2007 GomTV3 MSL - Nov 8 - Ro4A

On November 09 2007 09:16 Day[9] wrote:
I disagree with a majority of the previous posts.

Whenever a player who is as strong as savior starts losing, so many people in the community begin to claim that "Savior's play has been solved" or, more generally, blame the build order used by savior. Its much simpler than that; Savior's build(s) is/are perfectly fine, and arguably brilliant; However, his fundamentals and small decisions, especially in the midgame, are inconsistent w/ the logic of his build(s) and are costing him games.

There is absolutely nothing wrong w/ the fast defiler technique used/abused by Savior. In fact, I'd argue that his overall play style (3 hatch opening to 3rd gas to hive) is one of the most standard ZvT flows around (its very flexible for different maps). So, why is savior losing? Lets look at some of the weaknesses and strengths of the fast hive play in ZvT.

Weaknesses of a fast hive style play: you are fairly low on unit count in the midgame due to cost of the fast tech. Consequently, its critical that you play a defensive, harrassment driven, patient, and non confrontational style in the midgame. This involves placing lurkers strategically to prevent M&M from running around the map, harassing well w/ mutalisks, and delaying the push as long as possible until those defilers pop out. If a terran begins to push out w/ a standard 4 tank 1 vessel 30 M&M army, you absolutely CANNOT confront the army right as it leaves. Zerg must wait until the LAST second (ie the army is seiging outside your natural) and THEN attack it, for ONLY then does zerg have enough units to take the army down. Think of Savior vs Oov on Ride of Valkyries, Savior vs Iris on Longinus II (OSL semis), Savior vs Hwasin on Longinus II. hell think of Savior vs ANY strong terran about a year ago. Savior was extremely patient when taking down the critical first push. Savior would slowly delay the push w/ mutalisks and lurkers, and then place lurkers behind to stop reinforcements. Eventually, savior would take down the push, but almsot 95% of the time, this occured at Savior's front doorstep, NOT in the middle of the map, and DEFINITELY not right as terran left home.

Strengths of fast hive: Fast hive is intrinstically a momentum play. That is, you cannot play to win in the midgame stages (remember, you have no units!), but by getting defilers quickly you can massively swing the game into your favor in the late game stages. In other words, a fast hive zerg WANTS to play a long game. Fast hiving is equivalent to saying "i'm better at playing long games than my terran opponent." Again, our old school dominant savior seemed to say this before every ZvT. Almost all his games were won after 15 minutes w/ hive tech playing a critical role. Savior would play a brilliant defensive game w/ excellent positioning of units and force terran to overextend himself. Think of Nada vs Savior of Longinus II in Game 1 of the OSL finals. Nada had complete map control throughout most of the game, but savior kept a strong defensive positioning w/ defilers and lurkers. Eventually, nada had to take outlying expansions (the double gas high ground expoes), and Savior smashed them w/ drops, end eventually won after a solid 25 minute battle. There was never any pivotal central battle. Any battle in the middle occurred after Savior already had the advantage.

However, look at Savior's recent games! The only real opportunity for the fast hive style to win early is once the mutalisk harass pops. We saw Savior smash Cloud on Blue Storm in this exact way. However, if you can't take the win there, and you are going for fast hive, DONT TRY TO WIN UNTIL AFTER THE HIVE. In Savior's games against mind, when mutalisk harass didn't work, Savior simply made strings of fundamentally weak and inconsistent decisions. Savior was unusually aggressive and impatient (as TheFoReveRwaR mentioned). Lurkers were weakly positioned (especially on blue storm) and Mind took out lurkers 2-3 at a time here and there. When you are fast-hiving, it is CRITICAL that you not throw away lurkers in this fashion. 2-3 lurkers are an ESSENTIAL part of the mid game stages. Savior would assault clumps of marines w/ weak mutalisk micro. Savior didn't do his trademark "burrow 3 lurkers to prevent reinforcement." Savior seemed to be trying to force the win at odd times. For example, in Game 4 on Python, Savior's counter attack fails miserably, yet Savior's attempt at killing mind's main army only failed somewhat badly. Theoretically, Savior could have waited for Mind's main force to reach the @9 natural, and THEN crunched it (a la Savior vs Iris on Longinus II). As some have mentioned, Savior's even appeared to be having sloppy macro, arguably the most important fundamental in Starcraft

I mean honestly, you can still see the brilliance in Savior's BUILDS even when he loses. On blue storm, taking the @12 expansion was a GENIUS move. In addition to being reasonably easily defendable, fast hiving makes the @12 expo a guaranteed dropoff point directly into the terran main. Had savior not made so many mistakes in the midgame, Mind would have had 0 chance of keeping his main alive in the later stages. But, again, Savior threw the momentum of the fast hive away by playing so sloppily in the midgame.

In short, its not that "Savior is becoming reliant on fast hive to win." Rather, its that "Savior assumes that once he gets a hive, he cannot lose." Savior is acting like he has everything in each game: enough mutalisks to harass aggressively and kill ANY amount of marines, enough units to confront and win any battle he pleases, enough "will" to control the game. Savior seems to assume that just because 2 lurkers are THERE that a group of M&M will run in fear instead of stimming and killing. Having won so much for 3 years, Savior has probably sub consciously convinced himself that he can win SIMPLY because of a fast hive, forgetting that his solid fundamentals and patience are what contributed to his success, not JUST the build itself. Hopefully if Savior can cool his head and focus on consistently making strong, cautious, correct decisions, we will see the return of the Maestro that every Zerg user remembers and loves .