Strategy Forum Highlight Nomination Thread - Page 5

On September 16 2011 19:11 Chaosvuistje wrote:


I'd have to agree with Pugnae, if we miss position our zerglings they will all get chopped off by forcefields or blasted by storm, losing tons of supply in the blink of an eye.

Mispositioning should always be unfavourable, with good positioning you can kill the Infestors well, with bad positioning you'll get your collosi snatched away from you. And this can actually be stopped quite easily unlike a forcefield spell or a storm by sniping the infestor with X ( fill X in yourself, blink stalkers, DT's, feedback, phoenix spreaded out ) even at 9 range.

Having that said, with 7 range neurals I won't be researching neural parasite unless the protoss goes for an immortal composition. Against collosi they will get fried again and against archons the Protoss will probably have HT out anyway.

On September 08 2011 21:58 Chaosvuistje wrote:
I have known this major flaw in protoss design since the end of beta where I really started playing Protoss and Zerg off and on.

It is sad for the protoss players around us. The truly mechanical players get punished for the race while the weak players ride on the strengths of timing pushes. I've always imagined Protoss as a broken race, not balance wise but design wise. And it breaks my heart that they can't do multi pronged attacks or small pokes at an enemy without getting swamped. The biggest appearance of the design flaw is PvP, where it still hasn't breached past the one base phase.

I thank you for this post. And as a Master zerg player I can see that I fully agree with it. Protoss just can't be balanced well if offense and defence is so much intwined. Because nerfing one will nerf the other and vice versa. It is sad, but I truly hope that Blizzard revamps the warp gate mechanic with gateways. And give warp gates a trade off when compared to gateways. I don't think this is feasable in a patch however, only in HotS could such an enormous feat be implemented since the metagame then will be slightly in shambles allowing protoss to relearn timings more easily.

On September 08 2011 15:18 Chaosvuistje wrote:
+1 melee zerglings become 20% cooler when compared to a normal zergling which does 5 damage. Not only that, but the +1 melee upgrade opens up the path for a quicker +2 melee upgrade which is an upgrade with infinite possibilities.

Meanwhile, the +1 range only benefit your roaches, which attack slower than your zergligns and are in fewer numbers than zerglings. Not only that, the +2 range does not give the Zerg the ability to oneshot probes.

On September 04 2011 04:57 Chaosvuistje wrote:
Ummm...

No.

Let me explain why this won't work. First off, Broodlord tech takes an enormous amount of time to get up. And if you want to have them out reasonably quickly, you need to get your third up. This third will make you extremely vulnerable to Roach attacks where your spine crawlers are not, because +1 roaches will swamp your Zerglings utterly.

Mutalisks are great, but you need to have quite a tight build going to get them out safely when you are playing against a good zerg. Otherwise you will just get swamped by upgraded Roaches. Muta's can be used to deny the third of the opponent, AKA give you an advantage later. But they don't do anything to defend you unless you want to get out a lot of Mutalisks in which case you will have to abandon the Broodlord plan altogether.

My advice is to get good at Zergling Baneling and Roach timing attacks to get you into an advantage rather than going straight for Infestor Roach. This will give you a better feel for the match up.

On December 25 2011 17:33 Chaosvuistje wrote:


I think I have seen that game actually, although I didn't take notes on it and I don't have a GSL pass so I'm unable to watch the VODs ( yes, even the up and down ones, sadly ).



Don't believe anything casters say simply because they are famous. Artosis says Mech is the way to go in TvP, and I can't say many terrans bar the fanboys of artosis believe it is. I mean ask Goody, the actual mech god, and HE will tell you that mech doesn't work in TvP. Also I wouldn't believe D9 to say the word 'hard counter' in any way shape or form unless he is joking due to him believing it is a bad word.

As for the Mutalisk transition, maybe against a fast Infestor player you have to transition out of them faster, like at 5 or 7. But it certainly doesn't impede the Mutalisking player from getting map control and an uncontested third and maybe even a fourth. While the Infestoring player will have to fight for his third to get up while staying at home. I mean think of the things I can do to annoy your Infestors for a minute:

• Send a small pack of Zerglings to intercept them and do damage to them. You have to protect them using your own lings or even waste a fungal.
  
• Send random Mutalisks out to attack your Infestors, which you have to back up with Queens or be forced to retreat back.
  
• Send Zerglings and Banelings to attack the third, have you fungal them or attack them with Zerglings and Banelings of your own, and later come in with Mutalisks once you expended some energy.
  

And I could go on and combine all of these just for the heck of it. I'm saying that while it might be possible to hold your third against a good Mutalisk player, it takes far, far more skill to pull it off than the Mutalisk player has to pull off. You need to have good fungals, you need to not have your Queens sniped, you can get your Infestors intercepted, you need to worry about counter attacks while I harass the third, you need to spread creep for your queens and protect it otherwise they will be slow as hell... It is far, far easier to mess with the Infestoring player as a Mutalisk player than it is the other way around where you fungal some of my Mutalisks and kill them. Plus the thing you can lose as the Infestor player can be Infestors, your third and stray Queens. These are far more important and gamechanging than a couple of Mutalisks could ever be.

Fast Infestor styles do have these troubles, because any aggressive opponent, either with a lot of Roaches, Zerglings or Mutalisks, will get the third up faster. It takes a lot of fungals to kill off Roaches, and you can't really be certain that they will clump up. The only advantage I see from a fast Infestor player is that he can have a large Infestor ball up faster for sniping bases and the like. It doesn't give economic safety that Roach based or Mutalisk based styles do provide, while still hinging everything on the control of the Infestor player. It's not forgiving in the least.

I use this midgame Spire style simply because I want to get a third up safely and without much unit making beforehand. Mutalisks are the perfect unit for that as they are amazing against pretty much everything Zerg uses in the early game, aside from mass Queens. Getting the third up and saturated fast is the only reason I even left my old timingattack based Roach style behind in favour of this. Mutalisks simply allow you to freely saturate your base within reason without having to worry about balancing unit vs drone all that much.

I'm not a firm believer that there is such a thing as a hard counter for someone that goes Spire in the midgame of ZvZ where people have droned up almost equally. That includes Infestors, if played correctly and transitioned fast enough. Perhaps if I go for 12 Mutalisks as my style against Infestors, I will lose painfully to a push coming later. But I refuse to believe that if a Spire player is smart and transitions well, that he would still lose because the other player went 2 base Infestor. And even then I feel that the 2 base Infestor player relies more on the opponent going for Mutalisks than the Mutalisk player relying on the opponent to do anything.




Roach/Hydra/Infestor might be more micro intensive if it is pitted against Muta/Ling/Bling, but there really isn't any micro aside from pre-battle positioning and fungalling against one another. It is boring in the way that there is almost no harassment, counter attacks or in-battle micro going on at all. It's just unit trading and postiioning and large army clashes until one player succumbs from economic disadvantage. Boring for spectators that don't understand ZvZ and slow for players that want to micro a lot.

Now imagine Mutalisk versus Mutalisk, now there is nothing but harassment, counter attacks and defences going on. Once Infestors are transitioned into, Mutalisks can't roam the map uncontrolled or they face getting fungalled hard. So now you can just go on double Muta harass to evade the large muta flock of your opponent while still being safe with Queens and Infestors at home. There are so many bases being taken and so many being taken out by counter attacks that there really shouldn't be a time in the midgame where there isn't any action going on. It relies far far less on deathball versus deathball than Roach/Hydra does which is why I prefer to watch and to play it.