The Report Remastered!

On September 17 2017 06:49 JWD[9] wrote:
If you go observer hunting with scourge, can Lurkers force Protoss to waste Psistorms?

Day[9] said something about how to use Psistorm. Never storm a moving unit, wait until the armies are engaged. So what if instead of attacking Protoss, you just dance, run around like a headless chicking, until storms are weathered?

I am actually on the otherside of your Problem, I have the worst Storms. But mostly because I try to storm moving things all the time.

cheers

On September 22 2017 01:34 quirinus wrote:
I don't know if you ever played TvZ, but to me, ZvP feels quite similar, both require you to scout and respond accordingly, both allow you to use a variety of builds, both have somewhat fragile but powerful armies, and both benefit from higher apm (I find that my apm naturally rises when playing these matchups compared to some others), and both try to limit the other race's number of expos, or slow the rate of expansion.

You can use you knowledge of ZvT in reverse (ie. TvZ) to figure out what's going on in ZvP. You just gotta learn the responses, tactics, strategies and builds best suited for the situation at hand. There are many different niche things you can do to overcome different things, and you don't see many of those in pro games - you just gotta play over and over, and experiment/think a bit, and as you find these solutions, your understanding and winrate will increase. Don't get me wrong, progamer builds are great, but they're too streamlined and harder to apply to the craziness and variety that ladder games exibit.

ZvT:
1) Generally it's pretty good to get just a handful of hydras and upgrade speed. If the terran is going heavily into wraiths, then range is also very good. My response to 2 port wraith is expanding, getting some speed hydras and overlords. They can't both harass you and prevent you from expanding, thus you gain extra income to deal with their switch. You gotta scout the switch so you know if you need lurkers. Sometimes you can blind counter them since the most common followup is 2 dropships of mm, prepare for it and then counter hard (they won't have many units since they're 1 base and were building paper airplanes the whole game), or if you can't kill them, slow down their expo, while you expand.

Getting evo chamber upgrades at the start isn't that important vs the bio followup, but if you scout them going mech, you can get them faster if you want (maybe +1 air carapace too if you plan on mutas later, fueled by the expo(s) you took).

2) Lings usually. Very often it's just enough to get at the top of their ramp, it's not that easy completely hiding your build on 1 base. If they go a mm + tank push, they're very likely to not have many units. You just overwhelm them with hydras/lings and maybe a few lurks. Get into a good position near your base and surround them when they come - on some maps with bridges on nats, like Destination, you can instead slow them down by camping the other side of their bridge, and retreating a bit when they siege up on the other side, then when their units start funneling trough in an unorganized fashion, you let most of his army to the other side and strike while some are derping on the bridge and before he gets time to organize the units that passed over the other side.

3) I think this comes down to experience, understanding and responding correctly, similarly to skill of knowing when to drone and when to make units.

ZvZ, I'm not very good at it, but here are my thoughts:
1) Depends very much on the level of your micro, but usually a few scourge are good at the start when the muta count is quite low (like 4). At that stage of the game scourge are very cost effective and will give you a slight economic lead if you land them well (usually 1 on each muta, sometimes 2 on 1) They're also good later on when big muta fights happen (like 2+ groups), because it's hard to control and micro that many mutas, so they're bound to hit something more often than not, if they come from a good angle during the start of the fight.
2) I find that 12p speed is good, if you take drones off gas after speed starts, it's a pretty decent build against all races imo. Keep building lings and send first 2 to scout each main not covered by your lord. I usually build 10 if I see a toss fe, and try to run by or kill it if it's a bad wall (or just 1 cannon), vs good walls, you can just camp outside and prevent scouting, allowing you to do whatever you want, and placing the toss on the back foot since he doesn't know if a hydra bust, mutas or something else is coming, so they have to cover everything, making them weaker. Taking drones off gas gets you an extra hatchery, and it's not a bad idea to just place it next to your starting hatchery if you're scared of some zvz ling 9p shenaningans or 2g p. With this you can afford a 3rd hat at your nat pretty easily if needed too. The beauty of this build is that you don't need to send a drone scout, as your overlord and first 2 lings do all the scouting, and you threaten the other player, and deny scouting. There's a lot more details that go into executing this, but I dont want to go on rambling forever, so I'll stop here.

ZvP:
1) lol kinda too broad of a question, or too vague. I could say micro, macro, tech, strategy, tactics.

General:
My favorite matchup is either TvZ or ZvP. There's so much variety in them, and they are very apm intensive, so I feel really good when I manage to macro well, it's really satisfying because it's hard. I used to be very good at ZvP, and knew a lot more about it that I discovered on my own, but I forgot a lot, so now it's probably TvZ.

The problem with "no zergs" on the ladder is in the map pool. There actually are zergs out there, but you rarely meet them, unless you play zerg. Zergs ban maps that terrans and tosses like, and terrans and tosses ban maps that zergs like, so it's hard to meet each other since they pretty much don't have many common maps that both play. This results in many ZvZs and TvT/TvP/PvP matchups. This is something I hate about the current map pool and matchmaking system, since I don't like ZvZ. There are many details in ZvZ to learn and execute, but I loathe to learn them all since in any case I can just to make 1 micro mistake or bad call and die. The one nice benefit of ZvZ though, is that matches are very short, so if you play you can quickly raise trough the ranks to your real level, while for other matchups it's slower. Plus, you can practice more games in less time. I knew a guy on iCCup that would just play ZvZ if he could, to quickly raise to his level each season, and then starting to play the other matchups after that.

There were plugins for windows explorer right click menu, but you're probably thinking of bwchart and it's feature where you can make it read a whole replay folder, and it would list all matches, races, maps, players, apms, positions, colors, opening builds. Then you could filter the list to find the replays to find the ones you want.

There's also bwrepinfo, which is famous for displaying effective apm (eapm), and being a simple and clean program. I doesn't have many of the features that bwchart has, but as I got better, I started preferring it over bwchart more and more.