In this post, I would like to bring your attention to the Day[9]'s Daily #589, where he analyses the 'safe early expand PvP build' by State versus Minigun on Akilon Wastes. The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate that the build by State does not constitute a completely safe strategy, as declared by Day[9]. Although the build provides a viable option to defend against early opponent pressures, such as 4-gate, it is weak against one particular strategy, that is, 3-gate Phoenix opening. To demonstrate this case, I focus on the 2nd game by MC vs. Grubby in WCS Challenger League played on Whirlwind, where MC uses a very similar build as State. Not only this analysis proves the continuing perilousness of fast expanding in PvP, but also illustrates the superiority of Phoenix openings in the current state of PvP.
State's Fast Expand + Robo build
State opens with 13 Gateway, 14 gas, 15 gas and begins with a Sentry, followed by a Warpgate research. He then builds a 2nd sentry simultaneously with a Mothership Core, and expands at 4:40, which makes the completion of the Nexus perfectly aligned with 100 energy on the Mothership Core for a Photon Overcharge around 6:20 when a 4-gate can hit.
Exactly at the 5-minute mark, State throws down a Robotics Facility to secure himself from follow-up aggressions, such as 3-gate Blink or a delayed 4-gate. At 5:15, he further builds two additional Gateways to protect himself from any air aggression. At 5:30, a 3rd Sentry is being started.
Minigun attacks at 6:15 with 5 Stalkers and a Mothership Core. However, at 6:20 State's Nexus finishes and State immediately activates Photon Overcharge. The 3rd Sentry is also available for the fight, but State decides to additionally warp in one Stalker just to make sure he fights off Minigun without losing anything...and he succesfully does - Minigun is forced to recall home. Immediately after this push, Minigun enters State's main with an Oracle, but only manages to kill two Probes, because State brings a couple Stalkers from his natural to defend. At this moment, State has an Immortal, several Stalkers and the 3 Sentries at the front as well as few extra Stalkers in his main to repel any further Oracle harass. Pretty safe spot now for State, don't you think? But not so fast!
MC's Fast Expand + Robo build
Let us turn to another PvP on Whirlwind, between MC and Grubby (starts around 2:29:00), where MC does a similar sentry opening as State, yet is unable to defend against Grubby's aggression.
MC opens with 13 Gateway, 15 gas, 16 gas. Correspondingly to State, he starts with a Sentry and a Warpgate research. 2nd Sentry coming up, followed by an early expand at 4:30 (10 seconds earlier than State) and a Mothership Core at 4:40. This represents a deviation from State's build, because it means that MC's Nexus will finish at 6:10, but Mothership Core will only have 100 energy at 6:40! But in this particular scerario, it does not constitute a big deal (luckily for MC). What matters is that MC builds 2 Gateways at 5:20, his 3rd Sentry enters the field 5:30, 4th sentry is being put into production, and a Robotics Facility is only being constructed at 6:00. What this means is that MC will have 4 Force Fields at his disposal to protect the ramp on his natural and buy himself some time before the Immortal comes out. At the same time, MC will have 3 gates against potential air attack.
At 6:50, Grubby enters MC's main with 2 Phoenixes, which MC was aware of, because he scouted them with a hallucinated Phoenix at 6:20. Accordingly, MC prepares 3 Stalkers, forcing Grubby to go harass MC's natural, where the Photon Overcharge is ready and activated. The investment into 3 Stalkers slightly delays MC's immortal, which is only started at 7:15. Nevertheless, despite having 3 Stalkers in place, Grubby goes with 3 Phoenixes to MC's main and manages to kill 4 probes. MC warps in 2 additional Stalkers to prevent further harassment in the main, leaving 4 Sentries to defend the front.
The important moment happens around 7:55, when MC's Immortal comes out at his main. Grubby flies in Phoenixes into the main, sees that the pack of Stalkers is quite far from the natural, and thus flies down to MC's natural (where the photon overcharge has expired) to attack the vulnerable Sentries. At the same time, Grubby pushes into the natural with a mix of Gateway units, swiftly puts a forcefield on MC's main ramp, blocking all of the MC's 5 stalkers and the Immortal in the main, while killing all the Sentries, Mothership Core and 9 additional Probes.
Grubby's aggression vs. State's fast expand
Now, as you can see, the build by State and MC are not completely the same. First, the gas timings are different, the Nexus and Mothership Core timings are different, and third, the timing of Robotics Facility and two additional Gateways is different. The biggest obvious implication is that MC's Immortal was later and could not protect the natural against Grubby's frontal push.
But what would happen if Grubby used this strategy against State's build? Let us picture a hypothetical scenario of Grubby playing against State instead of Minigun on Akilon Wastes' with each of their respective builds.
The critical moment happens at 6:50 when Grubby enters State's main with 2 Phoenixes and sees Immortal just coming out. Here, State naturally builds 2-3 Stalkers at his main, while walking his Immortal down the ramp to join his 3 sentries there. Grubby flies to activate the Photon Overcharge at the natural, and with his 3rd Phoenix joining at 7:15, he carries on to kill 3-4 probes at State's main. Seeing that the Immortal is already positioned in the natural, Grubby is unlikely to perform the same surgical strike as in the case of MC.
However, Grubby still has 2 very viable options:
1) Either he can 'knock' on the doorstep of the State's natural, forcing him to warp in extra units in the natural, and potentially waste some forcefields. Meanwhile, Grubby can fly with his Phoenixes once again to harass the mineral line in State's main or even natural. Given the dead area behind the natural, State's main army lured deep into the front, and couple of his Stalkers guarding the main, Grubby would safely manage to kill at least 4 Probes, depending on the energy left on the Phoenixes. All-in-all, State would already lose 7-8 Probes in the whole game...with a potential to lose more.
Or:
2) With 4 Phoenixes, and the mix of Gateway units, Grubby has the option to directly challenge State's forces at the natural, lifting the Immortal and attempting to target fire it. With a good micro, Grubby can overpower opponent's units and depending on the damage done, he can go and harass Probes before another Immortal comes out or Grubby can just kill his opponent right there.
Either strategy has a pretty good chance of putting State behind. This is not to prove that State's build order is bad - no at all! It works very well against many builds as shown by Day[9]. What is more, it is actually much safer than MC's build, not least due to the fact that Photon Overcharge is 20 seconds quicker and the immortal is earlier. However, the purpose of this analysis was to demonstrate that fast expanding is NEVER a safe option...especially when your opponent opens with Phoenix. This case only proves the great utility of Phoenix openings in the current state of HotS PvP match-ups, as evidenced by many Korean protoss', most notably sOs. With its exceptional mobility, ability to make an opponent unit passive and higher durability than Oracle, Phoenix offers the most universal utilisation in the early game of PvP, being able to harass the mineral line as well as help in a straight-up engagement.
Thank your for reading, and I am welcome to some constructive discussion on the topic.
...I am posting here for two reasons. First, this is a very well-written article, with good support, and you deserve some replies. Second because, despite the fact that you have laid everything out rather clearly, and I have thought about it for some time, I'm not sure I have anything intelligent to contribute but questions.
As I understand it, the crux of the issue is that phoenixes have the ability to: 1.) Kill sentries, quickly and with little effort 2.) Kill Motherships, quickly and with little effort 3.) Kill probes 4.) Render an immortal a relatively ineffective tool
Because State relies on mothership + sentries, early on, it seems like he's fairly vulnerable to this: They can force him to blow his nexus cannon, which will only defend him until, as you observed, about 8 minutes.
I have the following stupid question: It's hardly the end of the world if State has to blow some force-fields. Why not FF the ramp to the natural (not the main ramp), leaving your stalker force to guard the main, while continuing to reinforce? Or, at a minimum, threaten to FF the army in half. With that sort of early force, immortal + 3 sentries can kill half of the army.
The alternative is to put your entire army in the bottom and eat the probe losses from the phoenixes.
This may be wrong or overdefensive, but perhaps it is safer to keep all your probes momentarily at your natural against an aggressive stargate player. Then you can simply defend your natural with all your units and prevent him from killing your msc and sentries, or probes without taking damage. Once you manage to warp in enough stalkers and set up a good defense, you send probes back to your main.
I haven't played this style enough to determine what your priorities are against aggressive stargate play, but maybe it's not that hard to adapt the strategy. I know this would be an expensive solution, but maybe it would be possible to throw up a forge earlier and buy time with force fields and photon overcharge in order to get cannons up. Whether it's possible or even viable to reactively do this to a well-timed probe poke or hallucination, I don't know. Maybe it would have to be a core part of the build for it to be completely safe against this. But if you're going for a macro game and ground upgrades like State did, maybe it would be possible to skip something else in the build and get a forge earlier or something.
Or maybe, you can't... PvP is such a coinflip anyway. No wonder I suck at it.
Although each tech path in PvP has its own strengths and weaknesses, they really do flow in a circle of how effective they are against each other, kind of like a rock-paper-scissors thing: Blink->Stargate->Robo->Blink, etc. A phoenix opener is pretty much a hard hard counter to a robo opening because the robo player really can't go colossus and needs to immediately cut into blink or templar tech. That being said, it's already a really tough hold for the robo player against a phoenix player.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean it's impossible to hold off. Generally, you need only 3-4 stalkers in each location to stave off phoenix harass until you get the necessary economy and tech to deal with them well. In this particular opening, MC/State will go up to 3-4 sentries with 2-3 stalkers and a MsC upon expanding. This means you can deal with any upfront pressure pretty well, but when you expand to 2 bases, you create an environment that a stargate player thrives in before you can actually get all the tools you need. As a result, you HAVE to take a few probe losses from phoenixes. Which is fine, because you expanded WAY earlier, and you know you'll have a probe lead anyway.
Poring over MC's game, he really should have just warped in 2 more stalkers with his sentries and kept his army placed much further forward toward the ramp so he could immediately forcefield it. He didn't need 5 stalkers to chase away phoenixes in the main, and his sentries ended up just sitting idly by the nexus as they got killed off one by one. In either case, he's going to lose some probes, but when you skimp out on so many forces at your natural, you will always open yourself up to some kind of attack.
TL;DR: Accept a few probe losses, knowing you're ahead in the expansion count and just make sure you have a few stalkers with your sentry force. Also, standing closer to the natural ramp makes you immune to a lot of early pressure at no real danger to your sentries.
1) there have never been catch all builds in PvP, never have since 1998 and likely never will be.
2) fast expand with more gates and a delayed robo is actually decent vs stargate play (picture 1gate fe, 3 gate, robo), but yeah it's still a tough spot because unless you can get a full scout off, you will be forced into making that immortal for safety. If you can invest that 250/100 into 2 stalkers you are actually fine vs stargate, it's just basically impossible to do so.
3) stargate/pheonix openings aren't necessarily the best builds, as twilight play can still do very well against them (dt allin, dt expand, and blink play included).
First I'd like to say this article is written very well and touches on a lot of intricacies that I wouldn't have thought of such as the 4:40 nexus aligning perfectly with the Mothership core 100 energy (I'll have to practice the opening to see how I like it, only having a handful of Sentries early game seems scary). I myself am a lowly diamond player, but have dealt with this sort of fast expand PvP scenario occasionally, especially against some low masters. Sentries have become much more powerful in HoTs thanks to the combination of photon overcharge and force-fields, so a fast expansion makes sense now. I've found that opponents who use it against me fair rather well against many tier 1 compositions- aside from if i choose to open Stargate tech. I've never truly understood why...but the article brings up the points in excellent clarity and it really applies to all matchups where one player takes rapid expansions; extremely mobile units (ie. Stargate, blink stalker) counter any sort of rapid expansion. It forces the opponent to split forces, lose macro focus. Final analysis of this is that greedy play is never a safe option, especially in PvP, but with proper scouting, perfect build timings, and unit composition it can certainly be viable.
As a side note in relation to Stargate play, I would like to see more professionals bring on the void rays. it seems that no-one really uses them early game and I'm not sure why, because in PvP I think prismatic alignment is SO strong, but pheonix appears to be the meta, anyone's thoughts on this?
On May 25 2013 09:11 Dapapoose wrote: First I'd like to say this article is written very well and touches on a lot of intricacies that I wouldn't have thought of such as the 4:40 nexus aligning perfectly with the Mothership core 100 energy (I'll have to practice the opening to see how I like it, only having a handful of Sentries early game seems scary). I myself am a lowly diamond player, but have dealt with this sort of fast expand PvP scenario occasionally, especially against some low masters. Sentries have become much more powerful in HoTs thanks to the combination of photon overcharge and force-fields, so a fast expansion makes sense now. I've found that opponents who use it against me fair rather well against many tier 1 compositions- aside from if i choose to open Stargate tech. I've never truly understood why...but the article brings up the points in excellent clarity and it really applies to all matchups where one player takes rapid expansions; extremely mobile units (ie. Stargate, blink stalker) counter any sort of rapid expansion. It forces the opponent to split forces, lose macro focus. Final analysis of this is that greedy play is never a safe option, especially in PvP, but with proper scouting, perfect build timings, and unit composition it can certainly be viable.
As a side note in relation to Stargate play, I would like to see more professionals bring on the void rays. it seems that no-one really uses them early game and I'm not sure why, because in PvP I think prismatic alignment is SO strong, but pheonix appears to be the meta, anyone's thoughts on this?
Good post Grusux was a fun read.
This is true, especially for all those poor terran players going 1rax FE and CC first who have been experiencing the pain of splitting marines up to survive against blink all-ins and stalker/MsC pressure day 1.
In relation to your side note, the main reason why void rays are really bad to open with is because they are strong only for the first minute of being out, then they are useless until you have a bunch of them. This is why opening with void rays is bad. You can either all-in with them during their first stage, but if you fail to do damage or you try to open up a macro game with a void ray, you open yourself up to a death timing where you won't have enough void rays to defend. In addition, in PvP, you have to blindly make your first unit out of a stargate; if you're against a phoenix player and you open up void ray, you lose the game lol. So...there's that coinflip aspect.
Very good info i like it as a reference for timings. However alot of it is based on theory-craft. If the push at front is scouted or if the phoenix use too many lifts on workers the push may fall flat leaving the defender at a huge advantage with econ to go double sg if he chooses to. Or even a large blink gateway timing could work for a counter attack. I would also like to mention that a 1g expand is normally only used on certain maps that prevent blink play. A perfect example is that the Game shown above by MC v Grubby is on Akilon a great map for mobility based attacks. Where State's is on a 4 person spawn map with great spam distance to be attacked and no blink ledges. Just something to keep in mind as I'm sure all the pros keep this in mind when choosing a greedy expand play.
On May 25 2013 08:17 Teoita wrote: Couple of notes:
1) there have never been catch all builds in PvP, never have since 1998 and likely never will be.
2) fast expand with more gates and a delayed robo is actually decent vs stargate play (picture 1gate fe, 3 gate, robo), but yeah it's still a tough spot because unless you can get a full scout off, you will be forced into making that immortal for safety. If you can invest that 250/100 into 2 stalkers you are actually fine vs stargate, it's just basically impossible to do so.
3) stargate/pheonix openings aren't necessarily the best builds, as twilight play can still do very well against them (dt allin, dt expand, and blink play included).
4) Day9 makes wrong calls quite often actually.
from what i've seen, if you scout stargate all-ins coming, the best response is to throw down a forge and put down 3 cannons. It does take a bit of a lucky probe scout or if you go zeal and then two sentries and they don't use early pressure and you can hallu scout.
Yeah i agree with that but it's basically impossible to scout the stargate allin anyway. All you know is he will be one basing, and if turns out to be, say, one base blink instead you have 3 cannons that do nothing and not enough units to defend a blink-in.
Maybe it would be a good idea to gather replays of 1 gate FE for this thread. We could look at stargate all ins and other stuff. The thing is, I haven't found replays of stargate all in vs 1 gate FE. I haven't seem too many vods of this either.
This kind of all in seems to be such a commitment though. I could be wrong but I don't think you can get a sentry early on with an expansion follow up in mind, and switch to an all in as a reaction to hallucination scouting (even if you go sentry first). Unless the stargate player does a stalker poke and sees the early nexus, gets a lucky scout with a probe, or the expanding protoss expands super fast (before or right after getting his msc, without shooing the probe away), I don't think it's possible to reactively punish the expansion. Right?
Yeah you can if you scout well. Going zealot/sentry means this build has no map control so simply poking with a probe will show you the nexus building, or at the very least the sentries on the low ground (which can only mean this build).
You can't react in the midgame with hallucination or phoenix scouting though.
I wonder if sentries are really necessary if you chrono wg. I know sentries cost gas and therefore it's cheaper to make them + early gateways instead of stalkers + gateways, but maybe 1 less gateway wouldn't be a problem with your initial stalkers + a robo. Maybe it's possible to come up with a 1 gate FE variation that includes early stalkers instead of sentries.
The nice thing about the sentries is that they allow you to get faster gateways, nexus and robo (and an immortal) because they cost so few minerals. You need all of those for defense. Even just making 1 stalker instead of 2 sentries slows that down a bit, making 2 stalkers even more so.
I've been planning to write a short guide on 1 gate FE in PvP when I have some more time soon. I think it's actually very solid but this build from state and/or MC is just awful.
The key thing with 1 gate FE is that in my opinion you should make the MINIMAL number of sentries. Sentries are just awful in PvP for stopping pressure, yes forcefields are good against some forms of pressure but they are nearly useless against the most dangerous forms and the immobility of sentries hampers you against the most dangerous tactics for 1 gate FE: stargate and blink openings.
I use a build going 1 gate FE going into 2 gate robo but I use only 1 sentry. Sentries are nice for a few reasons, their high gas low mineral cost is nice, a clutch forcefield is essential for stopping some moves and hallucination or guardian shield are decent niche options later (but not that neccesary imo). By going more stalkers you are MUCH better off against blink and stargate plays, the moment you scout those (with your hallucination if aggression stays off, otherwise with obs), you just make the extra gate then and you'll be fine.
Personally I don't think there is anything that can really break the 1 gate FE if done properly. Except in rsvp's replays i haven't seen anyone do a proper one yet though. This 4 sentry play is just awful.. They are completely useless in PvP, except for hallucination scouting the sentry is just a total crap unit in PvP. Forcefields become nearly obsolete very quickly, their damage is pitiful and guardian shield matters really little in PvP fights, I don't get why the build get's so many. You can't even really deny scouting by going sentry first, though the tradeoff for the fast hallucination might be ok.
If 3 of those sentries were stalkers these games just become easy holds where the 1 gate FE is a bit ahead (though phoenix openers can often nearly equalize by killing probes).
^ This is what I was thinking about. Even if you get 1 less gateways, you could get more stalker, immortals and photon overcharge. A nexus up at about 5:40 along with warp gate research done by 6 minutes means photon overcharge to even things out before the unit count becomes overwhelming. I guess you could even warp in sentries if need be, because you can get warp gate so fast if you chrono your cybernetics core.
Here you go guys: a vod from proleague today - Parting vs Stats. Both players go msc expand. Parting gets 2 stalkers and 3 gates + a robo. Stats gets a few sentries (and 1 or 2 stalkers before wg research is done) and does a fairly strong blink timing against Parting by getting a twilight council at 4:50. No robo for stats though, so I guess even if you don't die early on to a 1 base push, there is still luck involved. I guess he just didn't expect DTs based on scouting information or Parting's play style. Or maybe he just took a risk, after all PvP is still a build order coinflip...
EDIT: Stats build is actually interesting. He goes MSC + sentry --> expand --> stalker --> twilight --> sentry --> add 2 gates --> stalker. The initial sentry has enough energy to send a hallucination scout. So as long as there is no proxy dark shrine, you won't die because with units and force fields you can buy yourself enough time. No gases at third during the blink stalker push, and apparently just 3 gateways.
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