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On October 31 2011 19:50 Plexa wrote:Show nested quote +On October 31 2011 19:47 RuneZerg wrote:
In the last engagement i dont think any amount of micro could've saved you - he was just too far ahead by then
I accept that he had the game won. But with that said I dont think I was as cost effective as I should have been in the deciding engagement. Agree/disagree?
Indeed, you lost your sentries in the engagement prior to this one. This caused you to have no chance to block out the roaches while dealing with the bane drops, it just became you attempting to flee from the inevitable death. With forcefields you can lay a wall for the roaches(and in this case the banelings he left on the ground) if he doesnt pull overlords back, then stutterstep snipe overlords while stalker-blink-splitting if he does then try snipe a few while they are on retreat, 1 overlord with banes is 300 minerals and 100 gas, and get a few while the overlords are on the retreat. If you do this properly his bane count should be diminished when you are forced to engage and a good split prolly make the banedrops kill your shields but nothing else. I think my main point is that banedrops is a HUGE investment - and with good micro you can make it very very cost inefficient for the zerg
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I don't really have the game knowledge down to say if you should change the unit comp but just looking at baneling stats i would encourage you to have some more colossus to kill them as they drop while you move your stalkers. Storm would work as well but between forcefields and microing/blinking stalkers there's enough on your plate (or hand i should say haha)
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Watched all 3 reps. The banerain wasn't really your problem. You would have lost all 3 battles even if there were no banelings. 2 major issues:
1. You're bad at deathballing lol
2. You either panic or get too excited during the battles. Maybe the banelings are causing you to panic or something. But either way, you need to improve your late game army control.
So what do I mean by you're bad at deathballing? First of all, you're not attacking with a 200/200 army, so your army is already unnecessarily weaker than it should be from the start of the engagement. Game 1 you attacked with 180 supply, game 2 you attacked with 170 supply (random zealots + colossus elsewhere). I understand that sending some zealots at an expo while you attack with your main army is a good strat, but you can't afford to spend 20-30 supply doing so. Second of all, your composition is just... lacking. Game 1 you had basically just stalker/immortal. Why no HTs? Game 2 you had mostly stalker with only 1 colossus and 2 HT (wtf?), which got caught out of position and died pretty quickly anyway. Game 3 was a bit better, although you probably could have used some robo units in there. Anyway the point is you need a better 200/200 army composition. More robo units. More HTs. Adding in air would be good too.
Microing during the big engagements: you're too trigger happy with blinking all your stalkers at once. During big engagements, there's probably only 2 scenarios where you'll ever want to blink all your stalkers at once - 1) chasing after a retreating army or 2) you have a lot of zealots in your army and they're all trapped behind your stalkers. Game 1 the blink forward automatically killed you. You don't need to blink all stalkers to try to kill some infestors. Just take a few. Game 2 you blinked everything back which caused the rest of your army (especially your power units - ht/colossus/immortal) to get picked off easily. Just blink a few stalkers back at a time. Preferably the ones that are getting hit. This also helps a lot against banelings since then you can spread your army out via blinking as well.
Your spell usage is lacking in these big engagements. Again I think you panic too much. Many times you have sentries but either don't use GS at all or wait until the battle is halfway over before remembering to throw up a GS. Then like in game 3, you had 5 HTs but only get 1 storm off before walking your HTs into the opposing army and forgetting about them. Really the only thing you have to worry about in these big battles is 1) is my army positioned ok (i.e. no zealots/archons trapped behind stalkers) 2) use spells like gs, ff, storm, and feedback and 3) blink stalkers backwards, a few at a time. It doesn't take 400 apm to do it, just don't be scared when you see overlords coming your way.
Also as a side comment I don't like your opening build. While it didn't put you behind in those 3 games (all 3 games you were either even with the zerg or ahead going into mid game after your zealot pressure even though it didn't seem like it did anything), I think it hits way too late. If you go FE > 2 gate you should aim to hit by 7:30-8:00 at the latest, otherwise why not go for warpgate timing instead? If I get a proxy pylon up I can get +1 zeal in the zerg's base by 7:45-8:00, if no proxy pylon then still 8:30. Yours were hitting at like 9 minutes into the game or something.
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I've only watched the first replay so forgive me if I don't have the full picture.
In my opinion, heavily stalker builds rely on map control, and scouting. In game 1, you built a single observer (and when it died, you didn't rebuild it). This hinders the protoss a lot because creep spread ends up winning map control back for the zerg.
Secondly, observers is used to gain vision of high ground. One of the advantages of blink is the ability to blink up to the high ground when attacked in an unfavourable situation. If you were able to blink up to the high ground in that first big engagement, I believe the banelings would have done less damage to your army, especially because you could target overlords without worrying about roaches there.
Lasty, you were right about passive. The last thing blink stalkers are good for is mobility. I would have liked to see you patrolling the map, and utilizing blink whenever in an unfavourable situation.
This analysis might not be top notch (platinum random player) but I hope it helps
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If you see overlords coming at you i find its best to just force field his entire army of and kite the overlords back, however in the first game you just get caught with your pants down due to that blink ^.^, like Doko said, there are a couple of macro slip ups which hinder you severely.
A few things to note;
The zealot push and eventual harass just doesn't seem to work at all, which accompanied with the 90 probes on 2 bases with 3/4 of your potential gas, just puts you significantly behind without him really doing anything.
You don't seem to scout or clear any creep, when you push out at 180 supply you are completely in the dark as to what he is doing, what i would consider is scouting with the warp prism, you should notice he is cleaning up your harass with nothing but roach ling, which would indicate he has limited anti-air, allowing you to be significant more aggressive with your warp prism in terms of scouting
Other than that, smart engagements are key you lose a bunch of stalkers just due to bad luck when you try to take your third, and the first 3 zealot pushes could have gone significantly better if you had hugged the walls and ran those first 4 away from them queens 
Like i said before, blinking all your stalkers, unless you know its safe, is way to risky, losing 5 or 6 to get 1 or 2 Infestors and realizing you need to back up is way better than what happened
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i don't understand why are you going so much with a gateway composition, i mean blink stalkers are good but if you have extra immortals, they will take a steaming dump on banelings and roaches altogether
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I just watched game 1 and one thing i noted that you had 4 robotics facility at the 26 min mark and only built 1 observer and 1 warp prism. If you had built 2-4 immortals from the first 2 robos you things could have gone differently. And i dont know why you built 2 extra robos when you didnt even use the ones you had. I think thats the main thing you did wrong in this game didnt use the robos. Just my opinion.
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Okay, in the game against whiteout the zealot pressure doesn't hurt you at the least. You still lost more cost for cost but you kept his drone count low at the least.
The zealot/sentry/void ray attack was nice. After this attack you have no real info about the zerg's unit composition or number of bases. use what you have at your disposal and grab a phoenix for scouting. You have the money for it for a long period of time. Against the heavy roach composition, skipping charge in favor of an earlier blink with gas going into dt/stalker instead of archon (ht variant) and charge and storm. None of which are great against roach.
He didn't have an overseer there either so you could have dealt a lot of damage while taking nearly none around 15 minutes in his counter attack.
The zealot/dt harass is nice in the mid-game and sets you up okay in the late game. I hate to say it but really it's your unit composition that got you killed. Before the large engagement you have 17zealots, 16 stalkers, 6 hts, 9 dts and 4 archons. You're up against around 50 roaches and 20 banes in overlords. Your army is screwed before this battle starts.
Once the battle happens though, you lose your hts that have 7 storms and only cast one. Without that aoe, which isn't good vs roach anyway you're in really rough shape. You need some immortals and preferably colossus to go with them. You lost a lot of gas units throughout the game which could have been 2-3 colossus to complement your army. I know they're boring but they're a pretty good unit.
Also, I've had success with HTs against bane drops when I engage them well away, say near the top tower on metal, from my base. Storm under the overlords as they try to chase you, then attempt to snipe as many as possible with the stalkers. Just leave the zealots sitting somewhere else for a flank. You cannot at any cost allow the banes to connect with your clumped zealots or you're in a lot of trouble. In this game against his composition your zealots are worthless.
In the game against Odal on Antiga, your zealot pressure cost effective at least. It's 62 drones to 52 probes and he doesn't have his 5th and 6th geyser which he'd love at this point for more mutas.
The second attack you're pushing cross map on antiga with zealot/sentry when you know there are mutas on the field. The two zealots in his mineral line get 12 worker kills which helps and I don't think you're that far behind. You deflect the muta harass very nicely and are ahead on resources lost. Taking a fourth base on that map can be very difficult pvz.
He has 5k banked to your 1500 but you have 3000 invested into cannons.
It was the engagement in the middle that really killed you. You have 3 obs and a watch tower on the map but none of them are there to spot for that engagement. He kills some hts and all of your sentries in exchange for some roaches.
After that you don't use your gas on the gold base and float 3500 minerals. If you had been able to spend that quickly you could have pushed much sooner. Those 78 lings are not nearly as intimidating at 22 minutes as the banes are at 25 minutes. You're right, after that the game is over.
I think you missed a timing after the infestors dropped their energy and played with the mindset that you were behind all game.
Well also, in that engagement you get caught in a bad position. If you're going to harass with 9 zealots, at 189 supply you're already missing 29 supply. Then there's an archon and HT in your main, so 35 supply. Then you also have 82 workers on two bases. Really, you're missing nearly 50 supply in army compared to him. Another 25 stalkers or 6 colossus and 13 stalkers would really make that fight look completely different. Or void rays against his roach/bling army that cannot hit air!
Against Mojar your zealots again do not do as poorly as you think. 11:13 probe count 58, drone count 45!
Transfer workers to third base faster. You know that.
Okay, one thing I've noticed in the three games is your army movement. What prompted you to move out at that point? You have observers and a stargate. Scout ahead of your army so you don't get caught in these awkward spots.
Once you were caught there the game was over. You have nothing that can engage that army yet. Colossus help a lot.
Overall points: Get more scouting info and keep observers ahead of your army. Cut workers earlier. If you prefer 82 workers, that's fine. I cannot tell you otherwise but you did not expand aggressively enough in these games to utilize 82, and 87 workers. I'd say 65-72 at your expansion rate. Just watch it more closely.
If your army had the nearly 50 supply you were missing in games 1 and 2 (between workers and not being capped) and you had a better position, spread and concave for the engagements from better scouting you can avoid the terrible engagements you endured.
Also, if they have no infestors harass the ovies and roaches more with storm, phoenixes or stalkers. And yes I know colossus are boring but they're very, very, very good.
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-- nevermind, I don't want to derail the conversation, will post my comment elsewhere --
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Well according to oGsMC, vs this strat, you should scout it (via sg or hallu opening) and when u see baneling nest, get twilight/blink and just don't move out.
He has made a bunch of banes and nothing to do with them if u just turtle. and create stalker/collosus deathball and get a cannon behind each mineral line to distract baneling drop pathing on probes.
As for the actual engagement later on, keep your stalkers on a separate key and move them forward and backward trying to snipe overlords. When the roach/overlord drop army tries to engage, forcefield off the roaches and run back with main army while keeping stalkers ahead to snipe the incoming overlords and blink backwards if necessary.
Most of beating this strat is based on practice with your army control vs this composition
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High diamond player, so hopefully you take my advice for what it is and can look past my low rank. Only saw the first replay, watched up until the 19 minute mark because the game seemed to be more or less over by that part so it's where you should watch. With your initial zealots when there is no creep spread you should put your zealots on the far side of the hatchery and on hold position. This way the queens take longer to get there since they move so slow, and much more importantly, with them hugging the hatchery on hold position they will attack the hatch until the lings come up, then immediately attack the lings and won't get surrounded. You got surrounded in the first 3 engagements from being in the open. The first time attacking the hatch, the next time attacking near his nat you were surrounded, and then your army got surrounded and you lost valuable gas units which actually hurts in later engagements. As already mentioned your offensive blink was the final nail in the coffin.
Since you defended quite well you were even despite having some poor engagements, but blinking in and being clumped you took extra damage from blings and potential fungals. Work on blinking back your front tiers of stalkers as ovies come in so the blings do as little damage as possible, and if they blow up on the immortals hardened shields you are in great shape as it takes a lot of banelings to kill an immortal.
You took your fourth quite late as you mentioned, but still had a quite high probe count. You were oversatured with 86 probes on 3 base which is enough to pretty much fully saturate 4 bases, so you were behind a full base worth of income from being over cautious. The wallin you made at your third was a good idea but restricted movement to your fourth which is a potential reason why you felt it was hard to take (although meta is hard to take expos against zerg.
The final thing I thought was that your tech seemed quite late after your robo. You didn't have templars or colossi which would have been a large help against the lategame zerg army. Your stargate was going up around 18 (more or less, can't remember exactly) minutes and you had no robo support bay or dark shrine or templar archives which would have helped out against the army you faced.
A brief summary, poor engagements, late fourth while oversaturated, late tech which you could have afforded to throw up earlier (especially if you had a faster fourth)
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I have a couple bits of what I would affectionately refer to as "dumb commentary". Before I check if a strategy is bad (stalkers/immortals vs. roach/bane), I like to check if the armies were at all even.
Game 1: His army was 7250/3000 to 5275/2350. So his army was almost 1.5x as expensive as yours. You had 1 upgrade advantage over him.
Game 2: 7425/2775 to 5300/3450. Closer, but 700 gas probably isn't worth 2100 minerals. It should be noted that you got a legitimately atrocious engage here. More on this later.
Game 3: You had a more expensive army here! Let's talk about this.
The underlying problem I see here is that you are going for high-tech, finesse units (DTs, HTs, Archons), and are then not managing them well. In the second game, your outgunned army is attacked while you aren't paying attention to it, and your colossi spend most of their brief lives focus-firing down rocks. There is no way you ever win this battle. =)
The third game is perhaps the most telling, though. Your composition is: Stalker, DT, Zealot, HT, Archon. His is Roach/Baneling. All of your units are on one hotkey. You have 6-7 high templars, all of which have 75 energy. In the engagement:
1.) Half your archons are in back.
2.) All but 1 of your high templars die without getting off a storm because they wander into melee range of roaches (woe!)
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Finally, I think that stalker/colossus is a better combo for fighting roach/baneling - zealot/HT heavy comps are exactly what a zerg wants to fight when he has mass roach. You just need to kite the zerg army while focusing down overlords until you're ready to fight. However, that circumstance never appeared in your game - the one time you had stalker/colossus (game 2), you got a really, really bad engage and lost your army.
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To summarize:
Stalker/Colossus is good against roach/baneling - templar tech/zealot really isn't.
If you use finesse units (HTs, sentries), you need to make sure you get the most out of them - otherwise, they're dead weight in your army. Another 6 storms and you might have won that battle in game 3.
In the first two games, your army was significantly smaller, resource-wise, than his.
In the last two games, you got awful engages.
Hope that helps.
-Cross
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Sorry, I'm not hear to help or watch any replays. But I would like to mention that, Plexa... You have more patience than I ever will. If I was the administrator of the site playing against some of these members, and I opened with clear forum guidelines posted in a sticky at the top of the forum, and transitioned into a post looking for help and had my opponent respond with the compositions shown in the first few posts... I'd be implementing my ban-rain strategy so fast the forum supply would drop from 200/200 to 160/200 before my opponents could Blink.
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The problem isn't the bahrain thing.
You seem to be playing a very passive style which allows Zerg to mass in the mid game and roll you over while assembling gateway heavy armies that are prone to get rolled over by these sorts of attacks. Remember that the gateway units are not very efficient without massive amounts of AOE to back them up. You need more colossus or HT/Archon. Immortals are good for roaches but then what? They are good for support or built up for a specific timing attack against roaches, don't just build tons of them like in game 1.
Additionally you should seek to engage in better positions. Both game 1 and game 2 basically were decided due to your army being caught in a really bad position without a good Col/Templar based core.
Protoss isn't my specialty but those are the general feelings I got.
Also: G1, the dropping is okay but it is easily counterable when you only drop/attack only at one place. A single drop isn't going to do anything to one base where the opponent can just sit his whole army under your war prism.
Also: Someone make a chocolate rain parody right now.
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I'll try to address the unit comp vs the banerain but first just general comments on the games:
Game 1: Your 4 zealot harass was meh. Whenever i do it I go 7 lots because either way if it's roaches you're way behind, but if you get to the third w/ no lings on your back, you can either take it out or force a massive number of lings and if you just sit in the mineral patch, 7 lots will basically tank an infinite number of lings.
If you bother to get a warp prism, do cool stuff with it. You basically did two attempts with it that flopped. Whenever i pop out a warp and am going b-stalks, i'll make 12 or so and head to the far expansion and basically drop my warp in his base as i hit the expo, and there's a very good chance that at least one will do damage. Usually you can get a zerg to flood everything to the expo with stalkers just by letting him see you're heading that way, you don't even have to actually attack it. Also 4 stalkers can do ridiculous work in a warp, drop snipe queens etc, its very underrated.
As far as unit comp goes, I think he would have beaten you whether or not the bane rain was there, his army was just bigger and scarier. You really also had no reason to attack. If you dont have archons, templar, or collos vs infestors, you have to have a much higher army count, which you didn't. I think you may have had that feeling of *oh no, it's zerg, he must be macroing and i'm gonna get owned if I don't attack* but your worker count was pmuch even, you could have just split the map in half and done some warp prism and blink stalker harass while you built up a better deathball.
I'd comment on the rest but i've already typed way too much.
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I play Zerg, not Protoss, but maybe I can give some insights from my POV:
Game 1: I feel you didn't make any big mistakes overall, but 2 things happened: the small losses you suffered added up and the Zerg had a bigger income (less harvesters for most of the game, but better spread out in more bases). Your harassments were inefectual and in the end his army was 2000/1000 stronger than yours, and, more importantly, your army comp didn't make up for it. Stalker/colossus can attempt to kite the baneling overlords, but stalker/immortal/sentry has a worse time doing it (plus no way try to kill infestors to deny fungal). After that, the game was in his favor, even though he made a few bad mistakes that almost put you back in there.
Anyway, I would avoid that unit comp unless you're sure he's just massing roaches or you have some kind of stargate stuff to force gas to be put into hydras. I was surprised how easily your army was rolled, though.
Game 2: You could have won if you just reinforced the zealot push! Both your macros went to hell, but he came out ahead since he had a 10 worker lead and (more importantly) his 3rd secured. Your second push was throughly crushed, and it was amazing you stayed in the game (great muta defence!). During the bainrain push you were kinda caught off-position, your army was a bit smaller and the stalkers got blink-stuck at that ledge (was funny, though).
Game 3: I just don't know what to say. The game looked yours until that big engagement. Still, your army was 20 food weaker at the time of the big engagement (though, still, you had the resourse lead), you didn't have forcefields or a decent aoe damage dealer (only 1 storm went off) and the positioning favored him a whole lot. Also, his banelings found their mark (zealots and HTs) so perfectly it brought a tear to my eye.
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Mothership archon beats baneling rain pretty decently, you don't destroy the army and you don't trade very well, but it takes a lot of banelings per archon and archons are massive so the splash is absorbed much better.
Personally I think every protoss who is going mass blink stalkers should try and take a 4th as fast as possible, its kind of difficult to "maintain" but its worth that risk, if not 3 bases is kind of hard to do.
Anyways upon mass blink stalker (you already have twilight ^^) if you scout the baneling nest with one of your many run bys, especially if you scout overlord speed is to tech to mothership asap. If you think about it, a zerg who is massing roaches has to afford baneling nest/drop/speed/overlords/zerglings/banelings on top of already having 160 pop of roaches (not very easy to do). Which means he will sacrifice roaches by engaging or harassing your third very slowly (losing 5 or so at a time to not incite a push). In this time you should be able to get a mothership out and some archons (again with your own sacrificing of 5 or so stalkers every once in awhile).
To answer your question about composition, just make sure your lategame composition is archon mothership blink stalker.
You should take it very slow, play methodical. There is almost never a reason to attack a zerg who is massing roaches, the longer they are forced that much pop the better. Just deny bases and blink away.
I hope this helps again this is the general "what to do", and you should be very careful with your units and be diligent with your scouting!
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Things to do
1)Split (Blink Split)
2) Focus Fire OLs
3)Let colossus do the tanking vs banes but not vs roach army.
4)Establish good positioning
5)Never! Engage on creep unless you have to
6)Immortals, Immortals, Immortals as they are both good against bling/roach army, and then you just stop at 2-3 colosus.
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In my personal experience of ZvP, I find Banerain to be a very powerful strategy against most unit compositions, but there are a few units that it ends up being essentially worthless against, specifically, the Archon, the Void Ray, and the Immortal.
Assuming a deathball is the goal, you are aiming for 4-6 colossi, a handful of voids, HTs, and as many stalkers as you can muster. While that is certainly a solid unit comp, adding immortals doesn't actually cost anything extra, and adding archons should always be a goal for any PvZ army (though their gas cost is extremely high, so skimping on them is understandable).
In general, I would just say to get more immortals once you start seeing roaches, even if that means delaying colossi. A zealot/immortal base for you army is actually a lot scarrier than a blink stalker base in my opinion.
For you specifically, I didn't see anything majorly wrong (saying to micro better vs banerain sounds like a cop out), I would just suggest tweaking the unit comp, that should give you more 1A goodness.
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Why don't you just do what terrans do with their marines and split them into really small groups. I imagine this would be really easy with blink
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EPT
