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I've been having huge trouble dealing with this strategy at ~1000 diamond. If he opens with a 2 base mutaling build i'm forced to go a 2port phoenix build to deal with the mutalisks (stalkers do not handle well vs MASS mutas) with zealots to deal with the lings.
I can set him back pretty decently while he's forced to transition out of mutalisks by harrassing ovies and drones/queens until he gets spore crawlers down but because i've invested so much in phoenix im really not in a position to make any ground offense (+ he usually has 80-90 zerglings by that point)
Anyways, needless to say, once 4-5 ultras are out on the field i really dont have an an answer to it. By the time they come its usually late game and I'll be at something like 180 food, with physically no room at all to transition into immortals, and if i do get immortals out he goes back to lings and i get wrecked.
Heres a recent replay vs some 700 zerg i played in a custom. Ignore the chat at the end, the guy was acting like an asshole in the lobby which pissed me off.
http://screplays.com/replays/hakker/8508
Any suggestions. I know i was behind on 1 set of upgrades. If he had come ~15 secs later the upgrades would have been even, not like it would have mattered much.
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Well, my first thoughts are that with you forcing him to lose the air battle by building so many phoenix, you should be ready to transition into say... Immortals. Alternatively, what you could do is use some standard gateway play (stalker/sentry heavy) mixed with your Phoenixes... Guardian Shield is painfully good against Mutalisks.
With Guardian Shield up, instead of 9-3-1 damage the Mutalisk does 7-1-0 which is 8 damage every attack compared to 13! Huge huge decrease in damage.
After watching the replay, i think you dominated him pretty hard but you made a couple big mistakes. First off, after that first big phoenix strike, all he had was like 50 lings that he conveniently placed in his own choke point! If you showed up with your Zealots right then and there, IN HIS CHOKE your Zealots would have had a BLAST playing 300. You crushed his Mutalisk play real hard and he was literally forced to move into another tech area, and you let him.
Next, your macro wasn't as good as it could be. After you beat his mutalisk play, you threw down four gateways, yet never used them at all. At the same time, you were queuing units up two or three units in your Robotics facility for the rest of the game! If you simply turned say... two of those gateways into robo's instead, you would have been able to have the same gateway production you did, and then had like three, maybe four more colossi in that big engagement, as well as the same count of everything else.
Finally, despite grabbing a HUGE lead, you did nothing with it besides expand. You let him turtle up and build up a respectable army after supply blocking him hard by slaughtering those Mutalisks and overlords. There was literally nothing he could do at that point in the game. At the same time, you saw how you had double the army he did with your phoenixes! After that first engagement, you had 140 food, he had 80. The lead you had at that point was insurmountable, especially since as zerg he was spending his larva at that point on Overlords in order to make more stuff. With more game sense, you could have ended it right there before he transitioned.
Other than that, you played a good game. Your strategy is great, just needs a few tweaks, and game sense is always evolving anyway; I'm sure eventually you can look at it and say "Damn, he has nothing, i'm going to hit him hard."
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On September 13 2010 08:27 iCanada wrote:
Well, my first thoughts are that with you forcing him to lose the air battle by building so many phoenix, you should be ready to transition into say... Immortals. Alternatively, what you could do is use some standard gateway play (stalker/sentry heavy) mixed with your Phoenixes... Guardian Shield is painfully good against Mutalisks.
With Guardian Shield up, instead of 9-3-1 damage the Mutalisk does 7-1-0 which is 8 damage every attack compared to 13! Huge huge decrease in damage.
After watching the replay, i think you dominated him pretty hard but you made a couple big mistakes. First off, after that first big phoenix strike, all he had was like 50 lings that he conveniently placed in his own choke point! If you showed up with your Zealots right then and there, IN HIS CHOKE your Zealots would have had a BLAST playing 300. You crushed his Mutalisk play real hard and he was literally forced to move into another tech area, and you let him.
Next, your macro wasn't as good as it could be. After you beat his mutalisk play, you threw down four gateways, yet never used them at all. At the same time, you were queuing units up two or three units in your Robotics facility for the rest of the game! If you simply turned say... two of those gateways into robo's instead, you would have been able to have the same gateway production you did, and then had like three, maybe four more colossi in that big engagement, as well as the same count of everything else.
Finally, despite grabbing a HUGE lead, you did nothing with it besides expand. You let him turtle up and build up a respectable army after supply blocking him hard by slaughtering those Mutalisks and overlords. There was literally nothing he could do at that point in the game. At the same time, you saw how you had double the army he did with your phoenixes! After that first engagement, you had 140 food, he had 80. The lead you had at that point was insurmountable, especially since as zerg he was spending his larva at that point on Overlords in order to make more stuff. With more game sense, you could have ended it right there before he transitioned.
Other than that, you played a good game. Your strategy is great, just needs a few tweaks, and game sense is always evolving anyway; I'm sure eventually you can look at it and say "Damn, he has nothing, i'm going to hit him hard."
Honestly i've tried using stalkers but late game they just dont work. When your base is cluttered with buildings its very easy for mutalisks to outmaneuver you, even with blink (at which point sentrys wont keep up with the harrasment) and they don't even counter mutas that well.
Anyways, when i saw it i thought that there was no way that my force would be able to talk on all of those zerglings, but i guess looking at it it probably wouldve done well. Thanks for the constructive response.
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Yeah, no worries. It isn't easy to look at that ingame and say "You know what? I can crush his army." It really is fairly difficult, and quite frankly, i suck at it too. It made me cringe watching the Zerg actually, I'm only a mid platinum Zerg, and he was not great with his queens. By the time his Muta's got out, they had 100 energy a piece.
X.X
As for how you handled the Muta harass, it was great really. The Mutalisks didn't even kill a probe, the thing you need to work on is the transition afterwards... which is why i said it might be easier to use Stalker/Sentry to counter the Mutalisks.
The big thing really, is just the Macro. If you aren't going to use seven warpgates, don't get seven. Especially since you wanted to fight off his ground heavy army using Robo units, get more robo's instead. I think you easily could have had a 200/200 force by the time he got to your base even if you didn't push out after denying his Muta/ling play.
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when you got air superiority with phoenix why not keep using air and going only zealot as ground units - its pretty hard to kill voidrays with hydras while zealot charge
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as Alphasquad mentioned... Where were your Void Rays? If you force him to get out of Mutas, then you should be prepared for what he will bring in their place with all that gas, so "I can't transition out" is a poor excuse.
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The trash talk is kind of stupid.
Following up with void rays would have been a good response, but the question really is: why did you do nothing after the phoenixes?
You supply capped him pretty hard, so he had to use all of his larva to rebuild overlords. He's laid down like 6 spore crawlers. You've killed a bunch of his drones, and made his spire worthless, as well as killed all of his mutalisks.
So what do you do? You tech switch and start upgrading, and let him macro up in peace until he decides he has had enough sitting around and decides to attack you. You were up on food like 170 to his 124, but you sit there at like 170-180 food until he decides to attack you with his 163 food against your 190 food army. You're now down to a 27 food advantage, but 22 of your food are tied up in phoenixes that haven't been used in like 10 minutes, you have 11 more probes than him, you are at 1/1 upgrades to his 2/2.
He has 114 supply worth of army, and they are all attacking at once.
You have 134 supply worth of army, and only 112 of it can attack the ground, plus some of your pheonixes are spread around the map. He has 6 ultralisks which do splash damage, and your army is primarily composed of zealots that do little damage to the 5 armor of the ultralisks.
You're also sitting on like 1000 gas at the end. My question is why?
Templar would have been good. Void rays would have been good. Not bunching your zealots up in a ball like you did would have been good, you want the concave, you don't want to give it to him for free. Carriers would have even been good for getting rid of the hydras and lings. Colossus are good against low health, low armor units, but I mean they only do 24 damage to his ultralisks.
I think you started with air, you should have continued. You spent the money on two stargates. You put a lot of pressure on him. You dealt a lot of damage to him. If you had continued with air, got void rays, maybe got a fleet beacon for speed, maybe got carriers, and used those as they were made, you would have kept him in his base, you could have picked off his ultra den, messed with his upgrades etc. You would have forced him to go for hydras in place of ultras. The phoenixes could have helped out by lifting hydras.
Hydras, unlike ultras, aren't that hot against chargelots.
A zerg player wants more than anything to be left alone. Your first mistake was to just leave him alone after your first very effective harass.
Your second mistake was that it seemed like you had no idea what you were doing after the phoenixes finished. You just sat on a bunch of money and did nothing for a good 5 minutes. In fact, after your first harass, finished, you quite obviously had no plan to transition into anything because you immediately plopped down 4 gates, 2 forges, and 2 pylons. If you had a plan, structures would have already been placed, and you'd already be building from them. But in the end you just filled yourself up to cap with tier 1 melee double-attacking melee units against tier 3 high armored area effect melee units. It's similar to a zerg player sending a bunch of 1/1 zerglings against 4/2 ultras and the complaining about the balance.
What did you want to accomplish with the phoenixes? You wanted to get rid of the mutas. Ok, you did that, now what can you use them for? You can kill the overlords. Great, what does that do for you? It stops the opponent from reinforcing for a while as he has to spend larva on overlords instead of units. What does that mean? That means that if you damage his army now, he will not be able to easily recover.
You should have just taken out his expansion after you first phoenix push. You spotted the ultralisk den. Void rays, Immortals, DT, Archons are all very good against ultralisks. Zealots, Sentries, Stalkers without Blink, Carriers, Collosus and Phoenixes are all kind of bad against Ultralisks. Your army was comprised entirely of the all kind of bad side of it.
Then you complained about Ultralisks being too strong. You know what, the ultralisk nerf would do nothing against your composition. They're reducing the damage they do to armored targets. You were using Zealots. Zealots aren't armored. They also take a lot of splash damage when you bunch them up in a ball and let 6 ultralisks surround them.
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EPT
