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Road to Diamond, and beyond!
 

Firstly I would like to thank crAzerk for the idea which I have completely stolen. I will be documenting some of my ladder games on the road up the league tree.

For those of you who don't know, I am currently a Gold league Protoss sitting around the middle of my division. I recently submitted a replay of mine to TGM replay analysis and after reading nirvAnA's analysis I was inspired to try and get out of gold.

BadgerWatch v TheFlash PvZ Slag Pits



I'd like to start out by saying that out of my 13 games, I have had 11 PvZ's. Blizzard ladder gods, I wouldn't mind a change!

Anyway, my usual plan going into a PvZ is the 3 gate sentry expand. I find at my level that the inevitable roach ling all-in that comes in response is usually poorly executed enough for me to survive. I know this is not ideal thinking but it will do for now. Once I start getting beaten by it I may mix it up a bit more.

The game starts off as normal, he goes gas, pool then tried to put the hatch down but I get my kicks out of microing my probe round in a circle to prevent it for as long as possible.

Now, after looking at the replay I should probably have sent a probe or a hallucination out around the 6 minute mark just to scout his drone count and see if he is going to roach ling all in me. I'll start doing this from now on (if I remember!) but my usual mindset is to assume that it's coming anyway.

Around the 7 minute mark my probe that was sitting on the Xel'Naga tower got picked off by his swarm of lings, worried about his lings streaming into my base I quickly threw down a pylon to finish my wall in. About 30 seconds passed and he still hadn't attacked me, stupidly I assumed (without scouting) that he had turned around and gone home. Much to my despair, as I start attacking the pylon to maynard my probes down to my natural I see this coming from the left.



And this following it up



Right now I was thinking, man I'm boned. I'd forgotten to get a cannon and I had 1 zealot, 3 stalkers and about 6 sentries to hold off 20ish lings and 6 roaches.



With some reasonable forcefield placement I managed to hold it off and the game proceeded with him producing more roaches and lings off 2 bases the entire game.

He continued to attack me fairly consistently. My mindset was "well if you want to keep throwing away units and not drone up or expand I'm happy to let you do it." One particular example of terrible, terrible micro on his part; a huge wave of roaches attack my nat again, I have a bunch of stalkers, a few sentries and 2 colossus. I may have held it anyway but he decided to right click on my colossus. Microing back my colossus resulted in his roaches trying to push past my army as my stalkers wailed on them without fear.

He must have wasted at least 50 supply on this engagement so I have a window where he isn't going to attack me, he is either going to drone up or keep producing units like he has all game and try again. In any event I get my macro on, throwing down another 4 gates and taking my third.

I've had the economic lead all game since his roach ling attack essentially failed early on, so I'm quite content to sit back on 3 bases, max out, get upgrades and go for a death push. But alas, one of his lings scout my third and he sends a huge swarm of them in to snipe it. My observer placement allowed me to see that he had left his roaches back at his base, and owing to the fact there was no way I could get my army to my third to save it I decided to lay in wait.


Bye bye Nexus


SURPRISE!

After taking out this ling force I'm close to maxed and go for the kill. (He is still on 2 bases!!) I move along the top lane past the gold and push down towards his natural. He brings out a large force of roaches and corruptors but some good forcefield placement coupled with pulling my colossus back allowed my stalkers to take out his corruptors before finishing off his roaches for the GG.

BadgerWatch v Caligula PvP Slag Pits



This was my first PvP since the patch with the nerf to warpgate. I was never a fan of 4 gating even in PvP and have searched ever since I switched to protoss for a way to combat it. Now that 4 gate is not the be all and end all anymore I am much happier in this matchup.

I've been using Adelscott's 2 gate pressure into expo in PvP lately, and while my execution is still horrible it seems to be effective.

In this game Caligula was doing some crazy stuff. He delayed warpgate tech for ages, went gate, robo, gate and then massed sentries and immortals. It was an interesting combo to say the least. My expo was up way earlier than his which gave me the economic lead.

In PvP I am always unsure of when to push out, in this case I pushed out just after my 5 gate production kicked in. In hindsight I probably should have scouted out his army before engaging. Luckily he didn't press the issue as his 3 immortals would have ripped my army to shreds.



I like to have 1 robo per mining base, producing 2 colossus at a time lead me to having a much better army composition when we engaged. He took a hidden expansion just before I pushed in to take the win, if I hadn't have pushed then and allowed the expo to kick in the game might have been different. I question his choice of unit comp in the PvP "Late game" but it ended up being a fairly straightforward GG.



That's it for my first blog, I'm going to go play some more games now. At this stage I'll probably try to release 1 or 2 of these a week. I'm using it as a motivator for actually analysing my replays.

Feel free to leave feedback if you would like. Ciao