Even with all the cheating that has gone on since Battle.net's inception, a lot of people still play ladder games long enough to reach 1100, 1200 or whatever just to show the rest of the community that they have some skills.

For myself, ladder has always been a challenge and sometimes very frustrating. I remember playing about 20 ladder games one season in the course of 4 weeks. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get above 1000 and dropped down below 900 a couple of times. I thought my skill was gone because my opponent was always one step ahead of me. Then one day, I came home from work, got onto battle.net, and downloaded a patch. Within a week, I was up to 1150.

Then there was last season where I was knocking at the door of 1200. I was at 1187 when I started reading battle reports by AQD3. I left a message in his comments section asking him for a game. I played him ZvP and he royally spanked me. After that loss to him, I went on a 6 game losing streak bottoming out at 1030. That 6^th loss was my 30^th game. K factor set in and I never even broke 1100 for the rest of the season.

You guys still with me here or have you already clicked your back button and gone on to the next report? Enough with all this chitter chatter, it's time to get to the meat of what I'm talking about.

Having fun on the ladder, is it possible? How low can my rating go if I don't take ladder seriously and just play for fun? Let's find out...

Okay, time for a report

As most ladder players know, the key to getting a ladder game started (especially on a Saturday morning) is to create a 1vs1 game on The Lost Temple. I did so and waited patiently for someone to join while I ate a bowl of Post Raisin Bran^tm. I never noticed it before, but the flakes in Raisin Bran look very similar to zerglings after one of my tanks roll over them.

As I was pondering this deep thought, RED-ert joined the game.

The great thing about playing your first game on the ladder is that the only thing your opponent has to look at is your melee record. My melee record for 555-1212 was 14-25 due to all the funky BGH strats that had failed in time's gone by. RED-ert's record was 16-34-13 and he was by no means intimidated by my record. He was raring to go so I started the game.

I went random and drew terran at the 9:00 position. Red-Ert chose zerg and started at the 3:00 position.

Seeing that my opponent was Zerg, I decided that my tech of choice for this game would be science vessels. When I asked Ducky (Who is Gosu see here) what he thought about Science Vessel rushing he said...

In order to reach a critical mass of science vessels, I knew that I would have to secure plenty of vespian gas. My build order consisted of depot, barrack, refinery, bunker at choke, factory, engineering bay. I used this build order to stop all the cheese rushes that Red-Ert could throw at me, mainly lurkers. I placed a turret, tank, bunker combo at my choke and then started constructing a command center there. The command center was halfway completed when the first zerg assault charged my defenses. It was 12 zerglings. My defenses were adequate though and I was able to hold off this initial threat quite easily.

When my command center was finished, I lifted it off and floated it into position at my natural. I constructed another bunker and turret down in the valley along with 2 more tanks to complete my choke defense. I now had secured 2 vespian geysers.

I did a quick scan of his base to discover 2 hatcheries, a hydra, den, 2 sunkens, and 2 evolution chambers. One of the hatcheries was in the process of morphing into a lair. I was a little bit disappointed by this because I had been hoping that he would go hard air. Irradiate is much more effective against zerg air. But alas, it was not to be.

Back in my base, I started constructing starports. When the first starport completed I immediately began working on a science facility.

When the add-on for my first starport completed, I began building a dropship. I loaded a tank, 2 marines, and 2 SCVs into it and flew off towards the top right island where I started a 3^rd expansion.

With 3 operating gas expansions, I found that I was able to pump science vessels continuously out of 5 starports so I ended my starport production there.

My next conflict with RED-ert came when I sent my first 12 sci-vessels on a roundabout trip to my opponent's base. My plan was to scout the 6:00 main and natural expansion and then sneak up to the northeast hoping to do some serious irradiation on my zerg friend's drones.

My trip was cut short however when I ran into 7 overlords full of troops over the 6:00 main. There were no troops on the ground and I had mana for about 16 irradiates. I only had to use 8 of them to cause utter chaos. When irradiates began hitting the overlords, they went out of control. RED-ert didn't seem to be focusing on these troops because it took them a very long time to start dropping off troops. By this time, the overlords were popping and very few hydras and zerglings escaped this radiation disaster.

I flew my science vessels off to the east, ignoring the stray toxic spurt from the scattered hydras that remained from RED-ert's attempted offensive.

As I flew to the east, I was surprised to discover that RED-ert had expanded to the 6:00 natural.

I sent my science vessels to the cliff overlooking the 6:00 natural and proceeded to pull off a sort of turbo newbie with my science vessels by dropping my remaining irradiates onto the busily mining drones below. I was having myself a fine old time and congratulating myself over a brilliant ladder victory when RED-ert put the smack down on my science vessels with a bunch of scourge (probably 16-24 of the suckers). I limped home with my four remaining science vessels to lick my wounds. Luckily, while I had been busy microing my science vessel assault, 10 more science vessels had built back at home.

I had enough mana in each science vessel for at least one irradiate so I decided to do an assault on the drones at RED-ert's main base. I also sent my dropship loaded up with 4 SCVs and 4 marines to start an expansion at the island at the bottom right because, "I required more vespian gas".

I sent 12 science vessels across the board to his main at 9:00 and let me tell you, I had a blast. RED-ert's flash of brilliance had obviously been momentary because there were no more scourge to attack me. In fact, there were no scourge, no hydras, no sport colonies, no mutas. Just sunken colonies, overlords and drones.

He had 5 overlords grouped together, and even though they had the speed upgrade, they all stayed grouped together until they exploded from 1 shot of radiation.

I had irradiated most of the drones at his main when suddenly another flock of scourge flew in (presumably from his expansion). Another 5 science vessels bit the dust.

Not to be intimidated by those nasty scourge, I gathered another 12 science vessels together and flew back over to his expansion.

Even though he had erected three spore colonies there, my science vessels were still able to irradiate his entire drone line using the protection of the cliff.

At this point, his economy was ruined and mine was flourishing. I had 3 operational gas expansions and I had an unbelievable amount of minerals stored up due to my constant science vessel production. I decided that I had teased RED-ert enough and I started building 5 battlecruisers to finish him off. (5 cruisers would be plenty since I would have unlimited d-matrix =] )

However, RED-ert decided to save me the trouble.

My science vessel strat had succeeded and my new ladder rating was 1024!! Boy do I feel like a badass.

Conclusion or My thoughts on Why This Worked:

He obviously decided that the simplest course of action would be to circumvent my frontal defense by dropping me. Had his forces made it to my base, I could have been in trouble. Luckily, my science vessels caught him in transit. At this point, I think he really lost his will to continue the fight. With his major offensive destroyed and my counterattack completely crippling his economy and supply, he must have decided that all was lost.

I have to admit that I am quite surprised at having my first crazy strat work for a win in my first ladder game. Again, RED-ert was not the best of players, but that's no excuse for losing to a mass science vessel strat on Lost Temple.

Oh yeah, one more thing. This game was a helluva lot of fun to play, and win or lose, that's the point, right?

Regards,