Need help with very late game pvt. I can't seem to be able to put together enough stuff to crush the damn terran. Here are two replays of PvT's gone wrong, one is 58 mins, other is close to 50. What have I missed?
In game 2 I actually disconnected, but the mere fact that it lasted for so long, and I wasn't able to win is eloquent enough.
Game 2:
I can see a lot of similarities in this game. You seem to cut probes completely once you get 2 saturated bases (46 probes). Unless you are planning a 2 base all in, don't cut probes. It's worth it to have those extra probes for a couple of minutes so you can have a fully saturated base once you take your third.
5-6 templar max in your main army, rest go to archons (unless you are planning some warp prism templar drops or something like that). you can have some templar at bases to fight drops, but only 5-6 templar in your main army. The rest go to archons.
What you can do is transition from HT into collosus. I can't remember but you had like 11 templar or something. If you cut templar at 7, that would be 600 gas you could have used to get your collosus tech up. What's happening in these games is you're attacking too late. He was maxed out long enough to have a huge bank of minerals, which he decided to put into those planetary fortresses. If you can get your ultimate deathball up faster, you can kill him before he gets to do that.
Also, cloaked ghosts. They are unbelievably annoying late game, as I'm sure you have noticed. Try to have multiple observers with your army, with observer speed researched from the robotics bay. You'll need to put cannons around your mining bases as well.
There was one point in the game where he had a ghost at one of your mineral lines, and you had two cannons warping in. And you thought to yourself something like "I can't be bothered to run my probes away, I'll wait for the cannons to finish so I don't lose mining time". probes are worth more than mining time The same with drops and mutas. Run the probes away as soon as you see that you're going to lose some. Maybe you'll lose 200 minerals in mining time, but losing 10 probes is like losing 500 minerals, plus those 10 probes won't be harvesting for the rest of the game.
If you can't attack into his army safely, and you're both maxed out, consider teching up to a mothership. It helps, if you can get one out.
Notice in game 2 you were kind of keeping up on economy with your enemy. And if you didn't DC, you had that game easily. So the loss in the first game wasn't really anything to do with your style or tactics, it's just that he took an economic lead and you couldn't catch up.
Thanks delete. Play greedy and win moar gamez, got it.
If you noticed in game 1, I was a bit hesitant when I saw the bay. I had a strong itch to put down TC and gateways for a blink all-in, then got a strong desire to do double nexus. But then was like ahh screw it, let's put down 2x gates just in case and foreverdiamond more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by delete12
P.P.S. where's the triple stargate carriers, I am disappoint
I found them kind of map-dependent, and Shakuras is not the map. I've had great success on Korhal and Entombed, but I get 0 terrans on those maps for some reason.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by souljah
Upgrade : Give roaches invulnerability to nukes, as their namesake on Earth have.
I think its mainly down to engaging too early/creep spread and not going back at the end. Notice anything else?
You're quite right about engaging too early, and I think this heavily contributed to your loss, but I'll go through some other things I noted down aswell.
Things I Liked
Up until things started to disintegrate significantly, your injects were spot on. Hitting injects and scouting will take you a long way.
Your defense of that 2rax was really solid as well. Nice.
Keeping up your expo scouting in the late game was awesome aswell, that's an important thing to do - nothing worse than watching a replay to find out your opponent had just randomly expanded a bunch of times without you noticing.
Scouting
OL Scout
It's always worth saccing an OL to get vision of your opponents base. Always always. At 7.30, you know your opponent is expanding but don't have any vision of his tech. This made me a bit scared. A 9min OL scout is too late, even for an FE terran. Around the 7min mark is probably better, 5 if they're onebasing. Ish.
Towers
There's no point not taking that other watchtower. Lings are free.
Scouting OLs
Keep OL's in the airspace between bases to scout drops - it wasn't such a big deal this game, but against drop-heavy opponents it's almost mandatory.
Tech
Lair
Your lair was quite late, and as a result you were on pure ling/bane for the majority of that extended engagement, which made things difficult. Getting your lair also allows you to scout with Overseers and Changelings, or Speed OLs, which is insanely helpful.
Upgrades
Your upgrades were ok, but only because your opponent didn't upgrade at all (imba terran, wtf). Against an opponent who hammers down on the upgrades, 2/0 lings against 2/2 marines gets ugly real quick. Dem upgrades.
Engagments
This is the part I'd prefer you paid the most attention to.
Sieged Positions
Warfare 101 - if you're attacking into a heavily entrenched position, expect heavy losses. For this reason, it's always preferable to engage terran opponents out on the map, so that
If you lose the engagement, your opponent isn't within siege range of your base
Your opponent is less likely to be sieged when you hit him
This is why creep spread and scouting are both imperative for Zerg players.
Last Second
If your opponent is sieged outside your base, engage at the last second possible.
The advantage you have as a defender is that you reinforce quicker than your opponent, because your opponents reinforcements have to walk across the map. The longer you wait, the more reinforcements you will get compared to your opponent.
This, IMO, is why you lost. You made lots of little trickly attacks instead of a couple of massive ones, thus negating the defender's reinforcement advantage. While this put you on an even field, your opponent had better positioning, was in siege range of your stuff, and most importantly -
Positioning
Attack from multiple angles. Always always, especially with lings. Split your lings into two groups, a-move them in from two different angles, and then micro your banes. Attacking from a single angle gives your opponent more time to shoot the crap out of you while you get a surround.
Hope that's helpful. WP man, gl
___________________________________ Apth.767 SEA | NA | KR
I think its mainly down to engaging too early/creep spread and not going back at the end. Notice anything else?
You're quite right about engaging too early, and I think this heavily contributed to your loss, but I'll go through some other things I noted down aswell.
Things I Liked
Up until things started to disintegrate significantly, your injects were spot on. Hitting injects and scouting will take you a long way.
Your defense of that 2rax was really solid as well. Nice.
Keeping up your expo scouting in the late game was awesome aswell, that's an important thing to do - nothing worse than watching a replay to find out your opponent had just randomly expanded a bunch of times without you noticing.
Scouting
OL Scout
It's always worth saccing an OL to get vision of your opponents base. Always always. At 7.30, you know your opponent is expanding but don't have any vision of his tech. This made me a bit scared. A 9min OL scout is too late, even for an FE terran. Around the 7min mark is probably better, 5 if they're onebasing. Ish.
Towers
There's no point not taking that other watchtower. Lings are free.
Scouting OLs
Keep OL's in the airspace between bases to scout drops - it wasn't such a big deal this game, but against drop-heavy opponents it's almost mandatory.
Tech
Lair
Your lair was quite late, and as a result you were on pure ling/bane for the majority of that extended engagement, which made things difficult. Getting your lair also allows you to scout with Overseers and Changelings, or Speed OLs, which is insanely helpful.
Upgrades
Your upgrades were ok, but only because your opponent didn't upgrade at all (imba terran, wtf). Against an opponent who hammers down on the upgrades, 2/0 lings against 2/2 marines gets ugly real quick. Dem upgrades.
Thanks for the very helpful comments. My timings on builds are quite off, I only started playing again recently(since season 1). I didn't send that OL in quite so early since after a 2 rax you have quite a big break period between the next attack.
Anyway thanks again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nemo
About Lewis
Race
Zerg Location
New Zealand League:
Platinum
Disclaimer: I'm a plat zerg analysing a masters' replay, so someone clever should probably look at this.
Scouting
Not a whole heap of tech scouting done, no idea about his tech path other than what you can extrapolate from his build order at 9.30. You had blind spore crawlers up to deal with potentialities, but personally I would prefer some OL saccing.
Positioning
This is really the only criticism I feel comfortable giving.
Angles
You do make attempts at multiple-angle engagements, but the problem - IMO - is that you're attempting to get multiple angles with one group of units. I'll try to explain -
In most of the engagements during that replay, your army walks around in one group, then when you encounter your opponent you try and split up a bit to get a good surround.
What it might be worth trying is walking your army around in two groups, and coming from two completely different angles.
Forcefields
This applies to the very last engagement in particular - if one half of your army gets FF'd out, walk the other half out of range. Else it's just your opponent killing half your army, then killing the other half.
The only time I'd feel comfortable committing to an engagement where half my army gets FF'd is if my opponent FF's units inside, rather than outside, the engagement, and retreating will lose me half my army anyway.
I don't think that using half your army to engage while half of it just stands around on the other side of some FF's is the best use of your forces.
Overall
I think you had a long series of uneven trades, which is OK against Protoss, but unfortunately they were uneven enough that you wern't able to put pressure on. 200v200 battles are never much fun in ZvP.
My advice to you would be to try and get multiple angles on your opponent with two distinct army groups, rather than one. It's a lot harder to forcefield efficiently when you're being attacked from the left and right, rather than just left and slightly-not-left.
Cheers yo
___________________________________ Apth.767 SEA | NA | KR
I agree with the things Apth had to say. I think you should consider the saying from War3 "never fight a battle you can't win". It applies a bit less in starcraft, but it's still important.
With his first push off two bases with 12 sentries, you shouldn't have tried to engage his army when you didn't have enough to crush it. It's fine to try and bait out some forcefields (you definitely have to bait out some forcefields), but if you're losing a chunk of your army each time you do it, you'll never build up the mass of units you need to actually kill the army. Because he kept on taking out chunks of your army just by using his sentry energy, you ended up with more than double the resources lost.
I don't play zerg so I can't really say much about expansion timings, but I think you shouldn't have taken the fourth. Or, when you spotted him push out with an army too big to handle, you should have cancelled it and just had a macro hatch in the main or something. Also, you were floating a bit too much resources the whole time, if the extra 500 minerals had been 20 zerglings you could have held it.
Anyway, the reason you don't want the fourth is because of how hard it is to defend. Just the map layout. This is what happens when you instinctively run to defend it.
On the other hand, if you were just defending the third, you could have got a relatively easy flank depending on how good your opponents forcefields were.
red diamonds are spine crawlers (from the extra 500 minerals you had)
blue ellipse is the deathball
red lines are your potential attack paths. He can't run into the spine crawlers, so you can kind of kite a bit there, and maybe bait a few forcefields, and once he's run out of forcefields you can get a group of lings to flank from behind. Of course all of this is just dependent on how good your opponents forcefields are. If his warp prism is out of position and doesn't spot the highground, you should be able to flank easily with lings as well.
And yeah, he takes out your third as well. When a protoss is up in supply and economy in the midgame, you aren't going to catch up. You'd have to verify this with an actual zerg player, but I think going infestors against stalker oriented armies is better than hydras.
I might steal that guys build. forcefields are pretty fun
1) seems like me trying to bait ff by sacrificing some of my army is a bad idea
2) my engagement, with so much sentries, i should try to surround as much as possible
i would work on those details in the future, thx alot
edit: i dont sac overlord cause i read the toss strat by his expo's gas timings
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its a small L not a capital i
BnetID: faithHunter - 631 League: Silver vs Gold (If I am not mistaken) Matchup: vs
Some points that I want to improve on:
Map Control
Macro and Supply Blocks (i.e. how many times a macro lapse happened, how many times did I get supply blocked, etc.)
Defending against harrasment or drops
Summary of the game as far as I can remember:
I opened up with a 1-1-1 to Hellion Drop him, but then he scanned my base so I transitioned to Banshees. He hellion dropped me, but I managed to defend against it. Then he expanded and I did too. Then we went on a somewhat linear Marine Tank vs Marine Tank game, but for some reason I was behind in terms of army. I tried to contain him from his third, but he circled around and killed mine. I got vastly outmacroed afterwards, and gg-ed out of the game.
Thanks in advance.
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Formerly known as neozxa
Instead of complaining about balance, try, try again.
Earlygame ZvZ is basically a knifefight with suicide bombers.
BnetID: faithHunter - 631 League: Silver vs Gold (If I am not mistaken) Matchup: vs
Some points that I want to improve on:
Map Control
Macro and Supply Blocks (i.e. how many times a macro lapse happened, how many times did I get supply blocked, etc.)
Defending against harassment or drops
Summary of the game as far as I can remember:
I opened up with a 1-1-1 to Hellion Drop him, but then he scanned my base so I transitioned to Banshees. He hellion dropped me, but I managed to defend against it. Then he expanded and I did too. Then we went on a somewhat linear Marine Tank vs Marine Tank game, but for some reason I was behind in terms of army. I tried to contain him from his third, but he circled around and killed mine. I got vastly outmacroed afterwards, and gg-ed out of the game.
1-1-1 to be able to punish greedy play and defend any early attacks (banshee, hellions, bio), THEN expand, don't make so many buildings you can't afford to produce from
Make sensor tower. His won him the game by denying your BF hellion drop.
Don't siege in the middle of such an open map, it's not Xel Naga with a centre that you can hold to be safe
Tell us which ones were defeats please and give a quick explanation why you think you lost. Choose the one you want to be analyzed, we can't do more than one at a time and it's not useful to you anyway.
Tell us which ones were defeats please and give a quick explanation why you think you lost. Choose the one you want to be analyzed, we can't do more than one at a time and it's not useful to you anyway.
Thanks.
Sorry about that I will paste them here and update my first post.
Defeat3 - I played this so badly its not funny... never took a proper 3rd and just general macro and unit control was sloppy. In my defense it was second match of the morning and I was still sleepy lol.
Last edited by pkat; Sat, 17th-Mar-2012 at 11:03 AM.
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