EPTThis will be my first blog post here on TL.net (well, my first blog post anywhere in fact). My reason for starting this blog is to keep a sort of "diary" over my attempts to become better at this game. I chose to make it public in this manner in the hope that it might help others as well.
I have been a casual Starcraft player on and off almost since the game was released. By casual I mean that while I have played a lot of multiplayer games, it has been almost exclusively against friends, and while I have wanted to become better at the game, I've never invested the time necessary. As such, even though I have been at it a long time, I am not a good player.
This changed when I picked up the game again this winter, after not having played for almost 22 months. This time, I feel that I want to invest the time and effort needed to improve to a decent level. I have no aspirations on becoming an A+ player, but if I can play a game against a strong player without completely embarrassing myself, well, then that is good enough for me.
When I started again last year, I resumed playing the race I last played, which was Protoss. Back in early 2007, P was not that popular a race, but that never bothered me. I enjoyed the somewhat simpler army handling compared to Terran which I had played before (TvZ being the reason why I stopped playing T). Now, in late 2008, it seemed that everyone was playing P. So, I started off playing a few games against the computer, just to get some feeling for the game again, but of course this quickly became boring. So I started playing a little against a friend, and found the TL practice channel on ICC (thanks to TL Attack!), and I quickly reached a level that's probably close to D+. No too impressive.
I quickly became annoyed at the fact that 50% of my games seemed to be PvP. So, since I was going to spend time learning to play the game properly anyways, why not switch race? I picked Zerg, since they have always been a mystery to me. I scanned a few guides on Zerg, and then tried my hand at some ladder games. And promptly found out that playing Zerg wasn't like playing P or T. I had expected to lose, but when I watched the replays and saw just how bad my opponents had played, I almost gave up.
But, I still wanted to give it a shot. So I asked a friend who can play Zerg what we thought my biggest problem was. Turned out I had way too few drones mining. I had gotten some weird notion that I didn't need many drones as Zerg, so I focused on units far too early. I had felt like I didn't know what to do to improve my game, but now I knew a specific problem, and could work on it. I figured my drone problem was part of a more generic build order problem, so I started reading Ahzz's wonderful guide on Zerg, and saw I had not even been close.
So I started to play a lot of games with my friends, working to get my build orders down. I select 12 hatch against T, and 9 hatch against P and started practicing. Still got horribly owned, but at least I didn't feel confused in the early game. I now played with a plan. But my eceomy was still horrible. When a game was over, even if I'd had 3 bases against 2 I usually had 2/3 or less minerals mined compared to my opponents. So I started watching Chill's fpvods on how to play Zerg, and comparing his play to my own, I saw that I was way to scared of an early attack from my opponents, and over defended myself, hurting my game severely.
I tried a few games where I put off building creeps and lings until I actually had to, and suddenly I had more minerals at hand than I knew what to do with. Literally. I would get crushed, my saved up 3k min 1k gas mocking me from the top of my screen. And I couldn't understand why, it felt like I was building the number of hatcheries that was recommended. Time for another round of self-analysis.
A lot of the "help me!" threads in the Strategy Forum end up with people telling the posted he needs to take care of his macro, but the how to actually do this can be tricky. Play a lot of games is of course a good way, but there are so many distractions in a real game that you constantly forget what you should be doing. My plan then was to practice against the computer in single player.
I could of course win against the comp every time with a 9 pool into mass lings, it's not hard. But my objective here was not to win, but to improve. So I played the comp as if it was a real player. I did straight ZvT on Python, every game the same: 12 hat into 3 hatch muta pressure into lurk/ling. The good thing about doing this build is that the comp will actually do a M&M attach before your mutas are out in most cases, so you will get to practice scouting for his attack, and dealing with that (I opted for 4 sunks supported by 12 lings, since I felt that would be close to what I would build in a 'real' game). Furthermore, I practiced getting my lurkers up while I was doing muta harass. Not that simple, but not as hard as I had expected. When my lurkers popped, I attacked with lurkers, about two groups of lings, and my remaining mutas, while taking an expo. I did not finish the game, but 'contained' the comp while setting up my exp and keeping my minerals low from building an army. Then in for the kill.
Rinse and repeat. Everyday when I got home from work I did this 10 times or more for a week. Then I tried playing a game against my friends again. Big results.
One of the people I play against is somewhere around C/C+ on ICC. I had played over a hundred games against him, without a single victory. This time, I started out losing, but the games were closer. At the end of the day, I managed to win a ZvT against him. I finally started to feel like I could do this.
I still have problems with my game, no doubt about it. I win maybe 1 in 15 now against my C friend. I want to win more. I still have far from perfect macro, but its better. I still need to improve my drone timings, and learn when to take expansions, but I'm better at it. My biggest problems right now, from what I can identify from my own replays are the following:
- Poor scouting
- Poor reacting to scouting information (really REALLY bad at this)
- Poor reacting to events on the mini map
- Poor army control (I waste units a lot of the time)
- Somewhat passive play (I rarely drop or do any sort of early pressure)
My goal now is to work out a good training method for these items. I do not exclude playing a lot of games, but I'd like a focused method as well. We'll see how it goes. Oh, and I also need to play some ladder games on ICC to see where I'm at.
TL;DR: Welcome to my blog, and I hope to play against you soon!
