Alright so i woke up and realize i missed most of the GSL today. no bid deal, a protoss is playing hmmm brown vs losira, noname vs losira.... damn this kid gona have trouble since Losira just won vs NSHS in KSL the previous day :-/...
Into game was a really nice turtle P style thats i love and often do on ladder. The map daybreak allows brown to have an aggressive 3rd expand timing which did throw losira off by quite a bit. The decision to make the 4th base at the rich gas base instead of the 9 oclock also limit losira in counter attack options. Overall a very beautiful turtle/econ aggressive style that most Protoss should learn to abuse vs Zerg.
Meanwhile Losira is not bad either, his 3rd timing was crucial vs a stargate follow up from P. The moment the hatch finish at his 4th base finish, his hive also completed with infestors on the way. Great play in general.
But, why did losira lost? well let me introduce you to a concept call "Simple mathematics". 1 base vs 1 base P > Z. 2 bases vs 2 bases P>Z. X bases vs X bases P>Z. + Show Spoiler +
Ok its not simple mathematics but i have alway wanted to say that in my blog, u mad?
Now consider map such as day break where there are only 5 expansion on each side of the map. A Zerg player will be at the disadvantage once the map is closed to being mined out. Split map situation is something you SHOULD avoid when play games on map such as daybreak.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijf6RysNq9I&t=2272s DAT DRIPPING ( go to 37:50)
Did you know daybreak is just match point rotating 90 degree and add in a base?
Who played better in this game? Jeadong. Who was ahead the entire game? Jaedong. Who won the game? Stork. Imba? i dont think so. If you are new to BW, Protoss is considered to be the 'easy race' which is very friendly to noob but extremely hard to play on high level. There has not been a protoss champion for years until the very recent Jangbi > fantasy OSL. Long story short Stork won that game and left Jaedong in dumb found. Why? Because stork used the map the way it supposed to be used while Jaedong was playing a regular macro game and didnt take into consideration that the map will be mine out faster than Python or Fighting spirit.
Back to losira vs Brown, Losira was siting on 5 base ( 3~4 mining) with tons of spines, BL infestors. While Brown was ALSO sitting on 5 bases (4 mining bc his 5th is late). So theory wise, the game is stalemate with 2 'conflicted bases' that both players cant take. Losira mining out faster. This trigger the fact that Losira will feel pressured to deal some damage with the super army he created which then result him being the offender and, let me quote Artosis, "In a perfect starcraft game the one who attacks first will lose.".
Now thats how the 'bigger picture' that most people dont see. What most people saw was:
OMFG HE MOVED ALL THE CORRUPTORS INTO VORTEX AND HIS BL TOO OMFG ARCHON TOILET BANELING BBQ SDAKJDLL #$#%@
Mothership is imbalance. Yeah i said it, as a Master Protoss player, i admit in PvZ, mothership IS imbalance. Blizzard knowing this had nerfed mothership multiple time across the history of sc2: from the instant teleport in beta to the timing of units coming out of vortex. But 1 thing blizzard did missed with vortex: The 2 seconds of invulnerable of units poping out of vortex is not enough for massive air units to spread out correctly. What does this mean? Units such as Carrier, Broodlord, BCs or even slow air units such as VR or corruptor(low acceleration rate) are still heavily affected by archon toilet.
Good example could be HuK vs Aria on metal (this game is really famous btw).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TdXexwnTzo&t=1585s Go to 26:25
All the BL was still stacking on top of each other once the invulnerable gone which cause all of them died at the same time. This is no where 'balance' and i expecting blizzard to fix it once it is used in major tournaments (yeah yeah HoTS has no moma ship but hey, major tournament will still be using WoL for a while). Mean while Zerg will have to accept that they have no answer to vortex except having 9000 corruptors with +3 and spread them out like lings vs banelings and realized mothership could vortex more than once.... HUE HUE HUE HUE
But yeah, design your strategy based on the map that you play and kill people before they have more than 100 energy on their mothership will be something that a zerg player should take out of this blog. Application could be 'close spawn' in 1v1 obs metal ZvT or ZvP. Its not impossible to win, its just impossible to win macro wise. You have to cheese, you have to all-in and be aggressive. Nobody is a perfect human (Flash is a machine, does not count) and they will make mistakes, exploit it! Take your chance or die trying!
Peace :D NB.
P/s: still hot head on balance/strategy discussion? angry toward me? dont be! Here some IU!
perfectly thought out topic and then you drop the whole mothership imba argument. there's nothing imba about motherships lol. nicely written for the most part.
Protoss deathball was imbalanced and Protoss turtling on three bases was impossible to beat.
In the meantime, all meaningful statistics showed that Zerg was favoured in the matchup.
Mothership gameplay late game is imbalanced.
...
The game is so young, the strategies have had so little time to settle and to be figured out. Imbalanced is such a meaningless term in a late game that has been largely undiscovered because almost all mapping out of the matchups has been devoted to timing attacks and beating the opponent way before split map situations on larger maps can possibly occur.
A lot of Protoss players likewise felt the matchup was incredibly hard because of the Zerg deathball. While the Mothership is one of the solutions, players like Hero fight the deathball not only with that, but in other cases with pure multitask and multipronged harass and attacks.
If everything that is winning because it has not been figured out is imbalanced, not because there are no good answers but because those answers have not been discovered yet, then these discussions about balance will just never be fruitful at all.
I mean, all you need to do is spread out your Blords...much like toss needs to spread out templar/sentry against terran because of EMP. It's almost the same exact thing because you'd lose the game if all of your templar and sentrys got EMP'd right before an engagement.
On December 06 2011 09:50 Silidons wrote: I mean, all you need to do is spread out your Blords...much like toss needs to spread out templar/sentry against terran because of EMP. It's almost the same exact thing because you'd lose the game if all of your templar and sentrys got EMP'd right before an engagement.
its liek saying in TvZ you should split out your thors when you play mech else you gona let banelings kill all of them. The problem came down to 2 points:
1/ Massive units are generall not good by themself except mothership. 1 BL wont deal any dmg, 1 thor is shit, 1 carrier is a joke. But putting like 5 of them we have a serious threat.
2/ They are MASSIVE, in size. The model is huge. This meaning if you split 6 of them out, thats already half medium avg size map. How do you split thor on xelnaga? you DONT. I mean even if you some how can, the AI will soon screw you over when the enemy retreat and you have to chase them. Not counting the fact that your DPS will be greatly reduced plus there could be more than 1 vortex (moma ship has 200 energy).
The mothership itself is imbalance. If you have to count the fact that it takes a lot of effort to get to that stage in the game and the chance of 1 player actually using mothership, yeah it has a minimum effect on balance overall accross 3 PvZ match up but if you look at some specific situation in game there just really no counter to it.
this video proves a point that i was trying to make
Losira didn't exactly handle the mothership usage in the best way. Pretty much none of his Brood Lords were initially captured by the vortex, it was largely corruptors. What he did was the exact worse thing to do, because Brood Lords going into a vortex with that many archons will do absolutely nothing once they come out. They'll die having done almost no damage. Even if they would have died on the outside (something I'm hardly convinced of, I haven't checked since it was live but I remember thinking that he'd have actually been alright if he had just stayed out of the vortex), anything would have been better than what he did. Brown could have placed the vortex somewhat better though, I think.
As for whether or not the Mothership is overpowered in general... well, it's certainly very (perhaps too) powerful in combination with Archons against a lot of Brood Lords (and to a lesser extent other air units). Not sure there have been enough games to really show much though, as that's a very specific usage. It is still fairly vulnerable despite it's massive health, and being a powerful support caster is to be expected given the tech required, that it's unique and that carriers aren't good.
The mothership is ridiculous and the archon toilet is stupid for how fucking good it is(I am also a protoss player)
But I still think Losira could have handled it differently. If he would have bum rushed the mothership with his corruptors, quickly remax, and then attack with his army he would have won easily. Sure the corruptor attack would be an inefficient trade, but Brown didn't have nearly enough AA to deal with all those BL's. If it weren't for the mothership Losira would have rolled over brown easily, even though they were on even bases.
On December 06 2011 09:40 Lavi wrote: Maxed t3 army being destroyed by a handful of archon in seconds... Imbalanced or not, the word that comes to my head is "disgusting"
It's the concept of splash damage. Similarly, a single nuke can also kill a maxed T3 army, but that is also rare, but like Archon toilets, very exciting
On December 06 2011 10:23 MrSalamandra wrote: Losira didn't exactly handle the mothership usage in the best way. Pretty much none of his Brood Lords were initially captured by the vortex, it was largely corruptors. What he did was the exact worse thing to do, because Brood Lords going into a vortex with that many archons will do absolutely nothing once they come out. They'll die having done almost no damage. Even if they would have died on the outside (something I'm hardly convinced of, I haven't checked since it was live but I remember thinking that he'd have actually been alright if he had just stayed out of the vortex), anything would have been better than what he did.
As for whether or not the Mothership is overpowered in general... well, it's certainly very powerful in combination with Archons against a lot of Brood Lords. Not sure there have been enough games to really show much though, as that's a very specific usage.
agreed
he also could have attacked with the corruptors over the areas of that map where ground units couldn't go under it.
Mothership is overpowered and BLs are overpowered without the mothership, but seeing as how BLs often arrive earlier, I don't think zergs can complain. After all, ZvP has been heavily zerg favored for a long time, and getting to the late game on 5 bases is an achievement in itself. Zergs have always been about denying expansions and taking large economic leads through that, but if you end up being even then don't they deserve to lose?
For most maps protoss and terran strategy is to put pressure on the zerg to prevent them from getting too big, and it's basically the same for zergs in this situation, but just on different maps and at different points in the game. Brown said himself that Losira's style is too well known, and it was easy to defend against it.
it's not exactly a super-army if there's a weakness now is it : P
each and every army has its weakness, being there are units that are evidently cost effective, or allow you to trade an army for an army. in starcraft, it is a matter of unit range, cost, build time, and many other factors. if you just consider unit-cost, is an infestor useful in a max Z v P engagement?
that depends solely on what each player is doing with their army, along with how much easier they've made it for themselves to control it. whenever i think of a micro tournament/micro challenge map, i remember how one-sided some fights can be because of the timing and position that units take before the inenvitable clash happens. the different matchups don't have extremely distorted differences in the overall cost of units, but some retainable units can be worth more than gold by the time each player wears each other down to the lowest denominator of a composition.
but what happens when it seemingly feels as though you need to mash your army against theirs while devoting the majority of your focus on making it so that you win? zerg to me is a damage-over-time race. broodlords in small numbers, medium numbers, and in large numbers need time before their damage can be felt on the same scale as say, bio vs gateway collosus. you see a pro giving themselfenough leeway to be able to blink just under the broodlords for a kill of the majority of the pack as soon as possible. you see chain-fungals laid on any of the stalkers to give the entire army a chance to deal enough damage---- but is it all really optimal? i don't remember it ever being so easy to tech switch as in sc2 with zerg.
you have 40-60 larvae, granted some of it is going to be constantly spent to keep bases in-tact when out of a max-vs-max situation. i can also guarantee that the first reaction a protoss usually has to trading armies is warping in a round of stalkers. because sc2 is so different, maybe there should be some next-level thinking of what your reaction would be by the time you effectively trade army for army and nearly cost for cost and on even footing as your opponent. your transition as zerg is atleast as fast as a protoss choosing to reinforce with gateway units. one of your most cost effective units, being the zergling has the ability to run across the entire map within 20 seconds as well as deal some of the highest dps in the game due to adrenaline glands with hive.
obviously, i'm going nowhere with this rofl... but overall i'm quite impressed with the zerg counter-attack tactics used in sc2 already, but i'm not impressed with the lack of any noticeable innovation since all command-issuing mechanics have been heightened. i know one day there will be zerg burrowing banelings or even hydras at every path, ramp/corner, even sacrificing a small amount of potential economy to make those plays happen-----and all as often as humanly possible. everyone who plays a macro game right now is satisfied with being able to take an average-to-slighty-advantage meal-ticket in order to get the composition that they're comfortable with-----that's what i feel anyway. what happened to simple zealot dragoon - observer combinations? or a game where both players float 100--150 supply from mid to end game? i say, try to end the game with razor thin timings before you even need to think of using broodlords.
On December 06 2011 10:37 Itsmedudeman wrote: Mothership is overpowered and BLs are overpowered without the mothership, but seeing as how BLs often arrive earlier, I don't think zergs can complain. After all, ZvP has been heavily zerg favored for a long time, and getting to the late game on 5 bases is an achievement in itself. Zergs have always been about denying expansions and taking large economic leads through that, but if you end up being even then don't they deserve to lose?
For most maps protoss and terran strategy is to put pressure on the zerg to prevent them from getting too big, and it's basically the same for zergs in this situation, but just on different maps and at different points in the game. Brown said himself that Losira's style is too well known, and it was easy to defend against it.
completely agree with you on how ZvP had been on Z favored the past couple patches. But that is not an excuse to have a bad designed unit inside the game.
You see the reason for mothership being removed from sc2 was not bc it was imbalanced or anything, its simply a design flaw. First of the cloaking field CANNOT be code inside sc2 engine, if you 'hard code' it the engine will lag out, and the current solution is to cloak 1 thing at a time is just too complicated for the tooltip to describe (aka non-newb-friendly). RIP Arbiter (and you ask urself why Tyler is not taking sc2 seriously). Second of all the vortex is imba if combined with splash damage. As stated above, this is simply due to unforeseen usage of the spell therefore imbalance. Who know what if in the future TvT just revolve around making 1 ghost per CC to emp all the mule income. That would be imbalanced too :-/.
Take away those 2 and mothership became an immobile unit that is used to recall -> put it on nexus. Done, blizzard thought process flow chart in 1 minute :-/. Terrible designers =_= that gave each race a dragoon and a seig tank.
On December 06 2011 10:50 nanaoei wrote: it's not exactly a super-army if there's a weakness now is it : P
each and every army has its weakness, being there are units that are evidently cost effective, or allow you to trade an army for an army. in starcraft, it is a matter of unit range, cost, build time, and many other factors. if you just consider unit-cost, is an infestor useful in a max Z v P engagement?
that depends solely on what each player is doing with their army, along with how much easier they've made it for themselves to control it. whenever i think of a micro tournament/micro challenge map, i remember how one-sided some fights can be because of the timing and position that units take before the inenvitable clash happens. the different matchups don't have extremely distorted differences in the overall cost of units, but some retainable units can be worth more than gold by the time each player wears each other down to the lowest denominator of a composition.
but what happens when it seemingly feels as though you need to mash your army against theirs while devoting the majority of your focus on making it so that you win? zerg to me is a damage-over-time race. broodlords in small numbers, medium numbers, and in large numbers need time before their damage can be felt on the same scale as say, bio vs gateway collosus. you see a pro giving themselfenough leeway to be able to blink just under the broodlords for a kill of the majority of the pack as soon as possible. you see chain-fungals laid on any of the stalkers to give the entire army a chance to deal enough damage---- but is it all really optimal? i don't remember it ever being so easy to tech switch as in sc2 with zerg.
you have 40-60 larvae, granted some of it is going to be constantly spent to keep bases in-tact when out of a max-vs-max situation. i can also guarantee that the first reaction a protoss usually has to trading armies is warping in a round of stalkers. because sc2 is so different, maybe there should be some next-level thinking of what your reaction would be by the time you effectively trade army for army and nearly cost for cost and on even footing as your opponent. your transition as zerg is atleast as fast as a protoss choosing to reinforce with gateway units. one of your most cost effective units, being the zergling has the ability to run across the entire map within 20 seconds as well as deal some of the highest dps in the game due to adrenaline glands with hive.
obviously, i'm going nowhere with this rofl... but overall i'm quite impressed with the zerg counter-attack tactics used in sc2 already, but i'm not impressed with the lack of any noticeable innovation since all command-issuing mechanics have been heightened. i know one day there will be zerg burrowing banelings or even hydras at every path, ramp/corner, even sacrificing a small amount of potential economy to make those plays happen-----and all as often as humanly possible. everyone who plays a macro game right now is satisfied with being able to take an average-to-slighty-advantage meal-ticket in order to get the composition that they're comfortable with-----that's what i feel anyway. what happened to simple zealot dragoon - observer combinations? or a game where both players float 100--150 supply from mid to end game? i say, try to end the game with razor thin timings before you even need to think of using broodlords.
you see thats what most people thought from the beginning: Artosis, idra, any zerg players since beta really. "Zerg is a macro race. We can remake 200/200 ezpz". That, is true, by the nature of the race, but it is a very bad way to look at the game(race in general).
As the meta game developed through out the sc2 life span. Most of the timing rush/counter attack path had been figured out. You could see how players walled off their base when they attack with a 4 gate, walling off their 3rd base on metal with gates and cannons, ..etc. Zerg just cant simply 'trade' army inefficient anymore. Thats not counting the factor that the 'unit building time of Zerg is not 0. Yeah roach lings are really fast to pop out of the eggs but consider small map with a mobile blink stalker army, a counter attack could happen in 5 seconds and you cant even regroup your army in time. Beside, wrap prism, wrapgate mechanic, these stuff had been the main topic of complain lately and there is a part of it that is true.
As a result, you could see how ultralisk build time was buffed but thats simply is not enough.
As is to say, in this game (Losira vs Brown), Losira cant even afford trading army in-cost-efficient. The map is really 'small' for a swing back attack and in any case 2 players was on equal mining while losira clearly will mine out first. He was in a corner economically and about to be 'contained' by the map design itself. Try to watch the BW game if you dont know what im talking about.
Nice write-up NB :D Me as high master zerg player feel the same way. I came back from few months break and Zerg macro build doesn't work anymore. Protoss learned to wall better, position units and abuse the map choke etc and it is really tough to trade units cost efficiently. And when it comes to late game with protoss decent income, and nice upgrade (chronoboost makes 3/3/3 not too hard) and mothership on top of it. well GG.
On the side notes, I've been doing mass muta ball stragety and it works great in certain maps. I think muta mass is imba too lol
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.teamliquid.net/tlpd/images/maps/235_Match%20Point.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/images2/thumb/4/42/Daybreak.jpg/400px-Daybreak.jpg)
