Sorry. No Mercy 3 will have to wait - I want to do some pure, simple battlereporting first. Seems like few people are doing reports of decent players battling it out, so we need quantity more than quality right now. The TY reports will do just that - bring a lot of informative games between gosus that we can all learn of.

Onto today's report - this is the first game of... let's call it a "best of 5" between [o]Mr.X and [-Whear-], although they were actually practice games between those two experienced players. Let's meet them:

[-Whear-] - An excellent random player, if I remember correct he won Montaro's 2v2 tourney together with [-Bluewolf-] and this is indeed not his biggest achievement, I hear he was playing in Korea for a while. I'm sorry I'm a bit uninformed about him, the last few months I haven't been on B.net much ;(.

[o]Mr.X - My country's pride, Mr.X has twice been KBK finalist and made it to the top 16 at the live finals in Korea during the first KBK competition - he and :+:jolly:+: were the only non-Korean players to make it that far. For the last few months though, he didn't have access to Battle.net and now that he has a good ISP he is starting his practice for the next KBK season - needless to say he is not what he used to be, but he is quickly recovering.

Battleground - the only map that matters, Lost Temple. Both players random, this is common for Whear, while Mr.X is known as a Zerg player, but in practice he randoms too. Whear draws teal Terran at 12, and Mr.X gets red Zerg at 9.

The two of them follow pretty normal build orders, with Whear walling in and starting a refinery after his supply and barracks, and Mr.X sending his 10th and 11th drones to build a hatch at his natural, while getting a 12th drone. Sending 2 drones is a must nowadays especially against Protoss players who send 1-2 harassing probes to prevent the Zerg expansion... At the ramp those 2 drones meet Whear's scouting SCV and both players now know what race they are facing. I hear an explosion in my headphones and as I take a look at Whear's base I realize he has canceled his refinery and started a second barracks.

One of the drones is rightaway morphed to a hatchery at the natural, and the other one goes on a scouting mission and finds the Terran base at 12. After checking out the nice wallin, it remains there, at a safe distance from the ramp as warning for early attacks. Mr.X gets a Pool and an extractor as soon as he has the cash while pumping drones. The aim - early Lair. Whear has his SCV running in circles and watching all those amusing activities at the Zerg base, and at home he starts a refinery for the second time and an academy shortly after that, with a few marines as defense. Mr.X transfers some drones to his natural and gets a second extractor running a while later, while putting a Den down at his main. He also morphs a single creep colony at his natural.

This is when Whear decides to strike with a small force he has assembled - 5 marines, 2 firebats and 2 medics. On the way out they kill the drone that was waiting below the ramp and this causes Mr.X to put down another creep colony and morph the first one to a sunken. While the MMF squad is marching towards 9's natural, Whear climbs up the tech tree, he has already finished his factory and he is working on a starport. Later he will get a science facility. Mr.X already has 2 hydras at his natural, and while the attackers are quite close Lurker Aspect finishes researching and the hydras start morphing to lurkers... Maybe fearing a sneaky drop, the zerg player morphs a creep colony at his main as well.

As the marines and firebats stim and engage the sunkens, it is a bit unclear whether the lurkers will be finished in time, so Mr.X gets a bit paranoid and runs his drones away for a while, while also building another creep colony behind his hatch. Due to the medics not being clever enough who to heal after the stim, a firebat and a marine die to the single working sunken before it is removed, and then it gets even worse - since the second sunken isn't online yet, everybody remaining is completely healthy and the medics wander away from the combat units which causes the loss of another firebat and marine as the sunken starts hitting.

While this is happening, the two lurkers morphed and burrowed, so Whear retreated. Mr.X hatched some more hydras and turned them to lurkers. Looking at the screens, I notice he has even canceled the creep colony at his main, that's how greedy he is :(. The reason he had just 2 early lurkers? Well instead of getting 4-5 early lurkers, he is working on droping capability and then overlord speed. Before being ready to drop though, he starts pushing with now 5 lurkers towards the terran main.

Not even halfway to the enemy base he encounters about 10 marines, 2 medic and a tank with siege - obviously Whear hasn't been idle. The lurkers burrow/unburrow in two separate groups, the marines hit and run, losing some of their number and killing one of the lurkers during that, and draw the beasts closer to the sieged tank. Scan is used and another lurker is removed, but the other 3 completely destroy the terran force except for 2-3 marines that run back home...

Whear suspects that Mr.X will try to climb up his ramp with the lurkers, so he rallies everything he got below his own ramp and waits there. He also starts a CC in his base, intending to get his natural. X though, returns his lurkers and loads them up in ovies together with 4 new lurkers and 3-4 hydras. The 5 overlords unload their cargo amongst Whear's SCV's. Needless to say, the 7 Lurkers kill many of Whear's SCV's before the rest manage to run away. A tank also dies to lurker spines before it can kill anything with the help of a last scan before the comsat explodes... All that Whear can do is lift his command center and wait for his first Science Vessel.

When this is at hand, he sieges 2 tanks at a safe distance from the lurkers and floats his detector above them, but Mr.X does something I have noticed him do in a lot of games - he doesn't wait for the lurkers to be removed or try to get them closer to the tanks and M&M, but rather unburrowed them and loaded them back into the ovies and left the scene. This way he lost just some hydras in this successful operation and returned the lurkers to his base, where he was assembling a mega lurker drop now...

Whear has floated his new CC to his natural and started mining, so he isn't out of the game yet... indeed his main's CC is working too. Mr.X sends a hydra to check out the situation, notes the expo that Whear has and starts attacking SCV's, which causes them to surround the hydra and weld it to death... ouch. Again Whear has the problem of terran mobility and the concern where to place his troops, and he guesses that Mr.X will try to take out the expansion so he camps below his ramp once again.

Mr.X hasn't wasted his money on ventral sacs for just one drop though, so he loads 10 lurkers and 10 hydras and drops Whear's main once again, while expanding to his mineral only. Note if he had lost the units from the first drop he would have had just 3 of his lurkers now. Well... sadly this game turns into another example of the problems terrans have, as the marines and tanks desperately climb the ramp and attempt to save the base in vain.

I think even if Whear had a bunker and a tank up there as defense, the outcome would be about the same - terrans can hardly handle such a large zerg drop when their troops aren't at home. After the game Whear commented that X had his lurkers pretty early, or maybe canceling the refinery delayed him too much, but I think it was the nasty zerg drops that killed him rather than the unsuccessful rush. So I guess at least a bunker with a turret and good building placement at the critical place around the mineral line are a real must in TvZ - that will kill at least one of the overlords and some of the dropped units and at least give you time to pull away your SCV's.

For a really nice and cheap terran anti-drop defense at 12, check out Slayer's building placement at the last KBK final here. Also note the way I_LOVE_STAR (the zerg player in the same movie) placed his Sp.Pool to get maximum gas out of his extractor with just 3 Drones instead of 4.

P.S. [o]Mr.X as ever inspected this and had something to add about that creep colony in his main... turns out he just made it and canceled it afterwards because he needed supply for a lurker. Don't believe him - he's just making that up so we think he's not greedy =\

Also at first he didn't want me to post this, since he likes [-Whear-] and thinks he is a great player, but I promised to report all the games of that best of 5 and as you will see... well let's not spoil it, I'll just say [-Whear-] did pretty well ;).

[o]Mr.X vs. [-Whear-] Game 2, ZvP !