Strat Chat: Updates and Vods

First of all, who the fuck is Lilbow lol, and why is he playing in the WCS finals. I've been out of the loop quite a bit, so my analysis may not be 100% on point, but I'll give it a go.

So the game starts with a risky gold base first, which doesn't actually gets scouted; To follow up, Hydra gets ling speed fairly quickly in order to defend it (6:15). So, from what I can tell, Lilbow blindly takes a 3rd nexus, and even though Hydra has the potential to rush out ~30 lings at 6:30, he chooses not to on the assumption that the gold base will get him further ahead in the long run. Tbh, I feel like Lilbow's early build matches up with Hydra's purely out of luck. Had Hydra just gone gasless triple hatch with the gold base, he would have been super far ahead; granted, that's unlikely, but the fact that Lilbow has no opportunity to punish Hydra's expansion is merely a factor of luck.

The chargelot/archon build was more pure luck. He starts charge before even scouting Hydra's base, so it was obviously a pre-planned build. Perhaps there's room in the build to cancel charge and go blink as he scouts the gas counts at the Zerg natural and 3rd (full gases at all bases mean no roach timing, likely mean mutalisks). The combination of only 3 bases and a total of 4 gases (assumed that the main base has both gases taken) means that Hydra is most definitely gearing up for a roach timing. The defense of the roach timing is absolutely beautiful. Again, the fact that this is a blind 3-base build going up against a Zerg player who went gold base first into ling speed into a fast third base means that the timings coincidentally lined up for the archons to just BARELY be able to get up in time. However, the micro is excellent.

The reason why chargelot/archon died for such a long time in pro play is that 1) colossus-less styles got LOLed on by swarm hosts, and 2) the threat of a heavy ground army (roaches/hydras) vs the threat of mutalisks made zealot/archon a huge risk -- you'd end up losing way too much trying to defend mutalisks to be able to make use of the raw power of the composition. As for new swarm hosts, I can't confirm on their efficacy versus gateway armies, but I assume they still do decently well if you pat attention and kite with them. In this scenario, Hydra panicked after losing his roach push so horribly and began spamming ling/roach while trying to do a cute counterattack with the swarm hosts. What he should have done instead was used the swarm hosts to kite the gateway army while using his ling/roach group to counterattack and building static defense at home. This would have whittled away the gateway numbers before Lilbow could move across the map and also forced defensive warpins to happen at home, allowing Hydra's superior 4-base economy to translate into a tech advantage and just steamroll the inferior zealot/archon composition.