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So I've been playing against Z recently and it is by far my worst MU. PvP and PvT I can win sometimes, but Z is impossible. My macro is always better then the Z player, but I always end up losing because I don't know how to attack, don't know unit combinations, so I ask for help TL.
Delta- Quadrant
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/119103-1v1-protoss-zerg-delta-quadrant
This game started off with my opponent going random, so I didn't make a wall-in because I the chance of him being zerg was only 33%, so that messed up my build because he went pool first so I had to boost my zealots so they get out faster. I figured even then he'll be behind if he doesn't do any damage.
At around the 6:40 mark I'm already getting scared cause I see roaches, and I'm not really sure what unit is good against those, so I pull back.
At 8:20 I start my expo, I have 1 Immortal, 3 Stalkers, 3 Zealots, 2 warpgates and another gateway coming up.
9:00 in and I have 50 population I build a Robo bay and Twilight council at the same time
at 11 minutes I'm almost done with the Blink upgrade, have a Colossus coming and my weapon and armor upgrades are halfway done. My population is 67 and I realize now that my macro sucks nuts...
At bit after 11 minutes he attacks me with roaches, and I get scared even though hes retreating because I know how bad I am at engaging Zergs. I have over 10 more population then him, and my Colossus is out after the small engagement.
At 12 minutes in I have 6 Zealots, 4 Stalkers, 2 Sentrys, and 1 Colossus
We've had small skirmishes up until 16 minutes, I have a population of 108 and his is about 90. I'm attacking and this is where everything goes wrong, I'm attacking up his ramp and he reduces my pop. to a mere 78.
Eventually he finishes me off and I GG. After the game I was thinking about it and the reason I lost hast to be one or a combination of these options:
A) I don't know how to engage the Z army
B) I have a bad unit combination
C) I don't know what units counter what, can anyone tell me how the hell you fight off Hydra/Roach?
Anyways, on to the next replay.
Metalopolis
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/119106-1v1-protoss-zerg-metalopolis
I block the Zerg's expansion for a little bit, so I already feel really great about how this game is starting.
I go for a 4 warp gate rush, and I don't make more then a Stalker at home because I doubt that he will attack because he FE'd.
He had roaches and at around 9:40 he quickly killed my force of Stalkers and I ran the few that I had left at home. Right now I'm thinking that the reason I'm dying is because of my unit composition, but idk what to do still.
At 17:30 he goes Ultras and lings, and this is the first time I face this on SC2. In BW I would usually get reavers and archons to fight this, but I'm clueless what to do now. How do you fight these things? I get rolled quickly, I storm what I can but eventually I had to GG.
These are just a few games out of many that this has happened, most of my losses are from Zergs, I just can't play this match up. I'm pretty sure its a mixture of my army composition, my micro, and my general lack of knowledge of what counters what. So pleaseee SC2 Strat section, help me.
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I look at pro reps, watch Huk and all these people, and I really can't differentiate between how they attack and how I attack. I know they do it better, they end up winning, its just WHAT are they doing different that really gets me -_-.
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Watched the first replay, so many things I want to say, I will try to show restraint, note I watched the entire game from Z side first and then from omniscient spectator.
#1 - Why WOULDN'T you build a wall on DQ? Maybe since I don't play P I am missing some fundamental advantage of not placing that first pylon close enough to the ramp to wall in, but seriously why would you take the risk of him 6pooling you, for fucks sake its vs RANDOM so it wouldn't be that much of a suprise, especially on DQ.
#2 - The 11 overpool (the in/famous build by jd) is not a 6 pool, and considering his sacrificed a larvae and placed the pool late (not to mention got queen later than he should have), it somewhat bothers me that he even won.
#3 - You built a very quick robo, but I didn't see you build an observer, you played the game fully blind after initial probes.
#4 - You sacrificed your collosi by trying some blink manuever when he had a roach heavy army...use the range of your stalkers and collosi to your advantage, and try to use observers so you can actually see up his ramp without getting your collosi so close. You had him trapped on one base but your ran your collosi to melee range to get 1shot by roach/hydra.
#5 - templar archives and dark shrine, AND researching storm, but not researching extended thermal lance, and you say you can't differentiate yourself from huk?
-edit-
to answer your questions, first learn the basics before you worry about professional micro
collosi beats hydra roach (rapes hydras, safe from roach if you guard the collosi well) get observers so they don't burrow play you and so you can keep and eye on spire/corrupter to counter your collosi.
Any non-zealot unit against roaches in the early game (immortal DESTROY roach in midgame+ if you protect them similarly to collosi), make sure you have more than one pylon near ramp buildings if they do roach so they don't Katrina your production buildings near the wall (assuming you actually build one ~_~"), as roaches will shoot up the ramp and take that shit out w/OL vision if they plan on early roach play.
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wall off v random, as wall ins shut down 2 gate pressure zealots and ling rushes. The chance that a walloff ISN"T going to be effective is 33% (isn't great v. terran). Err on the side of caution.
As to your actual play, you're not doing an efficient 4 WG. I can assure you that if your timings would have been right on with your 4 WG push, you would have destroyed him. You're trying to expand, Throw out a stargate and do the push at the same time. Just do your 4 gate as fast as possible. You don't necissarily have to win with the push, but do some damage. You would have at the very least killed his expansion if not outright won with the attack. The push should start around 6 minutes. You're getting yours out at like 9 minutes.
Beside that, you are not macroing well enough. You are not constantly producing probes, you are not constantly warping in units when you can. His composition didn't kill you, the fact that he had a closed to maxed army compared to your much smaller army killed you. TBH about anything would have killed you at that point. Don't fall into the trap of thinking it's the composition that killed you. Watch the replay and realize that you could have been doing a much better job of constantly producing, and if you had, the exchange would have went much better for you.
Also, you seem very indecisive about what you wanted to do. You kind of have the "everything build" going on. You have a templar archive down, stargate, and you just don't have a plan. Have a plan from the beginning of the game and try to achieve the goals you set yourself. Say to yourself, in the midgame, I want 6 WG's with some upgrades and zealot leg speed, then later, since I have that twilight council, I'll throw down a templar archives and get a robo for storm drops to weaken his economy so he can't defend against a big attack I'm aiming up for and some immortals will really help that push. This is just an example, but have a plan that you think is fun, and aim for it. You need to be able to adapt to things like pressure, losing workers in a drop, etc, but keep going for it. If something obviously isn't going to work, you might have to adapt the plan. For instance if you're focusing on a heavy HT endgame, him going mass ghost might dissuade you, but unless there's an extreme example like that, just keep working for your end game, yeah, you might need to throw down your robo a bunch earlier than you wanted because he's doing some cute play with burrow, etc, but having that plan will do wonders.
So to sum it up, work on your macro, always be making out of all your structures(with the exceptions of when you know you need to cut probes for a timing, or after you have a number that you don't want more because you're not planning to expand and you're saturated)! Also, have a gameplan. Chose something you like and take some losses seeing if it will work, but then you have a gameplan for that matchup and you'll feel really confident knowing that it's strong.
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I watched the first game on Delta Quadrant. This is clearly a lower league game, so I'm going to ignore the finer details and go into the big problems.
Here's the main reason why you lost:
You OVER micro your units.
This game had two main battles. One was fought in front of his base. You had 2 colossus, a handful of stalkers and some zealots. Your army was vastly superior yet for some unknown reason, you walked your colossus straight into their roaches. You also blinked your stalkers into them for no reason.
The second battle, the counter attack. you could of held that one off. It was 3-4 hydras+ 6-7 roaches versus a colossus and 8-9 stalkers. Unfortunately, you blinked your stalkers into them AGAIN, and walked your colossus to it's death.
There are small things that contributed to your loss: like letting your macro slip, not chronoboosting (I think you used it twice all game), delayed warp gate tech but these finer details can be worked on later.
You actually had that game won. You had the better army and better econ. The main reason why you lost is because you suicide your units. You should abuse the range on the stalker and colossi. Your thinking seems to be: "Oh colossus beats hydras. So I should move the colossus to fight hydras". Well that's not wrong, it's just that the colossus would just get shot down by the roaches.
Solution: Next time, try not to do too much. If you KNOW your army will beat his, just attack move straight into his base.
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I would like to thank everyone for their posts and trying to help me. I'm only a Bronze level player so thats why I have so many mistakes, and I will be correcting them. I wrote everything in this thread down on my journal and while playing I game I'll glance at it and look at all these tips. Thanks a lot TL!
Gona go play some games now. If I get a PvZ I'll post another rep here to show you guys how much yall helped :D
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I cringed when I watched the first replay. Forget what everyone else has said so far: this one tops the list.
I just paused at 4:05 game time. Two zealots are out, you scouted that your opponent went pool first and your scout was killed by 4 lings 30 seconds ago. Your nexus has been at 100 energy for a full minute and you have yet to chrono boost anything.
I would suggest getting your basics together; watch the replay yourself, and examine things you can change.
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On December 22 2010 16:16 Distrust wrote:
There are small things that contributed to your loss: like letting your macro slip
Please don't say this. This is not small. Your macro will be more important than anything else in the lower leagues, if you get passed a few minutes and live, in bronze, you probably should win if you're good at macro. I can throw a TON of units away and still win in bronze, because I can make more units faster than my opponent.
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On December 22 2010 16:38 wherebugsgo wrote:
Forget what everyone else has said so far: this one tops the list.
...Your nexus has been at 100 energy for a full minute and you have yet to chrono boost anything.
I would suggest getting your basics together; watch the replay yourself, and examine things you can change. [/b]
Bad advice. Chronoboosting is a great tool and you should be using it as often as possible yes, but making constant workers/units is more important. Chronoboosting will cement your economic lead, but don't read this and go, "ah yes, I'm not chronoboosting, clearly that's why I lost". "getting your basics together" IS a good piece of advice, but that's what most people have been saying thusfar, Macro, macro, macro.
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some things i noticed from first replay:
one of your assimilators at the expansion only had one probe mining it the entire game.
you had over 3k minerals when you died even though you had 8 warpgates.
you never scouted after initial probe. if you arent going to get an observer then at least get hallucinate.
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On December 22 2010 16:46 Arisen wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 16:38 wherebugsgo wrote:
Forget what everyone else has said so far: this one tops the list.
...Your nexus has been at 100 energy for a full minute and you have yet to chrono boost anything.
I would suggest getting your basics together; watch the replay yourself, and examine things you can change. Bad advice. Chronoboosting is a great tool and you should be using it as often as possible yes, but making constant workers/units is more important. Chronoboosting will cement your economic lead, but don't read this and go, "ah yes, I'm not chronoboosting, clearly that's why I lost". "getting your basics together" IS a good piece of advice, but that's what most people have been saying thusfar, Macro, macro, macro. [/b]
It's not bad advice. Chronoboosting is a central macromechanic of protoss.
It's akin to watching a zerg player who makes a queen but never injects larva, or watching a Terran player who builds an orbital command and never calls down a mule.
Chronoboosting is part of Protoss basics. If you simply focus on making probes in lieu of learning how to time your chronoboosting, learning how later will be much harder than if you make probes AND chronoboosting (since the former is harder while chronoboosting anyway; the probes come out faster and the resource management is harder too)
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Okay this may be a bit late ... but after watching the DQ game ... I'd like to give you some PvZ tips I feel that might help you. Your macro was okay considering you're a bronze and in the game it wasn't your bad macro that lost you the game. In fact, what lost you the game was exactly what you thought yourself, it was unit composition and army engagement skills.
Your Zerg opponent was signficantly behind you in Macro and being a Zerg, he's supposed to be ahead. So if you had won that battle where you went up his ramp, you would have won the game. Here are a few things I noted from your game.
1. Use more sentries. The Roach/Hydra Ling army is strong when they get a wide concave. The use of Force Fields messes this concave arrangement up and usually while they are trying to get into good attacking positions, your Protoss ball of death eats them up. It's an art of playing Toss to kill more units with relatively lesser units. Only when he commits to engage or he is forced to engage should you use Guardian Shield. Notice he was poking and running away all the way back to his base and you wasted Shields chasing him with the shields protecting your army from nothing. If you have a good amount of sentries you can make a virtuall wall which splits the army and you can pick off a portion of the Zerg units. I guess you could call this trimming the army, in some cases you actually halve it and pick half the army off before finishing the next half.
2. Immortals own Roaches, Stalkers are decent against Roaches but both get owned by hydras. So to deal with Hydras you need Collossi. Don't let Hydras get into position to do their insane DPS and this again points back to the usage of Forcefields. So typically when you're up against a Ling/Roach/Hydra army you need a Zealot/Sentry/Stalker/Immortal/Collossi. If he has more lings you need more zealots. If he has more roaches you need more stalkers and Immortals/Collossi ( In a perfect world you would have both but having more of one type is better than have less of both I think). If he has more hydras you need more collossi and sentries. I guess it takes practice and experience of engaging such battles because as the level gets higher there will be Corruptors to deal with the Collossi and eventually Broodlords. And there will be upgrades of the tier 1/2 units. A good zerg will have Carapace 1 pretty early.
There's also the scenario where they don't go Hydras but straight to Mutas which is the most annoying type of play against Zerg. Such is the case that many Protosses have started using Stargate builds just to play against Hydras instead of Mutas.
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I was about to sleep, but then I saw your post and decided to see if the advice I gave was useful or not.
I was disappointed when I saw that you're still blinking your stalkers directly into their army. You have to realize that while doing that seems like it increases their damage output, but it is offset by the extra damage they are taking.
I understand why you're having problems against Zerg. Stalkers will die very easily when they are close to Roaches, Zerglings and Hydras. When you blink into them, they take extra damage.
Stop blinking your stalkers into other person's army. Trust your stalkers. Just attack move in.
Other than that, you outplayed the other person. Nice job on the tank/marine aggression. You won that game because you out-macro-ed him with having more bases, probes and production facilities.
Small things to watch out for:
1)You're still not chrono boosting. At the very least, keep it up until the first battle. Just try.
2) Your first obs wasn't even used. You sort of forgot to set the rally point.
3) Upgrades were a tad slow. And you picked weapons instead of armour. Get +1 weapons against Zerg. Get +1 Armour against Terran.
4) You got thermal lance late. Try and get this when you build your first colossus. Think of your colossus being incomplete without it.
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On December 22 2010 17:58 Distrust wrote:
I was about to sleep, but then I saw your post and decided to see if the advice I gave was useful or not.
I was disappointed when I saw that you're still blinking your stalkers directly into their army. You have to realize that while doing that seems like it increases their damage output, but it is offset by the extra damage they are taking.
I understand why you're having problems against Zerg. Stalkers will die very easily when they are close to Roaches, Zerglings and Hydras. When you blink into them, they take extra damage.
Stop blinking your stalkers into other person's army. Trust your stalkers. Just attack move in.
Other than that, you outplayed the other person. Nice job on the tank/marine aggression. You won that game because you out-macro-ed him with having more bases, probes and production facilities.
Small things to watch out for:
1)You're still not chrono boosting. At the very least, keep it up until the first battle. Just try.
2) Your first obs wasn't even used. You sort of forgot to set the rally point.
3) Upgrades were a tad slow. And you picked weapons instead of armour. Get +1 weapons against Zerg. Get +1 Armour against Terran.
4) You got thermal lance late. Try and get this when you build your first colossus. Think of your colossus being incomplete without it.
Hmm, but I heard that when you blink stalkers it makes whatever is shooting them lose which one it was shooting so they stay alive later? Either way I'll stop blinking, its become a habit and I'm trying to break it.
I admit, I don't chrono boost much, but I did this last game I played =). I realize how much it helps now, I just beat a plat player and I think chrono boosting was a major reason as to why.
Would you recommend just double forging? I'm not sure if its worth it to spend those minerals on the extra forge+ upgrade instead of units but I realize I'm Bronze and it shouldn't matter much, right?
Okay, I wasn't sure really when to get the lance, I'll just get it as soon as I start my Colossus
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On December 22 2010 16:39 Arisen wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 16:16 Distrust wrote:
There are small things that contributed to your loss: like letting your macro slip
Please don't say this. This is not small. Your macro will be more important than anything else in the lower leagues, if you get passed a few minutes and live, in bronze, you probably should win if you're good at macro. I can throw a TON of units away and still win in bronze, because I can make more units faster than my opponent.
Well, I guess this game pretty much proves this is wrong. His marco needs work, and he should definitely focus on that, but is not the reason why he lost. Yes I'm sure you can mass any unit and win, but he can't win even with a macro advantage because he doesn't know how to use his units. His colossus ended up being an overpriced baneling.
Sometimes it's not helpful to to get into this "macro is everything" mind. What he needs to hear IMO is:
-have a gameplan (ie don't get every tech in the game), know roughly how to react to what he's doing
-the point of collossus is that they shouldn't die, you need to abuse their range and not suicide them
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On the game on scrap, there were portions where you were trying to control stuff in his base where you just stopped doing anythnig back home. First when you were doing your initial probe scout and again when you put your observer in his base. In both cases, if you don't have the hand speed to do both things at once, hold shift and run a few circles around his base, then move your probe either back home to your mineral line or to his natural to scout expo's with the probe and concentrate back home. You probably lost 4 or so probes between the 2, and 4-6 units, put your core up late as well.
Also, there were allot of times where there was just a probe or two just chilling back home, waiting for to build, or for no particular reason. you should have the probes on your mineral line until you have just about enough to build, send him over, build, hold shift, then move him back to your mineral line so that your probe is spending the most amount of time mining as possible. This may seem small, but you probably lost enough minerals to that to make a gateway easily, if not a round of units.
Your hotkeys are interesting. you have each nexus hk'ed to 1 and 2 respectively. Unless you have a specific reason not to, I would recommended using all your nexi on one hotkey (when your second nexus comes up, click it and push shift 1 and both will be on one, then you can press 1 ee every probe cycle instead of 1e2e). Also, if 1 or 2 feels comfortable for you, by all means use it, but allot of people do use 4 for nexi because 4e is very fast and natural, this is just a personal preference though. You don't have your gates hk'ed, but I'm assuming you're using w, if not, use w or a hotkey.
So as to that one, focus more on probe/pylons. You got supply blocked a few times so work on that too. Also, you're quing a probe as soon as 1 starts (each nexus has 2 probes worth of minerals apiece sunk at one time). This seems intuative if you know you might forget, but you really should be trying to only que the next probe only a second or so before the current probe is finished.
The rest is small stuff. You put your first gate at 12 without any scouting, blocking a probe for a few seconds and never produce out of it. You could have made it at 13 just as easily. I would recommend zealot before your core goes down just in case he goes for something cheesy and has stuff at your base super fast, but thats just personal preference. You make a forge for no apparent reason, etc
I would like to point out in this game, yes that observer confirmed cloaked banshees were most likely going to be a threat, but don't think that's the only way to tell. You could have poked up to his front and looked at what he had. If he had marauders at all, cloak is delayed, if he has a lot of marauders (a popular play v toss) he cannot support that and cloaked banshees at the same time, so don't think that you have to get a super early observer every game, if you like it though, that's great.
Allot of the same stuff on metalopolis. There's a large space of time where you see that attack coming, you go oh, shit, an attack, and you forget about probes and warpins. It's easy to see the win and say yeah, go me, but you really need to go through and look for these kinds of things, you missed a lot of probes so when your 3rd went up it was pretty useless for awhile. You also missed allot of warp ins.
There are more things to work on, for instance, you had a TC up in your base for like 3 minutes before you used it and as a result of those minerals couldn't build some units, you ended up having 2 darkshrines (no reason to need 2 unless one dies) and a Templar archives and I don't think I saw one of either. You put up things way before you can use them (you can only really support 4 unit producing structures per functioning base while still making probes and pylons). But I'll say it now,
None of these points are as important as not forgetting your probes, pylons, and using your unit producing structures. Work some more on that and just focus on one or two things every game to improve and you'll be looking much better in no time.
Also I notice you like that kind of fast collosus 2 gate play (btw, you should get range very fast for colossus, you delay a ton), and your expansions are probably a bit premature against a good player. The goal of that build is oft times to get 2 colossus with ranged and a gateway army, push out and use that push to cover your expansion. I'm not at all worried about that though, because it isn't untill you face much better players that they can see that expo and what you have and know that they can probably kill off your expo.
A good step in the right direction, keep it up, gl.
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On December 22 2010 18:19 Arisen wrote:
On the game on scrap, there were portions where you were trying to control stuff in his base where you just stopped doing anythnig back home. First when you were doing your initial probe scout and again when you put your observer in his base. In both cases, if you don't have the hand speed to do both things at once, hold shift and run a few circles around his base, then move your probe either back home to your mineral line or to his natural to scout expo's with the probe and concentrate back home. You probably lost 4 or so probes between the 2, and 4-6 units, put your core up late as well.
Also, there were allot of times where there was just a probe or two just chilling back home, waiting for to build, or for no particular reason. you should have the probes on your mineral line until you have just about enough to build, send him over, build, hold shift, then move him back to your mineral line so that your probe is spending the most amount of time mining as possible. This may seem small, but you probably lost enough minerals to that to make a gateway easily, if not a round of units.
Your hotkeys are interesting. you have each nexus hk'ed to 1 and 2 respectively. Unless you have a specific reason not to, I would recommended using all your nexi on one hotkey (when your second nexus comes up, click it and push shift 1 and both will be on one, then you can press 1 ee every probe cycle instead of 1e2e). Also, if 1 or 2 feels comfortable for you, by all means use it, but allot of people do use 4 for nexi because 4e is very fast and natural, this is just a personal preference though. You don't have your gates hk'ed, but I'm assuming you're using w, if not, use w or a hotkey.
So as to that one, focus more on probe/pylons. You got supply blocked a few times so work on that too. Also, you're quing a probe as soon as 1 starts (each nexus has 2 probes worth of minerals apiece sunk at one time). This seems intuative if you know you might forget, but you really should be trying to only que the next probe only a second or so before the current probe is finished.
The rest is small stuff. You put your first gate at 12 without any scouting, blocking a probe for a few seconds and never produce out of it. You could have made it at 13 just as easily. I would recommend zealot before your core goes down just in case he goes for something cheesy and has stuff at your base super fast, but thats just personal preference. You make a forge for no apparent reason, etc
I would like to point out in this game, yes that observer confirmed cloaked banshees were most likely going to be a threat, but don't think that's the only way to tell. You could have poked up to his front and looked at what he had. If he had marauders at all, cloak is delayed, if he has a lot of marauders (a popular play v toss) he cannot support that and cloaked banshees at the same time, so don't think that you have to get a super early observer every game, if you like it though, that's great.
Allot of the same stuff on metalopolis. There's a large space of time where you see that attack coming, you go oh, shit, an attack, and you forget about probes and warpins. It's easy to see the win and say yeah, go me, but you really need to go through and look for these kinds of things, you missed a lot of probes so when your 3rd went up it was pretty useless for awhile. You also missed allot of warp ins.
There are more things to work on, for instance, you had a TC up in your base for like 3 minutes before you used it and as a result of those minerals couldn't build some units, you ended up having 2 darkshrines (no reason to need 2 unless one dies) and a Templar archives and I don't think I saw one of either. You put up things way before you can use them (you can only really support 4 unit producing structures per functioning base while still making probes and pylons). But I'll say it now,
None of these points are as important as not forgetting your probes, pylons, and using your unit producing structures. Work some more on that and just focus on one or two things every game to improve and you'll be looking much better in no time.
Also I notice you like that kind of fast collosus 2 gate play (btw, you should get range very fast for colossus, you delay a ton), and your expansions are probably a bit premature against a good player. The goal of that build is oft times to get 2 colossus with ranged and a gateway army, push out and use that push to cover your expansion. I'm not at all worried about that though, because it isn't untill you face much better players that they can see that expo and what you have and know that they can probably kill off your expo.
A good step in the right direction, keep it up, gl.
WTF! I didn't know this wowwwww... I played bw and I guessed SC2 would be the same, guess not lol. So what you're telling me is that you can hotkey 2 nexuses and make probes without selecting each one? Mind = Blown honestly. Can you do this with warp gates too?
Thanks for all the help btw, I read all your posts and I'm making notes. That game that I made two Dark shrines because I forgot I already built one, and I know these are all pretty bad mistakes. I really don't like using HT's that much because their storm isn't as strong as it was on BW. Do you think eventually I should get a few HT's mixed in with my army? Is it worth it?
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On December 22 2010 18:15 MilesTeg wrote:Show nested quote +On December 22 2010 16:39 Arisen wrote:On December 22 2010 16:16 Distrust wrote:
There are small things that contributed to your loss: like letting your macro slip
Please don't say this. This is not small. Your macro will be more important than anything else in the lower leagues, if you get passed a few minutes and live, in bronze, you probably should win if you're good at macro. I can throw a TON of units away and still win in bronze, because I can make more units faster than my opponent. Well, I guess this game pretty much proves this is wrong. His marco needs work, and he should definitely focus on that, but is not the reason why he lost. Yes I'm sure you can mass any unit and win, but he can't win even with a macro advantage because he doesn't know how to use his units. His colossus ended up being an overpriced baneling. Sometimes it's not helpful to to get into this "macro is everything" mind. What he needs to hear IMO is: -have a gameplan (ie don't get every tech in the game), know roughly how to react to what he's doing -the point of collossus is that they shouldn't die, you need to abuse their range and not suicide them
What game is that, because he won both of these? In the replays I watched he didn't have a macro advantage in the first 2 games. I don't know which rep you're talking about but theres a reason this "macro is everything" mindset is so popular. It doesn't matter if you're fauxer, he cannot win with his micro if I have allot more shit than him and just 1a. The reason people try to pound this into bronze league players is because so many people can't macro that if you can and they can't, you win. army control is important, but not anywhere near as important in these low leagues. Once you start reaching people who consistantly macro well, that's when army movement, etc comes into play. I'll leave you with a passage from Ver's "how to improve"
"Having good mechanical macro is both by far the most important and the simplest mechanic by far, and once you get to the top there is little to distinguish one player from another in terms of macro. At the lowest level, you can go astonishingly far just by doing a good build order and having solid macro. Along the same line, no matter what other skills you may have, you will never get anywhere if you can't macro.
Many posters come into the strategy forum and say straight up "I know I macroed bad but what else is the problem?" Well that right there is their ONLY problem: that they are concentrating on other factors besides their bad macro. For anyone new who wants to raise in skill quickly, prioritizing macro is so much more important than anything else it's inconceivable that something besides macro should be worked on first.
First, one build at a time. Until you can get one build down subconsciously, don't even bother with
anything else, you'll just make it worse"
Source
http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/stet_tcl/How_to_Improve_by_Ver.pdf
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Your macro was very good in the beginning of the first game. You made alot of probes didn't really get supply blocked. I don't really like your build too much. ( the colossus was a bit fast in my opinion ) but that really doesn't matter. Your macro really started to slip after a while, and you got a ton of gateways that you didn't even produce out of and you didn't get enough collosi and you went for far too much tech. There was no need for high templar nor dt's. Collosus gateway army was just fine. But again this is NOT why you lost that game. You lost the game because you over-microed. You try to do fancy stuff that just ends up biting you in the butt. Just a-move. Just do it. A-move your army and just watch don't do any other micro at all. Macro is still fine. And you'll see that you would've beaten that roach hydra army very badly.
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On December 22 2010 18:31 BROotogy wrote:
WTF! I didn't know this wowwwww... I played bw and I guessed SC2 would be the same, guess not lol. So what you're telling me is that you can hotkey 2 nexuses and make probes without selecting each one? Mind = Blown honestly. Can you do this with warp gates too?
Thanks for all the help btw, I read all your posts and I'm making notes. That game that I made two Dark shrines because I forgot I already built one, and I know these are all pretty bad mistakes. I really don't like using HT's that much because their storm isn't as strong as it was on BW. Do you think eventually I should get a few HT's mixed in with my army? Is it worth it?
Yes you can do that with gates as well. A popular setup is nexus on 4 (so 3 base its 4eee) and gates on 5 (5 s shift spam click in a psi field), robo or star on 6. So hotkey one to whatever number, then select another one, shift #, repeat, or if you can select all at once, just control #
As to HT, that's totally up to you. They are good units (feedback can totally shut down drops) but if you can't control it effectively because your hands aren't fast enough, I'd say for now don't worry about them. Storm is still ridiculously awesome, though granted not as good as in bw. I can tell you that you probably shouldn't waste minerals on the templar archive if you don't plan on using them. Don't get something you can't use just because.
Glad you found out now about the hotkey thing so you can get in that habit now and have a good hotkey setup.
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What would yall suggest to fend off banelings?
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Forcefield and map awareness.
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Hmm the thread suddenly took a shift to PvT ... but anyways you seem like you'll be out of Bronze very very soon. With your BW background, you know when to plop down a Nexus and transfer probes. I watched the game on Metalopolis and saw you had 4 mining bases at 20 minutes while Terran was struggling to get a second. Since you won both those games it's a bit hard to actually comment on them. It actually makes me want to comment on the Terran play.
I guess what you need now is probably know how many tech buildings you should make and when and what army composition you need and how to use it.
And as far as Macro goes, of course there's so much you can improve to become a top level player, but obviously you're way ahead of your bronze companions. You know how to get the money and the gas, how you use them will be the next problem to solve and practice.
Blink Stalkers are best used in situations such as chasing Mutas and dropships. In some cases they do well when blinking into seige tanks. Blink Micro when rushing blink stalkers against Zerg or even Protoss is also popular.
High Templars are awesome against Terran .. learning to use them is a must and a recommendation. It's Collossi vs Viking and HT vs Ghost wars in PvT and to become better you need to learn both. Storms may not be as strong as in BW, but they are still strong and so many Terrans are even calling it IMBA ( rather the amulet upgrade which allows instant warp and storming ). So yeah learn to use them, and in my opinion they're a bit more micro intensive than Collossi since there's Feedbacking and making Archons etc whereas Collossi is mainly standing back out of harm's way and abusing range with thermal lance.
Yeah you can hotkey gateways as well as use the W key for warps and you don't even need to use shift to warp a bunch of units, just pressing down S and left clicking in the pylon field warps in stalkers. So it is with FFs, press down F and left click consecutively to create a wall.
Yeah and post more PvZ's you lose if you can. As far as Banelings are concerned, I've seen them being used when busting cannons and in Zealot heavy armies. Otherwise I don't see them as much in PvZ and I guess this is where Blink excels if you army is stalker heavy.
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Ok here is some general stuff on decision making and macro. There isn't a line that divides good macro and good decisions, they encompass each other. Macro simply means spending money. How you spend your money is where the decision making comes into play. There are 3 things that you can do to macro: build an economy, build an army and build tech. How aggressively you pursue 1 thing will cut into what you can do with the other 2. And usually doing 2 of these things significantly sacrifices the third thing. If you tech and build an army you can't really make probes as fast as possible and it'll be more difficult to find the resources to expand. If you build an army and expand you'll have no money to tech. And if you tech a lot while expanding you won't have the resources to build a good sized army.
In the first game you were hyper-aggressive in teching. There is no way you could ever have a good size army throwing out that much tech. Especially when you put a tech building down then attack before the tech is finished. What purpose did the tech building serve or what did you foresee in the future that warranted teching and attacking at the same time? There is no way you could have a sufficient army while doing this. Don't tech and attack at the same time unless you need a key piece of tech to keep from dying. For example if you 4 warpgate against a terran and he opens with fast cloaked banshees you should immediately tech to observers or you'll just lose. Tech, let it finish, utilize the tech in your army, then attack.
So let's look at it from the zerg's perspective. Zerg got 5 upgrades the whole game and didn't build any building he didn't utilize. So his tech was leaner compared to yours. Looking at the drone saturation his economy was garbage compared to yours. So that means he devoted the bulk of his macro to building an army. Was it a good army? Actually it was crap too, but let's call it 'good enough'.
Your economy is amazing. I think it's better than some platinum level players. But you need to STOP TECHING SO MUCH. You asked what the counter to roaches were. Well in that game the counter to roaches was an army. Build an army. An army of what? Doesn't matter. Any army built with your economy would have smashed that zerg. As long as it's an army that utilizes the most out of that economy. Some people are saying that intelligent decisions are a better answer to some situations than blindly building an army. Well the rebuttal to that is that good macro informs you of what decisions are even possible to make. 8 warpgates, 1 of every non-stargate tech and 2 forges upgrading is super not possible off 2 bases. But you wouldn't know that without good macro. Build an army. And keep building an army. Want to know how MarineKingPrime wins? He builds an army of Marines. You might think it's because he's awesome at splitting his Marines to take minimal damage from banelings, but the only way he knew he could get away with that is by being really really good at constantly building an army. Good macro informed him of the possibility of overwhelming zergs with good micro.
Lastly, I'd like to echo the same advice a lot of people have said about colossus. Colossus deal damage, everything else serves to protect the colossus. Zealots, stalkers, sentries, immortals, phoenix, your first born child, those neighbors you don't really like... everything serves as a meatshield to the colossus. And every time you get colossus also get range. There are far fewer instances where not getting range is a better idea than getting range.
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Hmm, but I heard that when you blink stalkers it makes whatever is shooting them lose which one it was shooting so they stay alive later? Either way I'll stop blinking, its become a habit and I'm trying to break it.
I made a replay for you using the unit testing map on Blink micro.
1st example: How to micro properly. 8 Stalkers vs 16 Marines. All stalkers live.
2nd example: Blink into. 8 Stalkers vs 16 marines. 3 Stalkers live.
3rd example: Regular attack walk. 8 Stalkers vs 16 Marines. 2 Stalkers live.
4th example: How to micro properly. 8 Stalkers vs 9 Roaches. 7 Stalkers live.
5th example: Blink into. 3 Roaches win.
http://hotfile.com/dl/91281478/03c7a97/BlinkMicro.SC2Replay.html
Replay sites wouldn't let me upload custom games.
I just did this without practice or any well thought out procedures, I.E it's possible to easily have all stalkers survive on the 4th example.
I discovered something pretty interesting.
Blinking INTO marines actually wouldn't cause marine DPS to increase, but would increase DPS of stalkers. Stalkers damage occurs when the beam hits. That travel time of the beam is used to determine DPS. However, marines shoot bullets, which the game engine registers as instant.
Roaches on the other hand, have the same problem as stalkers. They rely on the acid spray to actually hit the target before damage is calculated. When you close the gap, both DPS party increases... but Roach balls are stronger than Stalker balls.
Anyways, the whole point of this was to show you proper blink micro. The lesson is to stop blinking into the opponents army. Just let your units attack. All the replays I've watched of you, your battles would of been won easily if you just attacked walk and focused on re-enforcing the army.
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On December 23 2010 04:05 Distrust wrote:Show nested quote +
Hmm, but I heard that when you blink stalkers it makes whatever is shooting them lose which one it was shooting so they stay alive later? Either way I'll stop blinking, its become a habit and I'm trying to break it.
I made a replay for you using the unit testing map on Blink micro. 1st example: How to micro properly. 8 Stalkers vs 16 Marines. All stalkers live. 2nd example: Blink into. 8 Stalkers vs 16 marines. 3 Stalkers live. 3rd example: Regular attack walk. 8 Stalkers vs 16 Marines. 2 Stalkers live. 4th example: How to micro properly. 8 Stalkers vs 9 Roaches. 7 Stalkers live. 5th example: Blink into. 3 Roaches win. http://hotfile.com/dl/91281478/03c7a97/BlinkMicro.SC2Replay.htmlReplay sites wouldn't let me upload custom games. I just did this without practice or any well thought out procedures, I.E it's possible to easily have all stalkers survive on the 4th example. I discovered something pretty interesting. Blinking INTO marines actually wouldn't cause marine DPS to increase, but would increase DPS of stalkers. Stalkers damage occurs when the beam hits. That travel time of the beam is used to determine DPS. However, marines shoot bullets, which the game engine registers as instant. Roaches on the other hand, have the same problem as stalkers. They rely on the acid spray to actually hit the target before damage is calculated. When you close the gap, both DPS party increases... but Roach balls are stronger than Stalker balls. Anyways, the whole point of this was to show you proper blink micro. The lesson is to stop blinking into the opponents army. Just let your units attack. All the replays I've watched of you, your battles would of been won easily if you just attacked walk and focused on re-enforcing the army.
How does the projectile covering less distance translate into better DPS? Stalkers have a constant rate of fire, like all units, so DPS is not dependent on anything except the number of times the unit fires per unit time, which should be the same regardless.
I can understand if range is an issue where units are not firing, but there is no justification for blinking on top of units as you describe.
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You are a pretty good player actually.. once you get use to the macro hotkey/mechanics, you'll be in diamond in no time.
I don't have much to add to all the ridiculously good quality comments above. Good luck and gg.
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EPT
