EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=156700
I decided to go ahead and play Terran. I'll be writing a blog entry every time I hit a new level of the Solo Terran achievement. Here's what I felt after finally unlocking the Marine portrait!
Since I played Terran a few times when I first got the game, I already had 3 wins logged in 1v1 using Terran. This was back when I first got promoted to Diamond and the caliber of players I was playing against was quite different. Let's take a look at my stats in getting those 7 more wins to unlock the first stage of the Solo Terran achievement!
Current 1v1 Ladder Points: 1524 (+62)
Current 1v1 Bonus Pool: 0 (-17)
Current 1v1 Standardized Points*: 614 (+40)
Record(Since switching): 7-5
*Points when bonus pool has been removed: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=156329
Before I hit that Find Match button I spent a lot of time mentally preparing myself to lose many times. I know ladder doesn't mean a whole lot but no-one likes losing! The level of familiarity I have between my Zerg and Terran is HUGE! Honestly I don't even know any Terran builds past the 15 supply point. Anyway, after steeling myself for the inevitable losing streak, I finally made my way into the first game. Surprisingly just by continuing to make units and having average macro (not spectacular, but average resources usually under 500), I was able to last until the endgame against my Protoss opponent. As the game got longer and longer though, my inexperience with Terran started to wear me out and I lost. I kept playing and ended the night 7-5 and unlocking my marine portrait!
I still don't feel comfortable playing Terran. There's plenty of situations where I know exactly what my opponent is doing, but don't really know what I should be doing. I've found that all of my games either felt really easy, or really hard. By picking an arbitrary push timing, I seem to either catch my opponents completely off guard and win easily or get repelled and lose terribly. Kind of on the same note, I have a really bad sense of how the game is progressing - I'm not sure what my opponent should be doing or even what I should be doing in response. I have a hard time gauging whether I'm ahead or behind. I feel a lot more confident judging this when playing Zerg. I attribute this to lack of experience and expect it to get better as I continue to play more and more games.
Playing Terran hasn't been some magical cheat code to being infinitely better though (Which is great!)
I've gotten a new respect for a speedling/baneling army. Playing as Zerg I always felt that banelings were hard to use and only moderately effective against good Terrans. Playing as Terran I can see why many players are terrified of those stupid rolling limes. I'm not familiar enough with playing Terran yet and my unit control is much under-par leading to some huge huge losses to baneling armies. Mutalisks also seem to be an issue but I attribute that to poor base design. I end up building too many structures next to each other and create a maze for my units to have to file through when trying to defend against mutalisks. My turret timing and placement is atrocious and I'll be looking to improve that in the future.
Against Protoss, I find that it's so hard to fight collossus without having some sort of economic advantage. I can't seem to afford pumping a sizable MM army while also teching to vikings and sacrificing medivac production. However I'd rather my toss opponent go collossus than templar as I'm definitely not comfortable enough to incorporate good ghost play into my game.
What I really want to work on from here is learning some solid and concrete builds against various races. I've been playing by feel up to now and think that I'd do much better learning a real build. By luck I managed to not play any mirror matches in my 12 games played and think this as a blessing since the standard MM army seems to be worst in this matchup (which is all I've really been able to do).
All you Terran players out there, please teach me some builds for the various matchups! Also, some of the Zergs I played against dominated me so badly it made me excited about playing Zerg again. I'm hoping to finish this challenge soon and get back to the swarm YEEEEYUUHHH!
Replay pack of my journey to Solo Terran 10:
http://www.filefront.com/17331590/AnExperimentFirst10Wins.zip
TL;DR - Unexpectedly decent win-rate. Still very unfamiliar with the race and really need to learn some builds. Banelings are OP.
