My biggest trouble with Zerg is trying to manage everything. Keeping the eggs going, managing military units, etc. I was doing a 1v1 with my friend who played protoss, and I thought I had it, but then he comes in with stalkers and Dark Templars, while my overseer was somewhere else, his DTs came in and owned my ground units, while his Stalkers took care of my mutas... it sucked.
Just curious, what would be the best option to take out Photon Cannons as Zerg? He just massed those in his base, due to me not being aggressive enough.
[quote name='Droenixjpn']My biggest trouble with Zerg is trying to manage everything. Keeping the eggs going, managing military units, etc. I was doing a 1v1 with my friend who played protoss, and I thought I had it, but then he comes in with stalkers and Dark Templars, while my overseer was somewhere else, his DTs came in and owned my ground units, while his Stalkers took care of my mutas... it sucked.
Just curious, what would be the best option to take out Photon Cannons as Zerg? He just massed those in his base, due to me not being aggressive enough.[/QUOTE]
Brood Lords? Why was he massing cannons? If you weren't pressuring him, it would seem a waste to go with static defense and not units.
Don't ask me why he was massing cannons, lol. He actually did mass units too though, but still me and him are pretty noobish compared to others. I guess Brood Lords would work, but meh. I get too annoyed when Photon Cannons come into play, for whatever reason, they instill fear into me.
[quote name='Droenixjpn']Don't ask me why he was massing cannons, lol. He actually did mass units too though, but still me and him are pretty noobish compared to others. I guess Brood Lords would work, but meh. I get too annoyed when Photon Cannons come into play, for whatever reason, they instill fear into me.[/QUOTE]
Roaches/Ultras/Broodlords. Roaches lose their effectiveness if there are a ton of cannons though. Ultras do too if you don't have a lot of them and there are a lot of cannons. If the cannons are massed up on a ramp and you can't get a lot of units hitting them at once, then Broodlords will be your best bet.
[quote name='Droenixjpn']Just curious, what would be the best option to take out Photon Cannons as Zerg? He just massed those in his base, due to me not being aggressive enough.[/QUOTE]
I'm a more passive player when I see mass inbase defense.
Economy wise, remember that one photon cannon is 150 minerals. If he's putting them up early in the game, I would expand rapidly. Zerg with 3 bases running all at once is dangerous and if anyone lets that happen, it's game over.
Once you put up some bases, focus on getting the econ up and running, then if he ever decides to attack you should have more units than him. In the meantime, instead of engaging his photons, make him engage you. Harass his mineral lines with small troops and prevent him from expanding.
At a beginner level I'd focus on simply having more troops than the opponent. Unless there's some gross hard counter and a poor play (running marines into tanks) then for the most part, having more troops is superior even IF they're countered.
[quote name='panzerfaust']Is this game still boring? I've been looking up the "exciting" pro games and people get excited over simple marine spreads vs banelings.
Really?
(i know i know, it's a good game, i'm just being hard on it =p )[/QUOTE]
Watch Dreamhack.
EDIT: And if you have mutas, there's no excuse for getting caught off guard with DTs. Mutas are your scout force.
While I've yet to see anything that matches my favourite Brood War game of all time (seriously, ing watch that one), there are some damn good matches. Game three of MaNa Vs MorroW at Dreamhack (the video for which I would link you, 'cept it refuses to load right now for some reason), for example.
[quote name='panzerfaust']Is this game still boring? I've been looking up the "exciting" pro games and people get excited over simple marine spreads vs banelings.
Really?
(i know i know, it's a good game, i'm just being hard on it =p )[/QUOTE]
I get bored with this game, because it is not much fun, nor bring more curiosity to the players
[quote name='The Crotch']I could not disagree more.
While I've yet to see anything that matches my favourite Brood War game of all time (seriously, ing watch that one), there are some damn good matches. Game three of MaNa Vs MorroW at Dreamhack (the video for which I would link you, 'cept it refuses to load right now for some reason), for example.[/QUOTE]
That game was amazing. I've never seen that before. Holy shit at the 30+ kill Dragoon.
one army vs one army play? slow tank pushing? only one base?
in BW the cameraman often has trouble because there's so much going on
there wasn't that much going on here.
BW >> superior to watch[/QUOTE]
Fine, fine.
Game four more to your liking? Drops, nukes, HT harassing mineral lines, yes, one big-ass army against one big-ass army plenty of times, 4/5 bases a piece...
Game four more to your liking? Drops, nukes, HT harassing mineral lines, yes, one big-ass army against one big-ass army plenty of times, 4/5 bases a piece...[/QUOTE]
too much one-army play...
... the key to that game was vikings being stormed for free? really? these people supposedly have 300 APM?
there's just not enough multitasking compared to BW and their control isn't as tight as top BW players.
i'm not anti sc2 here, i was well prepared to erase BW from my memory when the beta came out, but this competitive scene just isn't delivering for me -- at least not yet.
the game is solid, it's intense to play, and like broodwar and any other competitive game i get into -- i don't end very pro at any of them, in fact i'm pretty average even though I spend so much time admiring top play.
which is why i notice that this isn't very good "pro" play, or that maybe the game just isn't at the point where entertaining play is possible. i feel like this game is riding on the competitive hype from kids who want to achieve the pro status that broodwar brought to koreans. "It's starcraft and i'm going to get awesome at it!" Regardless of what blizzard has done to its design.
maybe it'll be better in a few years or after the expansions come out and when the maps are better, but right now SC2 is pretty dull (compared to BW) to watch AND play
Oh, undoubtedly the players aren't up to Brood War good, no argument. Naama let his shit get stormed and, despite having a huge resource surplus, kept all his workers mining and never repaired a single thing. Still fine watchi' for me.
I like watching BW (and sports in general) because they do things that I can't do.
I haven't seen anything in SC2 that looks impossible for a mere mortal like me to do.
The reason why I don't play BW is because everyone is beyond my skill level and it's impossible for me to enjoy myself playing. But I'll sure have fun watching people play.
Some fo that stuff is pretty nail biting, I doubt I could keep up with that survival by a hair type game. I just don't have the nerves for that, so it's interesting for me to watch.
[quote name='kainzero']I like watching BW (and sports in general) because they do things that I can't do.
I haven't seen anything in SC2 that looks impossible for a mere mortal like me to do.
The reason why I don't play BW is because everyone is beyond my skill level and it's impossible for me to enjoy myself playing. But I'll sure have fun watching people play.[/QUOTE]
You can watch all you want, but I highly doubt you would be able to pull off a victory like the one in Naama v Mana. Knowing the theory behind a build is the easy part. Actually executing it with perfect mechanics is the hard part.
[quote name='DarkRider23']You can watch all you want, but I highly doubt you would be able to pull off a victory like the one in Naama v Mana. Knowing the theory behind a build is the easy part. Actually executing it with perfect mechanics is the hard part.[/QUOTE]
The mechanics are far from perfect. There were so many mistakes, and the free storm on the vikings was icing on the cake.
Multiple psi storms is not as impressive in SC2 as it is in BW. In BW, you had to be extremely good to use it well. In SC2, any noob can T click T click T click.
Builds in SC2 are simple and easily learned in a day because they're not mechanically demanding. Builds in BW needed at least a week and were often scripted up to 60 food and depending on the other person's build, there were often multiple branches on what to do.
the game looked to be over after flash lost the first engagement. but flash is possibly the greatest of all time and demonstrates why... turn allows two vultures to go by and flash's control completely changes the game and just uses relentless pressure that makes turn lose his advantage. and the multitasking is just sick. THAT looks impossible.
the game looked to be over after flash lost the first engagement. but flash is possibly the greatest of all time and demonstrates why... turn allows two vultures to go by and flash's control completely changes the game and just uses relentless pressure that makes turn lose his advantage. and the multitasking is just sick. THAT looks impossible.
[/QUOTE]
... the key to that game was tanks walking straight past vultures? really? these people supposedly have 300 APM?
As far as the whole "just one big army" thing goes, I think a lot of that has to do with some of the new things given to protoss.
Chrono boost is awesome. I can speed up my research. You can't speed up your research. yeah, I can get probes out so ing fast. Suck it, terrans.
Colossii are incredibly powerful. Zhiiiiing! Zhiiiiing! No more marines. And if they have too much anti-air, kheydarin amulet! In the last State of the Game podcast, one protoss player compared it to the "Wonder" building from Age of Empire: that is, if the game goes on for too long after it's been researched, it's damn near an auto-win for the protoss. Fook yar.
And part of that is because of the warpgate. Faster unit production than normal, and we can get our units wherever the we want with a pylon. Your army's not home and you're getting dropped? Warp in three templar and use their amulets to instantly fry 20 enemies. yeah!
Sentries are utterly game-changing. They create chokes out of open fields and walls out of chokes. They make fast-attacking enemies do comically reduced damage. . Yeah.
And blink! Shit! Blink is blink! yeah!
But because of all that super-powerful shit, something had to give. With sentries able to over early-game aggression so well, with warpgates allowing us to reinforce weak areas so quickly, with such powerful upgrades to some of our units, and with chrono boost able to pump out armies at great speeds/get key upgrades done far faster than normal, something has to be weakened.
And that something is the core protoss army.
Stalkers and zealots kinda suck. We've gone from having an army that's expensive and powerful to an army that's expensive. 70% of the time, they're just meatshields for the units that we actually care about; the other 30%, they're highly inefficient anti-air, and if you try to do shit with just zealots and stalkers, you'll probably get your ass kicked. So we park these horribly weak units underneath our awesomeasshit colossii. We have them cower behind forcefields created by our sentries, and we hope to god they distract you from the high templar moving up to storm your lines.
"Hey, wait, I saw blink stalkers used really well in the game betwe-"
Yes, I'm sure you did. And blink stalkers can be very powerful. So can chargelots. Thing is, those two units both start off weak (zealot being kite-able by pretty much anything in existence, and stalkers doing piddly damage), get super awesome! if you get their upgrades at a half-decent time, and then go back to being mostly useless again in the late game. Stalkers have the worst upgrade scaling in the game (that is, they receive the least benefit from attack upgrades than any other unit - even sentries get better DPS from +1 attack than stalkers), and zealots just do not come in great enough numbers to be able to overcome the fact that melee units melt like I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter against anything with range (not to mention concussive shells, which just... ugh).
EDIT: Coming up next on "Rants About My Race", "How having the best detector in the game ed us over."
[quote name='The Crotch']... the key to that game was tanks walking straight past vultures? really? these people supposedly have 300 APM?
[/QUOTE]
If we played that exact same game and you let me get 2 vultures past you, I doubt I would be able to the amount of damage he was able to do (key mine placement preventing reinforcements from both ends). Not to mention, the advantage that Flash gained wouldn't be enough for me to win. And it's arguable if the tanks would be able to take out the vultures.
Not to mention, with no MBS / Auto-mining workers, there are actually places to put the APM.
Letting two vultures run by is not the equivalent of letting a key part of your ONE army get stormed for free and not moving them until the storm is almost over.
The game was a great example of Flash being Flash, but I'd hardly call it "a tense BW game". After he got behind in the early running, it was all-Flash, all the time.
[quote name='The Crotch']The game was a great example of Flash being Flash, but I'd hardly call it "a tense BW game". After he got behind in the early running, it was all-Flash, all the time.
Also, "Flash" is really fun to say.[/QUOTE]
Flash being Flash is always tense.
"Oh my God! He made a big mistake again! How will he ever come back from this one?"
What made this one tense for me was that Flash never had a superior army until the last minute. I'm pretty sure he was down in supply and he was even down an expansion for a good chunk of the game and he had to win it purely through multitasking and positioning. If just ONE thing he did failed badly, he would've lost the game because of how behind he was.
I remember when Flash came back against Savior after a muta harass basically destroyed everything (although it can now possibly be argued that Savior threw that game :lol.
But it shows why that match up was so stressful. When those M&M/vessels meet Zerg's army you have to do everything perfectly. And only 12 units per command group? Good ing lord.
They can harass, and hell yeah it's nice to have a few cloaked badasses wandering around the field, but you can not rush for DTs. Period. End sentence. Full stop.
In the time it takes a player to get DT production started, a colossus can be half-done.
MaNa (I think) sniped a lair with DTs in one of the Dreamhack games, but he lucked out on his opponent's poor reaction time and horrendous overseer positioning. DTs are at the very dead end of a tech tree, are very gas heavy (125/125), and take foringever to get online. Yes they're still good units, but for the investment they take, why not just get something a million times better?
[quote name='The Crotch']They can harass, and hell yeah it's nice to have a few cloaked badasses wandering around the field, but you can not rush for DTs. Period. End sentence. Full stop.
In the time it takes a player to get DT production started, a colossus can be half-done.
MaNa (I think) sniped a lair with DTs in one of the Dreamhack games, but he lucked out on his opponent's poor reaction time and horrendous overseer positioning. DTs are at the very dead end of a tech tree, are very gas heavy (125/125), and take foringever to get online. Yes they're still good units, but for the investment they take, why not just get something a million times better?[/QUOTE]
If archons were a better all-around unit, DTs wouldn't be a dead-end tech unit, really... but archon are sitting ducks against any ranged units, really.
[quote name='The Crotch']They can harass, and hell yeah it's nice to have a few cloaked badasses wandering around the field, but you can not rush for DTs. Period. End sentence. Full stop.
In the time it takes a player to get DT production started, a colossus can be half-done.
MaNa (I think) sniped a lair with DTs in one of the Dreamhack games, but he lucked out on his opponent's poor reaction time and horrendous overseer positioning. DTs are at the very dead end of a tech tree, are very gas heavy (125/125), and take foringever to get online. Yes they're still good units, but for the investment they take, why not just get something a million times better?[/QUOTE]
I hate to say this, but I saw a recent GSL match where a Protoss player rushed (or maybe did an early game push) with DTs on a Terran. He used a warp prism on the outskirts of the T's base on the Xel'Naga Caverns. It was completely effective.
i would have to check again to see the exact timing of that push. It was a small number of scattered DTs in the base completely rofl stomping the Terran.
[quote name='Gamehead']I hate to say this, but I saw a recent GSL match where a Protoss player rushed (or maybe did an early game push) with DTs on a Terran. He used a warp prism on the outskirts of the T's base on the Xel'Naga Caverns. It was completely effective.
i would have to check again to see the exact timing of that push. It was a small number of scattered DTs in the base completely rofl stomping the Terran.[/QUOTE]
DTs can own any Terran that gets caught with his pants down, but if that Terran made a push in the time the Protoss was getting DTs, he probably would have won.
[quote name='DarkRider23']DTs can own any Terran that gets caught with his pants down, but if that Terran made a push in the time the Protoss was getting DTs, he probably would have won.[/QUOTE]
That is true, however, I was merely pointing out that it is possible and effective even in high-level guess.
Should it have worked? Probably, not. But a build such as that isn't too common, so it can pay off.
You can't count on your opponents bad decision to make a unit useful though. Terrans have so many ways of detecting that unles you get DTs out before they build detection, or they just plain don't build any, you're screwed. At that point HTs would be more effective with psi storm.
Terrans have four different detectors. There's a detector on the orbital, which ever terran gets super early anyway. It can hit anywhere at any time, and can not be blocked. There are static detectors in the form of missile turrets. There are mobile detectors in the form of ghosts, which are amazing anti-protoss units even without their ability to totally destroy DTs. Then there are their flying detectors, which again, are awesome with their ability to completely nullify stalkers.
A protoss should not be able to go fast-DT against a terran, especially if they add a warp prism in there.
Also, I personally prefer the video of Artosis getting trolled:
[quote name='The Crotch']Then there are their flying detectors, which again, are awesome with their ability to completely nullify stalkers.[/QUOTE]
If you FF the PDDs you can take them out, because it can only drain so much at one time.
Or you can just blink retreat and engage somewhere else.
It's not a complete loss... just think of PDD like Dark Swarm, it's not insanely broken and you can nullify it with Irradiate. I mean, Feedback.
[quote name='panzerfaust']digging my friend's account out of bronze league, it's so much work
i'm on like a 20 game winning streak, can't they just bump me?[/QUOTE]
I remember my friends and I got placed into 3v3 silver with 2 losses. We went 37-11 before they promoted us. When they did promote us, they put us into platinum, skipping gold entirely.
[quote name='kainzero']If you FF the PDDs you can take them out, because it can only drain so much at one time. [/QUOTE]Wait... what? How does forcefield help you?
[quote name='kainzero'] Or you can just blink retreat and engage somewhere else.[/QUOTE]
Aye, engaging a long ways away is pretty key against early ravens. If
[quote name='kainzero']It's not a complete loss... just think of PDD like Dark Swarm, it's not insanely broken and you can nullify it with Irradiate. I mean, Feedback.[/QUOTE]
I may have overstated the power of PDD earlier. It doesn't work on sentry attacks, it can be taken out by HT fairly easily, and you'll need a good pile of them to have a true Dark Swarm effect against a large stalker force.
But my point was, it's not uncommon for terrans to get fast ravens because they're pretty in' bitchin' before you get too many stalkers/HT, thus making DT play even more not-good. It's not, "Oh , DTs, now I gotta make detectionshitshitshit", it's, "Huh. DTs. Good thing I already have a perfectly good unit that detects on the field, anyway."
[quote name='kainzero']I remember my friends and I got placed into 3v3 silver with 2 losses. We went 37-11 before they promoted us. When they did promote us, they put us into platinum, skipping gold entirely.[/QUOTE]
I originally landed silver 1v1. Within a few games, I was gold. A couple more, and I had hit platinum.
A good friend of mine has hundreds and hundreds of games in bronze, and has yet to move up.
ing watch that one), there are some damn good matches. Game three of MaNa Vs MorroW at Dreamhack (the video for which I would link you, 'cept it refuses to load right now for some reason), for example.
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