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Katowice25012 Posts
Flash is pretty good. Flash is so good that he inspired me. To make graphs. Maybe it shouldn't be a shock that when I'm inspired I play with charts though.
Anyway I was thinking of pitching this to the OSL newspost but then I got so drunk on Saturday that I woke up on the wrong side of the city without my glasses and a bruise that covers the entire right side of my body. Do you have any idea how much it sucks to walk home 6 miles when you can't see, don't know where you are, and have pizza down the entire front of your once fresh white shirt?
I'm not letting my hard work go to waste though. I had a funny genius idea and I'm not letting anything stop me from showering myself in praise.
What I did was take the supply counting box OSL has (that for some reason no other league can/will/wants to use even though its the best thing ever) and use it to make a time series. Standard disclaimer about how this strips a game completely of context applies, its meant to be used in conjunction with other knowledge not instead of.
It looked horrible when I tried to add labels, one axis is food and the other is time I hope you can tell which is which
This is the game that gave me an idea. After I saw flash move out and decimate Pure's army in about 5 seconds, I started laughing at how silly a graph would look that depicted their respective food levels.
Its also impressive (or at least interesting) that in the 10-12 minute marks it looks like you can actually see flash out-macroing Pure. He had less bases at that point and still manages to catch up in food while Pure's growth tapers off (though from what I remember this is when he was harassing with shuttles so maybe losing a reaver is what is showing).
Then comes the best part, you can actually see when Flash moves out and their armies engage. At the 14 minute mark flash has 168 food and Pure has 159. Exactly a minute later, as Flash's push has extended towards the top and is taking out bases, Pure is down to 90 while Flash is at 145. Its over by now and the graph shows Pure making his last ditch effort and losing everything.
Did you know Pure is 0-2 against ZergBong? Thats almost as amusing as the time Calm lost to Rage
Wax said in his recent OSL article that game 2 is the one in which Flash had to actually work for his win. The cool thing about this graph is that it shows, at one point Pure is at 140 supply to 98 (I actually double checked that because it seemed so unlikely). How often does someone come back from a 40 food deficit in the semi-finals of a starleague?
Again this graph makes it look like Flash has better macro overall, but there were a lot of small skirmishes as Flash took his third so its more likely a result of tanks beating dragoons in a one on one fight. I have no idea how Flash conjures up an army while Pure is losing units though, I guess he is just that much better. He loses a huge chunk of his army while Pure takes pretty minor losses and he makes tons of stuff out of thin air and wins a ton of battles to take it.
This graph needs a lens flare to go with the swinging gradient
Shockingly enough the first ~11-12 minutes of this are the same as earlier games. Terran grows less quickly than the toss and then Flash evens it up by mid game because he can click factories really fast. Pure wins some small battles but it doesn't matter as Flash still matches him in food a minute later.
I have a note that says Pure's first carriers popped at around 14 minutes, and you can see the counts are relatively even until it gets to the point where he has enough to start charging headfirst into goliaths. You can see the part when Pure stops mining because his population flat-lines while Flash is still growing.
Writing captions is the best part of using pictures--how cool are italics?
As a bonus I averaged out the numbers and got a graph of "the series". The points between 19 and 24 are just game 3, because the others didn't go that long.
If you were to sum of the series having seen nothing but this, you would probably come to the conclusion that Flash is stronger at macro (see the lines between the 12 and 14 minute mark) and that he fared better in engagements. Seems like a reasonable assessment, but that could also be said for any TvP that ends in a 3-0. I do think this gives a good view of how the entire series was, in a single image.
It might be interesting to do this same thing for a match that end in 3-2 and see if you can draw any conclusions about "how much a person won by" or the relative levels of play. A 3-0 limits what any kind of composite view is going to show (these were reasonably one sided games in general too, no idea if that helps or hurts). It would be neat to grab this similar data for more games and see if anything worthwhile pops up but I'm too big a degenerate for that kind of time investment (maybe once those lazy horses on our banner start pulling their weight and helping us out cmon guys you're killing me here).
As I mentioned earlier this was sparked when I thought Game 1 would be funny to see Flash destroy pure in a few seconds and it definitely accomplishes that goal. In retrospect I stole this idea from BWChart, so I probably can't pat myself on the back too much. Still pretty fun to look at, and worth sharing because when you have a chart up on your browser your boss will think you're working.
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i lol'd at the droprate of pure's unit.
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this is great! gotta love graphs... reading now
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Nice. I didn't think flash looked too impressive. Rather pure looked like a newb who couldn't macro. I mean if you 12nex every game and get away with it you shouldn't let the terran catch up.
I kept thinking that if Stork were in Pure's place he would have won 2 of those 3 games easily. Flash is just too greedy and Pure is too stupid to punish him for it.
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italics are super cool.
lol@pure's dip at end of game1. sup steepness
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That's pretty cool. SC2 has those exact graphs in the score screen for every game (as well as a graph for resources income at each point in game), and it's one of my favorite features
I think the graph in game 2 also has a lot to do with Pure using so many goons to try to take out the 12:00 expansion and losing a lot to great sim city and mines.
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nice graphs and writeups, thanks
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I love graphs. I also have a fondness for Lee Young Ho. Great thread!
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i thought it was gonna be one of those jokes graphs. hah. nice writeup! pure never really had a supply advantage over him, even as a toss.
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Interesting. First graph made me laugh when pure's food just disappeared
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Remember, 9 factories can produce units FOOD as fast as 19 gateways, simply because vultures are produced twice as fast as any protoss military unit.
As we can see, on most games flash went 2 shops at most, 3 very late game. That means Flash can produce unit food count as fast as 16 gateways , abusing the tornado terran play style.
There is no way protoss can replenish faster then that, A protoss would need 5-6 bases to produce of 16 gateways. and Flash makes sure he shuts those down very quick
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interesting idea, but that's what everyone would expect from a standard TvP where the T wins in the end. T is supposed to grow a bit more slowly on supplies (if anything I was surprised Flash only had THAT LITTLE delay in supply growth). Then, if T makes good use of his units and doesn't get fucked up (which obviously doesn't happen in a 3-0 win) his army is more effective, and in every battle the supply drop is going to be steeper for P. I didn't whatch the games but looking at the food/time curves P was behind in the first place by having that little supply advantage compared to T, that's not normal, it was due to Flash's superior macro, the rest was just consequence of good engaging by T, which is by no means easy, expecially vs good flanking+spellcasting, but if achieved it grants by itself the win.
p.s. actually i think good engaging is the hardest part for a terran vs a protoss in a standard TvP (and by standard TvP I mean the evergreen mass and attack strategy by T), terran is allowed to have supply deficit as long as he can make up for it in that very moment when P decides to a-move into him.
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Isn't P supposed to pull ahead in food during the early and mid game? If anything, it's impressive that Flash can keep even.
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haha this was a pretty good read, nothing left to do but shower you in praise.
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United States12607 Posts
coooooooooooooool
thanks heyoka! Instantaneous twitter link for stats articles.
Also: it'd be really fascinating to see this kind of information for a large set of games. Do different matchups look strikingly different? What do the graphs tend to look like if Protoss / Terran fasts expands, or if Protoss wins? Can we develop some "index", that's like RBI or something, that measures how fast, on average, a player gains population when he's left to macro?
I have to say the one thing that I didn't really see is Flash outmacroing Pure. Seems their supplies grew at the same rate for the most part…maybe he pulled a little ahead in the midgame sometimes, but only marginally.
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The only 3-2 possible in the OSL right now is Semi-Finals B. The Finals would again be 3-0.
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It really seemed like Flash was far ahead of where he should have been on the food count in games 1 and 3, watching them live. Instead of being 10-20 food behind at times, he was almost even. However, he was able to get away with 1fact double expands both games (and took his 4th faster than Pure as well), so that pretty much seals it.
Seriously, don't try to outmacro Flash on 3-4+ bases. What are people thinking?
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Brilliant :D Make more please...
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On May 10 2010 20:43 JWD wrote: I have to say the one thing that I didn't really see is Flash outmacroing Pure. Seems their supplies grew at the same rate for the most part…maybe he pulled a little ahead in the midgame sometimes, but only marginally.
You can quite clearly see that Pure pulled ahead macrowise in the beginning of each game, because he 12nexed, and then flash's macrocurve makes a comeback due to his fast third as a response to the 12nex.
Pure 12-nexed in everygame or else the macro would have differed more I think.
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On May 10 2010 21:50 StylishVODs wrote:Show nested quote +On May 10 2010 20:43 JWD wrote: I have to say the one thing that I didn't really see is Flash outmacroing Pure. Seems their supplies grew at the same rate for the most part…maybe he pulled a little ahead in the midgame sometimes, but only marginally. You can quite clearly see that Pure pulled ahead macrowise in the beginning of each game, because he 12nexed, and then flash's macrocurve makes a comeback due to his fast third as a response to the 12nex. Pure 12-nexed in everygame or else the macro would have differed more I think.
Protoss supply =/= Terran supply, its a little more complex than that
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