! Day[9] Podcasts E14: TvZ on Heartbreak Ridge - Page 36

On January 07 2009 09:15 motbob wrote:
Well, I'll get started transcribing it.

Hey everyone! This is Day[9], and I'm going to talk a little bit about defeating a Terran mech as a zerg player. So ever since Fantasy did his cute mech shit against GGplay, all anyone wants to do is mech. And that's fine; mech's cool; it's the current trend of the moment; it was never weak or strong. It's just an alternative type of play.

But the problem is that when I read the strategy forum or even watch the professionals play, I want to vomit. I feel like so much of the advice and the current ideas of how to play against mech is just totally wrong. Now, I'm a little unusual in that I've been around forever. I've been playing competitively for 10 years. There was a period way back when when mech was just as popular as it is now. That gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time practicing against and thinking about the dynamics of mech play. So I want to share a little bit with you guys about my experience against mech and what I feel is the correct way to think about and counteract a good Terran mech player.

So first, let's talk about the strengths and weaknesses of a mech build, then let's analyse what's wrong with current thought and play, and then I'll give some more concrete tips at the end and even a loose build that you guys can play around with.

So, let's dive right in and talk about the three major strengths and weaknesses of mech, in my opinion. Number 1: mech is good with big, one-punch-style pushes. Number two: mech is great at holding territory and playing defensively. Number three: mech is great at fucking with the Zerg early game.

Let's go ahead and talk about those three concepts in depth. First, I'll talk about this one-punch style army concept that I mentioned. This idea is that in small numbers, Zerg has an advantage over a mech army. In medium sized armies they're fairly even. But once you start talking about big, large armies, the mech army is way better than whatever Zerg can throw at it. So, the way this manifests itself in games is that Terrans will much often favor a timing push that is significantly later in the game, because early-game pushes are just so dangerous. In fact, it's often a bad idea to be very aggressive early on as a meching Terran player.

Number two: holding territory and playing defensively. With seige tanks and mines and goliaths, you can set yourself up and plant yourself and be almost inpenatrable. Two great examples of this are Mind vs s2 on the Dec. 15th proleague,



which is a great example of the way mech can "hold the line" in a way that MnM can't.

Another good example is Flash vs Savior on Baekmagoji.



Flash just had so much stuff that when Savior attacked with infinity Ultralisks, they evaporated immediately and Flash was just sitting there pumping his fist like a 15 year old.

The third thing is that mech is very good at screwing with the zerg early on. This is because they don't need that barracks, so they can do things like proxy barracks openings that don't really screw with the later stages of their mech build, and because vultures are so fucking obnoxious. They plant mines and dart around and kill drones, and whatnot.

So yeah, that is what a mech army is good at, and I'll constantly be coming back and referring to these things throughout this rant...thing. Now let's talk about what mech is bad at.

In order, the three weaknesses that mech has (in my opinion) are thus: one, mech has a huge problem with mobility; two, mech is not very good with applying pressure throughout the game; three, mech play has a weak mid-game (sort of an extension of the first two weaknesses). I'll talk about those in depth.

About mobility. Terran players often need to plant mines, but even if the Terran player isn't making many vultures, his tanks need to be seiged to maximize damage. So it's very difficult for a meched Terran to dart this way and that in the fashion that MnM does. And again (this is sort of an extention of the big push notion) the Terran can't really do these ninja-like things where it breaks its army into small pieces and splits up, because in small numbers, zerg is better against small groups of mech. So, Terran players suffer from a huge lack of mobility.

The second thing is the applying of pressure. Same thing: the Terran cannot break his army up and do dicotymous things, so the way mech players win is by doing huge pushes. Yeah, there's vulture harass in the mig-game, but I'll talk abouthow to negate that in a moment.

The third thing is the meched Terran's weak mid-game. That is the point in time when a Zerg player really needs to attack. The Terran player must play defensively in the midgame, because it can't push, and if it does vulture harass, it gets completely crushed by hydras. This is the point where Zerg can take a lot of expansions and win economically.

So, to recap, a meching Terran is very slow, but extremely strong. So the Zerg player cannot win by being cute. The Zerg player can't win with three lurkers and a dark swarm and feel clever. The Zerg player needs to win by having a lot of shit. And the way the Zerg does that is by creating a powerful economy by exploiting the Terran's midgame immobility.

Now, before I talk about good ways to deal with mech, I have to point out what is so bad about current theory and practice against mech. I can sum it up with the following: people play against mech the same way as they play against a MnM Terran. You just can't so that. For some reason, people think that you play a certain way against Terran, and it doesn't matter what Terran does. But against a meching Terran, you should treat it as a totally different matchup.

So let me list some things that are bad that you should not do. And yeah, there are obvious exceptions but on the whole, you should not do the following things.

-Don't go for a really fast mutalisk harass. I see a lot of players think they're really clever, getting their 3hatch, their spire, and going to kill a lot of SCVs, but the problem is that that doesn't work against goliaths. Against MnM it's great because the MnM sometimes gets isolated from each other and you can pick some off, and the SCVs can be taken out because the range upgrade is delayed blah blah blah... but goliaths have like infinite range and deal a fuckton of damage against air, so when you run in feeling so fucking clever, you leave with a bunch of dead mutalisks and the rest are red health. And that effectively gives you no advantage. It is very difficult to abuse a meching Terran with really aggressive harass. I mean, if you can pick off an SCV, do it, but don't make the cornerstone of your gameplay about getting an advantage with fast harassment because it will not happen.

-Do not rely on lurkers against a meching Terran. Against MnM, lurkers make perfect sense. Six lurkers can kill off like infinity MnM. I mean, you only need two lurkers to defend an entire expansion against Terran in the midgame. And again, a major purpose of lurkers is getting a little bit of map control in the midgame, because he doesn't have mobile detection. Meching players are already immobile in the midgame. They're not trying to attack in the midgame. They're going to wait until the later stages of the game where not only will they have detection, but they'll have an army that will completely kill the shit out of your lurkers. They'll have tanks and goliaths, which take many hits from lurkers and have very long range. So the fact that the lurker attack stacks is completely meaningless. In fact, if you do the math, you'll find that lurkers are extremely cost-ineffective at killing tanks, when compared to zerglings etc.

-Do not rely on defilers to beat a mech player. Now, this argument is a little tricky, but it's absolutely crucial that you understand this, or else your play against meched Terran will be crippled. Let's think about defilers against MnM. Defilers make perfect sense, because your lurkers that were oh-so-good in the midgame are now in serious danger from vessels and tanks. But hey, don't worry, you can throw down some dark swarms, and now you're totally safe against the MnM army. Now, against mech, it's not that defilers are bad, it's that defilers are significantly worse against mech when compared to MnM. Picture yourself getting ready to attack a mech army. It's spread out with tanks. The units are physically big, so even when they're as clustered as they can be, they're still fairly spread out. When the Terran has all his tanks seiged, and occasionally he'll have mines there too, your army will be eaten alive by the tanks, even in dark swarm, by the splash damage. You're dealing with 15-25 tanks against mech. You're not dealing with the 3-5 tanks you usually see against MnM. So, you just need to have a lot of units. You can't rely on the dark swarm. It is good, it might be the thing that tips the balance in your favor in a big battle, but you can't lock yourself into that mindset of "OK, I have my Hive, I need to get my defilers so that I can stay alive." That's the mindset that you have against a MnM player, not the mindset that you should have against a meching Terran player.

-Don't build Ultralisks. Ultralisks are great against MnM because the Ultra armor is so high that MnM shots barely do anything. The problem is against mech, it is the exact opposite. Ultralisks maximize the damage that a tank does. When a tank fires at a zergling, it can do at most 35 damage, because a zergling has 35 life. Against an Ultra, the tank does the full 70 damage, not including upgrades. When you throw splash damage and mines in there, Ultras get EATEN A-L-LIVE by a mech army. For an example, watch the second Youtube video. You will laugh at how many Ultralisks Savior lost at the end of that game. Now I actually did a calculation on this, about Ultraling against mech. It's shocking how ineffective Ultraling is against mech in terms of damage taken vs damage dealt. A much better spending of your money is on simple ground units, like zerglings and hydralisks. Those are going to be the core of your army, because again, against mech, you're not trying to make a "cute" army, with defilers and lurkers and Ultralisks. You just want an army that is a lot of shit.

to be continued...

On January 07 2009 11:31 qrs wrote:
Nice. I'll continue it for a bit:

And part of the reason, I think, that ultralisk/zergling is so popular is that players will develop an enormous economic advantage in the midgame--correctly so--and at that point, it hardly matters what the Zerg does in terms of unit combination. Ultralisk/ling just happens to be what the player does to win, so he incorrectly learns that ultralisk/ling is the proper counter, when it is in fact not. Again, all of what I've been talking about: this whole medic/marine mindset: it's all just ways of saying that the Zerg is not taking advantage of the fundamental weakness of a meching player, and that is the midgame immobility. A Zerg player needs to establish an extremely strong economy then, and then crush the Terran in the later stages of the game, when Terran is trying to do that big one-punch push.

OK, great. Now that I've said all that stuff, I want to give a few general tips of how to deal with a meching player, and then I'll finish things up with a build that I've done that's extremely effective, and you guys can play around with it and do whatever. It's just a good solid base:

• First thing: Hydralisk/ling should be the bulk of your ground army. That minimizes the amount of damage that your army is taking as well as maximizing the damage-output that your army is doing.
  
• In addition to that, you need to continue to make a lot of mutalisks all game long, as just an important part of your army. It's not going to be a big component of harassment; it's just really key to ensure that the Terran player is continuing to make lots of goliaths, and plus, when you expand (as much as you end up doing against mech), you can build up a very large mutalisk army anyways: you'll have like two control-groups of mutalisks in addition to your big ground army, and that is really what you want to be looking for.
  
• Now, in terms of transitioning, when you get that hive-tech up, an excellent method for busting a stationary push, or just, you know, a Terran line that's just sitting defensively and holding a whole bunch of expansions: a great way to bust that, when you get the hive-tech, is to get guardians. You can get 15-20 guardians without much difficulty, because, again, you're delaying your hive-tech by opting to expand much more in the midgame, so by the time you get hive, you have a really strong economy and a ton of mutalisks already. And that is what's going to really help you bust that push, because they have equal range to goliaths, and they can break the tank lines really well for your ground army.
  
• In terms of defilers: Defilers should really be the latest evolution of your play, it should be the last thing you transition to and incorporate into your army, because, again, just having the units is the most important thing, and having the expansions. Once you get a defiler, it will always help your army some, but you want to make sure that that army is substantial enough.
  
• And, in terms of ultralisks, you've already heard my thoughts on that: I wouldn't recommend playing with it unless you're really comfortable with your play, because frankly ultralisks are very difficult and technical to use, in that matchup.
  
• And finally, the most important tip that I can give against a meching player is that minerals are more important than gas. When you get an expansion, don't make that first drone--make a geyser (sic). The bulk of your army is going to be zerglings and hydralisks and mutalisks, and you're going to want to be expanding lots and lots. Gas is not important as any of those, and minerals are critical. What's also great about the fact that minerals are the key resource that you need: it opens up the potential for taking a lot of mineral naturals that a lot of players just seem not to have been considering against a mech player. So, yes, again: minerals are the key resource.

So let me finish things up with a really strong build-order that's brought me a huge amount of success through the years. I don't know if people think about builds the same way I do, so hopefully I make sense....But on the same note, I'm trying to make a video series about how to construct a build from scratch, and please keep pressuring me to work on that, 'cause i need motivation.

So yeah, here's my build:
So, as a Zerg player, you 12-hatch at your expansion, you open completely normally, and your basic opening is just the 3-hatch opening.

Now, if your opponent bunker-rushes, you just need to be able to deal with that. You should also be checking up on your Terran, because there's three basic things that a terran can do early on: Going 2 barracks, early expanding, and then getting fast gas. You need to find out pretty early on if he's going fast gas, because that's where the deviation occurs. You start off with the 3-hatch, because if he's going medic/marine you deal with that accordingly, and if you see him going mech, you veer off into the build that I'm going to say right now.

So if he's going a fast gas, the things that we need to worry about are:

• some sort of gentle early harass, with vultures, like a hidden 1-factory
  
• or there's 2-factory aggressive play
  
• or there's 2-port wraith

Those are the three big things: 1-factory, 2-factory, or 2-port wraith.

This is the build I recommend: You gas on 18 (and you have 3 hatches at this point). You gas on 18, making overlords at the appropriate times. With your first 50 gas you get a hydralisk den, before your lair. And then you get speed for hydralisks, before your lair. And you're going to be making between 6 and 10 hydralisks. And you're also going to be getting your second gas at an appropriate time: not too fast, but when you fiddle with this build you'll feel about when it feels right.

And also, have your overlords clustered in your base, in a way that your hydralisks are ready to defend against 2-port wraith, but also so that those overlords are ready to start wandering out into the middle of the map, because you need them as spotters against mines.

OK, great. The reason this build is doing so well for us right now is we have negated those three big things (the 1-factory harass, 2-factory harass, and the 2-port wraith), and for everything else Terran does, we're still OK. "Anything else Terran does" is like a fast dropship, or some sort of fast-academy build, and when we have speed-hydralisks we can still deal with that, because they don't have tons of medic/marine. In other words, we're not dead yet. There's nothing that we're facing that has killed us or has some sort of huge advantage.

I'm not going to talk about how to deal with 2-port wraith, because, again, the focus of this is dealing with mech. I'm just saying those initial variations to let you know that you are still OK against those things with this opening.

Now, at this point, you'll be fairly certain that your opponent is doing some type of mech build: he's planted mines in the middle of the map, say, you've--I mean, if he went 2-factory aggressive, you see a lot of mech units, and at this point, Terran is focusing on trying to get that expansion up.

As a sample map, let's say we're playing on Destination and we are at the north position. We have those overlords at our natural, ready to slide to the right expansion and ready to slide out our front ramps to spot those mines. Now, in this build, we've made 6-8 hydralisks. We have speed. Do not get range with the next 150 gas. Get a lair, and start planning on expanding. Your whole goal for the midgame is to have 4 or 5 hydras move out to an expansion and just sit to defend, you'll have another 4 or 5 hydralisks at your front and in your main, to just sit and defend, and then you're going to start expanding while getting mutalisks at the same time, and--and this is really key--and sending overlords to locations where you want to expand, because you need to clear out those mines.

Now, when that lair finishes, we're going to be going for a spire, and at this point, you're wondering: we're going for a spire and we have like 8-10 hydralisks, or whatever: what do we
do with the rest of our larvae? Well you're powering drones like crazy. Because you're not worried about an early Terran push: he can't really push aggressively early on. So you're making tons of drones, you're taking one expansion at the right that's defended by those hydralisks, and you're on your way to getting mutalisks.

When those mutalisks pop out, they're great because they force the Terran to delay his push a little bit, which extends the Zerg's midgame advantage. Those mutalisks pop out, the Terran has to stop making tanks, stop making vultures, and begin pumping out goliaths. Now, you don't want to do aggressive harass, but you want to be in his face just enough to let him know that you have a lot of mutalisks. You only need to make like 9-12 at this point, and at this point you can start expanding to the top-right natural and the left natural, and you've already been making a whole ton drones and expanding a lot, and you can begin throwing down more hatcheries and some evolution chambers. And at this point you just start making tons of zerglings and hydralisks, favoring hydralisks, initially: don't start making a lot of zerglings early on, because that's a little weak. You want to start with a lot of hydralisks, and then you can add on zerglings and hatcheries at the same time.

And what ends up happening is, as the midgame progresses, he's forced to delay his push, and when he does come out, you have an absurd number of expansions: you have your main, your nat, the right natural, the left natural, and the top-right corner. And you can back-upgrade: you can get the hydralisk range, the metabolic boost for zerglings, and overlord sight-range, if you want, and just begin spreading around the map, and you will be surprised at how easy it is to have total map-control and a raging economy--and you still have a lair.

You can start teching towards that queen's nest after a little bit, but again, the emphasis of your play is going to be adding hatcheries, both as production units and at expansions, and then, for the rest of the game, you'll just have this amazing advantage.

Now, against a really good player, it's going to be difficult to make that advantage very large, so I do need to talk a little bit about later-game transitioning. As you get your hive up, it's a great idea to get guardians, but really the most important upgrade for hive is the adrenal boost for the zerglings, 'cause now you have a bunch of cracklings that are really cheap, in absurd numbers, against lots of tanks, lots of goliaths (because you've still been making those mutalisks), and a handful of vultures. (The mutalisks actually help to cut down on the vulture count tremendously, so that's really great.)

So yeah, and the rest of the game is fairly straightforward. If you're having a lot of trouble in the later stages of the game, it's a good sign that you did something wrong in the midgame, or that you're going ultralisk/zergling, which I told you not to do .

So, yeah...I hope that this rambling was useful to some people because I would have made a post, but I don't like writing as much as I like hearing myself talk . So, yeah....Merry Christmas, Team Liquid. Cheers!

THE END

Edit: haha, crossposted with motbob: while I was typing all this, he was editing his post with the exact same thing. When he gets to where I stopped, he asks for someone to take over. Ah well, I'll type the rest now...

done

On January 20 2009 11:14 qrs wrote:
I'll start transcribing, in case anyone likes it in writing. I'll edit this post as I go; just posting now, so no one duplicates the effort.
OK, left off at 8:40. If anyone feels like picking it up, feel free, otherwise maybe I'll get back to it sometime later.
Edit: Thanks to tribal_warfare for transcribing the second (larger) part.

Hey everyone, this is Day[9], and I want to talk about a pretty advanced concept called Building Triggers and the Imaginary Player.

So I created the Gimme questions thread a while ago, asking about questions people had, just for me to rant on about, and a huge number of them were about builds, like, If he does this, how do I respond with this? or, When's a good timing push, what's a good build, on this matchup, on this map? And so, rather than going into specific advice and trying to answer those questions, I figure it would be really nice to give some general advice that you guys can apply in a wide variety of situations. And I mentioned two at the start: the first is what's called "Building Triggers" and the second is what's called "The Imaginary Player". So let's begin with

Building Triggers

The notion of a trigger is pretty straightforward in itself: that if A happens, you do B. And even though this is really a sort of simple idea, it has powerful, powerful applications for improving you play. So let's begin with some really simple examples that I know everyone is familiar with: As Protoss, when your shuttle is halfway done, you start building a Robotics Support Bay. That way, when your shuttle finishes, you'll be able to start the reaver right on time. Or, in another example, when your Spire is at 300 hitpoints, you stop making things at all of your hatcheries: that way, when the Spire finishes, you have three larvae ready to roll at each hatchery, and you can pump out a whole bunch of mutalisks.

Virtually everyone has experienced the two triggers that I just mentioned, because they crop up in almost every single game. Any time Zerg is going for a Spire, he's going to be obeying this sort of Law of Larva-Timing. But, in terms of other triggers, people seem to treat them as though they're this mystical knowledge, that there's this oracle that appears every hundred years and dishes out some sorts of timings or whatever. But the fact remains that any player can build his own triggers if he does so in a simple incremental fashion, which is exactly what I'm going to talk about, with a personal example of my own:

Let's talk about Zerg vs. Terran on Gaia, one of my absolute favorite matchups ever. Now, assuming that I'm not in vertical positions with my opponent, I love going hydralisk/lurker, because of the way that the middle of the map is kind of wide open but also kind of looks like a large path. Now, the problem that I have when I go hydralisk/lurk--or really that any hydralisk/lurk player has--is that if the Terran gets too many tanks, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop Terran pushes. If you have some number of medic/marine and 15 well-placed tanks, it's virtually impossible to break that with any number of hydralisk/lurkers. So, in the logic of constructing my build on this map, I knew there was a point where I needed to get Guardians, and the question is: when do I get Guardians.

At this point, a critical mistake that so, so, so many players make is to think that when late-game rolls around they can just feel it out: they'll be able somehow to "feel" when Terran has too many tanks and then they'll get the Hive. That logic does not work and you should avoid this at all costs. I mean, consider early-game: suppose I'm Protoss and I want to 2-gate rush a Zerg player: I never "feel it out". I never just say, "Well I can just wing this 2-gate rush." Instead what I do is get a precise, exact, optimized build, and follow that every single time I want to 2-gate rush a Zerg player and I make subtle adjustments based upon what the Zerg player is doing. There is no reason why you can't do this late-game. And that is exactly what I'm saying: that you want to have a precise plan of what to do late-game by creating your trigger and then you make subtle adjustments based upon what's going on. With that in mind, let's discuss how I came to answer the question, "When do I get Guardians in Zerg vs. Terran on Gaia?"

Step 1, and by far the most important step in building your own trigger: I chose a timing completely arbitrarily. I said to myself, "Let's get a Hive at 125 food: that's when I'm going to get my Queen's Nest and start teching up to Guardians." And I told myself I would play at least 10 games using this exact timing to see how it felt. In the actual games, I got crushed by tank pushes every single time: the Guardians were way late. So, great: now, all of a sudden, rather than trying to "feel my way" through the late-game, I instead established a hard decision with a very clear adjustment, which was: "Get the hive earlier." At this point, I backed off a little bit, and said, "Well, let me try doing it at 90 food." And when I did it at 90 food, the results were better--I was able to hold off the pushes a little bit more effectively in the late-game, but then, all of a sudden, I was losing in the middle-game: when the Terran's first push came out, I just didn't have enough hydra/lurk to kill it off. So immediately, I know that the trigger I'm looking for, the timing I'm looking for, is somewhere between 90 and 125 food, and I ended up settling at around 100 food as a decent time to start making the Queen's Nest and teching towards those Guardians.

An important note is that I didn't need to use food as a basis for establishing these triggers. I could have used any number of wacky things. I could have said, "I'll start making my Queen's Nest when my +1 attack upgrade is 75% done." Or I could have said, "Gee, let me start making my Queen's Nest when I get my gas done at my fourth base." I mean, anything you want to use as your trigger, totally go for it. Again, the most important concept in building your own trigger is first choosing a starting point and then incrementally adjusting that based upon your experiences in play. And the most important word there is "incrementally". By far the biggest mistake that you can make when establishing these sorts of triggers is to be too hasty in making your adjustments. That's why I said that I devoted 10 games to getting my Hive at 125 food. I devoted 10 games to getting my Hive at 90 food. Because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't making some sort of fluke in those games that would incorrectly make me adjust my play in a wrong direction.

There are two key aspects of this example I briefly want to touch on. The first is that this is a late-game situation. Many players feel really daunted by late-game scenarios, because it feels like there are so many variables and deviations, and there's a million ways you could have gotten there, and it seems like an intractable problem, trying to close down on a solid solution. But, as we saw in this example, I had a very simple question and there was a very simple process I followed. And, remember, if you just break it down into small enough chunks, there is no problem that is too hard for any player at any level to solve.

The second key point--and this is so, so, so important: if there is one thing you remember from this entire recording, let it be this--I never stopped to question whether my play was right or wrong. That is, I never said, "Should I be going Guardians?" I never stopped to do that; I never stopped to question whether I should be going hydralisk/lurker or anything like that. Rather, I said, "I am going hydralisk/lurker on this map, it feels like I need to go Guardians, when do I get those Guardians?" and I tried only to answer the question when. That is it. That is so important in the improvement of your play: to focus on a question and work on that. There are countless players in Starcraft who think the goal is to find "the right build". You see these players all the time: they're 2-gate rushing, you know, one week and then the next week they're going early-expand, Bisu-style, and then the next week they're just doing whatever the current trend in Proleague is. They keep changing and changing and changing. That is not your goal. Your goal in Starcraft is not to try to find "the right build"; rather, it is to find a build that you like that is based on solid logic, and then to adjust that build, and to work on it, and to incorporate newer, better triggers that make that build work.
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finished by tribal_warfare
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For example, one day I woke up and said "You know what, I'm tired of going mutalisk/zerling in zerg vs zerg. I want to go hydralisk." and I spent one season on PG tour just working on that build, making adjustments, trying to form new sets of logics, doing different openings until finally I had a solid build down. The following season I went 56-1 against zerg, I was playing an A+ level; and I say that not to brag but to point out that there was absolutely nothing special about my play. I simply started with some logic and then adjusted and adjusted and adjusted. I mean the one loss I had, was not to a phenomenal player at all. It was one of the first games I played that season. But he showed me that when I was doing my opening I needed to get twelve zerglings instead of ten. I had been relying on getting ten but it was just too little for his aggressive nine pool opening. And after that adjustment I could face nine pools in the future and hold that off. Again it was just these subtle adjustments.

I'd like to take the time now to answer a question I saw in the questions thread I created as well as to dicuss a conversation I had with Xeris about this very topic of building triggers, so I apologise in advance for potentially butchering your name but Oystein from Norway asked, "When you have taken expansions outside your natural in zerg vs terran do you ever make units from the expansions or do you stick strictly to drone?" I love this question because it has a clear motivation, it has an answer with some foundational logic and it can be turned into a question that can help develop a trigger to improve your play. So first of all, let me begin with the motivation. This totally was a question that came up in my experience as a Zerg player. You know, say the map is python and I take my main and my natural and then I take another main because I'm going for the standard sort of hive tech defiler play and what not. And I remember early on in my life time I would wonder when I had that expansion, should I just keep making drones? It seemed to make sense because I wanted to have my economy slowly getting better and better and the more drones the merrier right? Moreover, I could have a nydas canal linking my main and this expansion so I could have units in both places at once, and also when I take the natural as my forth base I can just transfer drones from that expansion on down. It seemed like I could keep making drones. At the same time I saw all sorts of benefits to making units from that expansion. If I'm making a lot of units at that expansion then I'll have a small little army that I can just move right down the ramp and I can use that to defend my newly building forth expansion. Also, if I'm occasionally making a defiler and some lurkers at that third base I can use those units to counter attack and a good example of this is GGplay vs Iris in the everstar league finals game five. So I saw benefits to both. That said, to answer your question Oystein, yes, there is a time you want to stop making drones from that expansion and begin making units and the logic to this is that you have all your hatcheries make the number of drones that you want to get to the level of economy you want and then that hatchery can join in unit production and that ends up being much more efficient then just slowly adding drones one at a time at that expansion. But what is so key about Oystein's question is that now we can ask ourselves, when do we stop making drones? What is the appropriate level of economy? And now we are just starting an exercise in building a new trigger that will help us improve our play. And again, what I love so much about Oystein's question is that it has a natural motivation, it can be stated as a simple problem and all we have to do is use some simple logic to reword that that as a trigger building exercise.

In another example I was talking to my friend Xeris on the phone about one base dragoon/reaver on Requiem. Because Requiem has really close starting positions, one base and its aggressive play is really great against Zerg because the zerg has to stay low econ in the early game. So if you can get a really good timing push in there with dragoon/reaver it's surprisingly difficult to stop. As I was discussing this build with Xeris he asked me, when do I get Dragoon range? I know I want to have range when I make my push but I'm not sure if I need to get it earlier, you know, to hold off some sort of hydra/ling bust at my front. And I think that is a perfectly worded question for a trigger building exercise. So lets just outline the process that we would use in that situation. It's now time to pretend that I am a budding, young protoss super star. That I have taken it upon myself to figure out precisely when to get dragoon range on Requiem.

Step one. I need to choose an arbitrary time to start getting dragoon range so I have some place to work with, so I have some benchmark for comparision. When I say arbitrary, it's important to note that I do not mean stupid. You should always use some sort of logic to make sure you have a reasonable starting point. So, in my eyes a reasonable starting point is to get dragoon range to finish right before I make that dragoon/reaver push. So I'll say to myself that I want dragoon range to finish right as my reaver finishes. All of a sudden I have a complete army with shuttle, reaver and a bunch of dragoons with range, so now is a good time to attack. So my arbitrary timing might be, start dragoon range right when my reaver starts. What I might discover after a game or two is that the reaver finishes much more quickly then range. At this point I might say to myself, "Ok, I need to back range up. I'm going to start getting range when my shuttle begins as opposed to when my reaver begins." and lets say that timing works perfectly. So now, right as my reaver pops out, my dragoon range finishes and I'm ready to roll out. Then suppose at this time I find that my push gets crushed over and over again. I think to myself, "Hmm, I need to get that second reaver before my attack." As a result, I no longer need to get dragoon range so early. Let me start getting dragoon range when my first reaver begins, as opposed to when my shuttle begins. And then lets say that timing lines up well, and right as my second reaver pops out dragoon range finishes and I'm ready to roll out once more. I've made a minor adjustment based upon the success of this push and again, kept the focus in my mind on when that dragoon range upgrade was beginning. Further suppose that at this point I play made ten, fifteen, games and against every hydralisk/ling player, this push crushes them. I'm steamrolling zerg after zerg and I'm feeling much more confident in my play until I get to a player who is going two-base mutalisk instead of doing this zergling/hydralisk on opening. Against this sort of player I might find myself helpless against his mutalisks early on because I don't get dragoon range until right when these reavers finish so I might be having a huge difficulty dealing with mutalisk harass. It's important then to say, "Well, gee, maybe I should get dragoon range earlier." And then you plan it and try to get the timing aligned for when his mutalisks pop out. Having adjusted the dragoon range timing, I need to make sure my push hasn't been delayed too much because if I'm really good at holding off mutalisks players now I need to make sure that I don't equally suck against the hydraling players. What may be the case is that I find that I can get away with upgrading dragoon range early to hold off mutalisk players and my push has not been delayed so much that my push can't crush the hydraling players. Although this was an entirely theoretical exercise I think it is a completely reasonable exercise of how you would be adjusting play game after game. Note, I never stopped to say, "Is dragoon range good on Requiem?" I just began with the assumption that it was and tried to adjust the timing until I found one that worked just right for me.

As I mentioned earlier, what you'll sometimes find is that there are situations when you can delay dragoon range sometimes and will have to get it earlier some other times. All your logic will eventually condense down into a theorem that will allow you to precisely get dragoon range at just the right time every single game.

I've spent a long time talking about building triggers so now I want to talk about an abstract and very related concept called the imaginary player. This is the notion that, because you cannot see what your opposing player is doing through the fog of war you have to account for all possibilities of his play until you know exactly what he is doing. For instance, if I'm playing against a terran player and he went one-base fast gas and I can't get up his ramp to see what he's doing he could be going for a fast two-factory push, he could be going for a fast two-port wraith, he could be going for fast dropship, he could be going factory vulture harass to an expansion. I just don't know what he's doing yet. So I must assume that I'm playing against all of those possibilities, all of those imaginary players until I know precisely which one my opponent is. To many of you, I'm sure this sounds like I'm saying, "Be sure to account for these possibilites." but the notion of the imaginary player is in fact much, much deeper than that and it's critical for you to work out all sorts of timings and triggers to truely become a great player.

Once I have a build that I really like, that I think is solid, what I do is I get about five replays of that build against all the possible types of players I could play against. So, for example, lets go back to my zerg vs terran on gaia. Lets say I really like my lurker\hydralisk build. I'm going to make sure I've played this build style against fast expand, two barracks fast factory, fast gas and all the variations I mentioned earlier, against two rax fast expand, and against weird sorts of all ins and bunker rushes. I make sure I have replays against all of these variations. And that is when I figure out the timings for imaginary players. For example, I'll watch five replays of a terran who goes two rax into medic marine fast expand and I'll mentally line up all his timings with mine. I'll say something like, "Ok, I'll see his command center when my lair finishes." and I'll line up other things like say my evolution chamber generally finishes when his engineering bay starts or he makes his academy when my hatchery has this many hitpoints from being finished. All these sorts of little things. I can even doing things like "He makes this building when my food is at this much." I mean, every player is used to saying things like, "I make my overlord at eighteen." and I'm telling you that you should think things like "When I make my overlord at eighteen, that's when he makes his academy." and then I'll extend this further. I'll watch five replays against a player who went two port wraith and I'll get all those timings worked out: when his starports start and finish in relation to my lair. Against a two factory player I know exactly when that push leaves his base based upon what my food is. After hours of studying these replays I now have a complete mental picture of what all possible Terrans are doing based upon my play and the numbers I get from my build. When every game begins I'm always aware of all the things my imaginary terran opponents are doing and throughout the early parts of the game I'm constantly thinking to myself, "Which imaginary players can I cross off?".

Which brings me to an absolutely critical idea that all high level players abuse relentlessly, and that is what I call the non-trigger. The basic idea of a non-trigger is that if you know your opponents timings well enough, you know that if you see nothing at certain points in time you can cross imaginary players off your list. For example, suppose my terran opponent goes two rax and that's all I get to see. He could be going for a fast tank push, medic marine and early expand, or some sort of aggressive one base play. Those are the three imaginary players I have in my mind, and three imaginary players whose timings I know intimately. For example, if my player is early expanding I know exactly when I first see that command center and I can go "three, two, one," and if I see nothing I know immediately that he isn't fast expanding and I can begin preparing myself for a fast tank push and preparing myself to play against a one basing terran player.

This seemingly counter-intuitive idea is unbelievably powerful. That you always know exactly what your opponent is doing. That you can cross off all imaginary players until you have pin pointed exactly who your opponent is purely through key periods of nothing. Many players incorrectly assume certain situations in starcraft are rock, paper, scissors because they don't acknowledge the power of non-triggers. They'll watch two professional players play and neither of them will scout each other very much, and when they finally confront each other the first player will have an army that absolutely crushes the second player. Many amateurs will look at that and say that "Oh well, the first player just won because of his opening build." but the fact remains that the opening player is constantly adjusting his opening because he is seeing nothing from the second player at key periods of time. Never assume that starcraft is rock, paper, scissors. There is always a solution there. If you spend time practicing keeping track of all the imaginary players, focusing on what the non-triggers tell you, you will never be surprised in starcraft. I probably get surprised by what my opponent is doing once every thousand games because I'm always keeping track of all the possibilities in my head.

Well, that about wraps up my rant for today. Hopefully some of you found that useful. I really hope that you guys can incorporate the ideas of building triggers on only to generally improve your play but also to discover timings in the builds that you like. Because there is no point playing a game like starcraft if you're having someone elses fun. I also hope that you can incorporate the notion of the imaginary player into your play. Not just because it's obviously helpful and it will greatly bulster your confidence in game as you'll never be surprised but more importantly, I think that one of the most rewarding feelings I get in starcraft consistently is just knowing what my opponent is doing, and then when I rewatch the replay, I was right. That is just such a powerfully cool feeling to be able to go "I know he's making his academy here and his engineering bay here and his expansion should be finishing about now" and when you rewatch it you're just dead on the money, and that's just such a confidence booster that you're right on track. Hopefully you'll use the imaginary player logic to build your own clever non-triggers that will give you perhaps the greatest joy possible in starcraft - being accused of being a map hacker. That concludes my rant. This is Day[9], thank you very much for listening. Cheers.