EPT末 代 本 座
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How Flash sees the map
Part Three is going to be split into three parts here. The first will touch on general principles of position. The second will touch on Flash's TvZ mech transitions, TvP vs. ground, and TvP vs. carriers. The third will touch on Flash's TvT.
Terran, in BW, had the widest range of playstyles. To quote Lightwip, Terran has many outs in any given situation. But underlying this simple truth is a more complex reality: Terran has a wide range of playstyles, because the Terran race benefits more from position than from unit composition, by far. (At least in BW. In SC2, that honor goes to Protoss and hive-tech Zerg.)
Positioned properly, all Terran units can kill huge amounts of stuff while suffering minimal damage in return. Positioned improperly, Terran units die like the glass cannons they are or even kill themselves.
This was Flash's greatest strength. When the game boiled down to a positional, set-piece match, Flash rarely lost, even if he was behind in macro. He was always able to have the right stuff at the right place at the right time. This is why opponents tried not to get to lategame with him.
This outcome arose out of two general rules:
- Punch with your fists, don't feel with your fingers
- Never take useless ground; bait the opponent into overextension
Rule #1: Nicht Kleckern, sondern Klotzen
Force concentration is a critical part of warfare. This is because the relative strength between two combat formations is the square of the simple ratio of each army's absolute strength.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester's_laws#Lanchester.27s_Square_Law
For example, if you had 10 dragoons shooting randomly at 5 dragoons, the 10 dragoons would end up doing 4x as much total damage as the 5 dragoons would.
This is why Flash was viewed as boring. Instead of making tons of itty bitty attacks, he would mass up and deliver overwhelming strikes where Lanchester's Square Law and 200 years of military experience would be on his side.
This idea is very simple, but most RTS players still don't fully get it, because pissing away small chunks of your army when you have an advantage is very, very tempting indeed. Flash understood well enough not to do that.
Rule #2: Don't take useless ground--let your opponent do that
Had the Soviets attacked Western Europe in the 70s, they would have flattened NATO, absent nuclear warfare. For the first time, they had qualitative parity with their opponents; on top of that, even though they only had a 5:4 quantitative superiority over NATO in the front line, NATO's forward defense policy was flat-out suicidal against mobile, mechanized formations. By piling their boys in an even belt from Fulda to the North Sea, NATO was holding a bunch of "useless ground" that would not have helped in them in the event of an attack. The orientation of good roads in Germany made it very difficult for a NATO division stretched along the northern German border to deploy to the south, and vice versa. All the Soviets would have to do would be to concentrate their divisions in a few breakthrough areas, seize road junctions, airbases, and bridgeheads 300 to 500km behind NATO lines, and then it would be game over Germany as all those splendid NATO formations sat on the border and ran out of fuel, food, and ammo, holding a line on a map that no longer meant anything.
NATO's field commanders understood this--they begged NATO high command for over thirty years to let them move their forces back to the Rhine and act as a mobile reserve, yet up to the very end, they never got that authorization, because that would be politically unpopular in West Germany.
Very few Brood War players bothered to read military strategy, and even fewer likely understood this aspect of it. Flash was, without a doubt, one of those few.
This is a textbook standard Flash TvT from early 2010. Flash is playing Sea, one of the five best Terrans in the post-Savior era, and a team leagues monster.
Flash and Sea open with cloaked wraith builds; Flash gains an air advantage but Sea gets a faster third. They trade a few blows, then open up into standard 3base TvT dropship play.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/vmtOA.jpg)
Here's a rough breakdown of the game on the map. Sea is red, Flash is yellow. Mains are 'M', Naturals are 'N'. The big blobs just past the natural are the factory rally points. Sea holds the red circle with most of his static D and about 20-30 supply of army, and holds the red dashed line on the southern high ground off and on. Flash holds the northern high ground, the yellow circle, permanently, and holds the transit area--the dashed line--with mines and only a few tanks. The yellow and red arrows are ground transit paths, while the light yellow arrow is an air bridge Flash opened up once he had enough dropships and the pink path is Sea's roundabout ground attack route into Flash's 5th and 6th. Numbers denote additional bases either player took. Black Xs are the expansions neither player held consistently.
What's notable here is that Flash, in spite of trading evenly with Sea in SCV losses between 6m30s and 10m, doesn't try to press forward in spite of taking a later 3rd. Instead, he lets Sea take the middle, while conserving his forces into just holding his three bases, while scanning and making sure that Sea only has 3 bases.
Since Flash knows he's getting gas, and hence getting army supply, at roughly the same rate as his opponent, he knows that if he holds less ground he has more army supply to spare for a mobile reserve. So Flash builds up a large dropship fleet and begins keeping a fresh macro cycle of troops loaded up all the time.
Meanwhile, as Sea holds the middle (roughly 9m to the end of the game), he doesn't use that "forward position" to get himself any additional macro advantage. On the contrary, by leaving a bunch of tanks, gols, turrets, and mines, there, he wastes army supply doing essentially nothing, compounding his macro disadvantage from the lost SCVs. Instead, Flash is the one to get a faster 4th and 5th, by virtue of taking the northern high ground permanently. Then he uses that faster 4th and 5th gas to build up a bigger army and dropship fleet repeatedly crushes Sea's attempts to take his 5th and 6th, then finally wears Sea down enough on the southern high ground and southern natural that Sea's 4th is basically dead too. Sea then taps out.
Flash did do a bunch of subtle mechanical things right. First, he kept all his units on the high ground whenever possible. Second, he understood that units loaded into dropships have the ultimate high ground and mobility advantage.
More importantly, though, he understood which positions were important (the northern and southern hills) and which wasn't (the middle) and allocated each macro cycle of fresh units accordingly. Finally, once he had a large dropship fleet, he was able to consistently "show up with more stuff, faster" than his opponent to the critical engagements.
Now, such unforced errors as the one above were rare. Far more common were matches where Flash forced the positional errors himself. A classic example occurs in the deciding game of the 2010-2011 SPL Grand Finals between him and Best.
Best is an extremely good Protoss player who excels at practice and preparing builds. This is his time to shine--he's been training for this game for the better part of a month now.
Flash opens 1rax FE. Best opens up with 1gate-range-goon-expo. Both scout each other. Flash knows that Best knows he is behind a little from the opening, and needs to force Flash to repair his natural bunker in order to catch up, so at 7m50s, Flash makes the game winning move.
Yep. You heard me right. At 7m50s, Flash sends an SCV out from his base, knowing that Best's other dragoon is at home killing his scout and knowing that when Best finishes range in another 15 seconds all of Best's goons are going to be knocking on Flash's front door. What is the point of the SCV? To build a half-finished engineering bay at Best's mineral-only, blocking the nexus placement.
This forces Best to take the 3 o'clock expansion instead of the safe mineral only, which makes Best supremely vulnerable because it means that Best has to hold more "ground" in order to get essentially the same amount of usable resources. Best could have taken 6 o'clock and the min only for the same amount of defense as he now is using to hold just one base. Now Flash knows that Best will be defensive since he's stretched thin (a metagame and playstyle read--if it was Stork, Flash would have been more careful), so Flash can cheat and get his min only and the 12 o'clock base and double armories with only 4 factories. The rest of the game was essentially a mathematical certaintly, barring some massive fuckup from Flash, as he now had a wide-open timing where he would have 180-190 supply, 2/2 ups, and science vessels versus a Protoss with only a single arbiter and no stasis. Even though Best expanded like crazy to the upper right of the map, this only compounded his bad position by making it trivial for Flash to cut those bases off from his production. In essence, Best was locked into a map position that got worse and worse as he expanded, which is the opposite of what you want to happen in PvT.
What could have Best done? Well, all that happened was that he left a 30 second window in between his probe leaving Flash's natural and his dragoons showing up. The rest of the game was pretty much a testament to Flash's deep, deep understanding of the game.
This was also testament to Flash's metagaming ability in that he read Best like an open book in terms of how Best would want to play the game out, but also in the fact that Flash, more than anyone, understood the implications of positioning and how to use and abuse it to its maximum. Finally, this is testament to Flash's mental strength, in that even though many A-class players could probably see a window like that and more than a few of them might see the implications, only Flash would have the balls and nerves to play that out against one of the best PvTers in the ace match of the Proleague Grand Finals.
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