Playing Terran

I am testing out Terran after the reset and I am really terrible at em, just as I where in the original they just don’t seem to fit me, I do fine against lesser skilled players but as soon as they “kinda” know what they are doing I get in serious trouble.

But I’m gonna stick to the 50 wins as Terran before changing again, then im going back to 50 more wins as Zerg and then toss again.

After this round I should have a pretty decent feel for all races, and ill start focusing purely on Protoss.

All though I might do another round at the end of the beta, to get all the changes in at that point.

But I really am looking forward to getting back to Toss.

Initial 5 matches

Hey, i Just played the first 5 initial games after the reset, with the goal of ending up in copper league (for testing how well and of which speed it would promote me and if i would eventually end up in the same place as i did before)

So i decided to have some fun with the first 5 games and here is basicly what i ended up doing.

Here are the replays for anyone wanting a bid of a laugh.

1: Drone attack, make as many drones as posible then attack (I would probally have won this one if i didn't quit)
2: Build 4 command centers and planetary fortress drop! (would also have won this if i didn't quit
3: build on my opponents creep hehe i messed up a bid here becaouse I where making the rules as I got into the match due to playing random and i where a bid slow at deciding what i wanted to do, but I did eventually get my spawning pool up in his main hehe :)
4: Cannons / Mothership only
5: mass infestors (this one was really really fun :-) and I would have won too had i not left in the end :)

Aftermath

Well after a really late night it’s time to reflect a bid 

The brackets for the tournaments can be found: Here

I will be uploading a replay package soon including but not limited to the 3 games I played in this tournament.

Overall I am both surprised and very pleased with the amount of players both signing up and showing up to the tournament and I really hope we can keep this up, but it does pose some ogistical problems both with concerns to administration and time the tournament started at ~20:00 and ended 01:00 So that’s a 5 Hour long tournament and this is not going to work in the long run, im sure there could be cut down on some of the time if people where a bid more efficient with playing their games but that won’t cut the tournament down by 1 Hour and in my opinion it should be cut to around 2 Hours so ending at around 23:00 at least on a normal workday.

I Would suggest starting the tournament at around 19:30 and make a max number of partisipants of 32 this along with some improvements in the players attitude towards getting the games played would go along way.

Another way to go would be to split the tournament in 2 workdays but that would pose issues with some people not being able to participate on both those exact days this by my experience doesent work.

A final solution could be to make 2 separate tournaments one for gold  plat players and one for cooper  silver either on the same night or 2 different nights. (the split is of cause up for discussion especially as the leagues doesn’t seem to reflect skill correctly at the moment but this will change in the retail version of the game when they are a bid more strict with the AMM searches)

The thing I like about the last idea is that the lower league players can compete a bid more with someone on their own level and get some good games in without being completely slaughtered and discouraged from participating in a later event.

All in all a great tournament and big probs for Fafner for the hard work and for taking the time to host it :-) /cheers

Teamladder.dk 1 on 1 Tour – tonight

Fafner is hosting the first Dansih SC2-Beta tournament and this will be my first sc2 tournament as well and I’m looking very much forward to it.

The sign ups started 2 days ago and there are already 30 signups, this just goes to show both how many beta participants have been invited and the mere amount of interest in the game.

I Don’t have any high hopes for my own performance especially since I signed up as >erg and I am absolutely horrible at playing Zerg, but I’m just looking to have a good time and hopefully obs a lot of good games, and hopefully win at least one match but with the amount of good players its doubtful I will get very far :-)

When looking down on the signups it amazes me how many of the people I know, from earlier sc/wc3 communities and it kind of makes me a bid nostalgic, ahhh good times…!

When to build Drones

I’ve recently changed to playing Zerg. To get a better feeling for all the races I’m taking them one at a time, and well I suck at playing Zerg. Sure I can win with a basic roach rush but anything apart from that it gets quite messy have no idea when I’m supposed to push, when to expand when to do mostly anything, but yet the hardest part of all of them is when to produce drones, its basically the same as sc1 either produce units to defend / attack or produce workers to improve your macro and productions capabilities latter on in the game. But in sc2 you won’t have high ground advantage to save you, so it becomes even more important to know exactly what your enemy is doing at all times, because you don’t want to produce roaches for defense if the enemy is going for a more eco oriented build unless you build enough so you can actually do an attack and you don’t want to be making drones if a push is pending.

I find this balance between eco / units to be extremely difficult in sc2 and I more often then none end up building to few because im preparing for an attack that never comes until a bid latter. when I’m out eco’ed or I eco to hard and a M&M army completely punishes me for it.

Well in short I need improve my Intel-gathering, and adjust my play according to what I see or what I expect, but the error margin seems a lot smaller then in sc at least at my level of play

My first, long game

Well Games in SC2 are usually very short ending in an somewhat early/timed push or rush ending the game quite quick.

I’ve only seen a few games I would consider as long games and I finally after more then 110 solo games, had my very first long game last night, unfortunately even though it where long it where not a very high tech'ed game, it basically ended up with both of us taking each others mains out both struggling to survive my opponent taking an island expansion with his floating buildings while I where trying to get expansions around the map him flying with his medivacs with m&ms while my hydras where chasing them and the extra expansions he where trying to get up.

It where quite intense whit a lot of stuff happening all over the map, but I draw the long straw in the end it probably would have ended in my opponents favour if I didn’t have a corrupter against his planetary fortress he got up at an expansion, or if he had simply just m&m pushed me early on.

It wasn’t a pretty game a lot of mistakes on my part and most likely also on my opponents part, but at least it finally happened a long game! :-)

High-Ground

Well I touched this subject earlier in my wall of text post about the reasons why we weren’t seeing many late game battles and one of my 4 points where about high-ground, and high-ground seems to be one of the major concerns of the sc community right now.

I fell over a great article on teamliquid.net (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=116142)

And it is pretty much spot on.

In other news my top 3 in unit concerns right now is:

Stalkers (Feels absolutely useless. weak dmg. output and dies incredibly fast)
Roaches (Let alone the threat of this unit forces you to take extreme counter measures also the HP/armour doesn’t feel right for Zerg.)
Marauders (Theire high hp and slow projectile is a pain)

The stalker is more of a balance issue I would love to see that unit get a higher standard dmg and a bid less extra t armoured or just completely remove the armoured bonus for that unit and just go for a fixed dmg rate.

The 2 other units I’m not sure it’s as much of a balance issue for me as it is an issue of me not feeling these units fit very well into the game

Sc2 Theme bar *updated*

Just an Update on the Sc2 Themed bar

Well we had a fun night with a lot of sc2 watching and foosball and of course drinking :-)
Here is a list of the different drinks my mate ended up concocting.

Mothership
Immortal
Stim-pack (shot)
Creep
Zerg rush (6 shots)
Kerrigan
Overmind (shot)
Queen of blades (Kerrigan+Overmind)
Spirit of Tassadar

So at least I got 2 names right.
Most of the drinks where pretty good, for the names I especially liked the Stim-pack shot an excellent excuse to shout “that’s the stuff”

SC2 theme bar tonight

My friend at ITU, who is also playing in the beta, have sent me an invite for a sc2 theme bar and well who could refuse such an offer he have likely conducted some new sc2 related drinks and can’t wait to find out what he have come up with,
If I where suppose to come up with some drink names it would be stuff like this:

Baneling,- small explosive shot
The swarm - big mix longdrink
Brood lord -
The Immortal - longdrink
Medivac - hehe imagining people at the bar yelling MEDIC! (TF2 style)
Hellion – Fiery shot
Proxy rush - shot
Pylon
Mothershp! – big mix longdrink

Well there are endless possibilities, those where just some that came to mind, it’s going be interesting to see if he came up with some of the same stuff or if he had a completely different approach to it :-)

Solo update

Well I am going to keep this short for once :-)

Gold League: Rank 13
42-39
Rating: 1379

I tend to win with:
An early game push just after the 2 immortal is out with zealots / stalker / sentries the mix depending on what I am up against, but the push seems to work well against all races
An early game zealot “rush” (3-4 gates)

I Lose to:
Muta's
Marine-Marauders
3-4 Gate Zealot "rushes"
Banshee rushes

Late Game.., not happening?

When thinking back on the original starcraft, some of the absolute best games I’ve had have been some of the longer games, where a game lasted from 30 min up to even an hour absolutely hectic games throughout the whole game.

In sc2 The Avg. game time is quite low I rarely get beyond the 12 min mark.
I don’t think I’ve had a game go into anything I would call a late game and the amount of games ive had where I actually got an expansion up and running without the coming push completely annihilating me can be counted on one hand, so basically Late game rarely occurs.

From my perspective there are 4 major reasons for this.

1: The Meta game hasn’t been developed yet:
Meaning if you want to get a Late game going you need I be aware of all possible timing attacks, knowing what counters it and when to scout for it, and the fact that a lot of players have no idea when they should do the timing attack it even makes countering it harder because you cant really anticipate what is going to happen at this point, There for going on an all in timing attack yourselvf hoping not to hit a hard counter seems to be the way most people approach the game because you have a larger chance for success then going in defensively and try to counter “everything”.
This will of course change as the players develops build orders and strategies for the game. So everything will become a lot more predictable.

2: Static defence is a lot weaker in SC2 then the original
I am actually biting my own tong for even writing this because I really HATED some of the static defences in the original, it where tremendously hard breaking a Terran fortification, but now it just feels like you can basically ignore it, and that isn’t fun either this needs to be balanced so its still a threat but not a complete game stopper like the original, right now it feels to weak.

3: High ground advantage:
High ground advantage is all but gone, you get some sight bonus but after the games ive had both 1 on 1 and 2 vs 2’s it really isn’t much of an advantage, the opponent gets sight almost straight away and gives 100% dmg rather then the original getting sight whenever something shoots and then having a large chance to miss.
In the old game having high ground meant something and it could turn a game around in sc2 you end up totally ignoring the high / low ground.
What i would like here is to see the old system back, this really is a way to get comebacks into a game and for watching games where comebacks are possible is a lot more fun and interesting then knowing who is going win after the first battle due to not being able to get any kind of upper hand as in high ground defence.

4: Micro not mattering enough
Its still only 3 weeks old and I’m not really writing the game of as of lacking micro or not being micro intense as I have seen other people do because there is a lot of possibilities for micro, but the problem from my point of view is that it doesn’t feel like you are getting rewarded enough for doing it.

An Example of the above problematic is I’ve had some Protoss games where I went for a 2 gate semi teching build getting around 5 zealots and 4 stalkers, when the enemy Protoss player engaged my ramp where my 5 zealots are holding position and my 4 stalkers hitting them from the high ground, but the 10 zealots still managed to get through the 2 lines of hold pos defence and after killing my zealots he could go straight to my 4 stalkers and even while attempting to micro them and get them killed off the zealots can get reinforced quite quick and even if i get the zealots killed of and 2 new zealots in pos at the ramp it feels impossible to hold back the next incoming waves / reinforcements of the other player, a 3 gate zeal stormp vs 2 gate tech zeal/stalker with high ground advantage the 2 gater should in my opinion win the battle without to much of a hassel.

And yeah i might not be the best player so my micro probably isn’t perfect but if you need absolutely perfect micro to be able to 2 gate and survive, then you are going to have short games because almost everyone will do the rush due to the difficulty required to defend.

Sorry about the wall of text I promise I will make the next posts a lot shorter :-)

Marauders and what they bring to messing up my table...!

After a few more 1 on 1's it feels like Marauders are the way to go for Terran against Protoss early game, along with marines (The new m&m's and if u got some medivacs latter in the game u got m&m&m's and that I tell you is a deadly combination!), but for this post I am going to manly focus on Marauders since they are really the ones making early game challenging as Protoss.

First let’s take a look at the units stats (for this patch at least)
Cost: 100/25
HP: 125
Type: Armored / Biological
Dmg: 10
+ 10 Dmg to Armored units
Range 6

With the extra passive ability
Concussive shell: Target hit by the Marauder is temporarily slowed

I'm not going in depth with the numbers or any of the math or nothing like that on my blog, I am sure you can find better blogs for the math-crafting, and besides the numbers are more then likely going to change in the coming beta months.

So Marauders are one of the units in the game right now I find dealing with especially.

A match against a “decent” Terran player would usually go like this:
I go for 2 gates getting some zealots and in time some stalkers to provide some defence against a possible reaper harassment and if there is a ramp for high ground defences
Then the Terran decides to attack and I get pummelled like there where no yesterday.

But why am I getting pummelled?
Well if we take a quick look at the Protoss early game units we got.
Zealots:
This unit is very much kite able especially with the slow attack of Marauders
So an all zealot army won’t stand a chance
Stalkers:
are Armored units and therefore take a huge amount of dmg from Marauders and goes down really fast, all though they also deal extra dmg to armored themselves but Marauders seems to have the upper hand especially with marines backing them up.
With a mixed army og zeals and stalkers they will just keep kiteing until my zealots are down and then finish off my stalkers.

I’ve yet to find an easy counter for this that doesn’t leave me vulnerable early game
But I have managed to eat it down a few times, but those games where just a straw away from toing the Terran’s direction when the push came.

The 3 plausible solutions to the Marauder marine rush:

1: The Choke!
Trying to keep a really tight choke (only doable at a ramp where u can use the advantage of higher ground (on low ground it gets quite a bid more messy.)
From there you can go in some different directions the immortal being the "secure choice", but you have a few other options here as well, but I would suggest getting the robotics no matter what direction you take.

2: Fast teching to Immortals
If you expect a marine & marauder rush (and well I can’t remember a Terran game where he dident go for the m&m rush)
You do have some free time at the beginning focusing really hard on your economy and teching straight for immortals only getting 2-3 zeals for the choke and 2 stalkers for an anti reaper safety and as soon as your robotic gets warped in use you’re chrono boost to get the immortals out fast because at this point your opponent will most likely be knocking at your front door.

3: Zealot Charge!
Another way to go is to get the speed upgrade for your zealots, this includes getting quite a bid more zealots then you usually would, but you shouldn’t forget your stalkers because if the timing push comes before the charge upgrade is done you want them to hold them back just a little until the charge upgrades finishes especially if u have a ramp stalkers will make the difference
This tactic requires quite a bid of gass upfront compared to going for immortals but if u get the charge before he can push in you are in a really good position to get in and win the game right there.

Well at least I have had some luck with these 3 tactics, but bare in mind that it’s only my own experiences and I am by no means a good player so I might be completely off here.

I however, even with the 3 strategies, do tend to lose quite a lot Vs Terran opponents, but then again I tend to lose quite alot to all my opponents, no matter the race :-)