Pony Express Issue 117: Mar. 22 - Apr. 12, 2010

Well I was going to recommend a game from KT vs STX from April 13th, but well, no VODs for those are up yet, so here's the next best thing recently – a TvT from the Winner's League finals, Flash vs Sea on Neo Moon Glaive.

And thus the game begins with Flash landing his Orange Command Center at 12,



and Sea landing his red Command Center at 7.



Both players go for the standard 12 Rax/12 Refinery, and getting their factory with their first 100 gas.

Sea loses his scout SCV, with not too much information gained, but feels confident enough to place his CC at the natural despite not getting too much information.

Flash opts to start his Command Center above the cliff, which means his expo will be slightly slower, but it shouldn't matter too much.

Sea scouts with his Rax, seeing both that Flash has a Tank and that he is building a CC to take his natural.



Meantime though, Flash gets a rather large force of Rine/Tank/Vult, and begins to push towards Sea's base. However, Sea has the crucial SCV outside of Flash's base, and sees the push incoming, so Flash pulls back in case of a Vulture counter attack.



Flash decides to establish his sphere of influence, marking his territory early in the game. He uses Rines for mine clearing, while slowly pushing forward with his Tanks.

However, Sea favoring mass Vultures, charges into Flash's Tank line, and absolutely decimates Flash's paltry force since Flash had about half of his Tanks lagging behind his forward advance force.



Sea, sensing a moment of weakness, then charges into Flash's natural with his Vultures, getting some SCVs and delaying mining. However, Sea did lose all of his Vultures in that attack, though he continues to push up with his forces, being rather aggressive.




Meanwhile though, Flash ignores all that and decides to take his third, starting his CC much faster than Sea, and even finishing it before Sea starts his third CC.



Unfortunately Sea made a tactical error when he decided to continue to apply pressure and add factories after he lost his Vultures. As a result he gets pressured by Flash's superior Tank numbers, losing a lot of Tanks as he scrambles to get his defense together.



Sea then tries to harass with Vultures at Flash's third, and Flash accidentally wanders a lot of units right into Mines!





And the MBC bench goes wild!



A few minutes later, he does it again!



And they go wild again!



At this point Sea is looking pretty good, having harassed successfully with his Vultures while maintaining his economy at a steady rate. He is also able to get his fourth up before Flash starts his thanks to his successful Vulture harass and Mines.



Sea also tries to push up the right side with a small force, probably trying to get his Tanks in a position to hit Flash's Factories from the middle, but is stopped by Flash's Tank force.



Now Flash has macroed up a rather large force, and is threatening a push into Sea's territories. Thanks to Moon Glaive's map positional imbalance layout, Sea is forced to place Tanks inside his main, decreasing his Tank army by three Tanks, which is pretty big.



Looking at the minimap, Sea has his forces rather spread out for whatever reason, and soon Flash pushes with his extremely large Tank force into Sea's eastern position, which gets crushed immediately. Sea is now in a precarious situation as his army is looking small compared to Flash's massive Tank ball.







Now Flash, recognizing the superiority of his forces, decides to fight to control the key resource node on this map – the 4 o'clock expansion.



Control of the unoccupied main bases almost always ends up being game breaking because it's usually the last untapped reservoir of gas left on the map after every other expansion has been taken. In any case, Sea is able to push back Flash's dropped forces at 4, though he's now fallen behind on upgrades.

Once again, thanks to Moon Glaive's positional imbalance layout, Sea has had to spend a stupid amount of resources on defense in his main, which is hurting him as he tries to grab more bases. Flash doesn't have this limitation.





And now Flash pushes to take advantage of Sea's separated forces. Sea has forces at 4 and his main, so naturally his main ball is smaller than Flash's. Flash takes advantage of this situation by pushing in and absolutely crushing Sea's main ball.



At this point, Sea is in a very desperate situation as his bases at the bottom of the map are severely threatened. Sea is forced to pull SCVs to defend, but even that isn't able to do much good, and he ends up losing all of his SCVs at one of his bottom bases, setting back his economy big time.





Sea is finally able to bring his forces to bear and crush Flash's push.



But now Flash has a very comfortable lead as his two bases at top right kick in, and his economic advantage takes off. Flash presses the advantage by threatening an attack at multiple locations, though now he seems content to try and prevent Sea from taking control of 4 natural.

Suddenly Flash brings his forces to bear on 4 main, and he crushes Sea's forces there.





Sea is forced to tap out.



Bad for Sea that he ended up getting hit by the positional er... wackiness of the map. However, that was well played by Flash, taking advantage of the fact that Sea's forces were spread throughout the map in small pockets. Flash hit hard and strong with a giant Tank ball, absolutely crushing any resistance from Sea, and gaining a huge economic advantage as he took out the SCVs at 6 while grabbing both bases at top right. Sea could have gotten back into that game, but he lost so many units to Flash's concentrated attacks that he couldn't build back up to an economic and army parity. GG.

Hi guys, since its been a few weeks since the last Pony Express I'll recommend three games