EPTOn February 19 2019 05:00 General_Winter wrote:
Getting back into the game after about 5+ years away. I just lost a game vs Terran (replay here https://sc2replaystats.com/replay/9835686) where I tried to roach timing them, didn’t see a natural, was confused and fumbled a bit, then decided to continue with the timing and died to hellions killing all my drones before I could make any roaches.
The game actually technically continues for about 5 minutes after he kills all my drones, and I do eventually make some roaches, try to attack and get crushed since the timing is late and he already has tanks and widow mines. But I think it was really over after that first hellion attack.
Q1: would my overlord at 2:40 have seen the CC if it was there? Or would I need to move it further forward and then back up?
Q2: If I saw, how should I have reacted when I didn’t see a natural base?
My thought is make a roach warren immediately to partially wall the ramp, and then start an additional queen and build the third hatch in my natural to make a wall in with my roach warren. Maybe throw down a spine also. My worry about this plan is that it might help with hellions or marines, but doesn’t do anything vs banshees or other air pressure.
At 3:11 my lings check his natural and confirm no CC.
Q3: At this point I know for sure he is doing some kind of 1 base aggression before expanding. How should I react?
It's too late to build my third hatch in the natural, but I could still build a roach warren asap. What I did was start a spore in my base and start more queens. Maybe I should have started some spines? I didn’t want to overreact though.
A bit later at 3:40ish some hellions kill my scouting lings. I don’t see this because may attention wasn’t on the lings.
Q4: When the hellions show up at my base at 4:03 was I just dead, or could i have reacted or microed better to save my drones?
I tried to use queens to block ramp and chase them away, but the ramp wasn’t creeped so they were slow going between main and natural, and when I tried to use the queens blocking my ramp to help vs the hellions, the hellions just rolled into my main.
One immediate change I’ve made to my play was just banning the map. Seems too wide and hard to protect natural from hellions.
Q5: what are good maps to ban as zerg?
Q6: Any other suggestions? Note I know having better macro and crisper timings helps with everything and I’m working on those, but I can’t immediately chose to just have them be better, so I’m looking for changes I can implement immediately as I try to improve those things gradually.
Thanks everyone!
Getting back into the game after about 5+ years away. I just lost a game vs Terran (replay here https://sc2replaystats.com/replay/9835686) where I tried to roach timing them, didn’t see a natural, was confused and fumbled a bit, then decided to continue with the timing and died to hellions killing all my drones before I could make any roaches.
The game actually technically continues for about 5 minutes after he kills all my drones, and I do eventually make some roaches, try to attack and get crushed since the timing is late and he already has tanks and widow mines. But I think it was really over after that first hellion attack.
Q1: would my overlord at 2:40 have seen the CC if it was there? Or would I need to move it further forward and then back up?
Q2: If I saw, how should I have reacted when I didn’t see a natural base?
My thought is make a roach warren immediately to partially wall the ramp, and then start an additional queen and build the third hatch in my natural to make a wall in with my roach warren. Maybe throw down a spine also. My worry about this plan is that it might help with hellions or marines, but doesn’t do anything vs banshees or other air pressure.
At 3:11 my lings check his natural and confirm no CC.
Q3: At this point I know for sure he is doing some kind of 1 base aggression before expanding. How should I react?
It's too late to build my third hatch in the natural, but I could still build a roach warren asap. What I did was start a spore in my base and start more queens. Maybe I should have started some spines? I didn’t want to overreact though.
A bit later at 3:40ish some hellions kill my scouting lings. I don’t see this because may attention wasn’t on the lings.
Q4: When the hellions show up at my base at 4:03 was I just dead, or could i have reacted or microed better to save my drones?
I tried to use queens to block ramp and chase them away, but the ramp wasn’t creeped so they were slow going between main and natural, and when I tried to use the queens blocking my ramp to help vs the hellions, the hellions just rolled into my main.
One immediate change I’ve made to my play was just banning the map. Seems too wide and hard to protect natural from hellions.
Q5: what are good maps to ban as zerg?
Q6: Any other suggestions? Note I know having better macro and crisper timings helps with everything and I’m working on those, but I can’t immediately chose to just have them be better, so I’m looking for changes I can implement immediately as I try to improve those things gradually.
Thanks everyone!
hey
i'm top dia not GM but i think i can help you out. i'll try to answer your questions in order1) i'm pretty sure your vision was in range, but next time just fly closer. you're probably too worried about marine snipes. you need to get information otherwise there's no point in sending the overlord in the first place.
2) after you see no CC you should be floating just far enough to see what buildings and addons are on the way, partly because it's possible terran is just making a high ground CC, which is an uncommon but conservative way to play. you want to keep the overlord alive, but it's not the end of the world if it dies. in this case you would have seen tech lab barracks and double factory...
3) so the reactor and lack of addon on the 2nd factory indicates he is going for mass hellion, and the tech lab on the barracks indicates stim. first thing you should realize is that this is a ridiculously unusual and aggressive cheese. 1 base mass hellion is weird on its own, but following up with stim means you already know 100% this guy wants to kill you right away rather than harassing and transitioning. roaches are fine if that's how you prefer to play - they make you safer in case of hellbats, but the gas cost slows your tech if the game doesn't end and you have to transition. queen/ling should be fine if your micro isn't horrible. obviously the spore was a complete waste, but more concerning to me is your drone split, which i'll go into on point 4...
4) i'm not sure why you think you need to have half of your drones at the natural that early. if they're all in the main then they get to mine and the hellions are easily blocked at the ramp. instead you have nine drones vulnerable for absolutely no reason. i assume you're going for mathematical efficiency or something, but it was actually really bad for you. to be honest as soon as you saw the hellions leaving his base you should have pulled them into the main, but you also shouldn't have sent them to the natural in the first place unless you were doing some kind of full NA mindgame to trick him about your drone count. anyway, considering the drones were in the natural, you could have microed a little bit more, but the far better move in this case would have been just mineral walking them into the main
5) i'm not a big map veto guy, so i couldn't tell you. i'll give you the answer you don't want to hear though, which is that no problem you can have with a map at your level can't be fixed with macro. no matter how badly you want maps to matter, they just don't until you're better (one of the reasons i don't veto often is because this applies at my level too). so until you rank up a bit you could say it's best to ban whichever maps make you uncomfortable and make you enjoy the game less
6) not really much to say in terms of general suggestions, but i would add that although you SHOULD have been dead after the first attack, your opponent's macro was unbelievably bad, and you were able to get back to a semi-decent drone count while he stayed on 1 base, so actually you did have a chance to win. you hurt yourself a bit before the blue flame hellion attack by having too few roaches/queens and generally late reactions/poor micro, but even still he didn't really do that much damage with it anyway
even as you did your roach counterattack you had a chance to handle your units much better and continue your transition. you just kind of amoved into his natural and then tried to pull back too late. send one ling forward to check if he has tanks by triggering their long range attack, and when you realize he does have a tank you need to either go into a ravager allin, which would have required high ground vision, or simply contain/back off. to be honest if you did have high ground vision a ravager allin would have been a good option for you because you had an insane gas bank you were never going to spend
finally i would point out that you failed to send out a second overlord and had no followup scout, so if he had gone into something like banshees you would have been pretty fucked. your lair was so late that you were forced into a bad allin, you were blind the entire game other than watching hellions come out of his base. obviously scouting actively comes with improving at the game, but in a game like that one you want to try to get a scout on his starport and 3rd CC timings, although in this case his macro was so bad that the information might have been bad too. honestly at your level i would say just get a lair so you can make an overseer, scout better, and transition into tech if/when possible. the cost of the lair isn't really a big deal compared to the macro mistakes you both make
so yeah, there are a lot of things you could have improved about your game, but the good news is it was more winnable than you think it was
