"The Slugs were fought off by a Tank utilizing its range, and several Marines with salt shakers"
-$gt.Zorn
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| Back in the old pre 1.01 days... | | | Author: | | | IP: | XXXX | | Date: | 07/08/99 01:07 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | Starcraft(1), Text Only(1) | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 2, Max: 6, Min: 6
Lifetime Rating for BadGuy(tm): 6.4286 |  | Ah, those were the days. This site, with all its entertainment, reminds me of the best game of starcraft I've ever played. It's been a while... I don't remember the names of players, not even the name of the map. The only screenshot I took was the final score to show that my kill to death ratio was two to one. In other words, I've killed two men for every casualty of my own.
Realize, this was just a month or so after I bought Starcraft, pre-Broodwar, pre-balance patches, pre-Blacklizard's post of Mutalisk Rush vs. Protoss imbalance on Lost Temple. In other words, Starcraft was young and innocent and so was I.
Oooookay, that was enough rocking in the chair and sitting on the porch pretending I still have teeth. On to the story.
The map was 'badlands' tileset, and not much larger than Blood bath, with a similar layout, but middle is 'bunkerable' while each player's corner has two elevated expansions at the sides (with rivers dividing the players). One expansion has a ramp, the other can only be accessed by air. My partner turned out to be worse of a newbie than I was. The teams ended up forming an X, with allies in opposing corners. I was Protoss, he was Terran, against a Terran and a Zerg. The map has another remarkable trait - there is a wall structure of U-shape right before the bridges to the middle island from every side. You couldn't drop anything on top of it, but you could hide troops behind, or shoot over it (it was thin).
In the beginning my ally gets double teamed, and bunkers in hard. I help a little bit with my zealots while teching and expanding. At one point I know everyone has at least one expansion and he doesn't so I tell him to do that and he says he can't find them. Knowing the map, I've sent something (a zealot I think?) over to show him the ramp up... and guess what? Sunkens. He tries to siege his way into the highest ground but loses the tank to a swarm of hydralisks. The initial locations have about six mineral patches each, so he finds himself mined out pretty soon. The other expansion is taken by the terran who sieges him from high ground. He floats everything he can to my side, across the middle, along with remaining 10-12 marines, and becomes a biased observer, unable to do anything without a command center and minerals. Meanwhile, I have both expansions set up, teched into observer/reaver and hightemplar/archon trees. Before I realized my minerals are drying up I've assaulted the terran base with archon/reaver drop, I've sneaked observers all over the map (small world!). My ally sent his marines as an unglorius distraction while the reaver was bending over the SCVs at one of the elevated things. Eventually, without proper support the 2 reavers and 2 archons were smoked out of there and expansion resumed - I've interrupted it a couple times, but I was playing defensive.
In the meantime, I had about 1/4 of the map all to myself, and once I've realized that I am being contained and minerals-starved, I've concentrated on two units that take very little minerals. High templar and observers.
The battle lasted an hour and a half. My enemies would gather a ton of troops in the middle (anything, really - tanks, goliaths, zerglings, hydralisks, guardians and so on)... the observer reports it, the templar crawls out around the natural barricade, past the two measly shield batteries and 3-5 cannons, then storms the heck out of their military. Ghosts too. I think I've interrupted 3-5 nukes with psi storm.
All this time, my ally was very envious, and laughed it up with each big splat that followed my mage bomb raids (all of them came back safely behind the wall!)
Besides high templar, I had a leftover dragoon force (which was used well from behind that wall because everything had to run around it), and later on merged about 16 templar into archons because I didn't know better and I had too many anyway.
One thing that killed my otherwise impregnable defense, was my carelessness with storms. I kept zapping my own observers, and 25 minerals added up until I ran out of them. I had one or two in the end, and couldn't make any more.
I ended up missing a drop at a side. The zerg had completed two hatcheries on my side of the island! (Tells you a lot about how good we all were back then...) The archons wander over and torch everything down. Yet, the two observers are not enough to patrol everything. A nuke flat in the middle of my heartland kills all the archons who were just standing there. Shortly thereafter another one kills the dragoon squad - aimed from a wandering ghost somewhere in the back. I found and killed the two little terrorists, but the damage was done. Left with 5-6 half-full templar, I was unable to stop the next hydralisk wave and lost the battle, after nearly two hours of holding them off.
If I knew back then what I know now, I could've lasted a lot longer - and, given the odds, had a shot at winning this containment and starvation blockade. After all, I had one quarter of the map in resources... 3 to 1 is good odds for Protoss.
As my base was being destroyed, I've noticed something ironic. I had a probe, a shuttle, and an empty high templar left, just standing there. I loaded them up and sent them in an empty place away from harm, just as my last building was going down. For another battle and another time, perhaps?
"Ah'll be bahk!"
Lessons Learned
- Psi storm rules
- High templar are great for turtling - when you can't afford to lose troops, just energy
- Don't lose troops when you don't have to
- Watch those observers
- Public game allies don't know what they're doing, always
- Starcraft is addictive |
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