[H] TvP how can i win this?

Irre

United States646 Posts

April 23 2012 02:50 GMT

Hey, mid diamond terran just looking for some advice on how I can beat this.. I thought this is probably the best macro TvP I've played in forever..

I did a nice little timing early to kill off some probes, I held supply advantage ,was up a base, was ahead on upgrades, kept up with his composition, tried a drop, sniped his 3rd several times, control wasnt godlike but i thought it was decent...so what do I do?

I'm so demoralized, this guy was in low- mid platinum and if this is a platinum level protoss wtf am i going to do against master if i ever get there (been in diamond for about 8 months with no progress despite getting a TON better than i used to be)

thanks, sorry in advance for the little bits of bm in the game. For what its worth its a pretty exciting match to look at i think, lots of action.

http://drop.sc/165294

PlacidPanda

United States246 Posts

April 23 2012 03:05 GMT

Okay i'm sure you know this, but Sc2 is a game of advantages. When you get superior economy you sacrifice army/tech. yatta yatta, you know all this. So yes you were ahead on economy and upgrades and you were switching according to his unit comp. However when you have the economic advantage then certainly your opponent has the army advantage, (until your economy kicks in). If you have the economic advantage there is no reason you should attack, let him come to you, this allows you to pick the engagements. Several times i saw you lose an army, panic, then a move all your reinforcements in into his army. I'm sure you know that all armies snowball in Sc2 therefore you must wait for your reinforcements to pool before attacking, if you did this, and alllowed yourself to benefit from your economic advantage you would have won the game.
p.s. you dropped once...always be dropping, a drop is enough to take out an expo if the army is out of position enough, therefore instead of pushing the third immediately, drop in his main and third and then choose when you want to strike with your main force.

fire_brand

Canada1123 Posts

April 23 2012 03:18 GMT

The main thing I saw was when you did something good you followed it up with something awful. Like losing your entire army. This happened pretty much every time you sniped a nexus or did some good damage.

If you had pushed your early advantage you probably could have won. Instead you tried to macro up, with less than perfect macro while he chrono boosted probes off of 2 nexi and caught up fairly quickly. You had a lead, but you squandered it. Also your early third was entirely pointless as you didn't produce scvs off it, or saturate until 10 minutes after it was up.

Dropping the toss and losing the entire drop and killing 3 stalkers is a bad trade. If you're going to drop, have it as part of your gameplan, and have some sort of dual pronged attack with very specific goals in mind. If you're going to drop just because you have a medivac and some units by his main, probably a bad idea.

The last thing you need to be aware of is how to engage late game. In one engagement you had your vikings in a good place, but your infantry was severely clumped allowing the colossi to absolutely shred them. Your goal in those engagements should be to kite back against the gateway units while thinning out the zealots and allowing your vikings to kill the colossi. When that's accomplished the rest of the army should fall easily.

In the later game engagements you overstimmed and ate a lot of storms. You need to scan ahead and try to emp the ghosts. Failing that keep kiting back and try to never let the HTs in range of your army, or get a huge arc and micro back smaller groups that get stormed. That way you can trade cost efficiently by avoiding huge AOE that will destroy your army.

The last thing you really need to work on that sunk you is that you macro slipped when you were controlling your army. Usually when an engagement ended there were no units at home for you to resupply with. If you had units waiting at home those two colossi wouldn't have absolutely wrecked your economy. I think they killed something like 20 scvs.

You have the right parts for a good TvP, but its just these small details that will help you win these big games.

GL in the future, feel free to critique my dissection of your game. I hope it helps.

aznkukuboi

120 Posts

April 23 2012 03:37 GMT

First, you were never mining gas at an optimal level. Sometimes you had 2 on one and 1 on the other. Then your third base had 5 scv's on one gas. I don't get it. Then you had 6 idle scvs for a good 5 minutes, then it was 12 idle before you noticed.

Your drop play was almost next to nothing. Also, you didn't have enough vikings in some engagements. 3 vikings per collosus is a general rule of thumb. You can NEVER have too many vikings. After you kill the collosus, you just land them and they make your army 2x tankier as they absorb tons of hits

That one fight near the end where you lost like 4 ghosts really costed you hard.

pimsc2

France73 Posts

April 23 2012 04:14 GMT

Despite the protoss being horrible and played really worst than you, you lose because playing bio can't allow little errors like you made. If you want a more powerful & forgiving TvP style, try Lynna's mech, Hammer 1-1-1, or Warden's Deathball. You'll never be annoyed again by the stupid protoss deathball. So I checked your replay and took a lot of screenshots :

————————————————————————————————
• Being agressive & not capitalizing on the benefits
————————————————————————————————

First you didn't produced SCV non stop so I consider your agressive push being very close to all in. Why the fuck would you 1 rax expo if you don't produce SCV constantly ? He has 10 more probes than you at the beginning. Anyway that's not my point.

7:48 • When you were attacking, 31 probes vs 27 SCVs :
[image loading]

8:46 • You made a good amount of damage, 23 probes vs 30 SCVs :
[image loading]

10:02 • But after that, you forget to produce SCVs, so he catches up very quickly, 32 probes vs 33 SCVs :
[image loading]

RESULT : You're agressive, do damage, but don't gain any advantage of that.
LESSON : it doesn't make sense to be agressive and if you don't macro at home at the same time.

————————————————————————————————
• Useless drops & not capitalizing on the positionning
————————————————————————————————

You drop his main with half of your force.
[image loading]

When he brings his whole army, you continue to attack with half of your army,
while the other half do nothing. If you look at his expansion at the same time :

[image loading]

Free colossus snipe and free nexus snipe…

RESULT : You engage 100% of his army with 50% of your army = bad trade, pointless drop.
LESSON : When you drop, be ready to move with your main force if he brings everything.

————————————————————————————————
• Bad timings
————————————————————————————————

What is a timing ? Just after an important upgrade is finished, you army is a lot stronger
than one second before, and won't be any stronger until the next upgrade finishes in a few minutes.
So you have to attack at the right moment and avoid engagements otherwise. Examples :

You engage without +1 armor & shields and trade somewhat equally..
[image loading]

After, you engage just before +3 weapons & +2 armor.
[image loading]

This is the horrible result :
[image loading]

You engage just before having ghosts & energy upgrade and you're stormed :
[image loading]

RESULT : You attack at the weakest timings you could imagine.
LESSON : By delaying the engagements 10 to 20 seconds, you'll trade your units FAR MORE efficiently.
TO DO : Hotkey your engineering bays and check them before engaging.

————————————————————————————————
• Bad macro
————————————————————————————————

Your macro is poor for a diamond player. You really want to improve this.

12:52 • 1-1 is finished and your armory too.
[image loading]

14:46 • You stay on 1 engineering bay and you waited 2 entire minutes before starting +2 attack
[image loading]

21 minutes, you only have 5 barracks despite having 3 bases, all with tech lab.
[image loading]

It means 5 units by production cycle. You're lucky the protoss only made 5 gates the entire game otherwise
you would have lost since a long time.

22:26 • Here you have a saturated main since a few minutes :
[image loading]

25:09 • You transfer only when you realize they're idle… It's really too late.
[image loading]

28:38 • The last big fight, SCV count : 67
[image loading]

They're toasted by colossi fire
[image loading]

Result, only 37 remaining scvs vs 55, you lost 30 scvs and you never remade them…
[image loading]

RESULT : Your blind agressive bio style greatly penalizes your macro.
LESSON : Focus on your macro, upgrades, economy & production rather than pushing.

————————————————————————————————
• Debrief
————————————————————————————————

Overall you played equally if not far better than the protoss who really sucked. But as you know, playing bio requires perfection. Great positinning, great upgrades, great army control, great macro. If you still want to play this style, you may get angry and rage a lot to protoss players because you need to perform really better than them at equal leagues. As your understanding of TvP bio isn't so great, I recommand you to try other TvP styles like Hammer, Lynna or Warden bio-mech play that may fit a lot more to you and that a lot of us are using with great success. Anyway good luck in your future TvP games.

Veetz

Canada109 Posts

April 23 2012 04:18 GMT

i would suggest building a 3rd cc if you are going to go for 4-5 barracks.. you delay gas already so another cc before taking gas isn't much diff and the extra mules/scv production will keep you ahead, instead you went for a medvac timing which was already too late since collosus were out.. then losing 2 medvacs worth of units for 3 stalkers evened it up and even put you behind if you hadn't been so far ahead in upgrades.. i felt like your economy management is ok but needs to be improved.. you stayed on 4 rax for so long, though he did force a bunch of vikings. Personally, i need 6 rax when 3rd finishes and usually more once it has kicked in and once i have 65 + scvs,, so your production wasn't where it needed to be .. Also, after you lost some scvs to his pushes, you never rebuilt them. you stayed on 43 scvs for a long time so you needed to rebuild those asap if you were to have any chance in the late game. Also ghosts came too late, ghost academy by 13 mins, no exceptions.. this is the latest ghost academy u can get assuming standard play.

Windwaker

Germany1597 Posts

April 23 2012 12:36 GMT

1. Concentrate more on your SCV-Production
2. Add more Raxes youe were on 5 rax (no reactor) until 25 minutes or so.

etherealfall

Australia476 Posts

April 23 2012 13:27 GMT

On April 23 2012 13:14 pimsc2 wrote:
Despite the protoss being horrible and played really worst than you, you lose because playing bio can't allow little errors like you made. If you want a more powerful & forgiving TvP style, try Lynna's mech, Hammer 1-1-1, or Warden's Deathball. You'll never be annoyed again by the protoss stupid deathball. So I checked your replay and took a lot of screenshots :

————————————————————————————————
• Being agressive & not capitalizing on the benefits
————————————————————————————————

First you didn't produced SCV non stop so I consider your agressive push being very close to all in. Why the fuck would you 1 rax expo if you don't produce SCV constantly ? He has 10 more probes than you at the beginning. Anyway that's not my point.

7:48 • When you were attacking, 31 probes vs 27 SCVs :
[image loading]

8:46 • You made a good amount of damage, 23 probes vs 30 SCVs :
[image loading]

10:02 • But after that, you forget to produce SCVs, so he catches up very quickly, 32 probes vs 33 SCVs :
[image loading]

When he brings his whole army, you continue to attack with half of your army,
while the other half do nothing. If you look at his expansion at the same time :

[image loading]

After, you engage just before +3 weapons & +2 armor.
[image loading]

This is the horrible result :
[image loading]

You engage just before having ghosts & energy upgrade and you're stormed :
[image loading]

14:46 • You stay on 1 engineering bay and you waited 2 entire minutes before starting +2 attack
[image loading]

21 minutes, you only have 5 barracks despite having 3 bases, all with tech lab.
[image loading]

25:09 • You transfer only when you realize they're idle… It's really too late.
[image loading]

28:38 • The last big fight, SCV count : 67
[image loading]

They're toasted by colossi fire
[image loading]

Result, only 37 remaining scvs vs 55, you lost 30 scvs and you never remade them…
[image loading]

Best post ive seen in a long time. Ditto.

HeyJude

United States157 Posts

April 23 2012 13:46 GMT

One thing that really helped my play overall as a terran player was learning to do proper drops. Take for instance your total supply is at <100 supply. You never send more than one dropship to a location, and don't be greedy with your drops either. If you can take out a few probes, or a pylon, etc, do it, then get your drop out. Get in the habit of returning to that dropship after doing macro rounds and keep dropping in and picking stuff off until he keeps units there. Late game it's ok to send a couple dropships once you're at or near max supply, but early game if you lose that much you can GG it :/

Nihonjin

66 Posts

April 23 2012 13:57 GMT

#10

Nice post to help op out. But that last part was not necessary or is true. Bio requires perfection and need more skills than toss. Bio is so flexible you can trade mich better than toss. You can harass so easily, you can lose the army and still be in the game unlike toss, and you can reproduce much faster. Mech requires perfection, good positioning and more skill than opponent i believe

Harbinger631

United States376 Posts

April 23 2012 14:19 GMT

#11

O_o....what an amazing post by PrimSC2!

pimsc2

France73 Posts

April 23 2012 14:24 GMT

#12

On April 23 2012 22:57 Nihonjin wrote:
Nice post to help op out. But that last part was not necessary or is true. Bio requires perfection and need more skills than toss. Bio is so flexible you can trade mich better than toss. You can harass so easily, you can lose the army and still be in the game unlike toss, and you can reproduce much faster. Mech requires perfection, good positioning and more skill than opponent i believe

Thanks. Yes maybe I'm a bit biaised, I lost so many games to bad protoss with lower apm & lower skills that I can't bear playing bio anymore. I think we can agree that both bio & mech requires perfection, but it's really more easy to reach perfection using mech, bio mech or even skyterran. You compensate the mobility with sensor towers everywhere to help perfecting your positionning, you have great turtling ability with tanks if you're late on macro or you need to secure an expand, you have more overall firepower and the protoss are not used to play against it so much so they're not as crisp as when they play against bio.

I also don't agree that much about the faster reproduction. After being maxed out the warping mechanics give one more production cycle for the protoss, and usually protoss lategame have a lot more gates than you have barracks. Don't forget gates can warp high tech units like DT, High templar & Archons to spend instantly a gas pool, or you can warp 20 zealots to spend a mineral pool. As a terran, you can't adjust that easily your production instantly to spend more or less gas.

Overall, it seems very hard to me to play bio at diamond & above leagues in the current state of the game, even if players with incredible controls like MMA, MKP or MVP don't have our issues thanks to their talent & their speed.

Anyway, it's not the place to talk about this. I just recommended the OP to try other styles that may make him happy again in TvP where he seems totally lost.

Irre

United States646 Posts

April 23 2012 14:28 GMT

#13

@fire brand: Thanks for the advice.. I definitely know there was at least twice where I did a poor job of macro during battles that left me with few reinforcements. It was fairly good for a lot of the game but there were spots to wrok on, and having more rax with reactors would have helped immensely, I was somewhat surprised by his collosus timing given that i killed ~8-10 probes early adn he had 5 gates and a robo so fast, so I paniced and threw down a lot of tech labs and never made reactors.
I also know my late game control slipped as things went on. I tend to get more and more tilted a game goes on because i know it becomes more and more unwinnable lol.
I will disagree on two points though: I may not have had perfect scv production after my marine timing, but he did spend all his CB to get out probes after that so he was able to catch up quickly regardless of my scv production. That being said, for that time in the game to be even or slightly ahead of protoss on workers is good bc of double mule. I also don't think my drop was pointless, I saw what he had left and where he was running from, and I did less than i wanted to with the drop but I killed a decent amount of units so it traded ok. It was probably better to just regroup and attack though, i could have won the game with a followup push. Thanks so much for the input.

@pimsc2: Thank you very much for that post, i can't believe how well you laid all that out for me, I feel undeserving of it actually! Lots of things I can actually see and work on...and I do thank you for acknowledging that I played way better than he did, that was the most frustrating part of all this for me..I realize its not perfect play im in diamond, but to lose to that protoss made me very sad t.t

I want to point out that he chronoed probes a lot early on, and I dont think i did a terrible job of producing scvs early game, but I will still keep it in mind throughout bc there were definite lapses throughout the game of scv production.

I will definitely try to pay more attention to macro things that ive been missing. I thought up until the 3rd CC landed, everything was going really well on that front. Then I gained some ground and I just spent way too much time moving my army and attacking with mechanics that I just don't have yet. I will start trying to hotkey Ebays for sure, and pay more attention to production. I definitely had up to 8 rax ( 2 at my natural 2 at my 3rd) but I am not sure when, so I probablyc ould have added earlier. Not having reactors was a huge mistake; as i said before I panicced with the collosus timing and forgot reactors...big mistake

As far as timings go I really appreciate that advice, I will try and work on planning out attacks better. My issue with this whole MU is I am constantly feeling that I have to end the game asap, bc I can't and don't want to fight the deathball. I also knew I was very far ahead in upgrades a lot of the game so I wasnt really thinking about a specific timing on them. ( At least one big engagement i had 2-1 and he had 0/0 still).

The engagements: I don't feel like they were horrible up until storm came out, but with the 2-1 upgrade advantage I felt that I should have done better than I did...collosus are so annoying

I also was in a position that I couldn't reinforce, but considering I killed his base and he couldnt push into me after the battles, I woudl assume taht is a good trade for me?

@Everyone: I have been really working on in all my MUs just being very very active with my armies, and this requires a pretty high amount of multitask. For the sake of improving on all these small things, do you reccomend not being so active? I can do a lot more of the advice in this thread if i slowed down a bit with all my aggression and movement on the map, but I am torn on the correct way to incorporate these new ideas..In the long run you have to do it all, but if slowly focusing on these things while maintaining activity is the better route to go im not sure.

Anyway, thanks for the help..lots of specific things to actually mentally check during games now and specifically improve on. Its actually really hard to improve macro at this point because its a lot of smaller things hard to pick up on watching your own stuff. Unfortunately no quick solutions to actually winning other than to do cheesy builds, but I'll at the very least improve on a lot of stuff while losing more TvP lol..and thats all I can really hope for right now I think...

zefreak

United States2731 Posts

April 23 2012 14:43 GMT

#14

You have 32 scv's by 10 minutes while 1rax expo? That should be the first thing you fix.

pimsc2

France73 Posts

April 23 2012 14:59 GMT

#15

Yes this is an important point. If you 1 rax expo you should be at around 45 VCS at 10 min.

zefreak

United States2731 Posts

April 23 2012 16:33 GMT

#16

Irre, I feel like you don't understand just how bad some of your benchmarks are. Your response to the help in this thread is a lot of 'well i actually didn't do that bad but yeah there were certain spots my macro slipped etc'. This is not the mindset that will help you improve. Your early macro was actually poor. Not tiny mistakes, but big ones. Unless you realize how you lost a game that should have been yours you will not improve.

I don't want to be mean or rude but I feel like you are going to not take advantage of all the great help in this thread because you overestimate your own ability. 32 scv's at 10 minutes while 1rax FE is like.. 20 scv's off of where it can be. Think about that for a moment. You have 60% of the amount of scv's you should have by the 10 minute mark. If your macro is that bad in the first 10 minutes, I shudder to think how poor it gets on a 3+ base economy.

edit: as for your question regarding practicing specifics (IE micro) or multitasking, definitely work on specific things first. Multitasking is not something you 'practice'. Multitasking happens automatically once the specifics are figured out and memorized completely.

Trying to learn to multitask is the wrong way to go about it. Drummers don't flail their limbs about in order to learn hand/foot independence. They must master first hand and then foot technique in order to be able to eventually learn it. Pianists will often learn one hand of a song, and then the other, and finally put them together. What you think of as practicing multitasking is actually just reinforcing sloppy play. You will not get better at your specific weaknesses in such a haphazard manner.

pimsc2

France73 Posts

April 23 2012 16:48 GMT

#17

Yes zefreak is right. It's not about strategy or unit comp. It's purely about macro & execution. Fix all these SERIOUS flaws and you'll be master soon. Then you will be able to blame your strategic sense & decisioning as the real factors of your loss, but for now it's just about executing everything better & faster, as for all players before master league.

Xyst

Turkey66 Posts

April 23 2012 18:10 GMT

#18

Amazing post PrimSC2!

Irre

United States646 Posts

April 23 2012 18:21 GMT

#19

ok then lots to work on;hopefully I can start buckling down again soon..very busy with a move and some other stuff atm. I get too stressed and angry playing sc2 right now, but I should be more clearminded and calm when thats done

Thanks again for the amazing post/advice pimsc2 and for a slight dose of reality defreak lol, I hope that I can look back at replays from when I was playing more and see less severly bad macro mistakes early game, but if not I at least know what i gotta do now..

pimsc2

France73 Posts

April 23 2012 18:46 GMT

#20

My pleasure

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