All text is thx. we all love it more than the flashy stuff, as long as it has substance and isn't spam.

In the recent onslaught of stupid and boring “fanfics” in br.com I feel that I can bore you all even more so with my guide – to zerg/terran. Really? How is that possible? Why would I do that then? are the questions on your mind right now but my answer is only this. You’ll learn something. I had promised some people that I would write terran and zerg, because they thought I was good. I’m pretty much equal with all races really, a random player. Kind of like a Jack of all trades, not amazing at anything, but decent enough at everything to fake being a pro.

A long time when I had played seriously, long, long ago in a time where dragons still existed, as well as good players, bnet was not a case of many if ANY hack accusations. People respected and knew each other well in x17 (this might have lasted for a couple months) and besides the standard flaming that goes on in a channel of that size, the community was one of competition and challenge. I feel that I should give my ideas on zerg before everyone goes into the craze that will become War3. Personally, I hope it will be a total failure leading to a quicker development of Starcraft2, but I’m sure it will be pretty good. I mean, who wants hero’s? Ogre’s that have horrid graphics and neutral units that attack and can potentially a balanced and fair game. I hate the graphics in war3 from the screenshots that I seen. Don’t expect it to be as good as Starcraft, don’t even give it a try. The less people supporting war3 will have blizz pushing for Starcraft2 faster. Neutral units attacking – a horrid concept taken from red alert. Fucking blizzard, should stick to what their fans already know and like.

My mood is odd. So that will be the theme of this report. This might not be a report, or even a guide. I don’t know, I just feel like thinking about Starcraft and typing really fast right now and not thinking, k, 72 words per minute i’m guessing. Spelling WILL BE BAD. Don’t worry though, I won’t say anything that is “too wrong”. In other words, take what I say with a grain of salt. Everybody has their own styles of play, and I think that everybody should try to master their own style of play once they find it rather than copy other peoples. A perfect example of a good style of play is a player named [WiT]Origin, owning people up with 3 rax marines early then outmicroing people to gain control of battles, and doing stupid firebat drops. Sounds stupid, but he beat me a lot. Surprising eh? I think out of all the players I had ever played I think [WiT]Origin was the most influential on my play. He had his own style, and stuck with it until he quit ( i think he quit). 3 rax every game! I tried it too, with varying degrees of success. 3 rax vs protoss, he could make it work. At my best he couldn’t really touch me, but.. well no he prolly could still beat me. The point is that strats that seem impossible still work. But for god’s sake don’t make your style something like, (GO TERRAN: 2 rax b4 depot – rush zerg, gg. The point of the game is to have fun, not to master winning in half a minute) Possibly random pointers of no relevance to each other as well as hidden meanings and ideas that can possibly be expanded on but I am lazy. I’m spending my time writing this, and I know there will be people appreciating my effort because I was complimented on my horrid incomprehensive simple minded guides of the past.

First remember, it is always better to random into zerg, than picking zerg, because of the possibility of rush by protoss. Then again it’s always better to random. Ok, onto the good stuff.

ZERG – BUILDS

haha. Zerg and build orders? Writing on this would take forever, and I especially do not recommend tsunami’s guide on zerg even though he is a good player. His build orders place importance on perfect execution, and a level of mastery that most if not all good and great players can do or want to spend the time to master.

Deny it as you will, but zerg is the race that requires the most micro – and possibly the most skill. Hatching in your main, going speedlings then tech of choice, utterly and completely boring, even if it is “safe” and “effective”. It really takes away the fun of zerg, and expanding first is my favorite, and if I die to a rush, I’ll just disregard that lose as my lack of micro. If your reading this you can’t possibly be one of those who wants to master execution to perfection anyways, or else you would be playing bw right now, so just listen to me.

One thing you must always remember, zerg is all about getting away with anything you can get away with. Disregard all concepts of passive defensive play when using zerg, go 3 hatch without pool if you think/know your opponent will not rush. Also, 9 pool if you think your opponent will do something weird, or is in an angry mood because of swearing in the chat room or something, they will usually overpower in my experience.

ZERG – STRATEGY

Three words. Flanking. Disruption. Powering.

These three key points of zerg shouldn’t be overanalyzed, don’t go too deep in it, but know how to do it and when to do it.

Not a hard concept to master, teach, or even explain. Just look at any replay of any good players. Naturally, they will spread their units into groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, or whatever amount they want. You don’t have to use hotkeys to control 5 groups of zerglings. I didn’t use hotkey’s for my groups of zerglings but I still microed them really well when I played zerg. Besides – hotkeying units is a drain of effort and must be exact, moving hotkeyed groups may lead to you confusing yourself of which units are where and trying to place your units in an exact place of your choosing and keep them there. That’s not what you want. With zerg you want to be random, insane, basically, and have your units all over the place.

FLANKING

Doesn’t take a scientist to understand what’s going on when a good player has his troops separated into two or three groups. Position troops so that when opponent comes at you they will be only hitting your middle group, while your other two groups surround and conquer. Of course, your opponent who is good will not just attack in a predictable straight line all the time, unless he thinks he has superior forces. That’s why you have to trick them into thinking you have very little forces. This one game I had fun with showes a good example. Ok lets see.. I cornered this stupid protoss player into having very little expansions while I had a lot. He had a lot of ground forces, but I knew flanking and the ease of zerg production would lead to my favor if he attacked instead of I. What most zergs don’t understand, is that protoss doesn’t really have a hard time defending, even a mad rush of guardian/ling/lurker/defiler/ultralisk etc etc. So they key is to get the protoss out of their shell.

What I did was in that game make myself obviously weak, dropping shitloads of weak pointless units into his main while dropping on his expansions (such as cracklings and hyrdas), and when he cleaned them all up quite easily, he thinks I have no forces or am very weak. So he rushes out with all his units and dies to 10 sunkens, behind 3 hatcheries and about 12 lurkers supported by newly built hyrdas. Stupid innovative tactics like this will win a lot of games.

DISRUPTION

Standard misinformation like this would be.. hmm.. sending streams of 12 zerglings into an expansion, regardless of how well they do, and lurker drops. Oh yes, lurker drops. Lurker drops are the backbone of any good zerg’s arsenal, and whether they go muta/guardian or anything else, they will do lurker drops.

Hmm maybe that wasn’t quite right. Whenever you have lurkers and have time to micro you should do lurker drops, but in a hectic, close game I depend more on hyrda/ling drops everywhere because its much easier, you don’t have to look. It’s so easy to do hyrda/ling drops, you just grab a ton of those units and a couple ovies and drop them on expansion. For example – 4 ovies and 10 hyrdas and the rest lings. Make sure you have a good defense and good production going, and abuse drops every other second.

Note: drops are usually more effective vs good players than running zerglings into expo’s because even good defences at every expo will not stop the units you drop if you do it often.

A good disruption tactic is early to mid game on when you have units in your opponents base, take out their upgrade buildings. This kills their mindset, I cannot count the number of times I have killed 3 forges in a row when my opponent screams, only 1 more second and I would have gotten 2/2/2! Basically with your opponent so steamed up he will make stupid mistakes which you take advantage and win.

POWERING

One word of advice about powering. Be intelligent about expanding – on temple. Meaning, expand to your natural first, then to your minerals only, then one other natural, carefully and with planning. However, this doesn’t apply to other, more bigger maps. In larger maps you can get away with expanding to another main even, and, going zerglings early on, mad powering with 4 hatches and basically killing your unaware opponent in a matter on minutes. Just keep up your macro, and disruption, and hope that his initial attack/drop/plan won’t kill too much of your troops/production/econ.

Of course, on temple you could still go crazy, but only if you have owned your opponent MANY MANY TIMES so much that he lacks the will to scout properly because he expects you to do the same thing to kill him, and do it for fun and challenge. Usually on the 7th game you can get away with 3 hatches before pool, if you have killed your opponent 6 times in a row.

TERRAN

Ah.. what can you say about this race. Still the hardest race to be learned by beginners, but harder to get good at than zerg, but easier to “master” because you can queue.

SO, what is QUEUEING? Well, it’s a concept I hadn’t mastered until three years of brood war had gone by. I never really understood that when you have money it’s better to put your gateways or raxes at 3 zealots/ 3 marines or whatever than 2. Theoretically – if you only put 2 units on the gateway, you will be more cost effective than your opponent who does three. So put 1 or 2 unit’s on your gateway (when you don’t think a battle will occur) early on in the game but once the game gets rougher or to a less fine point ( more macro, less thinking ), then put 3 or more to fill up the queue. I was SO surprised how easy it was to get tons of tanks when I mastered queuing. It is so easily to micro with terran anyways, except marines versus storm and lurkers, but ter does not use rines vs storm and lurkers unless they are stupid or overconfident.

MICROING WITH TER

WTF. I say any good terran that says microing with terran is really hard is only saying that to make themselves sound better. Man, microing with terran is a piece of cake, it’s just so easy to stim/scan/ and micro slow as hell tanks. Tips on microing with terran would be hmm..

Marines /medics – when attacking, put medics BEFORE marines when you patrol cuz they have more life. Hard to remember especially if they are mixed up but you can just select all medics with a ctrl – click.

Scan. Well just hotkey your stuff like this

1 is for rax

2 is for rax

3 is for cc

4 is for factory

5 is for scan

6 is for factory

7 is for factory

8 is for fatory

9 is for factory

0 is for scan

early on 3 and 8 are both for cc’s. If u don’t understand why, read over my old protoss report and go to the section where I talk about why doing 2 numbers on nexuses are so important.

then after this, whenever you want to start replacing 1,2, 0, 3, 5 with facts in that order. Well, my way is the best way, so just do it my way. Any other way is wrong. Haha, my guide, and your still reading, so I’ll say whatever I want. =)

TVT

Turrets have made t v t factory war. I was really good at tvt so just trust me on this. Then again, I think I was really good at ALL matchups.

Early on play as if you would a toss, but sac econ a little, going 2 facts. Faster fact if your opponent isn’t doing the same build as you, but try to equal your opponents speed when hes going 2 facts too. Why? Because if your copying someone your being slower, slightly slower, which is good, so be like 1 scv more than him. Build ? hmm 9 supply, 10 rax, if u think your opponent isn’t the drone harrassing type, then gas, depot double rax while skimping on an scv or 2 to make a quick first rax.

If u think your opponent is the drone harrassing type, just 8/10 gas – factory factory whatever.

1st fact – addon – build tank – start siege tank. Then rush – with 3 scv’s with the tank. VERY GOOD MICRO is necessary, also expect your opponent to do the same strat. Basically if they are doing the same strat whoever wins this battle wins the game right there. That’s what makes t v t so stupid. Keep building siege tanks and the moment your 2nd factory is done you should have had build an armory to get a goliath. After that if your micro sucked, build 5 tanks and charge into your opponents wallin, obliterating everything in your bath. Don’t worry about vulture drops, marine drops, or air. For the drops, your tanks should be able to beat your opponents main and your newly build stuff should be able to block the in main drop. And for air, well, turrets at 75 basically destroy any use of wraiths except at support units and shuttle chasers. I use bc’s and valkrie with science vessel late game – but that tactic actually doesn’t work that well, I only do it when I don’t care about the game and to make it fun, which is 90% of all tvt games because they are so boring. The best way to win t v t is to do DROPS, that’s right, just like zerg’s hyrda/ling and protoss’s templar drops, your bread and butter attack is a force of 3 shuttles of tanks supported 4 cloakable wraiths and maybe 2 valkries. You get the point. Drop expo’s, mass expo yourself, and your attack early on should have given you the lead on expo’s, because he is set back on the defensive, either contained or dead because you have hurt his economy.

T V P Ah. Difficulties in this matchup? That’s because your playing good players, which is good. This matchup SHOULD be difficult for terran, with all the things protoss can do. A point I agree on within a circle of players is that Protoss IS the better race among the two, but simply not mastered at the level that protoss is better than terran. Because of the hype of terran, better turrets, people mistakenly believe protoss is the weakest race. It might seem so, but I think it’s only because of the hype + more people practice terran = more terran masters. And more terran masters outnumbering protoss masters lead to less discussion among protoss players, as well as sharing of strats and such. Protoss really got the hard part of the patches, weakened their all powerful storm but gained a debatably awesome zealot in return and cheaper useless units. (scouts, yes they still suck and yes u shouldn’t use them. Btw, dweb is still good, imho, just that it takes skill to use it now instead of overpoweredness. Ah I miss the days where dweb + carriers own everything because people didn’t know how to stop it.)

You have a couple choices when facing terran. Deep six is not an option tho (marine medic tank vessel then late ghost).

Depending on how you think your opponent to react:

-tank rush fake then early expand

-tank rush

-vulture rush

-tank vulture rush

-vulture drop

-tank drop

Ok this is it. 1 hour of hard work typing and I am bored. So there you have it, my view on zerg and terran. I guess btw I should say that the best t v z tactic is to rush medic marine them with medium fast acad. Zerg has no real “counter” to this, and this strat is very flexible, allowing u to get gas, expand, drop, or whatever, at will, and put’s you on the offensive.