EPTYesterday I ended with 223, 18th place in my div (medivac alamo, diamond), 41-30.
Today I'm ending at 300 even, 12th place, 59-42. So I went 18-12 and gained 77 points, not too shabby. I also played 8 tvps vs my friend in custom games. I was at 310 or something at one point in the day, #9th place.
I was doing pretty well today, but started running into trouble with tvp. I don't think I lost a single tvz. I think I lost just 2 tvts, maybe a couple more.
In tvt I was using the fast thor + maurauder build I described yesterday. I had a lot of success with it, especially compared to my dismal tvt win rate yesterday.
The first game I lost with it might have actually been against its counter, I'm not sure since I fucked up badly. He went 2 or 3rax marine + tank support. I decided it was a good idea to meet him before he got in my nat. My version of meeting him before he got to my nat was targetting his single (he might have had a 2nd one, not sure) tank which was behind a large group of marines (who had stim) with both my thor and my few maurauders. Everything on my end was vaporized into vapor in literally less than a second, it was pretty funny. Obviously I messed that up, but I wonder if I wouldn't have lost anyway had I done better (not attacked the tank, stalled a bit with bunker or something, had more scvs repairing thor, etc).
Second loss was on fucking kulas. He went marine drop -> maurauder expo. My units were not prepared for his drop, I didn't know it was coming (I didn't bother scanning), and was just about to move out as my thor was about finished, so he did a little damage, nothing major though, I just had to pull scvs very quickly. But then I decided it would be a good idea to counter attack right away. Into bunkers and sieged tanks, with his cc already up and running. So basically I was fucked, both behind and having suicided units to no avail. We were horizontally close, and my maurauders and thors killed the rock block before he could with his tanks, so I kept killing one of his geysers and somewhat killing scvs/keeping them off mining, but he had quite a few sieged tanks and vikings/medics to give vision. I kept picking off tanks (he wasn't very smart), but I could never really do damage. I also wasn't macroing very well. He got his gold expo up first, and I attacked it with my maurauders, but lost the cliff at the same time. I took my gold expo and attacked his main with the maurauders, but he tank dropped my gold expo whilst cleaning up his main without too many losses (already twice stimmed maurauders with no medics die quickly), and I just didn't have the firepower to stop it, game over.
Again, I made mistakes, but that build might legitimately counter the build, hard to say. I really should've been able to get my gold expo up before him, since I was making 3rax maurauder and 1fact thor only.
For tvp, I was using the variation of gretorp's ghost/marine build I described yesterday for the most part. However, with this build I have no answer to fucking blistering sands, and have no answer to dt. I can only emp shadows so many times if he's making constant dts, and it's not like he doesn't have other units as well. Furthermore, the build feels too passive to me despite yielding a sizeable marine count. I don't like not being able to use my units if I have that many, but attempts to do so when timing windows were ostensibly open have lost me quite a few games. If p has 3+ gates, I can't attack because his army will rape mine, and if p hard teched instead I can't attack because I don't have detection or can't leave my base due to some sort of harass.
I tried avilo's ghost/mech 1/1/1 opening on blistering sands once, but I got raped. I just didn't have the unit count to fight him once he broke down my backdoor. I should see if I have the replay, it's too soon to fault the build for what was probably my retardation. However, taking his advice to do a bw style fd push with the first tank + marines was a complete disaster, losing all but one marine.
I ended up playing this guy called Sonic twice. First game was on desert oasis, and I went thor drop. Too bad stalkers can hit a thor from the main. But he didn't use blink aggressively (pretty sure he had it relatively early though, I could be wrong), so I was completely untouched going into midgame. But I never secured a 3rd base. I lost the game in a big fight not too long into the game where I lost my entire army. He only had a couple stalkers left, but I'd completely lost map control, and he had a gold expo up that I couldn't touch. I probably would have won (or atleast it would have gone on evenly for longer) if I hadn't forgotten to bring scvs with my thors to repair them. I lost 3 thors in that battle lol.
In the second game vs him, he did the gayest fucking build I've ever seen: he went like 3gate robo, getting a prism and immortals and harassing me with that, while getting colos. I think my mistake was expoing vs the all-ining faggot. AmbrosiaNation (aka varsityuser), one of the biggest faggot hackers of bw actually had one good line of advice: to not expo before protoss in bw. I'm thinking that advice rings true in sc2. When I saw his robo (and an immortal) and 3gates (lost temple), I responded by making 3 bunkers in my nat, and then expoing. I had 2rax, one making ghosts, one making marines (no reactor). I chased his stupid prism around my base, but he kept killing my spotting depots on the edges, and even took out one bunker from my nat cliff (I didn't replace it). Without stim and without spreading my units (I was worried about the inevitably impending all-in at my nat, and stayed near my ramp) I couldn't even do a single damage to the immortals. I kept emping the prism, but it didn't matter, fucker is too fast. Game ended when he attacked my nat with his army while simultaneously dropping his immortals in the very back of my main. I didn't even have enough units (2 bunkers) to touch his army, let alone deal with the drop at the same time. I feel like just making 2 more rax and delaying cc still couldn't beat this build, I think gretorp's build simply has no answer. For this situation, avilo's build would have been far superior.
Aside from those two games, I lost a few others to blistering sand and/or mass dt, and also lost some long games to mass colos (who'd have thought an army consisting mostly of marines and ghosts would lose to mass colos!?). I think I'm forced to try to use my variation of avilo's build from now on, I just can't see any way to win certain scenarios opening with gretorp's build. I'm not a fan of pure mech though, so I'll just transition into some ghost/maurauder/tank/banshee/hellion build, getting bcs after securing 3rd base. I did that once today on metalopolis, and it was really fun. I had enough tanks that he could never just attack me head-on at any point in the game, and so that I could be somewhat aggressive. Additionally, I could harass a lot with the banshees I made as an answer to his colos, and with hellions later when I got them (lategame I had a tech fact and reactor fact and made pure hellion, opting to put my gas into bcs and upgrades, but making tanks from the tech fact is probably smarter).
So tomorow looks like another day of freewins vs zerg, a little bit of work associated with refining the thor/maurauder build tvt, and starting from scratch basically with tvp. Gonna give avilo's opening a shot. I feel like learned a fair amount about tvp from trying gretorp's build, but that the build itself just has too many holes. It's great vs voidray, and nothing else really. Most of my wins with it came from protoss trying to attack my army head-on without colos/storm, and of course marine/emp does rape that situation. It's also somewhat map sensitive from what I saw, backdoors on kulas and blistering sands really strain the build. Vs non-allins it's pretty solid, and like I said it blocks voidray pretty well, but even on maps without backdoors it seems hard to fight 4gate or fast colos. Making 4rax and getting a shitload of marines with decent ghost count doesn't really help, because if they have colos, a large marine count just turns into a pretty orange colour across the screen, and against no-colos, I still can't actually attack protoss, since my gas is going into ghost (not upgrades, not tanks, not banshees), and my minerals are going into marines and depots (and ghosts) (not a cc), so p can just skip a round of units and expo before me while maintaining map control. Making a lot of bunkers and staying on 2rax works for maps without backdoors if they don't go drop, but if they do that falls apart.
I've seen bratok's version of ghost/marine: he delays cc until after ebay/medics/stim/marine hp, very awkward to me. Also I don't see how his build is any better against colos, drop + heavy gate, dts, or backdoor. Against all but the last of those avilo's has an answer in the form of banshee/viking, viking + tank, and raven respectively. Against backdoor bullshit, who knows.
Here's a replay pack of today's games. I don't know what replays are in here and what aren't, it's the few games I did save (which I think are mostly horrible losses) + the few reps saved in "unsaved" folder. It's possible a few are repeats, I didn't look at them. I think most of my tvzs were earlier in the day, and the "unsaved" reps don't go that far back I think, so there might be no tvzs in there. If that's the case, then I don't have any tvz reps, sorry (tvz is my best mu by far). I'll try to get back into the habit of saving my reps (I always saved reps in bw, but that was a very easy habit to break in phase 1 of beta since it saved all replays).
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Oh, and my neck is killing me. And fuck kulas/blistering sands.
