BGH Strat of the Day (Stopping the Carrier Rusher)

Welcome to my second encore presentation of the BGH Strat of Day series. If you have missed previous installments of this series, you can view them by clicking here and typing Drefsab in the author text box.

Prologue

Well, up to this point, I had never faced a carrier rusher in battle and going into this particular game, I really had no idea that I would be. That's how all the fun started.

The following is a 1vs1 game that I played against Hockey_~_Maste.

Early Game Build-Up:

Hockey's first move of the game was to ally and share vision with me. After a few seconds he realized his mistake. "Aw shit," he said. Being in the giving spirit (it was Christmas afternoon after all) I went ahead and shared vision with him. "Thanks man," he said, and then we both turned off our vision and began our build up. He then said, "No rush" and I agreed.

Before the game had started, I had chosen the zerg race. My plan was to build a gigantic amount of queens and broodling him into submission. My initial buildup consisted of a pool on 8, an extractor on 9, a second hatch on 15, and a second extractor on 17. As soon as I had the gas, I started morphing a Lair. I also built an evolution chamber and 3 spore colonies so that my queens would have a place to retreat to in case of pesky corsairs. When my Lair finished, I morphed in a Queen's nest, started researching broodling, and hatched queens with the gas surplus that I had built up.

As we worked on our buildings, Hockey must have decided that I actually gave a damn about what he got for Christmas because he started chattering away about all the presents he had received.

First Contact:

A little tune entered my head... "It's beginning to look a lot like Carriers, everywhere you look".

I clicked back to my base. I had a total of 11 queens floating above my main and had just started to research the energy upgrade.

I decided to send my 11 queens up to his base to cause some havok before the carriers popped out and blew me away. My plan was to broodling some probes and hamper his economy. As I flew over his natural, I saw that he had started an expansion there and already had about 10 probes mining it.

I decided that this would be as good a place to start as any. I picked my first queen, typed 'b' for broodling, placed the target symbol over a probe, and clicked. Two sharp beeps sounded and a little message appeared on my screen informing me that I couldn't target robotic units.

Oh my God, what was I thinking? I realized that if he built nothing but carriers and I couldn't broodling probes, then my queen army was worthless. Since I had tons of energy, I started parasiting all the probes at his natural. When I got tired of that, I flew over to the top left starting position and saw another nexus there with a couple of probes. I parasited them, then I moved on to his main. When I arrived, there was absolutely nothing to broodling. I was very irritated. I saw that a fleet beacon was warping and knew that there was no way for my queens to combat his carriers.

Grumpily, I parked my good for nothing queens over his stargates and pressed the hold key. I knew it would be a couple of minutes before he would be able to produce the carriers that would dislodge me.

Even though my queens posed absolutely no threat to his well-being, Hockey still did not approve of my tactics.

After spamming the word "no" all the way to the top of the screen, Hockey typed the word "rush". It was then that I realized that apparently, building 11 quick queens and sending them to your opponent's base and sitting there doing nothing is a serious breach of the "BGH No Rushing Clause". (Come on guys, cut me some slack. I don't play BGH very much. How was I supposed to know that?)

Hockey then brought a probe over and built two cannons around his stargates forcing my queens to flee the vicinity, but not before I was able to parasite a few more probes.

A Change in Tactics:

I clicked on a drone that was busily mining and moved him over the creep to an open spot where I started morphing a spire. I had a total of 4 hatcheries now, 3 at home and 1 at my natural expansion. As soon as the spire was complete, I started making scourge as fast as I could. I rallied all my hatcheries to the center of the map. I sent 1 queen in to scout. When she would find a carrier, I would have her parasite it. Then I would send in 6 scourge and blow the thing out of the sky.

**It only takes 5 scourge to blow up a carrier, the sixth one was there for drawing cannon fire.

Since he only had 3 stargates, I was able to continuously scourge his carriers as soon as they popped out of there respective stargates. This happened numerous times. All the while, Hockey kept screaming at me.

But Hockey wasn't born yesterday. Seeing that I was going to continue with my illegal rushing, he, being the intelligent player that he is, decided to change his tactics a bit.

Hockey's Revenge

I knew that very soon, I would be facing a lot of carriers and I needed to take some action soon. I morphed my Lair into a hive and then morphed a greater spire. While the morphing was going on, I hatched 4 control groups of lings. I was able to upgrade their speed while they were building, and then I attacked.

My lings busted through his 8 cannon choke and then went to work on his natural expansion where he had constructed 2 more stargates. Suddenly, interceptors flew out of the sky and began raining terror down on my lings. I was able to destroy the expansion, but I lost all my lings.

I madly started morphing scourge again, but instead of pressing his advantage, Hockey retreated his carriers back behind his cannon wall. I rallied the scourge to the middle of the map along with another 2 control groups of lings. I sent the lings into his main base and quickly destroyed the cannons that he had built to protect his 3 original stargates. Then I set 48 scourge patrolling the skies over his main while my 6 remaining lings proceeded to slowy tear down his main base.

The Final Showdown

I had a total of 8 hatcheries now and so I start pumping muties. When I had 60 in the middle I hotkeyed them to number's 1 through 5. Two of my control groups I morphed into devourers and one control group was morphed to guardians.

I then moved my 5 control groups over to the south side of his base. I also hotkeyed my 11 queens to number 6 and moved them to the south side of his base as well. Then I started lobbing green balls of acid goo onto his cannons with my guardians.

Sure enough, 14 carriers came out and engaged my guardians. Not for long though, because they were immediately engaged by 24 devourers and 24 mutas. It didn't take long for all 14 blimps to get popped into oblivion.

The guardians went back to work on the cannons and shortly thereafter, Hockey left the game.

The Scores:

Final Thoughts:

1. Build a bunch of queens to make your opponent think your rushing.
2. Switch to scourge when carriers start popping out.
3. Use lings to destroy unguarded buildings while you save up your money.
4. When you have enough money saved up, build a huge air force and win the game.

Until Next time, Happy Huntering.
Drefsab