Jan 29, 2017
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That Starcraft Shit
So in order to remain relevant much like NaNiwa and twitter, I’m going to actually do some posts related to StarCraft 2and how I’ve been fairing in the game lately. I guess I’ll start with some ideas I’ve been having and hopefully I’ll fill like finishing up when I get to my current results. I guess to open I’ve been looking for a tournament to play in again; you know something to practice for other than for the sake of just practicing. I’m thinking kind of a team league or something though, I know Battle.net has a team league they do on the forums and I think we have enough players still in the tumblrcraft SC2 community where we could support a small team league. I really hope so, I’m going to talk to guys like Archien and Aintfunny and see if I can get anything together, if it goes well maybe some people like Evergreen who left the game or other players who are newer and feel a little intimidated might be willing to sit down and practice. Also my team is down to just Aintfunny and myself and our roster is getting cold and lonely, I’d love some new faces to play with and get some practice sessions together. It is my greatest feeling that most good styles aren’t born from Ladder games but from practice with peers who can help you get different opinions and come together collaboratively. Anyway as far as my results go, I didn’t play last week like I should have, but I’m now 26/5 for the season which gives me the highest win percentage of anyone I know. I’m actually not sure why I haven’t been promoted, but whatever I’m just gonna keep rolling until I get promoted. I’ve been doing different things all day, but I didn’t start losing until after like 8 hours into a play time, and started getting notably supply blocked, which means I’m done for the night and not gonna keep pushing my luck. As of today, I’ve lost to one Terran, one Zerg, and three Protoss. The reason for both my losses to Protoss tonight was just bad organization and general decision making during a blink all-in scenario. Blink All-ins have traditionally been my weakness in the match up, but my losses today were due to supply blocks mostly or forgetting warp gate in one scenario. The supply blocks are mildly concerning, but the warp gate thing was just a fluke, albeit an unfortunate one. Protoss vs. Zerg I feel like I made a huge jump today over how I’d been doing. Previously I’d been all-inning which is mildly stressful to do because you have to get your timings right and make sure your scouting is perfect. I’ve been one gate expanding today which is significantly easier to do, I have to have moderately good scouting, but the earlier sentry helps out. From there I’ve been going up to like 4 or 5 sentries with four or five zealots and a stalker or two then apply pressure on Zerg’s third. If they have a third I usually kill it and just recall when the situation gets too hot to deal with. I’m sure I’m that guy that causes the angry posts on reddit and battle.net right now, but whatever. From there I’ve been following up by adding a Robo and Warp Prism and then when Zerg gets ready to counter attack just use the Prism to harass their main and natural and wrack up the worker kills and destroy vital tech. The two games I played today where Zerg went Swarm Hosts this proved to be fatal to them, because they couldn’t protect their base and pressure me and once they had their base on lock I had Archons and colossus up so I just killed them. There was one notable instance where the pressure was so good the Zerg had his Swarm Hosts positioned in his natural between the ramp to his main and his hatchery and I dropped like three force fields and locked him behind his mineral line. He left the game basically immediately after the Force Fields landed. In Protoss vs. Terran I feel like I’ve made leaps and bounds of improvement today too, feeling much more confident staying on Gateway tech a little longer. Again this is because I’ve been using the Warp Prism more and focusing on making more intelligent, fluid, in game calls rather than what I was doing, which was just going 1gate into 3 gate into Stargate every game while expanding. The result is games like I had earlier where I managed to snipe Terran’s bunker with a few stalkers and force him to abandon his natural early on. I canceled my Stargate and got a Robo then used my stalkers to break the rocks in his natural and set up counter attack points before returning home. Terran responded with pressure having a large unit leave however I had 2/2 finish when his 0/1. Once charge and a few colossus finished he couldn’t even keep up his contain anymore and was forced to fall back. The entire time his units weren’t able to build up because between my proxies and my warp prism he had too much pressure coming from three different sides at home to do too much damage. I’ve steadily relearning how to be aggressive in Protoss vs. Terran. I used to be incredibly good at it and then had diminished returns, but I think that’s largely because I’d been dictating the pacing of the game and then refusing to adapt to the pace I set even as Terran managed to change how they approached the game. Anyway that’s gonna be it for this long winded post. If anyone’s interested in a team league or if there’s anyone without a team out there reading this, feel free the message me I need to refill my ranks. I’m accepting everyone on Infinite Nation right now. My in game name is SaintEaon.711 and I hope to hear from you guys soon. -E
Protoss vs Terran and the Benefits of the Mothership Core
So needless to say Heart Of The Swarm brought some pretty significant changes to all three races. However after having experimented with many of them the two changes I'm most satisfied with are the Mothership Core and the potential for earlier Dark Templar. However I'm going to focus this article on the Mothership Core and how using and abusing it in Protoss vs Terran can get Protoss in a nice position early game and delay Terran's ramp up into their powerful mid game and ultimately get a Macro Protoss in a very safe position. The basics of Mothership Core Mechanics: The Mothership Core builds very quickly at is relatively cheap at 100/100. However that doesn't mean its a throw away unit and shouldn't be used to engage marines unless its got support. It costs two supply and that needs to be taken into consideration before doing anything aggressive with it. To start, the Mothership Core's relatively slow speed and wonky AI makes it something you have to babysit, which isn't necessarily a problem once you get used to it. Some players attempt to use the Mothership Core for Harassment of the mineral lines however with its low damage output I find that to be a waste of time, especially if someone forces you to recall. I'll explain better use of the Harassment abilities of the Mothership Core a little later, however I'll suffice it to say for now that the Mothership Core is preferably always with your army, however on a separate hotkey. The next important thing to note is the three abilities the Mothership Core has. They are, Mass Recall, Photon Overcharge, and Time warp. Each of these has very specific uses that have some utility, however I've found that the most useful thing the Mothership Core does is fly, I'll explain that below: Mass Recall: Mass Recall is the most important spell for Protoss vs Terran. This spell is the entire reason Protoss can be out on the map versus Terran at all with the current build (Build refering to Patch, not necessarily something within the meta-game). In Korea, you'll find yourself in the following situation a lot, you fought Terran near your 3rd, you managed to defeat the Terran and moved across the map to attack. However in that time Terran remade his army, boarded his medivacs and proceeded to fly across the map and base race you.
Mass recall is required here, because with a stronger more powerful army you can proceed to destroy Terran's base and economy, then Mass Recall back home and finish off Terran's army. Likewise Terran is very drop happy due to the speed of the Medivac right now anyway, and in any situation where you're attempting to hold the center of the map with your main force (Maybe to snipe expansions or for skirmishes) Terran will almost always drop you. Without the Mothership Core's recall function your ability to survive this play would be impossible. The next is Photon Overcharge. Photon Overcharge in Protoss vs Terran is either amazing or totally useless and there's literally nothing between the two. To understand this one needs to understand why Photon Overcharge is good vs Zerg and good vs Protoss. In PvP Photon Overcharge is good because despite the tankiness of Protoss units, they're in relatively few numbers in the early game when you'd be relying on it. Vs Zerg the Photon Overcharge is quiet dangerous due to the low health of the zerg units, but also because in the event of ling runbys, it changes the zergling's threat level and makes them target the nexus instead of the probes. Vs Terran in low Numbers Photon Overchage is amazing because it does good damage against the less Tanky Terran units. However due to the higher numbers Terran can pump out there is a window where Terran armies can just stim and crush your army and your nexus. Most of those pushes will happen between 10 and 15 minutes though depending on how well the early game went. Finally you have Time Warp which is supposed to be the "end game" utility for the Mothership Core. However due to the nature of the spell it isn't better or worse at any point in the game. However I do find that in late game scenarios when I'm doing the "Big Push" that'll win the game, toggling time warp twice to slow the army and then switching to storms while making sure I'm not taking EMPs and microing Warp Prisms and securing expansions can be a little difficult. Likewise if Terran tries to base race you, using Time Warp makes it so you can't Mass Recall. However early game Time Warp is really effective with stalker or Zealot pressure. Your own Time Warps don't seem to affect your units, so suddenly Zealots can close on marines and stalkers can kite for days. However be aware that if you're using the Mothership Core to help add pressure to the Terran early game and you do end up using a spell like time warp if your opponent gets a Medivac to your base it will do a lot of damage. Understanding those spells helps you figure out how and when to use them. However there are some interesting tricks to know. For example if you're forced to recall to stop a drop early game, once the drop is dead if you have less than 50 energy on your Mothership Core, kill it and rebuild it. Mothership Core's start with 50 energy, so if you're expecting return pressure you'll want Photon Over Charge as quickly as possible.
The next important thing to note is Harassment Techniques. As some people in the Tumblrcraft tournament have noticed I absolutely love harassment and aggression and the entire reason this is possible is due to the Mothership Core. The Mothership Core's vision range is HUGE. This is amazing because on most maps if Terran rushes to turbo wall in as is typical of Terran you can stay to one side of their bunker and usually always get a supply depot kill, which that early in the game almost always supply blocks Terran. You can also get additional marine kills as Stalkers shred marines prior to stim and combat shields. They also do decent against low numbers of Marauders before concussive shells. You can also get excellent scouting information based off of this. If you get to Terran's base and they haven't expanded and your Mothership Core spots about five marines and a widow mine, I would immediately pull back to your base. An annoying strategy that's seeped its way into the US servers is loading a mine or two and a few marines into a medivac and rushing for drops. This can be done off of a 1/1/1 and if you don't scout it you'll lose a lot of mining time and those marines can kill you out right if the mines don't. The proper response to this is expand, drop a robo, get an observer for the mines and use your mothership core for the extra dps to help kill the mines or medivacs. From there get a Warp Prism and return to harassing. Your expansion will be up sooner and if you've got a good eye you can see where Widow Mines are buried (they appear as little shadows on the ground similar to roaches). Get around 5 gates and preferably storm going while harassing. Its important to have proxies in place from here and go for storms. Colossus is not the right plan here. While you have the infrastructure in place for Colossus, they already have the starport for vikings. Archons and High Templar are stronger and they compliment the warp prism/zealot harass you'll be doing as those require purely minerals. Another good instance of the Warp Prism's usage is that most Terran's even when they have an army that can survive a Photon Overcharge aren't aware that they can survive it. The DPS hasn't killed them enough so that they know how much they can or can't tank. So if you get up to about five gates and use the Photon Overcharge when defending, most of the time Terran will pull back long enough for another warp in cycle to happen and give you the troops you need to survive. If you know your timings for Terran, and are comfortable with harass all you need to know are a few things in order to do damage remarkably well with the Mothership Core. These things are simple: Stim: Appears no time before six minutes
Concussive Shell: has a relatively low research time, however it can be nullified by adding Zealots into your early game composition and using the Mothership core to spot, giving you a better position. Widow Mines: Relatively easy to scout. Vespine Gas starts at 2500 gas, if you scout and see its at 2400 and you don't see an expansion or a slightly delayed expansion they went for a fast factory and are probably going mines, especially if you see marines come out of the barracks. If you see a reaper then it was for the reapers and you're probably seeing standard bio or they're slowly transitioning into mech. 10 Minute Mark: 10 Minutes starts a window of Terran Strength heading into the mid game. Terran will have all their vital upgrades supposing you didn't manage to snipe them as well as Medivacs. At this point you already needed to have 5+gates and have splash damage on the way. You also need to fall back from here to defend. Even if you have +1, close to even supplies, and a better economy at this point the Terran army will just be more lethal outright for about another 3-5 minutes depending on how far along your tech is. The best advice I can offer for surviving this point is make sure your upgrade spending has been focused on charge and storm. Get splash damage in the form of Archons which are beefy and allow you to have a little more minerals. Try and be active with a Warp Prism or proxies, when Terran inevitably tries to hit you back, punish them for leaving their base. Don't let Terran just leave their base, you can hit them just has hard as they can hit you.
I think I might try to get back I to Starcraft tonight. I've had horrible ladder anxiety due to the game change but I think I'm going to try~ Any good Toss builds at the moment?