I just watched BackHo's games vs sAviOr. The first one on Python reminded me so much of myself it hurt. Of course a much better me, playing a much better opponent but even so, the same mistakes. He did a fast expo, scouted sAviOr going fast lair and therefore without more information went for a few sairs with goon support. It's logical. It's a mistake, but it's a very logical mistake, one that I always make. Thought 1 The sairs are useful and can buy time vs muta until the goons arrive. If you pump goons then the muta can't do any real damage. Thought 2 If he goes lurks then the goons will break out in no time, but I'll need obs to exert map control. My FE gives me a short term advantage but I need to push quickly.
Consequence Stargate, mass goon and fast robo. No archives. At this point the muta have been repulsed and you're moving out vs lurks. But he's going mass hydra. You need a counter. You need it quickly. You have robo, you quickly throw down a support bay. It's logical. Reavers are a perfect support unit for goons.
Huge Fuck Up Somewhere along the line your thinking changes. Whereas normally you'd fight hydra with stormers and speedlots you've had a paradigm shift. You know you need to go stormers. You sit there thinking you must. But you've never got the gas because you're always pumping goons and you can't make zealots because somehow you still haven't got zealot speed. And a change occurs. On some level you start to believe if you could just make enough goons it might just work. In your mind you know you need storm, but in your heart you want to believe the goons can do it. You lay down gate after gate, upping it to 9 gates off your main and nat. You take an island. You keep those reavers coming, providing slow but effective support. Nothing can beat you. Goons are like the ultimate unit. 20 damage!!! EXPLOSIVE DAMAGE!!!(fuck yeah!) Kills shit on the ground!! Kills shit in the air!!! Decent range!!! There's nothing dragoons can't take, if you could just build enough of them. And before you know it you're late game, your grades are 1-1-1, you still haven't researched psi storm and your pure dragoon army is waiting for those reavers to crawl across the map. And that's when the pure hydralisk attack from every side in huge numbers. I lose game after game to this. BackHo demonstrated it flawlessly. I don't know what it is that makes players think pure dragoons are good PvZ. I don't know how we get there. But we do. Even at a pro level players still fall into the trap which gets me over and over. And that is why when I saw sAviOr tear through the huge army of pure goon as BackHo didn't even have an archives 20 minutes into a PvZ I knew I loved him. For me BackHo is hope. I look at him and I think "sure, right now I'm being owned by noobs on ICC because of that basic mistake but if I stick with the goons one day I could be owned by Savior on live television with it".
But there's more to him than pure dragoon PvZ. For shortly afterwards I saw another game of him against sAviOr. And I discovered BackHo has two modes, not one. That's right, not only has he pure dragoon, he has no dragoon. In game two BackHo did not make any dragoons. Realising his earlier mistake he purposefully avoided them. Early game we had sweeping armies of speedlots. Then we added copious amounts of stormers. By the late game we had speedlots, stormers and archons. The lack of dragoons was so obvious that sAviOr left a overlord following his army and whenever he added an observer he'd cruise a scourge in to kill it. That overlord didn't take a scratch. Every now and then a scourge would be stormed on it's approach to the observer but that was BackHo's only gesture towards anti-air. Time and time again the army of zealots swarmed into the lurkers, then retreated as BackHo realised they weren't very good at that. Over and over they failed to do any noticable damage to ultralisks as he replaced the fallen zealots from 12 gateways. This is a man who doesn't care what his opponent does. He doesn't see the need to react to them, he's got his game plan and he'll do it regardless. Pregame someone toggles him to either Dragoon = 1 or Dragoon = 0 and he'll play it out. He'll push his opponent to the limit with dragoons, or without, but no half measures. It may seem that this is a weakness, indeed it could be argued that it lost him two games vs sAviOr from relatively strong positions in each. But we should not consider these as losses. Not for BackHo. A loss would be when he goes against his arbitrary rules and makes a functional army. For him victory is the knowledge that he somehow has a progaming contract despite sabotaging his own game. And one day, when you all least expect it, he'll strike. And he'll use a mixed army and nobody will be able to equal him.
And that, more or less, is why I love BackHo. Oh, and there was that game that Pusan tried to lose over and over but BackHo just wouldn't let him. BackHo plays to nobody's rules but his own. Pusan can sacrifice 9 gateways for no strategic reason, Pusan can throw away as much of his unit production as he likes but if BackHo has decided he's going to lose then he's going to lose and nobody can change that.
Ahaha great read, Kwark. The logic that dictated BackHo's play is oh so familiar.. My favorite kind of player is the one who either knows he has a big flaw or is in the process of fucking up and then reacts by trying to spin it off as an advantage and put all their money on the hand they're playing with. Win or lose, makes for some interesting games
I suppose I ought to update/rewrite this after today. But to be honest it was absolutely standard from him. Against GGPlay he rolled his build dice and it came up 'speedlot and archon timing attack'. A build more commonly seen in PvP (BackHo uses the same dice for all matchups) but whatever, it can work PvZ. And then he stubbornly refuses to change. GGPlay responds with mass hydra and cracks and it is only due to BackHos ridiculous micro and multitasking that he even holds his own throughout the midgame. It creates the laughable situation where GGPlay gets hive tech but realises that it's actually a bit redundant because his hatchery tech is working at the moment and unless BackHo actually changes his unit mix to counter that he really has no need to go ultraling. I mean really he's a legend. He decides how the game is played and the opponent can go fuck themselves. And if he wants to play with zeechon then that is that. In other stubborn areas we have the absolute refusal to cannon his min line at his 3rd base. He cannoned his main and nat min lines vs muta harass. He cannoned his 3rd nexus vs lings. But his 3rd base min line was left open. After the first wave of muta harass killed 5 or so probes I thought maybe he just forgot. He pulled the probes off the min line and the muta backed away. However he then returned them to mining without adding a cannon, and promptly lost another 3-4 probes. At this point I suspect BackHo knew he had to cannon it. However on some level because he knew he had to cannon his min line it then became a moral war. Nobody tells BackHo what he has to do, he's fucking BackHo, he'll do whatever the hell he wants. So he kept losing probes and he kept replacing them and in the end he won that little skirmish, when all the muta died in a later battle. His 3rd min line remained uncannoned and the moral win was his (at the cost of 20 or so probes). And that is why BackHo is so fucking awesome. Nobody can argue with his macro, micro or multitasking. And when he decides to do a build then he does it and to hell with your subjective notions of counters. Whether he wins or (as more often happens) loses BackHo always comes out of games with a series of small moral victories in which conventional logic suggests he must do one thing but pure bloody mindedness and a willingness to sacrifice huge strategic advances for minor points of honour win through.
Hahaha, good read there. But I must say, sometimes I too see some similiarities between my own play and BackHo, like when refusing not to FE vs 5-pool...
heh i havent played sc or followed the pro scene since 2005 but wasnt it standard for protoss in pvz to have a huge mix of units, instead of massing 2 or 3 of them? ive always seen speedlots, goons, templars, obs, archons used together in a mix, and it seemed the strongest army. unless styles have changed since a lot since then.
On May 29 2008 05:51 ieatkids5 wrote: heh i havent played sc or followed the pro scene since 2005 but wasnt it standard for protoss in pvz to have a huge mix of units, instead of massing 2 or 3 of them? ive always seen speedlots, goons, templars, obs, archons used together in a mix, and it seemed the strongest army. unless styles have changed since a lot since then.
yeah the bit of everything army is strongest imho... I am hoping lot goon templar dt archon sair reaver arbitor army in my build very soon, if I get that good :D
What Kwark is saying is BackHo is so stubborn he doesn't change his ways even if it sucked balls.
EPT
Thanks.
(for the exact same reasons you gave 
![[image loading]](http://img379.imageshack.us/img379/9549/wallintau6vj8.jpg)
