Shock/Parno's Return from Retirement...

I'm hanging around nohunters when I spot -CD-Parno, one of my old buds from wwaaaaayy back in the days of Terran Foxhole (probably before most of you got your first copy of Starcraft ;-) ). He notes to me that this is actually his first time in the game in a long time too (mentions something about EQ, is that some new sport? Sounds addictive whatever it is). So this stages the perfect set-up for two guys who both haven't played SC in eternity but once...err, didn't suck as bad as they do now... So we decide to go with a pub game to get an easy win and convince ourselves that we still know how to play the game...

Pub 2v2 Dire Straits 2on2 join now!

-CD-Parno ( Terran, random ), Shockwave[xpow] ( Protoss )

vs.

Kenneth. ( Protoss, random ), Chunkie(? think that's his name) ( Protoss )

Starting positions are Parno top-left, Shockwave top-right, Kenneth. bottom-left, Chunkie bottom-right. So starts look like this:

-CD-Parno Shockwave[xpow] Kenneth. Chunkie

Early Game

Parno is going for a one-CC wraith build (People still build wraiths these days, right? Umm, I think so...go ahead...), later floats another CC to the top island between us.

Shuttle pops out, I expand to the right-side island between me and Chunkie while waiting for my reaver. There is still no recon at all at this point, so I opt for a blind drop because it will make us lose the game quicker ;-). A dragoon & reaver volunteer to sacrifice themselves and are loaded up, I skirt the right edge of the map and drop what ends up being Chunkie from his bottom right side. Chunkie is basically at the same tech level as me, he also has a shuttle/reaver and dragoon and is just starting to warp in some cannons. Unfortuantely, his unit & structure placement is not as elegant and he leaves an open area for my reaver to drop from the south side, additionally his reaver is to the north of his mineral line and thus his scarabs take a long time to weave through the buildings and such, giving me plenty of time to use load/unload tricks to circumvent. One thing I learned: On Dire straits boards, there is a gap at the center of the mineral patches. I regularly exploit this by dropping on the other side and funneling scarabs through the hole. Always clog this up with a pylon or cannon; it makes a perfect small choke for an attacking reaver to fire at peons and opposing units if not.

My reaver successfully gets two good blasts off on peons, killing a multitude. He immediately runs the rest of his away from the mineral line, and I chase with my reaver and dragoon into the opposing reaver and dragoon. My reaver absorbs a scarab as it tries to target the fleeing peons, we take out each other's dragoons, so I load up the half-dead reaver back into my shuttle and retreat it over his shore. I notice some cannons starting to warp in, but his pylon coverage isn't great so he is not able to cover his whole coast.

Chunkie is crippled. From here, I've learned that Following a successful early attack in an allied game, the best way to proceed is to simply take out the weakened player entirely so the game essentially becomes a 2v1, which then becomes easier to win than if you hit both players and possibly allow one to build back up to strength...theoretically... The way I look at it, if you only cripple a player and he has to rebuild from scratch, that basically puts him X minutes behind everyone else in tha game (i.e. as if he had joined the game X minutes later), which makes for a great advantage in early game, but then that advantage becomes less and less significant the longer he remains in the game.

My shuttle zings back to my base to meet with another shuttle, a couple of dragoons, and another reaver. I unload my damaged reaver and recharge his shields, load him back up, and drop everything on the north side of his island. This time I opt for the brute force (tm) method of just plowing through everything. A couple of dragoons, one reaver, a couple of cannons stand in the way but they are dispatched with the loss of one reaver. There is now a reaver and two dragoons pounding away at his base with no opposition. Shuttles are queued to head back to base after unloading, and all seems to be going well.

Corsair production has started back at the mainland, and my one expansion is brimming. Kenneth sends a shuttle with a reaver to try to save his friend's base, but it's repelled. My own shuttles arrive with yet 2 more reavers and dragoons, my corsairs chase away Kenneth's shuttles, his base is razed.

Chunkie concedes GG and we share vision & leave a pylon so he can watch the rest.

Mid Game

I decide to rapid-expand, transitioning to carriers and laying off of dragoon/reaver production. I also try to take Chunkie's old main at the same time. Powering ends up being a mistake, as Kenneth starts mass-dropping my expansions with reavers and corsairs. As I'm stuck with my carrier strat, I'm caught before I have sufficient numbers to repel his quick drops. Carriers then come and kill my expansion at Chunkie's main. Things are becoming quite problematic here since from counting expansions, it looks like Kenneth has established most of the bottom-left side of the map (including 3 expansions) whereas I've been busy killing Chunkie and not gaining resources as quickly.

Parno ends up effectively being out of the game and spends most of his time mining minerals, asking for permission to take free expansions, and building lots and lots of missile turrets (Look, more static D!).

After throwing down 3 starports and 2 cybers and massing upgraded carriers and feeling quite cheap about it, I start to try to plow through Kenneth's bases and take control of some of the resource spots. Unfortunately, Kenneth is a bit wiser than me. First I encounter scouts, which completely maul my carriers. This reminds me of a discussion thread I had on my forum:

Shock: Why don't people build scouts these days? They take out capital ships pretty well still, yes? Response: Because it takes just a bit of corsair accompaniment to make scouts ineffective, and only a newbie builds carriers-only without corsair support.

Kenneth has now completely retaken Parno's start, fortified it with tons of dragoons, scouts, an odd arbiter here and there, and templar, and has stopped a couple of attempts to evict him. This is one of the last major resource spots, so it's fairly critical that we're able to take it back. Parno is short on gas and only can make a few wraiths, which are mowed down by corsairs, and afterward resigns to just making marines. So the bulk of the burden rests on me. I take over the north island (Parno was driven away from there as well and his last base was the south half of one of the bigger islands near the middle of the map, where I occupied the north and selfishly took the gas) and throw down 5 or so shield batteries. I wipe out his scouts with about 18 fresh corsairs with dweb, then start back on carrier production.

Aha. Carriers die to scouts, scouts die to his corsairs, corsairs die to massive dragoons. We're in a constant stage of counter/re-counter and I'm forgetting that things like reavers and temps and arbiters would have done quite well here. I'm starting to feel choked as Kenneth squashes many of my expansion attempts and continues to execute successful small-scale attacks as well. Of course, everything is fully upgraded at this point, observors are everywhere, this is the standard late-game Toss island scenario.

Soon there is an assortment of corsairs, scouts, carriers, arbiters, dark archons, templar, and reavers at Parno's old base. I'm assuming Kenneth is using this as his primary. I start doing some el-cheapo carrier hit-and-run tactics from my batteries: Spot inland with an observor, target whatever is closest to the coast, hold down SHIFT and right-click on the target and then back to my shield batteries. Nice part about carriers is that even after they kill the target and are retreating back to shield batteries, their interceptors still acquire and fire at targets as long as those in range. And they are unlikely to take damage at all because it requires micromanagement for the opponent to target the carrier bodies instead of the interceptors, and often the carriers have already killed their target and are retreating by the time this happens. And no matter how well he groups his units, there is always some unit that is closer to the coast than the others, or a weak spellcaster (e.g. templar) that can be killed quickly in a hit-and-run. One of the better ways to counter is to bring your own spotter so you can see the carriers coming and have time to micro, but this is why as an attacker you can just keep attacking different islands to force your opponent to guess.

I get quite a few kills this way, Kenneth is starting to get very annoyed at me (Stupid carrier rusher :-) ), and all is going well. He is still outresourcing me, is using better unit mixes, and is in general using better unit tactics (Did I mention I forgot to upgrade dragoon range until my second cyber and I noticed, Waitaminute, what's that thing next to the 'upgrade air armor'? :-b ), so despite my small victories I am still waiting for him to squash me.

Eventually, quite miraculously, I break a hole in his defenses at his new main and plow through. I had brought in a couple of temps and stormed the group of units that he had tightly clustered at the coast to prevent my carrier hit-and-run's, then just brute forced through with carriers. While I'm razing his base, though, Kenneth returns the favor and recalls a couple dozen goons into my primary and starts to take it down. A few attempts at repelling the goons with reavers and generous dweb support all fail. I concede my primary, start rebuilding tech on my tiny islands, and go back to powering.

Final battleground is again at Parno's old main. After driving Kenneth off, I throw down a nexus and several starports (since there is little space on my islands) and restart assorted air unit production. Kenneth comes in and crushes this down with an arbiter and hundreds of recalled dragoons. He meanwhile sends another arbiter to 1) stasis all of Parno's marines on his island, then 2) recall a dozen dragoons there. The dragoons start tearing down everything, I send corsairs to dweb and then carriers to finish off but there are just too many dragoons. The island falls. Parno is homeless for the rest of the game.

End Game

After I ran him dry of resources, Kenneth GG'd; and, after some back-and-forth stubborness, finally agreed to ally victory instead of accepting the loss.

Ally victory and it ends in a draw. Chunkie comments that it was fun watching. The game lasted approximately 2 hours.

BTW: Kenneth outscored me and outresourced me despite losing. I invited him to NoHunters, so hopefully you guys will see him around. We ended up playing & winning a 2v2v2 together afterward out of nwtr :-). I think he really should have won this game, maybe he just had mercy on us? Seriously, he outresourced me, outproduced me, outscored me, qualitatively used better unit control and tactics, and generally was a better player. After the first few minutes, the game was essentially a 1on1 with Parno providing occasional buildings for Kenneth's corsairs to shoot at :-b. Someday he will have to explain to me in detail how he managed to lose ;-).

S hckwave ___________XPOW