"How do you get MS Paint to save as JPG??"-Carnelien
"stare it down" -SlingsNArrows
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| Let's start this again | | | Author: | | | IP: | WCS3.NORXXXX | | Date: | 08/02/00 09:08 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 5, Max: 8, Min: 7
Lifetime Rating for AQD3: 7.6184 |   |
Ah, D2, what a lovely game. The clicking. The mouse moving. The clicking. Finding stuff. The clicking. The interesting and deeply involved strategies that take quick reflexes and thinking to plan and execute….wait, nevermind. I showed up for Fox’s tourney last night and promptly got owned by a four pool. Something about building my gates in the middle of the map. On a little reflection, smart zerg vs random generally does a pool before hatch, and the proximal gate thing is pretty much an anti hatch first build. Oh well. Time to go back to D2. Hmmm…maybe the carpal tunnel syndrome in my mouse hand was acting up, but the idea of going back to the click game, I mean D2, just didn’t appeal. Well, the last time I had the skill of an absolute newbie and wanted to get better I played a lot of ladder and wrote reports on it, getting helpful strats from the BR.com community. Lets see how it works this time.
Well, playing ladder is a lot like playing golf. The other guy is probably going to be cheating. I’ve accepted this, and plan to play like I’ve shared vision the whole time. If anyone cares to help me warm up before my ladder games by playing me on LT fastest with my sharing vision, feel free to speak up. I highly recommend a few fastest games to warm up for you ladder players, it makes ladder games feel like you have all the time in the world. I made a game on Lost Temple and got Bill as my lucky opponent. His ladder score was 1024 with a 25-3 or so normal game record. His chosen race was protoss.
It’s the end of the world as we know it….
I started in the left spot with chosen protoss as my race. The probes seemed to move in slow motion after my warm up game, and the force flowed through me. I decided I’d use a build I picked up from Persian back in the Tao Kali ladder days, three gate goons with observers. Persian does it just a little bit better than I do, but since he has made two or so in Tao I thought I’d be all right vs a 1024 bnet ladder player =]. I started my build like this:
8 pylon
10 gateway
12 gas
14 core
15 pylon
16 gateway
18 pylon
24 robotics facility
26 robotics support bay
27 shuttle
30 observatory
As you can see, not the most efficient build ever, but it wasn’t bad. I’d normally go with a quicker observatory, except my scouting probe had managed to sneak into Bill’s base (located in the right start) and stayed off to the side. From what I could see Bill mirrored my build order almost exactly up to the second gateway. That’s when my probe bought it, but I knew that with that additional gateway dark templar would come after my first observer with my build. I got scouted by a probe too, except Bill had a more sophisticated scouting technique. He set the probe to patrol between my nexus and my natural, and withdrew it when my first dragoon came. I chased his probe back to his base, where three goons on his ramp chased my goon away. Not too much happened until I got my reaver and a dragoon loaded into the shuttle. I had halted goon production from one gate in order to get the fastest two gate reaver drop possible. I started a third gate and hotkeyed my gates so I could keep up on goons during the upcoming reaver drop.
My shuttle came in at the top of Bill’s base. I didn’t see any cannons or goons, so I dropped right next to the assimilator. I’ve found people run their mineral probes pretty well, but often neglect their assimilator ones for an extra few seconds. I took my accompanying dragoon and sent him to the middle of the probes, which would hopefully screw up their AI when they started running, and would give the reaver the extra second or two to get away when the enemy goons came knocking. My first scarab exploded harmlessly to AI bugs. The second nailed about four probes as they were starting to run. I got three more on gas with another two scarabs before the defending goons showed up. I left my goon behind and took the reaver out of there. I circled around back to my base. My first observer arrived at Bill’s entrance, wondering what I’d find. It seemed as if Bill had early expanded…My observer went down despite being over a cliff. Must have been spotted by Bill’s observer. Seeing Bill had expanded, I expanded to my natural also. I then took a probe in my shuttle and headed for the enemy cliff.
No, you’re supposed to roll over and die after I drop you.
Bill was hurting from the drop, but his troop production was greater at the time he had been hit. He had foregone the reaver in favor of an earlier third gate I believe. With this in mind, he attacked my new expansion with his dragoon force, obviously hoping to catch me with my reaver out of place and a lower amount of troops. He had twelve goons in his attack force, and I was defending with nine. As he came in I was busy on his cliff, setting up two cannons that could cover his entire mining line at his expansion. I immediately saw that my forces would not be able to hold, both due to his superior numbers and the fact that my nexus was preventing the proper positioning of my troops. I withdrew backwards a little to make the nexus interfere with his troop position rather than mine, then used focus fire on the goons closest to my troops. I also had three of my goons fighting from the cliff, which gave another minor advantage. Still, it was barely enough to hold for a little while, the initial damage he’d inflicted being severe while my troops were out of position. Then the next three goons from my gates arrived at their rally point on the cliff. Then another three another half a minute later. I held…although barely.
What of my turbo newbie cannon attempt? It worked…sort of. One of the cannons was visible to his observer as it warped in. He took it down with two goons. I guess he didn’t spot the other one, because it warped in uninterrupted. I dropped my reaver in the sweet spot just before it finished warping, getting in two good hits on the probes working, then another scarab slammed into his two goons. It would be enough that they couldn’t take down the cannon with the height advantage on my side. I took my reaver and ran back over the cliff. When the cannon started hitting the probes, he brought them back to his main….the few that hadn’t run from the reaver.
Macro works too.
Well, I had my expansion and he didn’t. With the extra gas I started a citadel and then a templar archives. I mixed in some zealots at this point, they do reasonably well vs goons when mixed with other goons. The main reason you don’t see a lot of them is that they lose in large numbers to goons and die very badly to reavers. I sent a probe to the bottom start to start an expansion there when I was ready, but mainly concentrated on four gate goon/zeal while working up to templar. I scouted with a dark templar and found Bill had started an expansion on the top start. If you think about it, we were still almost even except for a a minut of mining time on an expansion. The three cannons and two pylons I built cost more than his expansion nexus, and he had mined it for a few minutes before my expansion got online. The only thing that kept me ahead was the reaver drops.
I knew that letting Bill get the top start on line was going to leave me in a bad position. I had accumulated about a control group of goon/zeal and sent them to the top. Bill’s forces intercepted me in transit. Hacker! Wait…he did have lost of observers =]. I got hit with my forces split by about eight goons. I took the four goons I had ahead and moved them up the ramp, then stopped. The remaining forces hit his as he went for those first four goons. I lost some troops, but was coming out ahead. I had also circled my reaver to the back of his main again and dropped as this conflict was going on. The two goons he had defending took two scarabs, but only one died. I was forced to pick my reaver up because it was in the red, and flew off. Reinforcements from his main arrived to try and save his expansion just as my reinforcements hit also. The end result was that I took down the base and had two zealots left over. I expanded to the bottom position after the action subsided.
The game was just about in the bag now. His main’s resources had to be almost out. *your connection to battle.net has been lost* Mother$#@!$. I earned this win! Bill asked me if I had just gotten a connection lost message, whereupon we both cursed out battle net. I spent another minute macroing troops before I advanced into his base. His goons positioned at the top of his ramp held me for a moment before I started storming. Then I started taking down his structures and we discussed the game until it was over.
Thanks to everyone that reads this report. Please post your protoss vs protoss builds in the comments section, along with any criticism of my tactics. And yes, I do plan on continuing a ladder run.
AQD3
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