The PiG Daily - Thinking critically about SC - Page 15

Credit to phaeromon for some good walloffs I used, others I modified or changed completely: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/518768-walling-properly-2017-season-1-map-pool


Abyssal
bottom spawn - top of ramp, 3 spaces to the right.
Full wall the rock ramp - closer path
You will need to wall more behind the rocks later on

Bel’shir Vestige
Power field not touching cliff
Move pylon 4 spaces/2 pylons to the left (bottom spawn)

Newkirk
Right spawn
Start on left of ramp
One space down, and 3 to the right.
Should be 3 spaces above and 3 spaces to the left

Paladino
Right Spawn
In line with the destructible debris/in line with the cliff
Down 4 spaces

3 spaces down
3 3x3 buildings to create a full walls
Looks awkward but no more vulnerable than a regular pylon in wall
Only downside is hard to wall-off behind it when being busted

Proxima Station
Top spawn
Pylon lined up above gas, right hand side.
3 gates for full solid walloff

Cactus Valley
Power field just off the rocks/doodads
2 3x3 easy

Honor grounds
Bottom right spawn
Pylon at back
3x3 structures
Leave gap on north of it so easiest point to reach all 3 bases

This is a strong, solid opening that does some nice fast pressure whilst getting a tank up at home to defend any counter aggression. You hit a fast 6 marine widow mine drop in the main base whilst running a widow mine into the natural, following up with a liberator.

From there you have solid 3-rax production and pump bio, mine, medivac and can harass and attack the Protoss to death.

Build Order:

Note on How I write Terran builds: I will always write what each tech structure (factory, starport) has to do directly underneath it rather than in chronological order. This way you learn to remember each structures place in the build and how the addons swap. The order of what it does will be indented, for example:

Barracks 3xmarines Tech Lab Stim Marauder production

The actual build:

No scout with this order - if you want to scout factor in that everything will be slightly delayed and adjust accordingly 15 Gas-first 16 rax 19 orbital 19 reaper 20 Factory 2xwidow mine Tech Lab Tank Swap off and build reactor 21 2nd gas 20 reactor 22 depot @Factory - Starport Medivac Liberator Reactor 40 depot (nonstop depots from now - not listed in build order) 41 2nd rax (medivac at 75%) 54/4:10 3rd rax (next to factory) + 3rd gas Swap onto tech lab as soon as finished 60/4:50 - ebay 5:00 - 3-rax should be situated on tech labs and reactors, start shields/stim then concussive shells and produce marauders and marines nonstop. Factory and Starport should be building their reactors at this time then going into constant mine/medivac production

Later on: It’s flexible from here, I mention different paths in my daily video. However in this game Maru does a standard aggressive follow-up with no gaps in unit production. He eventually drops a 3rd base on location around 7:00 and then a 4th and 5th barracks as he gets the money for it

Different Transitions and Stages of Learning

“I’m not good enough to keep rallying etc. but Protoss just gets out control because I can’t attack from 3 sides constantly like maru!”

Try powering (skipping a round of unit production) after the liberator pressure when you're first learning the build. Get your 5-rax production and 3rd base up, get double upgrades going and then go aim to hit one very powerful 2-1 timing attack to overwhelm your opponent. This will help you focus on the macro order without distracting yourself trying to drop all over the place.

Once you're comfortable with the build you can have nonstop production like Maru does and drop your opponent to deaath.

The aim is to attack like Maru and seamlessly hit 2-3 locations at once forcing them to spread their defences. Then regroup and dive on one piece of their split army

Lately there’s been quite a large Protoss culture of whining. I play all the races these days, but have played zerg for over 6 years now. I’ve seen periods like this for all races, but especially experienced it as a zerg. I’ve been a big part of it. Check out this piece of idiocy:



^OMG so embarrasing lol - its just me bitching and complaining and bringing up random pieces of asymmetry in the game to justify “why terran is imba”. It’s absolutely empty bullshit analysis. Every race has their own strengths and weaknesses, and their own bullshit! Use it! Learn to combat your opponents!

“No way to scout”
“No idea what’s coming”
“Have to get lucky with scouting”
“No way to stop zerg unless you can see it coming”

I disagree with most of this stuff
I’ll be using a tight glaive pressure opening with a fast 3rd to show 1) How a tight build can survive just about ANYTHING
And all the details that allow that to be the case!
Showing a whole bunch of examples - including some mistakes

G1 - where things go wrong and I still come back
G2 - Ling bane one
G3 - Basics of scouting for 3rd base and then adjusting

Details

Solid walloff - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WbIhB2hryU
Wedge those units in between minerals
Pylons placed to create chokes
Extra pylons at 3rd
Hold position in wall
Always send 2nd/3rd adept to check for the drop! Or just put a probe on patrol
Never rely on a pylon -overlord has more vision and can avoid it and surprise you with a slightly later drop out of vision
Keep warping in
Only overcharge protected pylons - not ones at the front
Always fall back steadily and constantly use chokes
Never go into the open, as long as zerg can’t surround you you’re usually good
Add extra gates as soon as the zerg shows an aggressive stance - you normally go up to 7 gates soon after dropping your 2nd tech structure (SG/Robo) anyway. Just part of being safe.

Sim-city and walling off at your natural if they go for it - don’t get drawn right into the open
Never give up! The number of times it’s felt like I’m way behind, lost my 3rd, retook it and then realised zerg still had shit all economy is insane!
Sometimes I even am a little behind but since the zergs tech is so late you can do some serious magic with immortals/archons etc
Shade adepts out front to have a look around!
MSC sit out front to give you some warning
Often you bank gas warping in so many adepts - remember to drop a templar archives as soon as you stabilise so you can add archons and have a beastly counterattack! Even just 3-4 archons with a few immortals and some gateway units is an incredibly powerful army vs a low econ zergu



Ok I held on, maybe I took some damage, but what the fuck is he doing now? I can’t scout!

SG → phoenix/oracle for scouting
Robo→ Hallucination if you’ve still got any energy, otherwise prism to put on counter pressure.

Not only that but generally when you hold - you’re ahead. If you don’t take direct economy damage you should be way up, but you’re a bit blind. The best thing to do is “just go fucking kill him”. A big adept/immortal/archon push, blink/immo/archon, something like that.
You can go for this sort of push and still add say a forge, a 4th base as you push across. But at least you have a pre-set plan of “I’m gunna get over there and try to kill shit… and at least see what’s happening”. It’s really important to have a direction and a plan to get back in your opponents side of the map - especially vs zerg since they can be so greedy with pure drone production.

If you went phoenix maybe you want to play a longer game cos you have vision





“What if they just hide the roach ling and then kill the adepts when they shade?”

Now don’t get me wrong there is a small range of super well executed gambles that zerg can take that are nearly impossible to scout, like a roach-ling timing that waits for the adepts to shade out and THEN surrounds them instantly - the amount of timing and positioning to make this work consistently is INSANE though - it’s really not reliable at all
1) adepts will rekt a lot of lings if the surround isn’t great
2) adepts can hug terrain to survive a long time
3) roaches are slow as shit and guessing when/where the shade will end is risky business, super hard to pull this off cleanly

Build Order:
18g 47s
17p 51s
17h
2 lings + queen
Ling speed (leave on gas)
Straight to 3 queens
@natural finishes - pull 2 off gas
36 3rd hatch
3:30 - back on gas
3:35 (47) - Roach warren + 2xgas
@RW - 7 roaches
70 (4:30) - 2x evo
Melee Carapace Upgrades
75 (4:50) Lair

Strategy/Analysis
Great vs Helion Openings
You can just defend everything - but the mobility of the helions has made it really hard - especially with vikings clearing up overlord vision and libs/minedrops/helion drops coming in from all sorts of unexpected angles
Forces a huge overreaction as the helions can’t deal with this
Is the most minimal commitment to make Terran piss off
Normally Terran just want to be dicks in the current meta near the top there’s helions darting into bases from all angles, liberators seiging up mineral lines, helion and mine drops - all sorts of crazy multi-prong with many opportunities for big damage - all whilst the Terran is greedier than a fat leprechaun
This way you can make them piss off home, and force them to do things that aren’t greedy like make seige tanks.
Sometimes you get to kill lots of things like depots and ebays - that’s pretty awesome

Byul’s Shoutcraft kings games

Vs Byun - hits 5:30 on crossmap AFTER going ovie speed (48 drones as he hits)

Vs Keen: - hits 5:30 (no ovie speed, 55 drones)

Byul’s GSL Games

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/120556078
G1 vs Alive - Alive didn’t do his homework!
Helions overcommit = MASS LINGS AND GO FOR BROKE!
No more helions behind that wall destroying the lings - knows he has a good chance of breaking him with a much larger committment
G3 - nice pressure again just gets the ebays

Replay vs Vivid - show from the start

Understanding the Game State

“My biggest problem is with decision making, when to go roaches or banelings, when to make blink or charge, what does scouting mean?”

Every game is different, SC is complex. Learning to understand the games fundamental concepts is the most important part of Starcraft. That way you can analyse every game individually and come to your own conclusions about what makes a good reaction, what scouting means, how to adjust your gameplay after a streak of losses. Understanding of those fundamental concepts informs your ability to make decisions. How you line up those decisions is where a lot of the strategy comes from.

For a beginning player we often tell them to just stick to basic units and explore the game whilst by improving their macro - building workers and supply buildings (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMBgp-OA9Jc)

However at a certain point you need to focus on more than simply building more stuff and start understanding the fundamental concepts which we measure all situations in Starcraft by.

The Most Reliable Metrics

8:00 - assessment

The Two Pillars of Starcraft

Economy
Worker count
Enough patches to mine from?
Lose efficiency
0%efficiency

Army
Value
Upgrades are key, not just 1/1 etc but also bane speed, cloak etc.
Tech



More complicated:

Army Composition vs their composition
How do I know which units are good vs what?

But generally just a mixture of your own experiences combined with watching pros, and talking to your friends/opponents
Even pros are regularly coming across a composition used in a different way, at a different point in the game and going “woah - I didn’t realise that was good” and having to think about how they got there, is there a weakness? How to adjust either their army or their timing accordingly.
PacoMike’s heavy VR PvP


!!!14:00!! -

Bigger zerg army vs EFFICIENT P army storm/archons/air dominance =
SH want to get across the map to be effective - not good at defending because P can just pull back
My knowledge of SH as a powerful aggressive unit tells me to pressure.
Don’t just do things for no reason - seek to understand
If I did this pressure vs ravager ling bane I’d get jumped on and torn apart!

But PiG, who’s ahead?

Positioning is also something to take into account when looking at how the armies match up. If you have tanks/libs seiged at P’s natural, doesn’t matter how big P’s army is as it walks into the choke point of death!

Well now we se can see everything we can see he was in a great position, but he needed to find a way to get me back on my side of the map so he could split his sh and hit all my bases

!!!15:00!!! -

As I pull back from the locusts Vivid counters with lings
Knows he can’t keep defending or SH aren’t getting value
Knowledge of how our units matchup and how his work allows him to prioritise the SUPER IMPORTANT ling runby.

From here how do I play?

PSYCHOLOGY - UNDERSTANDING HOW YOUR OPPONENTS PLAYING

Recognise he’s stuck on Lair tech
No crazy creep, no crazy economy
Scouting constantly for a sudden boom in econ/hive
Harassment doubles as this AND buys time for me to get more stuff
More time I have = definite win with higher quality army
Scouting like a madman for SH/ling counters
More OBS/Oracles to counter his surprise counter tactics (he relies on these a lot)
Single VR since no AA! Make use of a weakness in his composition