[Code S] Ro32 Group E - Season 3 2015 - Page 23

On August 14 2015 21:00 GumBa wrote:

Yeah doing a trade tends to mean you actually work.

On August 14 2015 21:01 Big J wrote:

Can you make Starcraft themed bread?

On August 14 2015 19:45 deacon.frost wrote:
OK, I was never into BW, but I thought this is the type of game which would fit to Flash. Slow turtling macro game... and then he loses. Why?

On August 14 2015 21:12 epi wrote:


The same reason why he loses all other kinds of games. He doesn't know what to do.

In BW he wasn't just good at slow turtling macro games - in a way, it was an image he cultivated to hide the fact that he was one of the most aggressive players around. Not only that, in SC2 his macro isn't substantially better than anyone else's, and his micro was never the best, nor his multitasking, so his mechanical strength is mostly gone. That's not the major factor, though.

The reason why he was king in macro games in BW was that he made better decisions than anyone else. His game sense was second to none. Large macro games played to that strength because especially in BW, nobody could mechanically keep up with everything that was happening in a large macro game, so the major factor controlling who would win was game understanding.

This game is famous for Leta's poor drop (33:27) but just as important is Flash's drop (43:26) where he correctly detects a weakness in Leta's defensive dispositions and threads a fleet of dropships through a lightly defended corridor to drop directly on top of Leta's Physics Lab, stalling Leta's transition to battlecruisers. Even that doesn't win the game immediately, but a subsequent attack with the dropped units manages to pull Leta's reinforcing mobile force out of position to defend it, which enables Flash to take the mineral-only directly south of the original drop location, previously occupied by Leta's units. Ultimately the flow of minerals from that expansion provides Flash with the fuel to outlast Leta and win the game.

SC2 Flash is a completely different player, and I think that's what hurts the most about watching him as someone who was a big fan of his in BW. Flash in SC2 hasn't just lost his game sense, but now makes actively worse decisions than most average players. When he's not driving dreadful attacks into defended positions, he's falling back on a defensive style that counts on being able to anticipate and react to anything, which he also can't do. Almost any proactive plan by an opponent seems to catch him entirely by surprise. Even when he gets into a lead he doesn't seem to have any real plan aside from "get more stuff, roll them over", which is a far cry from the forward-thinking strategy he showed in BW.

Look at this. This is two of Stork's shuttles flying over a scouting SCV parked there because Flash was capable of not just predicting Stork's exact build but the flight path of the shuttles. The shuttles are immediately intercepted by a wraith (which is almost never built in this matchup) and a small force of tanks, and are shut down immediately. Flash saw it coming all the way.

Could I imagine SC2 Flash doing something like that? Not a chance. The worst game I've seen of him recently was his first game against soO in the Kespa Cup, where soO just attacked and Flash died on the spot, because he didn't have an army of any kind of size to defend the attack. He had absolutely no idea what soO was doing and no idea of what to do except take a risky fourth base to get more stuff. And although most of his recent games aren't quite that pathetic, they all follow pretty much the same trend: Flash makes a bad call or a bunch of bad calls and dies. When he wins, it's usually because he makes a mediocre-quality attack and his opponent botches the defense, or because his opponent tries to make an early attack and spectacularly fails it. Even when he wins it's not because he understands the game.

I'm a Flash fan. I want him to do well. I make sure to catch almost all of his games live even though I know what the result probably will be. But no realistic observer could say that him doing better is a likely outcome, because even though he's been playing SC2 for years his game knowledge has advanced very little. Until that changes, he won't be favoured in slow macro games, or any other kind.

(this got a little long, oops)