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On April 19 2013 05:36 Teoita wrote:
He did one off one base:
same opening
cut at 23 probes, no expo
mass stalkers off 4gate
use first oracle with msc to try and snipe marines/scv's
push with 2 oracles
my notes OP ^_^
ah ok, this is more what I was looking for thanks. Having a lot of trouble with PvT right now so I'm just deciding to ignore the matchup for a little while and work on PvZ/PvP
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On April 19 2013 05:11 Teoita wrote:
I got some notes on all his stargate stuff at MLG. There's a guide somwhere but if im not wrong it's not super detailed (as in, it's not recommended threads/TL strat level).
Opening BO:
13 Gate
16 Double Gas, 3 probes on each
18 Core (scout on 4player maps, no scout on 2 player)
20 Pylon in a corner
21 Stalker, WG
23 MSC, nonstop probes
Off gateway: stalker/stalker/sentry
28 Stargate at third pylon
Poke with 2Stalker/MSC and scout
42ish Nexus
6:50, 2 extra Gates
non stop oracles
7:30 extra gates, 38 total probes
push at 5 oracles
I have been having massive success with this in the diamond league. It has busted every terran except ones that put up 3 bunkers.... which I see poking with my stalker. I then expand and use the extra oracles for harassment and drop cleanup.
edit: typo
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Oh, last question, what is the target timing on this? just to make sure I'm doing it cleanly
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Italy12246 Posts
I don't remember i think it was round 9:30ish; check out the MLG vods they are free.
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On April 19 2013 05:51 LegionSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2013 05:11 Teoita wrote:
I got some notes on all his stargate stuff at MLG. There's a guide somwhere but if im not wrong it's not super detailed (as in, it's not recommended threads/TL strat level).
Opening BO:
13 Gate
16 Double Gas, 3 probes on each
18 Core (scout on 4player maps, no scout on 2 player)
20 Pylon in a corner
21 Stalker, WG
23 MSC, nonstop probes
Off gateway: stalker/stalker/sentry
28 Stargate at third pylon
Poke with 2Stalker/MSC and scout
42ish Nexus
6:50, 2 extra Gates
non stop oracles
7:30 extra gates, 38 total probes
push at 5 oracles I have been having massive success with this in the diamond league. It has busted every terran except ones that put up 3 bunkers.... which I see poking with my stalker. I then expand and use the extra oracles for harassment and drop cleanup. edit: typo
Would you say this is maybe more effective than the one base oracle all in?
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Can anyone recommend any general advice for improving my game to go from Diamond to Masters? I've been stuck in this league for a while now and I'm not noticing any real improvement in my play.
According to this analysis of my games my mechanics are decent: http://ggtracker.com/players/186723#?game_type=1v1&page=1 but beyond 'macro better' I rarely see advice on how to just make that little push upwards.
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On April 19 2013 06:24 Xaeldaren wrote:Can anyone recommend any general advice for improving my game to go from Diamond to Masters? I've been stuck in this league for a while now and I'm not noticing any real improvement in my play. According to this analysis of my games my mechanics are decent: http://ggtracker.com/players/186723#?game_type=1v1&page=1 but beyond 'macro better' I rarely see advice on how to just make that little push upwards.
It's hard to give general advices. From dia->master is a combination of proper macro, knowing how to defend common cheeses/timings and having a decent BO. Feel free to post replays.
Also keep in mind that the spending quotient is a good indicator, but not perfect. If you don't build enough workers and overconstruct production facilities, your quotient will be good, but that's not proper macro.
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So far 3/4 with 1gate expand versus zerg. I am really liking how flexible it is. On Whirlwind I have been immediately chronoboosting out a zealot because most of the zergs I have faced have just assumed that I was going FFE so they go for fast 3 base and it forces a ton of units. I also send the mothership core which forces queens or a cancel. I have been doing the double gas 2 probes in each gas thingy and it works out nicely. I go zealot, msc, expand, sentry while using all the minerals to wall off. I then start Stargate and add the third probe to each gas. I am sure there are lots of efficiencies to find but even with a rough outline of the build I have been having a fair amount of success.
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On April 19 2013 06:24 Xaeldaren wrote:Can anyone recommend any general advice for improving my game to go from Diamond to Masters? I've been stuck in this league for a while now and I'm not noticing any real improvement in my play. According to this analysis of my games my mechanics are decent: http://ggtracker.com/players/186723#?game_type=1v1&page=1 but beyond 'macro better' I rarely see advice on how to just make that little push upwards.
I'm gonna watch a few of your replays and see if I can give some more specific advice for you. I'm high masters.
http://ggtracker.com/matches/2829934
Watching this replay.
Aight man, here's your first mistake, a common one from people around your skill level: the unnecessary forge. Your opponent is 15pooling this game. Anything later than a 14 pool and you need to go nexus first. Yes, you're going to incur slight risk of ling runby if you don't scout well, but you're giving yourself a massive penalty by going forge first. Look over this thread and there's plenty of posts talking about what to do if they try to make lings and runby vs. Nexus first. Basically you should be fine as long as you nexus, then immediately get a forge, since you can wall off with a gateway and then cancel if absolutely necessary(ie he makes 6 lings and attacks).
This is a small issue, and I do it -all the time- too, but make sure you stop rallying probes to your natural once it's even with your main. You've got 36 probes in your nat and only 14 in your main at one point. So just try to keep track of that sort of things. Can't win games without proper income.
Another problem I see is that you have a lot of phoenixes, and you see him going muta/corruptor. You didn't drop a fleet beacon and get phoenix range. Instead you let him build up and just hold the map uncontested against your phoenixes. Against a muta/corruptor force, you want to get phoenix range and to keep raising your phoenix count. That way you can constantly keep him at bay, running away from you, instead of allowing him to just stack up and a-move into you like how he's doing at your attempted 4th base. With the phoenix range you can go wittle down his muta/corruptor count slowly over time without losing much, and put yourself in a much better position later on in the game.
At the end of the game, you have a templar archives, you have storm researched, you have time to warp in HTs and let them build energy to storm. You're not doing so. Against this muta/corruptor/ling army, you really, really need HTs. With HTs you can easily decimate this army of his. I see you eventually do get HTs but they're pretty late. You realllly needed to get these earlier.
The final reason you lost this game was the absolutely abysmal army control in the final battle. You've made mistakes in this game, but you still were in a winnable position during that last battle . There's two main problems here. You controlled extremely badly and you don't have enough production facilities to reproduce. You have a lot of minerals banked - Make some more gateways.
Regarding the final clash, you're not sending in all your units together. You're sending in your HTs and phoenixes and leaving the rest of your army behind. You can't just send in HTs unsupported, you need your army there since you get free hits off when they're dodging storms, and to tank infront of your HTs. You move in and you completely whiff your first 2 HTs. Are you aware of the flyers indicator? You can't simply storm on top of corruptor/muta, you have to storm on the flyer indicator that marks the ground that they're actually flying over. You also storm your own phoenixes shortly after which does pretty massive damage. When you bring in your actual ground army all your phoenixes and HTs are already dead. You don't have enough gateways up to support a big warp in reinforcement and you die to the zerg's rally.
Despite the bad control, you still could have won the game if you had did a couple of things a bit better. It all goes back to things like the late HTs and not getting the fleet beacon. You let him have absolute map control and you couldn't take your fourth. You needed to be able to push out and control a fourth base but you couldn't, and thus your economy suffered. Then when you do very poorly in that final fight, you don't have enough economy to fall back on.
Also, finally, another -huuuuuuuuge- mistake you made is your upgrades. You're in a late game situation past 20 minutes and you only have ground attack 3 and air weapons 1. This upgrade count is pitiful and it's going to make a very significant impact on a game. You need to be following your upgrades much better than this. You should have way more attack and armour upgrades for this final fight.
Was going to look at a PvT too but couldn't find a recent rep that I could dl off that page.
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On April 19 2013 07:44 SteveNick wrote:Show nested quote +On April 19 2013 06:24 Xaeldaren wrote:Can anyone recommend any general advice for improving my game to go from Diamond to Masters? I've been stuck in this league for a while now and I'm not noticing any real improvement in my play. According to this analysis of my games my mechanics are decent: http://ggtracker.com/players/186723#?game_type=1v1&page=1 but beyond 'macro better' I rarely see advice on how to just make that little push upwards. I'm gonna watch a few of your replays and see if I can give some more specific advice for you. I'm high masters. http://ggtracker.com/matches/2829934Watching this replay. Aight man, here's your first mistake, a common one from people around your skill level: the unnecessary forge. Your opponent is 15pooling this game. Anything later than a 14 pool and you need to go nexus first. Yes, you're going to incur slight risk of ling runby if you don't scout well, but you're giving yourself a massive penalty by going forge first. Look over this thread and there's plenty of posts talking about what to do if they try to make lings and runby vs. Nexus first. Basically you should be fine as long as you nexus, then immediately get a forge, since you can wall off with a gateway and then cancel if absolutely necessary(ie he makes 6 lings and attacks). This is a small issue, and I do it -all the time- too, but make sure you stop rallying probes to your natural once it's even with your main. You've got 36 probes in your nat and only 14 in your main at one point. So just try to keep track of that sort of things. Can't win games without proper income. Another problem I see is that you have a lot of phoenixes, and you see him going muta/corruptor. You didn't drop a fleet beacon and get phoenix range. Instead you let him build up and just hold the map uncontested against your phoenixes. Against a muta/corruptor force, you want to get phoenix range and to keep raising your phoenix count. That way you can constantly keep him at bay, running away from you, instead of allowing him to just stack up and a-move into you like how he's doing at your attempted 4th base. With the phoenix range you can go wittle down his muta/corruptor count slowly over time without losing much, and put yourself in a much better position later on in the game. At the end of the game, you have a templar archives, you have storm researched, you have time to warp in HTs and let them build energy to storm. You're not doing so. Against this muta/corruptor/ling army, you really, really need HTs. With HTs you can easily decimate this army of his. I see you eventually do get HTs but they're pretty late. You realllly needed to get these earlier. The final reason you lost this game was the absolutely abysmal army control in the final battle. You've made mistakes in this game, but you still were in a winnable position during that last battle . There's two main problems here. You controlled extremely badly and you don't have enough production facilities to reproduce. You have a lot of minerals banked - Make some more gateways. Regarding the final clash, you're not sending in all your units together. You're sending in your HTs and phoenixes and leaving the rest of your army behind. You can't just send in HTs unsupported, you need your army there since you get free hits off when they're dodging storms, and to tank infront of your HTs. You move in and you completely whiff your first 2 HTs. Are you aware of the flyers indicator? You can't simply storm on top of corruptor/muta, you have to storm on the flyer indicator that marks the ground that they're actually flying over. You also storm your own phoenixes shortly after which does pretty massive damage. When you bring in your actual ground army all your phoenixes and HTs are already dead. You don't have enough gateways up to support a big warp in reinforcement and you die to the zerg's rally. Despite the bad control, you still could have won the game if you had did a couple of things a bit better. It all goes back to things like the late HTs and not getting the fleet beacon. You let him have absolute map control and you couldn't take your fourth. You needed to be able to push out and control a fourth base but you couldn't, and thus your economy suffered. Then when you do very poorly in that final fight, you don't have enough economy to fall back on. Also, finally, another -huuuuuuuuge- mistake you made is your upgrades. You're in a late game situation past 20 minutes and you only have ground attack 3 and air weapons 1. This upgrade count is pitiful and it's going to make a very significant impact on a game. You need to be following your upgrades much better than this. You should have way more attack and armour upgrades for this final fight. Was going to look at a PvT too but couldn't find a recent rep that I could dl off that page.
I really appreciate the in depth analysis. I just wish that wasn't the game you picked up on, I played that game while I was really hungover, and I had to go take a shower immediately afterwards because I felt so annoyed at how bad I played.
That's definitely not indicative of how I usually play and I'm kind of ashamed that I missed a real chance to get some great advice by including that in the random bunch of replays I chose to upload. There was another one I played on Bel'shir Vestige where I got proxy gated and cannon rushed by a random player and I really would hate for you to see that too :p
Some more representative games of mine would be:
PvT: http://drop.sc/325318, http://drop.sc/325310, PvP: http://drop.sc/325309, PvZ: http://drop.sc/325312
If you could out any of those games I'd really appreciate it, you've already been so helpful.
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I'm watching PvT 325318.
The first thing I notice that I don't like is that you take a double gas for no apparent reason. 1 gas is the normal in PvT if you plan to fast expand without pressuring. People who get the double gas in PvT really early do so to get out fast tech while expanding or to pressure early while expanding(like with 2 stalkers + msc). You're floating huge amount of gas and that's 75 minerals(assimilator) + the mining time of all the probes you're using to harvest that gas, which results in a slow expansion. There are a lot of very valid builds out there that accept the slower expansion but they do so while trying to gain an advantage in some other way. If you're just doing a normal fast expand, 1 gas is fine, then you can add on the second one shortly after your expo goes down. So right off the bat I'd say you're behind. You've got some minor counter-play in the form of the early observer(which is nice, but you don't need that fast of a robo to defend against 1rax FE widow mines), and early sentries to gather energy, but I'd have taken the faster expo.
Other than that, I just watched up to 18 minutes and was generally satisfied with your play. I'm surprised you're not Masters since your macro and overall build seems pretty standard. However, it seems what is holding you back the most is your army control. You macroed fine, had good upgrades, had good unit composition, but 1a'd your units straight down a choke in a tight ball to be emped, torn apart by vikings, and stim/winned. Almost every single unit you have got hit by EMPs here and then you go ahead and suicide your entire army anyways.
I can tell you that I used to have this same problem: Macroing well but then throwing away your army. You really need to change your mindset when it comes to engagements. You can't expect to just macro well and then 1a to win a game, especially not against Terran. A lot of close games come down to army control. You built a great army, but then you didn't use it effectively. You need to first of all spread your units. You want to be attacking in a horiziontal line that concaves towards your opponent, not a tight ball. You can not let him throw down 3-4 EMPs and crush everything you have. Your high templars need to be spread out in a line behind your army. You need to be very careful with this engagement, and always try to scout ahead of where you're going ahead of time. You can not expect to just 1a into fog of war and win against skilled opponents.
A popular strategy with HTs is to sort out a single HT from the rest and move it ahead of your entire army and storm the first units it runs into. This way you can effectively soften up the Terran army and push them back while minimizing the risk to yourself. You will notice that the Terran employ this very same tactic of moving their ghosts ahead to initiate the fight, so when he has ghosts you will run into problems using this tactic, but then it just comes down to micro, feedbacking ghosts, etc. I would suggest tuning in to FXODesrow's stream sometime as he commentates a lot during his games and has pretty good HT control(I learned a lot of little tricks by watching his stream).
Another popular way of managing HTs is the "back up Templar". Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Leave some HTs behind so that if you suffer a catastrophic EMP, there is a chance you can still hold on. You don't have to leave them far behind, you can drag them along a little behind your main army, not close enough to be targetted but close enough to reinforce if things go bad.
Improve your army control and you'll easily be a master's level player.
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Thanks so much for taking the time to go so in depth with your analysis. I've known for quite a while that army control and engagements are holding me back. The other major flaw I've identified is just not scouting enough.
As far as the double gas goes I was using a build I'd seen SKT.Rain use in progleague where he gets a fast double gas with 2 probes in each, which allows him to expand relatively quickly while still getting a Mothership Core, 2 Sentries out of his initial gate and a Robo before additional gates. I quite like it, but I should still test out more traditional single gas builds.
Do you have any advice for improving army control in general? It feels like it's something harder to nail down than improve macro. I don't have a cut and dry answer on what to do.
Again, I really appreciate the help, it was awesome of you.
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Northern Ireland25107 Posts
How do you hotkey your armies and generally control them? At my girlfriend's atm so can't watch the replays, but if nothing else I have a pretty solid setup on that regard.
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I use ` for my MSC (which is a rebound 0) 1 for my main army, 2 for Templar and 3 for Stalkers. I'm not great at using all of them in conjunction, and it can get quite confusing some times. It's definitely going to take practice.
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Northern Ireland25107 Posts
Keep everything on one I bar templars, I bind stalkers to 2 additionally for blinks and sauntering around the place. My stalkers will be on 1 as well, but I have the luxury of controlling them independently as well. Sniping the occasional retreating medivac or viking over time really adds up as well, just as good practice. Temps on 3. I have Q and Tab as unit control groups, Q is pretty much my Mommacore, for PvT the latter will generally be a warp prism, for storm drops, or what have you.
My emergency templars are dotted around and I don't bind them. I suppose my army control is ok in PvT because I refuse to ever do timing attacks and just sit around grinding my opponent down, every game, so you kind of have to force yourself to have continually good engagements by playing in such a boring style
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Mid-diamond, just got stomped by a 10 pool on Akilon opening FFE and I'm not sure whether I should be building the cannon in my main or trying to defend it on the low ground with probes. Any tips? I read the section in the OP just by going cannon in main I seemed impossibly far behind...
Replay: http://drop.sc/325371
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If you scout 10p you should be able to fullwalloff with a cannon behind before the zerglings hit. Just dont build your nexus yet. It's a bit tricky on some maps.
(didnt watch replay yet)
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On April 19 2013 14:59 Taronar wrote:
If you scout 10p you should be able to fullwalloff with a cannon behind before the zerglings hit. Just dont build your nexus yet. It's a bit tricky on some maps.
(didnt watch replay yet)
Okay will do. Honestly I played it out pretty horribly. I don't face ten pools often so my mind stalled like an idiot. If you get a chance to watch the replay though I'd definitely appreciate it. I assume I should be cutting probes and focusing on starting the full wall off before cannon like the PvZ guide suggests?
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Is there any way to deny a drone from scouting my tech in PvZ? I have to delay my tech if I wait for my first stalker or sentry to kill it. Delaying a stargate makes your timing worse, especially if you go void ray or oracle before phoenixes. The timing of a robo can be crucial too, and if you're going immortal sentry all-in it's pretty much paramount against a good zerg. So what's the right course of action?
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Is there a custom map that lets you practise your army control solo, without a partner? Much like the WoL protoss multitask army map that blizzard made, I found that quite fun.
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EPT
