EPTIt was always a dream of mine to create a health-for-gamers guide. I think a lot of gamers have this same inspiration, that it would be helpful. One of the reasons these guides never get published is because of lack of expertise. Only so many gamers actually have the medical credentials to write a health-for-gamers guide.
Today I want to try a short commentary on health-for-Starcraft players. It became obvious to me after talking with some physcians about carpal tunnel one of the underlying causes of carpal tunnel has something to do with the pulmonary health. We are worried there are some problems spawned by the lack of aerobic element in Starcraft. Whatever know about aerobics, we also know that there is not much anaerobic AND aerobic operation going on when we are playing video games. As you will see there are many fat players like JulyZerg who keep consistently high APM.
But the imagine we are searching for is the hands are playing and the tendons are triggering rapidly.... but we are not triggering some needed cardiovascular health. Now of course there are some famous athletes like "the iceman" who are capable of warming various parts of the body with the mind. But we are just regular Starcraft players and we need to warm the fingers while we playing. There is some reason why the fingers are not warm enough while we play. If the fingers and hands and muscles and tendons were warmer would get superior results.
Anyone else have problems with cold hands?
replay collection
the first replay
some complaints: I got really angry this game because the game lagged incredibly. I'm still angry while I write this. I don't understand why everything has to lag so much or why there are a group of people who believe that massive lag is the answer to anything. There seems to be this irresistible belief that if there's so much lag that science fails us that science will somehow correct itself without the need for us to do anything. In other words there's the belief that math will correct science if science has gone wrong. Math isn't going to correct science any more than science is going to correct science. Neither of these beliefs are true. Lag is simply a problem and there's no ad hoc justification that can redeem lag.
The game itself was interesting. It seems the two-base Carrier approach may not work out for logistical reasons. It takes too much resources to build the Carriers, and then you're looking at forcing a fight with a specific timing window. In other words the Zealots and so on don't help that much, and it's better to just invest the minerals into a third base in this specific scenario. Either the initial Zealot timing will be successful or it won't, and if it isn't then there's no reason to continue with Zealots in the long-term in my opinion. Of course there's a lot the Zealots could do and they still may be best in some instances, but it actually might better to just use Dragoons with this build.
I don't use Dragoons here because my plan is to use Zealots, Templar, and Archons and keep my remaining investment in the Carriers. As you can see the Zerg could do some stuff about the Carriers including Defilers if he was really confident--which might give us more cause to consider Zealots against. The game itself is pretty horrible because of the lag, and the only reason I'm uploading it is because we finally get a replay of the Carriers working out correctly in PvZ. The Zerg has a few more options on this particular map and could have tried Mutalisk, as we assumed he would.
the second replay
we get another PvT replay. it would be encouraging if koreans would play other matchups but they're not really interested in PvP it seems. the only players that will play PvP are playing at around 375 APM which indicates they've been practicing quite a bit. I'm fairly bored of making only PvT replays because I've already played this same game several times. since 60% of my games are PvP we aren't getting anything in the realm of PvZ and PvP which are the matchups that need the most work. we finally got a PvP early so I could finally record my PvP build but as usual I completely mis-microed before the combat and it botched. Starcraft combat is quite annoying because the theory of quantum superposition actually comes into play in a realistic way--being realistic doesn't mean that it works correctly, but having the "correct focus" is important. as you can see from the so-called IdrA phenomenon, there is nothing that great about quantum superposition because in practice it generates a lot of painful friction--which gets us back to carpal tunnel and other various ailments that might happen.
the replay itself is pretty interesting because the opponent is pretty good. he doesn't do anything blatantly horrible and has a fairly realistic opening against an extremely early Robo. i'm fairly disappointed my Scout dies to two wraiths, which may have made a big difference if I had known a scout could lose to two Wraiths, but it did. As we can see from the last few PvTs Stargate is not a viable opening (a big disappointment for me). There's simply no way to invest in a bunch of Zealots and Dragoons efficiently without a Robo--which means Robo has to come first. Carrier first is incredibly strong and might be the best solution against a Terran FE opening under the circumstances. Reavers are surprisingly bad against Goliaths, partially because the splash radius isn't big enough and partially because SCarabZ are hard to target fire under the swarm of Interceptors. Thus it seems there are a few transitions options for this build--one is Arbiters and protoss infantry the other is Corsairs which might make the game begin to look like PvZ Corsair Reaver.
the third replay
i tilt at night and slam my hand into the wall repeatedly. after smashing my hand into the wall a bunch our APM drops around 50 points and we go brain dead.
i try to demonstrate the strategy against a korean protoss. we want to use very early reavers to give ourselves some breathing room. then by making use of the early reavers we can transition into corsairs. the idea behind the corsairs is to prevent reaver drops (which we don't). and then we try to snipe his shuttle (which we don't). and then he attacks with one reaver (which proves confusing). it might have been better to skip the arbiter, and just build more DTs while getting observer sight range. since he can't do anything to us while we have DTs and we have no observers, we're free to take some gambles around the map at expansions. as you can see we probably should have won this but didn't build enough gateways. one of the great lessons of PvP is that by simply having 6 gateways per base you can win against most opponents.
my strategy could have been executed a lot better, but i hadn't been planning to show this build yet. we're still waiting for more protoss opponents on fish which would let us show some more PvP builds. there seems to be no denying that a reaver with a shield battery is a great way to take territory at home. this is obviously something that should have worked its way into the meta a long time ago. our only real worry is that the shield battery is not great against reaver shuttle--but reaver shuttle takes a long time and so therefore isn't a huge worry as long as we have corsairs. losing 2-3 corsairs to get DTs on the field is a pretty big sacrifice but still probably reasonable, especially if the opponent loses units to the DTs. once we get DTs onto the field we should be able to deny the middle thereby allowing us to hopefully contain and expand. the biggest note is that apparently players don't respect corsairs like they should and therefore we will need to set down more pylons and maybe a scouting observer to prevent any kind of drop shennanigans--although this could pay major dividends in the long run as you can see from the reVOD.
Author's Note We can appreciate the IdrA phenomenon a lot more in retrospect. Starcraft seems to be one of the virtues of the Asian culture compared probably to many other things. When I'm playing I get quite the impression of the "Saiyan homeworld" effect where I'm dealing with 10x gravity....
Obviously I didn't play like 2/3's of my games today to look away at the crucial moment when my build was coming to fruition. It's quite frustrating to see 6 Carriers or 6 Reavers and Dark Archons charge into battle and die for no reason simply because for whatever reason the rest of my units didn't support them. It's not as though the time investment isn't there or the knowledge isn't there. It's quite obvious that the rest of the units should go to support the main protoss units and of course after 20 minutes of stressful Starcraft it's quite disheartening to see the main army get shredded to no point and purpose.
I think there's definitely some connection between the fearsome asian studying & gaming reputation and the tendency for things to happen in smaller increments. Maybe this is a fair assertion and maybe it's not but certainly there's much more psychological stress it seems--which might not just be a Western mentality but something factual. Westerners do have more of a reputation for winning or losing by a mile, and that seems to be a fault when we're dealing with a question of investing half an hour toward a climax that is too resounding either way.
