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| 3v3 Island Madness | | | Author: | | | IP: | 63-204-1XXXX | | Date: | 01/31/01 04:01 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 5, Min: 5
Lifetime Rating for Not.2.Good: 5.5000 |  | I’ve played a lot of awesome games lately, mostly 2v2’s on random (non-hunter/LT/Rivalry) 4 or 5 player maps from the brood wars folder. Just yesterday though, I hosted “3v3 or 4v4 Islands” on Primeval Isles and this was the result.
For those of you unfamiliar with the map, it’s a huge (256x256) island map using the desert tile set. The mains are located at all four points of the compass and in the corners. Naturals are on islands directly towards the edge of the map from the mains. Aside from that there’s about a butt-ton (metric unit I think) of small islands scattered about, and all of them have some minerals on them. There’s also a huge double gas/tons of crystal walled island in the map’s exact center.
In the past I’ve had problems filling games on this map due to its huge size, and the long games that implies. This time we filled to six very fast, within 3 minutes I’d guess, and away we went, TvB. On my team was myself as random protoss, bottom left; .Doobie. as zerg center left; I’ve forgotten my third allies name, so I’ll refer to him as Green, he was protoss in the top left. Our opponents were LittleAdnan, terran bottom right; LittleUzi, protoss middle right; and Diablo, zerg top center. I don’t remember if everyone randomed or if some people chose their races.
The game started out pretty uneventfully, as most island games do. My build was pylon, gas, gate, core, pylon, robo fac, support bay, robo fac, pylon. I announced to my team that my plan was reavers to templar. .Doobie. told me he’d be going fast mutas, Green said he’d get carriers. This had me kind of worried, usually people who set carriers as their first goal aren’t a whole lot of help for the first 20-30 minutes of the game. But hey, I’m flexible, I cautioned him not to die enroute his carriers and to make sure he got a lot of them.
.Doobie.’s first scouting lord found Diablo’s main and he naturally became our first target of choice. I sent my first shuttle with a reaver and 2 zeos up to visit while Doobie sent a flock of 3-5 mutas. Green sent a shuttle also, but I didn’t catch what was in it. Diablo was ready for us. We ran into well-placed spore colonies backed up by about 10-12 hydras. My drop got slaughtered killing maybe 8 or so hydras, and .Doobie.’s mutas were stuck taking pot shots of drones not covered by spores. To complicate matters, Diablo’s partners had sent him some foreign aid in the form of 2 corsairs.
Being persistent, by the time I’d lost my first small assault, I had a second shuttle with 2 reavers enroute to see if Diablo had kept up on his hydra production. I’d been producing reavers and shuttles non-stop from my two robo bays and had also pumped a few goons out of my single gate, to deal with the corsair threat. The second two reavers cleaned up Diablo’s hydras and knocked out one of his spores, allowing .Doobie.’s mutas to favorably engage the sairs (which was a good thing as those sairs had killed a reinforcing shuttle and it’s reaver). About this time, Diablo received more foreign aid in the form of a tank and some marines from LittleAdnan. These put paid to my reavers, but once the sairs were down I was able to ferry in more reavers and a couple goons and level the terran force and the remains of the zerg main.
Diablo was also persistent though, he had gotten a drone off somewhere and started a new zerg colony. Wherever it was, it wasn’t close. Doobie’s mutas scouted the expansions near the zerg main and came up empty, the hunt was on. About this time I actually got my natural expansion established and running (transferred some probes to it) and even began securing a second expansion site (I’d built a forge while I was mopping up Diablo’s main and started on ground attack upgrages). I had about 3 or 4 reavers, half a dozen goons and 4 shuttles sitting around in various places, so I decided to pump observers for a while. Green had a few scouts and a couple of corsairs up and .Doobie. had a huge flock of mutas hovering near his main, I think about 2 expansions starting, and his overlords were travelling the far reaches of the map looking for Diablo. This was to be the calm before the storm.
About a control worth of Corsairs from LittleUzi zipped into .Doobie.’s base and immediately mulched his muta wing, then went to work on the overlords. .Doobie. began frantically morphing spore colonies and I sent over 4 goons in shuttles. This proved sufficient to drive off the sairs, but not the 2 or 3 dropships of mixed terran troops that followed them in. .Doobie. was in trouble. My goons disintegrated rather rapidly to LittleAdnan’s tank + m&m + goliaths, and at this point the spores .Doobie. had morphed weren’t a whole lot of help. Thankfully .Doobie. had been rebuilding his muta force and was able to distract Adnan’s Goliaths long enough for me to shuttle in 3 more reavers and drop them dead center in the terran horde. 6 scarabs later .Doobie. was safe again, but we’d somewhat lost the initiative. About this point we were wondering what had happened to Green’s carrier plan when he hollers for help. Apparently Diablo had rapidly rebuilt, about 10 or so of his hydras were terrorizing Greens mineral line being opposed by a single carrier still building interceptors.…
I rechecked my main and noticed that I had about 6 observers sitting idle… I’d forgot to send them out during the fight for .Doobie.’s main. I rapidly corrected that problem and posted some of them in the flight paths between LittleAdnan’s (terran bottom right) base and the rest of the map. The other observers went to random locations on the map and I kept up observer production out of one bay while doing reaver replacement out of the other. By this point we still had not sighted LittleUzi’s main, but by process of elimination it had to be center right, since .Doobie. had sent lords to the top right start spot and came up with nothing but morphing Diablo expansions? Yes, you read that right. We’d found the guy we were looking for, but were so busy setting up expansion sites and microing our defense that we hadn’t noticed it till now. I immediately dispatched a couple of shuttles with one goon/one reaver each to correct the diablo problem. Doobie sent a small flock of mutas around the map border to raze anything they found. I ordered 2 shuttles troops towards greens base to reinforce him, but then noticed that he had a second carrier on line and seemed to be overcoming the hydra threat.
Diablo’s expansions didn’t last too long, though I did run into some corsair interference (in the form of a single corsair harassing my shuttle till I dropped its goon, then running away) trying to get to them. .Doobie.’s muta flock hit pay dirt though, he discovered a thriving and undefended expansion at the terran natural. I immediately sent 2 reavers in a shuttle that direction and discovered another island with a lone command center on it (no scv’s yet). I ignored that to drop on the cherry. Well, that drop didn’t work out right either, it only “looked” undefended, LittleAdnan quickly put my drop attempt to rest with about a control group of wraiths…. I think I killed maybe 3 scv’s for two reavers and a shuttle. Though I did damage yet another Terran command center, obviously he was going on a mass expansion drive and that’s why there hadn’t been a follow up assault from him yet.
The time of peace soon ended yet again, as another control group of corsairs accompanied by about a control group cloaked wraiths and 3 or 4 scouts showed up and commenced raping one of .Doobie.’s expansions. I noticed several scans during the game, and I’m assuming they concentrated on .Doobie.’s expands rather than mine since mine all had a couple of cannons and I had high templar readily visible in the areas LittleAdnan scanned, while .Doobie. was relying more on his ever-growing muta horde for defense as well as offence, consequently fixed defenses were a very uncommon site on .Doobie.’s expansions. While Greens expansions were fairly secure mainly because I don’t think he had any.
Doobie countered by sending in his muta horde, which actually did some damage and drove off the corsairs. Until the wraiths cloaked and munched them. They had taken out all of the lords in the vicinity, and though I was hustling observers to the area, I was still researching observer speed. Consequently my first observer arrived on scene about the time .Doobie.’s last muta bit the dust. Like I said, this is a HUGE map, and logistics is a major factor in maps of such size. I had been putting up a couple star ports since this looked like it was going to be a heavy air game, and even had about 4 sairs or so built when the whole attack started. After seeing this attack though, I rapidly started 2 more starports, a second cybercore, and began upgrading air attack, defense, and shields. Thankfully, wraiths and scouts kill ground structures really slow, so I was able to send in about 8 corsairs to counter attack LittleAdnan’s wraiths while they were still engaged with the hatchery. Well, this taught me that even corsairs need a little micro. There was a scout or two left over, and my corsairs immediately started gang-banging it while the clustered wraiths were barely scratched. To make matters worse, LittleUzi showed up with more corsairs and there went my liberation force (Uzi’s air force was 3/3/3 while mine was like 0/0/1, though my ground forces were 2/2/1, go figure). I began to panic. I immediately told one observer to follow the wraiths, one to follow the sairs, and one to just hang out in the area… Adnan did a scanner sweep and I my observers blew up. I panicked harder. Thankfully I had another observer in the area, and 4 more sairs building with 4 ready to go. As soon as I was back up to eight I sent them in, reinforced with the last observer, and the skies were once again clear over that expansion site.
I rapidly checked the mini map and deployed the 4 or so observers I’d pumped out while this was happening, I noticed a huge yellow (Terran) dot moving towards the center island (where .Doobie. had set up a major expansion site). It turned out to be about 5 or 6 dropships, I had my observer follow them and sent my corsairs on an intercept course. Doobie noticed this also and send a good part of his ever-growing muta horde on an intercept course also. This worked out perfectly as Adnan had to drop his troops early or risk losing them in transit, consequently this drop was put down with only moderate losses to .Doobie.’s air swarm and my corsair group. Near the end of the fighting Uzi showed up with a couple carriers and another control worth of corsairs. These were dealt with easily though, my upgrades were coming online (1//1/2) and .Doobie. had devourers to add to the mix, forcing Uzi to retreat.
Well, that explained the delay in attacks, Adnan was building up for that drop and Uzi had changed to carrier production. Due to the drop’s failure we had an advantage. Doobie decided to take on the terran main, he had about 8 guardians, 6-8 devourers and 20 or so mutas. I supported him with my 9 or so corsairs and later my 8 newly produced scouts. I’d gone into scout production when I saw the first carrier, but was still working on scout speed. The attack on Adnan’s main met almost zero opposition, and our troops were occupied for some time destroying terran buildings. I had dropped six of my goons to help support, but it looked like all the troops were gone. I immediately deployed an observer net around my team’s mains, thinking that the terran force would soon be arriving at one of them.
They showed up at .Doobie.’s island expansion, supported by 8-10 of Uzi’s carriers and a scattering of Corsairs. Looking towards Greens main I saw his “Victory Fleet” of four Carriers and didn’t think much help was forthcoming from that corner. I immediately broke my air force away from the fighting in the terran main to try to stomp Uzi’s air force. That was a pretty abysmal failure, I think I got 2 carriers and about 4 or so corsairs to my 8 scouts and 9 or so corsairs. The attack continued unimpeded. I decided that temps were called for, so I loaded up a shuttle of 4 of them and dropped them on the center island in an attempt to storm Adnan’s dropships once they loaded (I had an observer on that island so had a good view of events). I think Adnan was tipped off by it’s blur, since soon after my templar started moving into position he dropped some goliaths and ran a scan. I started hustling more observers towards the area and started doing random storms on the flight path I assumed the dropships would take. That’s not the most effective of tactics, but I did manage to take them into the yellow. Adnan ended up unloading his troops and forting up in a corner of the island, by this time I was down to 2 temps left with observers enroute. Uzi’s carriers had turned south to duel with .Doobie.’s air force over the ruins of the terran main, my reavers were enroute yet another Diablo expansion site, and Green announced that his plan was now to kill Diablo.
The game was pretty tight up until this point, though my team had a decided advantage with the razing of the enemy terrans base. However, about now is when Battle.net took a dump on us. The game completely stopped for about 20-30 seconds, and when it resumed everyone except me and littleuzi had been dropped. We called a truce and settled for an allied victory after an awesome game. I think it was a server split, since as soon as the game resumed .doobie. messaged me saying “f*cking battlenet”. We met up later in a channel and talked about the game and plans for a 2v2. The littles vs. .Doobie. and I, as Diablo has asci characters in his name and no one could remember how it was typed and green wasn’t all that strong of a player.
Anyway, I know this is a long one, I hope I described the action adequately. I apologize for the game not running to its completion. As far as screenshots, no apology, I just now decided to write to you people about this game and didn’t think to take any while I was playing.
Lessons learned:
1. Being aggressive really pays off, if someone had dropped me while I was
shuttling reavers and such to Diablo’s base, this would’ve been a short game for me.
2. Scouting is crucial. Stopping that first drop attempt on the center island was
the game deciding event this time around. Razing Diablo’s main early really only leveled the playing field due to greens relative inexperience at the game.
3. If you ever get a chance to play with either .Doobie., LittleAdnan, LittleUzi,
or Diablo (with asci in his name), go for it, they would all make decent partners.
4. Don’t sweat having a newer player on your team. It’s an incentive to play more aggressively (see lesson #1). Though he didn’t have that many guys, Green did send what he could when he could, and due to our early success with Diablo it made for a better game having the lower skilled player on our team.
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