273 replies to this topic

[Frost]

Watched that HoTS ZvP video from yesterday.

I don't think I'm onboard with those swarm hosts and that pull ability. Everything else looked good, but it seems like it upped the need of the Protoss player to have good micro exponentially, while the Zerg player could be significantly lazier than normal with his micro and still dish out massive damage. Not to mention the units that helped the Protoss not be in such a bind, the zerg could just pull out of the fight and autokill at will.

Map control is already a bitch with Terran since your only defensive structures have to also take away from your army and supply or they just sit there and look menacing. Not to mention the only mobile detectors are expensive as hell and fragile as glass. Looks like it's going to become even more of a problem. Bleh.

Meanwhile I'm not having any success with Hellions or Reapers for harassment, either, despite looking up strategies. I think they were written before the Queen/creep buff. Zerg just eat them up with the extra range and speed, preventing scouting other than scans, and making harassment defense crazy easy on the Zerg end; meanwhile they can just hover Overlords on you and watch everything, as well as escape from Marines and keep poking thanks to the speed buff. Grr.

TvT and TvP feels right, but TvZ just does not.

[badger2d]

I just saw the HotS videos.

These new units are not inspiring.

[Frost]

Heh. Well, DRG won the tournament, and it seems even he had a comment on how huge the queen buff is versus Terrans.

At least now I'm not wondering if it's just me being unable to do this thing properly despite trying. Read up on some good Zerg starts and it seems everybody goes heavy queens out of the gate these days... tried it out myself in custom, and good grief. It is at it seems from the other end; I should've read up on this when I was playing Random to start instead of just experimenting. I'd have lost to early game attacks a lot less as Zerg. I just saw the queen as a handy tool rather than an effective early defender. Damn queens just eat early probing attacks for lunch unless you completely screw up. Throw in a spine crawler and half-decent micro and you can focus largely on getting greedy with minerals and fast expanding early on unless they do a one base all-in and you fail to scout it, which isn't hard with the speedy Overlords.

I'm thinking they need to dial the queen's effectiveness back a bit, or give the Terrans and Protoss, especially Terrans, something more to work with in the very early game. Hitting them with Hellions is apparently not what it used to be. Most of the recommendations seem to be hitting them with larger numbers and trying to hide the fact that you're going that route from scouting, which isn't easy... guess you could put the Factory well back in the base and place Marines to ward off the speedy Overlords from probing too deeply, but then you gotta blow that early money on more Marines which means slower to get Hellions out, which means more free economy for the damn Zerg... errgh.

Maybe I'll just go back to custom and coop for a while and see what happens when 1.5 hits and maybe learning my way around this annoyance won't even be an issue and the old early game strategies will be useful again.


EDIT: I'm told learning to do a speedy, efficient 3 rax build works extremely well in lower leagues, even against the newly buffed Zerg. Might try to practice that some and get it down pat vs the AI and in custom, then take it on the ladder once I have it down.

[badger2d]

Got my first Protoss win today!

The enemy opened with an attack of four zealots and a void ray. This hit perfectly at the moment when my warp gate tech and second and third gateways all came online to enable me to warp in stalkers three at a time, which counter all of that stuff easily. It was a kind of hilarious anti-timing attack, he just went out of his way to offer his face for me to punch to start off the match.

I then got super excited to get my first Protoss win, charged across the map with my handful of victorious stalkers, and threw them away with suicidal efficiently in an attempt to jam my way up his ramp and win immediately rather than just continue play with an advantage. Meanwhile, to make matters more comic still, as I was running across the map I had left myself supply blocked and couldn't warp in more stalkers at home to deal with his one void ray that had run away and then returned after I left the base defenseless, and it demolished my robotics facility before I could fix that.

After that Laurel and Hardy act we put on together to open the game, we both settled down and expanded. I played a pure stalker macro game with double forges upgrading the rest of the way. It's good to keep it simple when you don't really know what you're doing.

He went for an army of zealot/void ray/stalker/phoenix/colossus...

Spoiler

[Frost]

Yeah, I've been noticing armies of a lot of 2 or 3 units seem to do waaaay better than armies of a giant mishmash of handfuls of different things. For one, it's way the hell easier to micro them. For two, well... it keeps you from out-thinking your own damn self. Several of my most crushing TvT wins were hitting players who couldn't seem to figure out what to build, so they built 4 or 5 of every unit available, and then my more simplistic MMM army with siege tank backup blew them to smithereens. Kind of counterintuitive to me since the reverse was more true in SC1, but I'm coming around from my old tactics.

Only exception would be in some cases where your opponent's forces are a hard counter to whatever you built, such as a formerly gold Protoss I ran into and beat who built a giant stalker-only army that had me way outnumbered... except he hit my Marauder/Siege Tank army with it. Numbers didn't matter, nor did his out-microing and macroing me matter; they got absolutely butchered by the massive vs. Armored bonuses.

[badger2d]

My original gameplan was to macro gateway units with double upgrades, and not worry about higher tech, I'm still getting used to Protoss macro and that takes all my focus. Going just pure stalkers was a minor adjustment of that based on the fact that he was building a bunch of air units. I wouldn't want to build pure stalkers against marauder/tank, that would certainly be suicidal!

Later he made a tech switch to colossus, but this is where the "Just go f-ing kill him" part comes into the equation - if he'd focused into colossus earlier that would've beaten my pure stalkers, but since he had been busy spending his gas on phoenixes and void rays and tech buildings along multiple paths, by the time we had our first big fight he had only two colossus without the range upgrade and I had a ton more stalkers than he did with a big upgrade advantage at 2/2 to 0/1.

[Frost]

Doing the combat achievements against the AI for for fun... actually kind of useful in a way, showing me some new, ultra-quick build orders and some fancier uses for some of the units.

Most fun was that Kill 20 units with a single High Templar one. Airdropping a High Templar into the back of a Zerg base with a Warp Prism and psionic storming all the drones away real fast before fleeing the AO again in the warp prism as the Zerg army came bearing down on me was pretty hilarious. Especially when I used that as a diversion and dropped the High Templar at the next base and repeated it. LOL. That was actually insanely cost effective, especially against Zerg since boom, one psionic storm and all their larvae go away... if I play Protoss competitively again I'll have to remember that. Hit and run on lightly defended or undefended mineral fields with a couple High Templars dropped by Warp Prism works wonders in no time flat, doubly so against Zerg.

I have a new respect for the Ravens too. Took over a Protoss base with 4 Ravens. Flew in from the back and dropped a PDD and then a pile of Auto-Turrets. Not only killed all the probes, but the turrets defeated the counter attack from a rather sizeable army what with the PDDs eliminating ranged attacks and my microing the Auto-Turrets' targeting. And then they last so long that means since they didn't die, they just sat there shooting the Nexus and anything that tried to come out of it until it blew up.

[Frost]

What the hell, they're actually REMOVING the Protoss Carrier for that lame little Tempest unit? MASSIVE FAIL. The Carrier is awesome!

[Sneaky Snake]

any luck on making silver frost with the new season starting??

[Frost]

Nope, haven't gone back to competitive yet. Been feeling an urge to get back to the campaign, so that's probably next on the agenda.

[badger2d]

Fun PvZ today, a kinda wild and silly opening that turned into a longer game where I felt that my knowledge of how the flow of the game feels from the Zerg side was really useful.

So this game - he opened with the most hilarious form of cheese, trying to build a proxy hatch inside my base. After I caught that just before it finished, he canceled it and he double expanded. I was able to deny them both because of a mistake, ironically - I had forgotten to take my gas in a timely way and dumped the excess early game minerals I ended up with into more zealots than I would usually have at that point.

After he cleaned up those zealots he boldly re-double-expanded and just poured on the drones, the right risky thing to do when you need to catch up as Zerg. My Protoss macro is very bad, and he had every chance of catching up. In fact, he did catch up and actually surpass me in income. But right about when that happened, and before he had enough time to really gain advantage from it, I had a small army marching in to snipe off his third base and set him behind again, with him just a spawn of units too short to really be able to take the fight. By the time he had those units my guerilla force was on the road back home. God, I used to hate it when people would pull that off against me!

He put the third base right back up and even added a fourth, again starting to surpass me in income. But by now I had successfully delayed real fighting for long enough that I had three bases of my own and I was closing in on a maxed out army and adding colossus support. And so I got to begin the death march that has trampled me into the dirt so many times as a Zerg.

It's a crushing feeling to be the Zerg in this scenario, when you have bases and creep everywhere and feel like you're controlling the whole map, and then this army just comes strolling along slashing and burning everything you hold dear to your slimy little heart, and there's not a thing you can do about it. But usually, the true reason it's happening is because your bases were harassed or denied several times over earlier on with timely attacks, and you were always just short of kicking your own war machine into high gear.

[Frost]

Yep, I loved that. As much as I prefer Terran in most scenarios, PvZ is just lovely once you've gotten a sizeable army going with Colossi + extended thermal lance supporting. Doesn't matter if he's outproducing you like mad, if the right counter army's not already mostly fielded, the zerg units just melt away like butter save for the really expensive stuff that he has neither time nor income to mass. Doubly so if you've been able to throw some Void Rays into the mix. Not to mention the significantly stronger Protoss units make sustained harassment of a Zerg SO much easier than harassing as Terran, especially if the map is friendly to being a bastard with Blink Stalkers.

Took my online Protoss strategy into the final Protoss mission in the campaign (In Utter Darkness) last night and it worked beautifully. First attempt, fried about 1000 more Zerg units than required before they finally overran me. I'll have to replay that mission later on and see if I can get it higher now that I know what's coming and when.

Obviously got room for improvement... apparently some people have gotten nearly 3500 kills on Brutal difficulty!

Wish I had some Thors for when the mass Corruptor/Brood Lord spam showed up at the end and overwhelmed me (I hate that lameass combo!). That would've been perfect. Cloud of tightly packed Zerg air units? What cloud?

[badger2d]

From the Zerg perspective, you must prevent an endgame scenario where the Protoss can field a substantial number of Colossus. You need to a) prevent or at least severely delay the Protoss from taking his third base by any means necessary; and b) have good scouting of his base so you know right away when the Robotics Support Bay is built, giving you time to put up your Spire and prepare with Corruptors.

I've felt from my experience that the magic numbers are 8 Corruptors vs 2 Colossus (and otherwise standard ground armies). If you can force a fight with those numbers, you can snipe the Colossus off quickly enough to win. If the Protoss is able to establish 3 or more Colossus in his army it becomes very very difficult, they will do such severe damage to your main ground force before you can take them out, and you just can't afford to commit much more heavily into Corruptors, because then you just won't have enough else to win the rest of the fight on the ground!

Re: Campaign, The Blaze of Glory achievement (750 extra kills, I think? You would've blasted right past it) on In Utter Darkness is the last one I haven't picked up in that section of the campaign. I played the campaign on Hard. All the campaign levels except that one require Hard for the third achievement, it's kinda weird how that one's a lone exception. I've held out against going back to pick it up on Normal, even though it's allowed, because of pure stubborn senseless pride.   I'm sure I could pick it up on Hard with another try or two! But also, my computer can barely handle this game, and that level drops my framerate to stop-motion levels, making it a real pain in the ass to play, and it's one of a very few levels that I haven't played a second time because of that problem.

[Frost]

Yeah, I've been trying to figure out what would be good to use against Colossi as Zerg; guess it's Corruptors. In AI matches I've played of ZvP, dealing with 3 or more Colossi with ground is EXTREMELY hard if you don't have Ultralisks in the field. Even then, it's a pain trying to get around to them since Ultras are melee units and there's an army in the way. As Terrans, dealing with Protoss pushes that are heavy with Colossi is relatively easy if I've Thors, Siege Tanks, Vikings, or any combination thereof; that one game I mentioned above with the massive 200 supply army vs 200 supply army all-in I played a couple weeks ago, both our bio armies killed each other, but the line of Colossi couldn't even scratch the paint on the Thors and Siege Tanks. And I didn't even use Ghosts.

Zerg... gotta get those Ultralisks in there, but that's a lot harder since they're melee units, take so crazy long to build, and you usually don't field that many unless it's late, late game... blasted Colossi! I guess the Protoss HAVE been fighting the Zerg for a long-assed time, so it makes sense their weapons are perfectly anti-Zerg.   Granted, I've mostly just been playing Terrans and Protoss, so it could just be my much lower familiarity with Zerg.

I need to figure what's good against mass air as Protoss, too. I feel like they have an edge on Terrans on the ground as long as the Terrans aren't overly mech-heavy, but in the air that feels reversed. Cannons and stalkers just can't replace Marines, Thors, and missile batteries. Phoenixes are no Vikings either. I've had some luck with Carriers, but only if they don't focus fire on them. So far I feel like if I see massed air as Terrans, I laugh at it, but it's been giving me trouble as Protoss.

Far as campaign, I'm doing normal on my first playthrough, but I'm gonna go back and attack Brutal after that. I've got an obsession with beating all the games I really like on the hardest possible difficulty. SC2 won't be an exception.

[badger2d]

Brutal's fun. I've completed  about 3/4 of the levels on Brutal. Again, the ones I haven't done are mostly the ones that give me framerate problems. I figure when I get a new computer, which I hope to do late this year, I'll probably do a full replay of the campaign on Brutal, for completionist's sake, to enjoy the eye candy that I've missed, and to just enjoy the sensation of being able to play the game at full speed even on the most epic levels!

[badger2d]

Frost you inspired me to go back and play In Utter Darkness again. Fun! My framerate wasn't so bad as I had remembered. I was able to get Blaze of Glory on the 4th try, playing on Hard, ending with 800+ extra kills.

[Sneaky Snake]

A large mutalisk ball is pretty hard for protoss to deal with. That's how I'd deal with colossi as zerg. The only real protoss response to a big mutalisk ball is an archon toilet. Stalkers are ok against muta's but don't really kill them fast enough.

[Frost]

Man, all that time I wanted to play Nova's game that Blizzard indefinitely postponed, and now I finally meet her and she's a manipulative lying B.

Oh well, a well-built manipulative lying B at least.

Sneaky Snake, on 23 June 2012 - 07:17 PM, said:

A large mutalisk ball is pretty hard for protoss to deal with. That's how I'd deal with colossi as zerg. The only real protoss response to a big mutalisk ball is an archon toilet. Stalkers are ok against muta's but don't really kill them fast enough.

I had to go look up what an Archon toilet is. That popsnizzle is hilarious!

[Frost]

1.5 patch is out, and the new user interface sucks and lags like ass compared to the original. I'm literally afraid to see what's happened to the actual game. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

[Sneaky Snake]

Frost, on 09 August 2012 - 01:40 AM, said:

1.5 patch is out, and the new user interface sucks and lags like ass compared to the original. I'm literally afraid to see what's happened to the actual game. Guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Nothing happened to it.