EPTI would prefer taking the game into a macro fest, simply because I need experience in this area, however it seems like the only way to accomplish this is by setting up a contain... which often leads directly into a drop base race
Any ideas?
How to avoid the base race?
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Toran7
United States160 Posts
I would prefer taking the game into a macro fest, simply because I need experience in this area, however it seems like the only way to accomplish this is by setting up a contain... which often leads directly into a drop base race Any ideas? | ||
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In1t4themoney
Germany77 Posts
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danl9rm
United States3111 Posts
if you want a macro fest, leave your army at your base and out-macro him. if he tries to attack, wipe his force out. don't counter-attack. just expand again. get all your upgrades and keep him well-scouted so nothing fishy goes on. there's your macro game. edit: if u have that big a problem scouting, then just work on your macro. scouting is a huge part of the game, really huge. but macro is still bigger, because, after all, it doesn't matter if you know what he's doing if you don't have an army. | ||
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CheAse
Canada919 Posts
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Ryuu314
United States12679 Posts
On April 24 2010 08:31 CheAse wrote: get control of the zel naga watch towers, usualy can prevent a base race. This. It's surprising how many players, even in plat, don't use them. They provide a HUGE amount of sight and they will almost always cover the route your opponent will take to get to your base. Also scout a lot. If you are playing protoss, use observers. They're relatively cheap and are excellent scouts. I usually have 1 at their main, 1 at their natural/scouting their army, and 1 searching for hidden bases. If you're playing Zerg learn to position your overlords in strategic locations where they give you sight, but cannot be hit. Get overlord speed as fast as possible. If you're playing Terran, you have maphack. After the 10 minute mark, scan > MULEs almost always. Use scan. It's incredibly powerful as a scouting tool. | ||
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Kezzer
United States1268 Posts
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WazZap
Netherlands73 Posts
On April 24 2010 09:01 BDF92 wrote: When I read the thread title I thought this was about base trading and avoiding that, but after I read the OP I am totally lost :/ Anyone want to clarify what he is saying? He wants to avoid base trading because ussualy timing pushes happen at the same time so they miss eachothers army. Ontopic: Scout more is the proper answer indeed! :O | ||
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Wretched
Australia121 Posts
just build up and keep expanding... | ||
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NewBKaeK
Canada57 Posts
I play Zerg, and I always try to have control of the Xel'Naga towers. On top of that keeping a ling or overlord in front of their entrance so I know when they are pushing out, which gives me adequate time to position my forces for defense, or send in a force to harass them and delay their attack. | ||
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apollo_440
Switzerland24 Posts
This can also be done, as mentioned before (to a lesser extent though, imho), by just keeping a scout outside his base or monitoring his activities with Xel'Naga towers. | ||
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the-darkest-templar
United States32 Posts
In my experience, whenever I'm playing terran, my timing push is usually a Marine, Marauder, Medivac timing push or drop, and well... whenever it's a drop, there's a protoss or zerg army running up my ramp as soon as I take out their hatchery or nexus. Someone suggested scouting, and I suppose that does work. What's happened to me though is people will try to kite my army around to buy time. And as soon as I make a definitive attack at a base or expansion, they pull the base-race move. Honestly, I suppose just staying ontop of macro and waiting them out may work better than what I've been doing. But then, I usually win most of my races. | ||
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Failsafe
United States1298 Posts
yes and no. things appear to have changed from starcraft 1. it seems that with the addition of warp gates, chrono boost, and larva injection timing attacks have received a major boost in power. moreover, air units have received a pretty substantial increase in the power of their air to ground attacks (banshees, void rays, and of course mutalisk are still around). protoss has also added the immortal to their arsenal, and it packs such a punch against terran that even with the increased build time, it is still a serious threat. it seems like there are a lot more ways to win (or lose games), and to a degree i believe that it's true. however, there is another thing worth pointing out as far as a discussion of timing attacks, and that's that starcraft 1 games also tended to end before either player expanded. i remember playing circa 1999 - 2001, and it was a pretty good bet that whichever player expanded first would lose. as the game evolved and knowledge grew, games tended to last longer and longer, and then finally game length collapsed again as pro teams developed specialized builds designed to either win or lose the game at a certain timing. today, sc1 has variable game lengths and it is not surprising to see a 10 minute game or a 60 minute game. whether or not starcraft 2 will evolve in the same way is not clear, but it is very important at this stage to recall that starcraft 1 once felt like a flurry of timing attacks as well. as idra says, solid defensive play takes longer to develop than timing attacks. to succeed at a timing attack you just decide something like "well roaches seem really good. i bet if i made a lot of those really fast i could catch my opponent off guard and he'd die." then you execute it to the best of your ability and chances are that even an optimal roach rush will not be too much faster than your first attempt. naturally it's possible to optimize timing attacks, but the marginal benefit of optimizing timing attacks takes much less time than to develop solid defensive play for defensive play you have to account for all possible timing attacks that your opponent could perform, and you have to account for all possible standard plays that your opponent could perform. then you come up with a scouting system combined with a build order that maximizes your expectation against that huge set of possibilities. because solid defensive play requires such tailoring, it takes many more games to develop and so regardless of whether starcraft 2 is robust enough to support such defensive play, we will not know the answer until much more time has past. fortunately (for you, perhaps, and certainly for me) the general level of ability has increased a lot, and so with more and better players working at the game, the evolution of game knowledge will occur much more quickly than it did with any previous RTS | ||
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Failsafe
United States1298 Posts
aside from pros (who still suffered from this a bit, but not so much as the casual gamer), early game PvZ is / was a nightmare. in a standard PvZ, protoss would fast expand with cannons for defense. from there, it was relatively easy for the zerg to deny protoss scouting by using speedlings. once the protoss not longer had any recon, the zerg could transition into 2 hatch muta, all-in hydra or all-in ling etc as well as the standard 3 hatch response to an FE protoss. 2 hatch muta requires a significantly different response than all-in hydra or all-in ling. likewise, standard zerg play requires a different protoss response than what's appropriate for any of those options. thus, in a series situation, zerg often could manage easy wins by simply mixing up his strategies: occasionally doing all-ins of different sorts as well as using standard play. even if the all-ins occasionally fail, the protoss must adapt to the possibility that they will occur by playing more defensive than he would like if the zerg always played standard. the matchup essentially made it very expensive for protoss if the protoss wanted a robust standard opening (one that was viable against all or almost all zerg openings). sc2 seems much worse for robust, standard play than sc1 simply because in sc1 there were only so many ways to win, and it was possible to defend against many possible openings with a relatively homogeneous set of units. however, in sc2, partially because of hard counters, and partially because of the new macro mechanics, there are many different timings and unit combinations required even in the early game to appropriately respond to specific threats. thus, it's definitely possible that we will not find a robust standard strategy for any of the matchups. instead, we may have to develop a standard set of strategies that will be robust, but an arguably undesirable consequences of this is that we will probably have to see many more games per series because one or two games will not be indicative of anything. in short, we may see many more "build order wins." and as sc1 shows, build order wins are usually unsatisfying | ||
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WorkersOfTheWorld
United States619 Posts
On April 24 2010 10:40 Failsafe wrote: + Show Spoiler + one possibility that i think blizzard has not sufficiently considered is that robust standard play may not develop in starcraft 2. it's possible that there are simply too many ways to win, and each one requires a particular style of defense that is very bad against one or many of the other ways to win. i think the best analogy is probably PvZ in sc1. aside from pros (who still suffered from this a bit, but not so much as the casual gamer), early game PvZ is / was a nightmare. in a standard PvZ, protoss would fast expand with cannons for defense. from there, it was relatively easy for the zerg to deny protoss scouting by using speedlings. once the protoss not longer had any recon, the zerg could transition into 2 hatch muta, all-in hydra or all-in ling etc as well as the standard 3 hatch response to an FE protoss. 2 hatch muta requires a significantly different response than all-in hydra or all-in ling. likewise, standard zerg play requires a different protoss response than what's appropriate for any of those options. thus, in a series situation, zerg often could manage easy wins by simply mixing up his strategies: occasionally doing all-ins of different sorts as well as using standard play. even if the all-ins occasionally fail, the protoss must adapt to the possibility that they will occur by playing more defensive than he would like if the zerg always played standard. the matchup essentially made it very expensive for protoss if the protoss wanted a robust standard opening (one that was viable against all or almost all zerg openings). sc2 seems much worse for robust, standard play than sc1 simply because in sc1 there were only so many ways to win, and it was possible to defend against many possible openings with a relatively homogeneous set of units. however, in sc2, partially because of hard counters, and partially because of the new macro mechanics, there are many different timings and unit combinations required even in the early game to appropriately respond to specific threats. thus, it's definitely possible that we will not find a robust standard strategy for any of the matchups. instead, we may have to develop a standard set of strategies that will be robust, but an arguably undesirable consequences of this is that we will probably have to see many more games per series because one or two games will not be indicative of anything. in short, we may see many more "build order wins." and as sc1 shows, build order wins are usually unsatisfying Exellent post. | ||
FakeSteve[TPR]
Valhalla18444 Posts
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ymirheim
Sweden300 Posts
So anyway, I used to get into a lot of base race games and I got fed up with it. So what I did was that whenever it happened I really took extra time to study the replay in detail and make absolutely sure that I identified the reason for why I got into that situation in the first place. Then I tried to formulate it into a short description and I wrote it down in my starcraft notebook. One example from the top of my notes would be: "TvZ - Scanned zerg base and thought I had good intel on his army being in or around his base(s). But when my army arrived at his base a nydus wormed popped up in my base and he moved his army through." Now all of a sudden it seems like I am just stating the obvious and thats exactly my point, when you loose to something like this, especially if you like me are not as an experienced rts player as many others the reasons for this happening may be a bit subtle but as soon as you go back and specifically look for an answer and then put it into words it will seem almost ridiculously obvious. So I just kept doing this, writing down every single scenario in which I had gotten into a base race and then when not in the game I could calmly sit down and write down what I should and should not do the next time I was in the same situation. In the above example I started to make sure that I scouted for overlords around my bases, especially ones hovering over spots that could not be reached by ground. Then when I moved out I either made sure to have a viking to kill off any overlords that were too close beforehand or alternatively that I just kept tabs on them and left a small group of units in my base, just enough to kill off a nydus worm that was being spawned. I obviously apply this method to a lot of other things than just base races obviously but I have while I started learning this game used this method to cut out a lot of my losses. This works very well for new players when you are getting killed by cheese or early all ins too. Take the time to figure out what happened, what signals there were beforehand that you could have seen and deduced that this was going to happen, and then articulate to yourself what you should do the next time you are in the same situation. | ||
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Shpiel
United States47 Posts
TL;DR? Scout more. | ||
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threehundred
Canada911 Posts
after you've tried it out focus on what units you'll be using to defend this strategy with and what units you need to keep the enemy from doing the exact same thing (expanding/heavy economic investments) so that when you eventually hit the 120-180ish food supply clash you'll be superior in force size, upgrades or timing or whatever. bottom-line is, if you want to play longer drawn out games create a game plan that will enable you to survive to the point of being able to mass produce well (if that's what you wanted to do) | ||
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willeesmalls
United States477 Posts
On April 24 2010 08:25 In1t4themoney wrote: scout I skipped all the other posts. Scout and develop a feel for what your opponent is doing. If he has enough units and is able to get into your main without you knowing, it is a scouting error. Workers at xel'naga tower/ overlord and observer spread. Terran shouldnt care because they win all base races with marauders and lift cc's lol. But if you do, you can lift a rax/factory/starport that you aren't using. | ||
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