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Master League Zerg, 900 pts.
Replay: http://drop.sc/185666
Map: Shakuras Plateau, cross positions
So a lot of Protosses have begun to figure out how to stop Stephano-style roaches by utilizing sentry/immortal behind a wall which makes it almost impossible to break unless the Protoss messes up with their forcefields. This causes the Zerg to have to grab a 4th, 5th and eventually a 6th base and turtle up on spine crawlers.
The replay posted above showcases such play. My response was going to spire tech, grabbing my 4th, then shortly after my 5th and 6th. Again, his mutalisk defense was great and he was able to keep my roaches out. So my army consists of zerglings, roaches and mutalisks, all that get countered by his 200/200 deathball.
Here are my questions:
- Were there any flaws in my macro (outside of my terrible supply blocks)?
- Was mutalisk tech the correct response? Should I have opted to go pure ling muta and tech very fast to hive tech?
- Was my drone count when he pushed too high?
- What could I have done differently with the composition that I did have?
Please watch the replay before you post. I think my problem is game-specific. Thanks in advanced! 
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On Shakuras Plateau the standard 3-base mass roach beats this easily. If his army is in his third attack his natural, and if it's in his natural attack his third. (If it's anywhere else, just swarm into the natural expansion) He then has to attack your roach ball from behind. It doesn't really matter how good his forcefields are at this point, a minimum of half your army will still be pushed into the third or the natural expansion, allowing it to destroy everything while he's blocked by his own forcefields. You'll eventually lose all the roaches, but he'll at best lose his third base and all the blocking buildings, a large portion of which are probably gateways so he has no production to take advantage of the fact that your whole army just got killed. Just start a spire, take gases 5 and 6, and go up to 160/200 on roaches again and get mutas when spire finishes and you have a free win at that point. Your mistake was to add more bases.
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On May 25 2012 10:33 Xequecal wrote:
On Shakuras Plateau the standard 3-base mass roach beats this easily. If his army is in his third attack his natural, and if it's in his natural attack his third. (If it's anywhere else, just swarm into the natural expansion) He then has to attack your roach ball from behind. It doesn't really matter how good his forcefields are at this point, a minimum of half your army will still be pushed into the third or the natural expansion, allowing it to destroy everything while he's blocked by his own forcefields. You'll eventually lose all the roaches, but he'll at best lose his third base and all the blocking buildings, a large portion of which are probably gateways so he has no production to take advantage of the fact that your whole army just got killed. Just start a spire, take gases 5 and 6, and go up to 160/200 on roaches again and get mutas when spire finishes and you have a free win at that point. Your mistake was to add more bases.
His natural wasn't something I could cost-effectively attack into. Sentries, 2 cannons with immortals will clean up a lot of roaches and basically render my attack useless. As for the third, he had a nice wall, plenty of sentries and stalkers. Again, attacking up there would be suicidal and all he'd have to do is leave his base and attack me after I throw away my units.
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On May 25 2012 10:41 romelako wrote:Show nested quote +On May 25 2012 10:33 Xequecal wrote:
On Shakuras Plateau the standard 3-base mass roach beats this easily. If his army is in his third attack his natural, and if it's in his natural attack his third. (If it's anywhere else, just swarm into the natural expansion) He then has to attack your roach ball from behind. It doesn't really matter how good his forcefields are at this point, a minimum of half your army will still be pushed into the third or the natural expansion, allowing it to destroy everything while he's blocked by his own forcefields. You'll eventually lose all the roaches, but he'll at best lose his third base and all the blocking buildings, a large portion of which are probably gateways so he has no production to take advantage of the fact that your whole army just got killed. Just start a spire, take gases 5 and 6, and go up to 160/200 on roaches again and get mutas when spire finishes and you have a free win at that point. Your mistake was to add more bases. His natural wasn't something I could cost-effectively attack into. Sentries, 2 cannons with immortals will clean up a lot of roaches and basically render my attack useless. As for the third, he had a nice wall, plenty of sentries and stalkers. Again, attacking up there would be suicidal and all he'd have to do is leave his base and attack me after I throw away my units.
If he's taking a third base and you do an 11-11:30 roach max, there's no way he can have enough units to defend both bases. If his army is split up between bases just hit the third and you'll easily break it. You've got close to double his supply at that point, and he's now got 40 supply of army in his natural that will never contribute to the fight at all. He certainly can't move it from the natural to the third when you have 60 roaches in the way that will annihilate it in the open field easily.
If his army is all in one place just hit where his army isn't and then you've removed his major advantage, he no longer has buildings in between your roaches and his army. He can try to use FFs to ram your roach ball against the third's blocking buildings but this will let the half of your army that got trapped by FFs just destroy the base he pushed it against. Yes you will lose all your roaches and kill few units, but it doesn't matter, you can remax incredibly fast and he has lost his third base and all the production buildings he used as walls.
The buildings blocking roaches is very strong on maps like CK, TDA, Entombed, Daybreak, Ohana because these maps let the Protoss wall such that there are always buildings between your roaches and his army regardless of which base you attack. Shakuras, Antiga, Metalopolis, Korhal do not allow this and there is simply no way to defend a third base from Stephano roaches.
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If you watch Stephano's games or listen to his commentary, he states that on shakuras it's better to go for infestor/broodlord rush instead of the roach max. The 3rd is pretty easy to defend on Shakuras and so when you see them taking a third you can just drone heavily and go infestor/broodlord and not have to worry about defending an all in.
For an example of this, go see hwangsin vs stephano from nasl yesterday.
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Yah, I agree with the notion that if the protoss takes SUCH an early third, you should simply grab your 4th and 5th together while rushing for hive tech behind 12312361215 spine crawlers and infestors.
Buy as much time as you can with infestors and spines while upgrading and getting broodlords, just be careful of prism harass and the game is yours to lose once you get 10+ broodlords with infestor support.
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On May 25 2012 11:13 EngrishTeacher wrote:
Yah, I agree with the notion that if the protoss takes SUCH an early third, you should simply grab your 4th and 5th together while rushing for hive tech behind 12312361215 spine crawlers and infestors.
Buy as much time as you can with infestors and spines while upgrading and getting broodlords, just be careful of prism harass and the game is yours to lose once you get 10+ broodlords with infestor support.
exactly, but at the same time if you think you can break their third, do it!
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How about nydusing (using 2 nydus worms) his main? I believe he won't be able to hold against it while a third of his army is at his 3rd.
User was warned for this post
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Completely disagree with Xequecal and agree with intelsc2. From a protoss point of view: when I go fast third, I love when you spam roaches at 12 minutes. With a 6:30-7:30 third I get full saturation way before your attack hits, and pure roach is extremely inefficient at fighting stalker sentry cannon (+immortal), especially if it's on a map like Shakuras or Entombed. Unless I really mess up my macro, have terrible simcity, or totally whiff a FF, a roach max won't do enough damage.
I'm not sure about the exact timings from a zerg point of view, but a common response is to tech very quickly to infestors and brood lords behind spine crawlers. When protoss takes a quick natural (FFE) you know he's not doing much before 8 minutes. When protoss takes a quick third you know he's not doing much before 12 minutes. A lot of spine crawlers and infestors are pretty good against stalker/sentry/immortal attacks; if he adds in colossus, you know the attack will come a minute or two later and you can go for brood lords instead.
If you are able to scout the third quicker in the future, you can take an immediate 4th and start teching. I think the problem in that game was that you were set on the roach max and didn't scout his expansion for a long time, which "locked" you into an ineffective strategy.
About mutas: recognize that the more you commit to roaches, the later you get mutas. Also, from a protoss point of view, if I knew I was playing against 3 base muta, I would choose to do this build since it gives me the quickest 6 gas. There is this sort of awkward timing right around 13-14 minutes when I am rolling in money, able to spam out 10-15 stalkers at once, and itching to attack. That's also around the time that you've invested all of your gas into mutalisks and not much into infestors/brood lords. Because of this, my very unqualified protoss opinion is that if you commit to mutas, you should be prepared for a base race.
Also, something funny is that if the cannon timing at the third is a bit late or greedy, you can sometimes just kill him with a handful of slow roaches. I am sad when that happens.
Hopefully this helped a little bit, sorry I couldn't really give you any technical tips about executing what I said from the zerg point of view.
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mc lost to a zerg in the MLG spring arena 2 a few weeks ago to a zerg that did like a 13 minute roach max PLUS had drops and dropped his deathball into the toss main immediately instead of even attacking the natural or third
heck i think theres even a free MLG vod of that somewhere (i think).... ill look for it
my god. i honestly cant even begin to fathom a counter to that as toss
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I'd like to point out that just 8 slowlings would have been sufficient to deny that expansion. Even just having made 4 lings at the start would have potentially denied the probe from putting it down if you were active enough to intercept it. He has only 1 gateway, and warpgate tech was still 2 minutes away when he placed the Nexus.
I see this as a failure of scouting to let the Nexus get so thoroughly entrenched in the first place, rather than a failure of decision-making after you finally discovered what happened. As the Z side of PvZ, for the early and mid game the whole map belongs to you if you choose to take it. If you are really going to let a single zealot bully you around, you should not be surprised when all sorts of easily avoidable shenanigans smash your face. Heck, for zero additional investment, you could have had an overlord (say, the one you sent south) to keep an eye on the third; as soon as you see that indefensible position start to go down at 6:00 you make your (larger, since it's later) denial force reactively.
As it was, the ONLY thing you learn from his base from 4:30 to 9:30 is that he has at least 1 gas mining by 9:00 and no more than 3 gasses taken total. When you can't rule out anything from an all-in warpgate attack to having 4 Nexuses, you should expect to lose at least half your games to guessing wrong.
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On May 25 2012 14:02 Crow! wrote:
I'd like to point out that just 8 slowlings would have been sufficient to deny that expansion. Even just having made 4 lings at the start would have potentially denied the probe from putting it down if you were active enough to intercept it. He has only 1 gateway, and warpgate tech was still 2 minutes away when he placed the Nexus.
...yeah, this...
I don't know. Perhaps I'm just terrible and my opinion is unqualified, but I'm constantly surprised that tosses are getting away with 6-7 minute thirds. We have so little stuff on the map at that timing that it really only works if Z doesn't scout it for a while (as in this case) or is so intent on droning to the roach max that they don't bother to shut it down.
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EPT
