC.




Meanwhile, TimeTraveler gets a fleet beacon. On one base. Uh...



His plan, however, becomes crystal clear when he builds a mothership. We all saw it coming. With his dark shrine, he will make archons from his DTs. TimeTraveler is going to try a one-base archon toilet!

Wait, you can't even do that in HotS. Well then, I don't know.




He's also building DTs and an oracle. This would be nice, except everything he's got is countered by marines.




Look at the minimap in that previous picture. Due to the confusing 3 player nature of the map, TimeTraveler has not actually found burnout's base, even though he's checked almost everywhere with zealots. Yes, he actually scouted. I was also shocked.

Eventually, he sends a zealot and finds burnout "fast expanding". For these two players, any expansion before 20 minutes is a fast expansion.



TimeTraveler is itching for a fight, so he attack moves all of his units across the map. This is not good news for the oracle he made earlier on.




He turns around pretty quickly with his 5 unit army.



After seeing burnout's expansion, TimeTraveler decides to get his own. This gives me a few ideas on how to get him to figure out what macro actually is. Currently, he only likes making "special" units, ignoring the fundamental aspects of the game. (Who can blame him?)



The mothership, in the meantime, has finished, and a tempest was built out of the stargate while this was happening. Now TimeTraveler is getting a carrier.




Burnout had taken note of TimeTraveler's attacking pattern, and cleverly made turrets right where an attack-moved air unit would run if TimeTraveler had misclicked slightly on the minimap when moving out.




TimeTraveler finds a brilliant tactic using the terrain of the map. He hallucinates a colossus (!) to walk up the cliff into his opponent's main base. By doing so, he will have successfully used special tactics.




Burnout can't believe what he's seeing. Just to make sure he understood the severity of the situation, he scans on top of his turrets as soon as they kill the hallucinated phoenix.




Since TimeTraveler really wants to scout (something he's never tried before), he sends another hallucinated colossus out. This is totally legitimate.




The journey of hallucinated colossus #2: He is set to complete a noble quest. To achieve his goals, he must see some significant part of burnout's forces or tech. Hallucinated colossus #2 knows the errors of his ancestors. He will not run into the horrid turret wall of his opponent. He remembers from the Protoss minds of his proud lineage the secret location of the wretched turret beast.



So he just runs into the other turret wall. Wonderful.




TimeTraveler's next move is to run DTs into the natural, where he had just seen three missile turrets.




After killing the marauders stationed there, TimeTraveler snuck past the turrets and went for the marines, but a scan allowed burnout to kill all of the DTs.




What had TimeTraveler missed with his two hallucinated colossi and DT army? Well, burnout had, in fact, built up a sizable force of battlecruisers, thors, marauders and marines. He hasn't gotten supply blocked very much all game, is saturated on his first base, and isn't floating a ton of money right now.




Let's take a look at TimeTraveler's army.



Well okay then. DTs and a mothership, with a few miscellaneous units including a tempest and a carrier thrown in. A slightly bizarre army, to be sure.

If TimeTraveler can confuse burnout enough, he can win this game despite being almost 50 supply down. His next move is to send a hallucinated warp prism into burnout's base, which gets a better scout than two hallucinated colossi combined.




TimeTraveler attempted additional special tactics by moving a group of four stalkers around the map and blinking down cliffs. This is clearly in order to have fun, but that's okay because they could accidentally do something useful.



In fact, they see a bunch of battlecruisers moving out! Maybe now TimeTraveler will make units that can shoot battlecruisers.



He forgets that stalkers can blink away just in time to lose them all to an equal number of battlecruisers.



Speaking of battlecruisers, burnout has just decided to move out, and his army is clearly superior. He's 50 supply up on equal workers and his opponent is going mass dark templars with 0 splash damage. How could he possibly lose?



TimeTraveler panics and masses cannons around an Artosis pylon.




He does have a lot of DTs though. Can they hold!?





Burnout remembers what scans are just in time.




Meanwhile, battlecruisers sneak into the main base. I don't know how four giant war ships reached the center Protoss nexus without huge blaring alarms going off somewhere, but there we are.




Meanwhile, thors kill reinforcement DTs at the front of TimeTraveler's base. You would think that TimeTraveler might try to get void rays or immortals or something, but I guess warping in ten invisible ninjas in five seconds is easier.




A carrier does arrive, and TimeTraveler even micros it against burnout's thors in order to not take as much damage. Thus, the first instance of micro appears in this game.



Yamato cannons are launched onto the main nexus. The cybernetics core looks extremely nervous about this.



Meanwhile, burnout gets cleaned up by more DTs and carriers.




Meanwhile, burnout has been mining with 23 SCVs on one mineral patch while his expansion sits almost untouched with about one SCV on it, so he has no money.





TimeTraveler, upon losing his main, desperately moves out with a pack of dark templars and one sentry. This sentry could win him the game.



He's still trying to defend with completely random and dumb cannons too.



A probe lures one of the battlecruisers into cannons and it dies.




The DTs and sentries arrive at the natural and kill the turrets as revenge for destroying the hallucinated colossus.



In this extremely tense situation, TimeTraveler decides to make oracles to counter battlecruisers and Terran buildings.



Meanwhile, burnout is not lifting his buildings, nor is he going after the last nexus with the battlecruisers. I'm curious as to what he actually was doing.




A carrier arrives in the main base of burnout but dies to missile turrets while on move command.



Suddenly, the situation becomes clear. Because TimeTraveler is strategically an idiot, burnout has been given a golden opportunity to eliminate the protoss with his BCs unopposed while lifting his last command center (or really any building) to one of the vast air spaces in the map. Since TimeTraveler only has a sentry and some cannons, this will allow burnout to secure a nearly guaranteed eventual victory. This is why the map is Terran favored, guys.

The CC dies.



Then the barracks dies, and then two hallucinated colossi shoot at supply depots while the last liftable structure dies to the DTs. And burnout GG's.



But... he could have lifted to the corner and killed last nexus so long ago...

---

After the game concluded, TimeTraveler started gloating in burnout's face about how thoroughly he had wrecked him. Burnout, who has never beaten a single person at Starcraft II before despite playing numerous 1v1s and practicing against the computer, took great offense. He proclaimed that burnout and TimeTraveler would never face each other, again and despite Vetharest's best attempts at settling the conflict, they remain divided to this day two days later.

And thus, one of the greatest rivalries ever to exist in ESPORTS draws to an epic conclusion. Perhaps they will meet in a tournament or on ladder or on Skype or face to face some day. Who knows? They might even continue to play SC2!