EPT
The map was that... I forget what it's called, but it's the 4player one that has the four corner starts; a battle report was played on it. We both opened pylon gate pylon obelisk; I gassed earlier while he went for his second gateway. We both proceeded to stalkers, and then diverged - him to Dark Templar, me to cannon expand.
His harass was unsuccessful due to my cannon placement. From then I obsed and moved out with my stalker force, but saw that he hadn't taken his nat and didn't want to push into his main (should have checked for hidden expos
). I decided to set up a soft contain with my stalker force while getting charge and storm, transitioning to the classic SC1 temp/zeal/goon PvP army.Taking advantage of this timing when my tech had yet to kick in and my templar were still gathering storms, Kevin pushed out with masses of chargelots and immortals. I backed up, blinking with my stalkers while retreating towards my nat. He established his nat around then, and his army size led me to realize he had a secret base somewhere.
His huge army rampaged into my natural, but with stalker blink and cannon / gateway placement I repelled his attack. He set up some cannons and a robotics outside my base, but I was content to wait for storm energy to gather, after which I figured I'd kill him with a hanbang attack.
However, I didn't quite make enough gates, and warpgates produce units faster than gateways. This meant that my resources started piling up rather quickly as I planted 5-7 gateways at once to keep up. Really impermissible on my part, as I should have ramped up pylon/gateway production as soon as I went over 1k.
At any rate, I put together a very shiny archon/zealot/templar/stalker force augmented with some observers; I sent a phase prism around back for some cannon/warp in harass, and busted out, killing his buildings and what units he had guarding. Unfortunately, once I was halfway across the map, a huge red army poured into my main and started killing everything - there was a backdoor entrance protected by destructible rocks that I hadn't noticed.
Thinking it was a bit late to go back, I pressed on, razing his natural and annihilating his probes with the thunderous wrath of my Templar. His main, too, took damage, but by then my main was essentially gone. I figured I'd return home, kill his army, and then finish killing his buildings, since my army was the stronger.
With some assistance from storm, I was able to destroy his forces, but then bad news - colossi with thermal lances on my nat cliff. Not much I could do there, so I went all in against his main, in an attempt to kill him before he could kill me. Producing a couple HT from my last functional gateway, I went into his home base and started blowing things up. His colossi continued killing my base, but then that secret expo of his that I never dealt with proved to be my undoing.
Units started warping in around my army and then I realized he'd produced infrastructure at an outside base and the game was irrecoverable; I tapped out.
Overall I felt it was an entertaining game to play, with a varied mix of units from both sides - him with immortal/zealot/darktemp/col, me with stalker/zealot/hightemp/archon. I feel that the separation of the light/dark templar buildings locks you into one path - I never got the covert warriors but he forewent the power of storm.
The obelisk vs pylon choice is still very interesting; due to the rampless map neither of us wanted to go obelisk before second pylon, but I can see this changing around as more people play the game.
Overall he outplayed me; I felt my army control was better, but his understanding of SC2 definitely exceeds mine and led to his win despite losing most of the battles. I think this is good, as mechanical SC1 players will not necessarily prove dominant in SC2 if they don't know what's going on, but SC1 mechanics will still assist you in the sequel.
If there's interest I can share a more 'strategic' type battle report of a game I played against another Blizzard dev; it's a much shorter game but I feel it shows how SC2 cheese will be more varied and viable than SC1.
![[image loading]](http://www.incgamers.com/images/screenshots/9323orig.jpg)
