Christmas Liquibition

Intro

I wanted to write a little about the liquibition and I figured why not do that in my blog, so here goes:

I was asked by Plexa to play in it against Drone on old maps so I was sure it would be awesome as I figured Drone and me would be pretty even skillwise with our rust from inactivity :D. I was scared I'd get slapped silly but that fortunately did not happen and we had a great match.

Introducing players

First a little bit about both Eri and me:

When I first saw Eri in a channel was when Nazgul told me that Eri was one of the best players around. This was back in 2000 or so when we still played Starcraft Vanilla (Original) and Nazgul was about to create Liquid. Eri always was a jovial fun guy that always tried to put effort into putting originality in his game. Later on he joined [pG] and went to the WCG finals in 2004 after winning WCG Scandinavia.

I started playing in 1999 or so and played Starcraft Vanilla until 2001 when I started Brood War. I got kind of known in 2003 when I joined iD. and started going high in ladders and winning against good players. I participated in WCG Netherlands 4 times from 2001 until 2004 and in 2004 I finally managed to win it and I went to San Francisco where I lost in the round of 16 to Zelotito. Afterwards Mondi begged me to join ToT and I dragged MidiaN with me

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I stayed active until around beginning of 2006 where the game stopped being fun for me to actively continue it.

The Liquibition match

On to the liquibition match:

The match pretty much started with Eri being pretty hungover and me suffering from a fever so it wasn't the best state of mind to begin the match in, but during the match I was doing okay and me being sick didn't matter *that* much.

I'll write about my thoughts on all the games.

Game 1 on Gaema Gowon:

He picked protoss and I picked zerg. Having played this map a lot in the past I knew that opening with multiple expands is totally safe while getting lurkers to pressure his expand on the ledge. The map has always favoured Z over P because of this so I was pretty sure I could take this match. I countered his initial harass with the 2 corsairs and zealot/goon very well by having units at all my bases to cover any drone losses while making sure I had at least 1 hydra on all the sairs so I didn't lose overlords either. I countered with around 10 hydra's to stop his natural from completing and because he had no storm I was able to do so. After that I just had such a big lead that I just macroed up, expanded some more and added some queens to make it even harder for him to break a contain (slow units against lurker/contain is no thx). One move that was pretty fun was that when he went up to his ramp with all his units, I was able to block off both chokes with lurker eggs for a short while so I had free reign on his natural with a small army. Game ended soon after.

Ramp 1

Ramp 2

Game 2 on Neo Jungle Story

He randommed terran and I picked zerg. Plexa mentioned a few times that we both practiced some builds but this was not the case. This zerg build was a build I used in WCG practice when this map was still a WCG map back in 2001 and 2002. Basically you can't really expand anywhere because your natural sucks because

1. It's really far away from your main
2. It's mineral only
3. It's hard to defend

So the standard was to get gas really early at around 11 supply, then get hatch around 12 or 13, then pool around 12 or 13. Because the bases were far away, no-one ever tried rushing so the build was a nice eco-build which allowed for a lot of gas accumulating. With that excess gas you could insta grade drop when lair completes and go spire and still have 600 gas for 6 muta's when your spire completes. So that's what I did. What was my downfall is that Eri also knew about this build and figured that's what I was going to do so there was some sick leveling going on. He countered my stuff perfectly by going goldrop/valk. I could've defended it if I had built more scourges and was more alert to his dropship so I could scourge it but he got a total of 8 goliaths on my island expand which was too much for me to kill. Game was over shortly after.

Goliath/valk against muta/scourge

Game three on Neo Silent Vortex:

I actually always loved this map because I almost never lost on it. You could always macro so fricken hard on this map. My gameplan was to just get some lurkers to contain him and take another base and just macrowhore while making sure he couldn't get another main. I patrolled a ling in one main while getting the other main up with a spore to counter any sair/dt harass. I don't think I was in trouble at any point in this game. He did broke my expands at some point but my ultra's were coming and I had a lot of hatcheries reinforcing my expands so I was pretty sure I could keep the main expands there. While he attacked me I also dropped his natural so his income was pretty much decimated so I was pretty sure I had the game won.

In the ending attack I dropped his natural and attacked his main while attacking his ensnared army with half of my army which was enough because his army comprised mostly of zealots.

Attacking main army

Attacking main army2

Dropping natural at the same time

Game ender killing the expand in the middle

Game four on Neo Forbidden Zone

We actually both picked random on this map because I didn't want him to have a huge advantage from the start because random on an island map is pretty huge because you can't scout him that fast of course. I ended up with protoss which I was fine with, granted that I thought Eri was either terran or zerg. My PvP has always been my worst matchup in Starcraft and things got even worse when my fast reaver went on a grand tour around the map to finally arrive at his base where I did minimal damage. After that I actually lost my shuttle and because of that I couldn't defend my natural expand which he killed afterwards. From that point on I couldn't really do anything and I left after some pathetic attempts on doing at least some damage with 2 goon drop sniping some probes and some reaver drops which did no damage because at this point he had double my supply and up a base.

Game five on Neo Bifrost:

Eri randommed Terran but he disced at the beginning so we restarted and this time he picked terran because that's what he wanted anyway. I picked my usual zerg. This map was pretty imbalanced back in the day in the fact that terran usually had it easy against zerg because they could pressure so well and without a gas expand that was easily defendable it was really hard for zerg do to anything. Also zerg raped protoss pretty badly as well due to all the different spots to attack and all the small chokes so lurkers became pretty strong.

This game however didn't show much of that. He killed an overlord pretty fast. My plan was to get speedling for some map control and get lurkers afterwards. After he killed my overlord, he thought that was a good timing window to attack me however, but my extra lings spawned at the right moment and I was able to destroy his marines with minimal damage. Afterwards my speed kicked in and I managed to run in and kill all of his infantry and some scv's. I kept pressuring with lings and got a spire because of all the marines I kept killing. After I got my muta's up it was quickly over.

Game six on Enter the Dragon:

Enter the Dragon is a pretty hard map for ZvT because it's really hard to defend expands and there aren't a lot of them so it's pretty hard to keep them as well.

Eri went mech again and started out with vultures which didn't do any damage. His drop also failed pretty badly because I had hydra's in my base fast enough and did a good job of killing the mines before they had a chance to wreak havoc on my hydra's. After this I teched up to muta's and made a sizable hydra/muta force to wipe out his first attack group.

Decimating his first army

Decimating his first army

After this I attacked his natural and took out a lot of scv's. I couldn't totally finish him off however and he stayed in there. Eri and me talked about the game afterwards and we figured on any other map it would've been over because I could easily take a few more expands and teched up to hive. Plexa mentioned a few times in the commentary that I should've upgraded more and teched up to hive, but because I had to spend a lot of money on units consistently to keep the pressure up and because I could not expand in far away places, this was not possible. What I actually should have done is get drop right away and put pressure on his main and get the islands as soon as possible. This is what I forgot and was also the reason why I lost. In the end his blob of mech units got so great that I had no chance of killing it. I got close a few times with a lot of muta's but in the end he just overpowered me.

Battles where I just ended up short of killing his army

Another close battle

This game was definitely the best of the series though, as it was really close at some points, but I definitely think I could've won this quite easily if I made the better decision of going drop after gaining momentum when killing his first army. Thinking about it now, maybe I should've even went for his main after killing his main army instead of going for his expand. Ah well, it was a fun game either way.

Game seven on Nostalgia:

This game he picked terran if I remember correctly and I picked my standard zerg. Because he meched in a lot of games I figured I could just take the nearest gas expand after taking my mineral only. My plan was to get ling speed so I could have some sort of map control and tech up to muta's soon after. Rage mentioned my exp was risky but I disagree. If he goes marines I would just get lair later and get sunkens at both my min only and my gas natural while having speed lings to counter/defend. If he goes tech I just get lair pretty fast and get muta's pretty fast to defend any harass.

He pressured some with marines but I had enough lings out to stop it while getting a sunk up fast enough at my gas expand. Ling speed kicked in and I managed to kill all his marines. After this I got my muta's up and his vultures and small marine force got decimated so I had free reign on his base with my growing muta force. The game ended pretty quickly so it ended with a disappointing game.

Overall I think the series was quite entertaining and we definitely saw some unusual strategies employed by both Eri and me on these awesome old maps. I think a lot of people enjoyed the games so I'm grateful for that.

Stuff that I wanted to do in this showmatch

ZvT: Muta/Queen. I wanted to do muta/queen against marines. I'm not sure why this is not used yet in 3 hatch builds, but if you can ensnare the marines, the new muta micro with the overlord grouping becomes even more imbalanced than it already is. Ensnare makes sure the marines can't get away and counter the hit&run from the muta's so it would be totally sick. Afterwards I just wanted to get 24 muta's, attack the command center and infest both of them. Unfortunately the only games where Eri went marine/medic, the game ended quickly (Bifrost and Nostalgia).

ZvP: Just play standard but add in queens with ensnare and broodling. I only got to ensnare because I was usually too busy to get more queens to really use broodling. The ensnares were pretty nice but not really *that* useful in these games

. I think ensnare works best when you are lurk-containing because the whole idea of lurk-containing is to slow down your opponent and force him to waste a lot of stuff on your contain while powering up. By ensnaring the protoss units, you just make it that much harder to get out of there. In the end I just used ensnare in the battles to make sure the zealots and archons take longer to get to my hydra's and lurkers.

TvZ: If I got to TvZ I would try wraith/medic. Cloaked wraiths with a dropship with medics to optical flare the overlords. It's kind of hard to pull off but it would be awesome to see if it would work. I think it'd be hard against Eri though because queens > cloak, but maybe it would work.

Ending words
This got pretty long so I'll finish this by thanking Plexa to invite me to play the showmatch. I enjoyed the attention from Teamliquid and I hope everyone enjoyed the showmatch from two rusty old players

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Links to replays and VOD for those who missed the newspost:

Vod tracker

Replays

Cheers,

Twisted

Christmas Liquibition

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