[johngreymore]

SUPER NOTE: This may work in plat and below, but cannot hold it's own against a perfectly executed 4-gate in say masters league. As such, this opening is crap and needs reworking


Hello there! I am Johngreymore. At the time of writing, I am a platinum protoss player. One matchup that has concerned the starcraft community around the world is PvP. I hope that, in this post, I can propose a viable counter.

INTRODUCTION

I want to first state that Day[9] recently put up a daily (#272) that talks about PvP [http://day9tv.blip.tv/file/4911821/]. It surprised and amazed me that he thought of almost the exact same thing! However, I feel that he made a few errors that I hope to address here.

I actually thought of this build when I woke up suddenly, one month ago, at 7 AM. My first thought: "I wanna go zealot, immortal, phoenixes (in pvp)". My reasons are two-fold: I didn't like the widespread use of collosi... and truth be told, I had never ever practised a 4 gate in my games... ever. So I had to defend myself by other means.

Something happened in between that made me apply that to an early game PvP. I will never recall the reason, but I did, and this is what came out of it.

WHY THIS WORKS

Your typical 4-gate has the player constantly gathering gas while waiting for warpgates. When those are done, it is typical of players to spend that gas on stalkers, with leftovers being spent on zealots. What unit counters stalkers? Immortals!

But what counters immortals? Zealots! Be warned that you should never underestimate those 2 zealots. If they get to your immortals, they dish out a lot of hurt. However, to counter this, we will be making our own wall of zealots...

WHAT DAY[9] DID

He essentially went for a modified 2-gate 1-robo, with gate ---> robo ---> gate, with warpgate research. In this build, i do not reserach warpgate and skip the 2nd gate entirely to ensure optimal play

EARLY GOALS

-To hold off a 4 gate, either just barely, or with plenty defenders left over, depending on how offensive the player is and what units he warps in.

-Constant probe production.

-An opening that allows you to transition out without too much hassle.

-One to two immortals early on.

KNOW YOUR OPPONENT: THE 4-GATE

Day[9]'s daily #272 has a wonderful chart of timings in it, which has few to zero 'bumps' as he calls it. I will reproduce them here, adding a few lines myself to get as precise as possible.

3.30: 1 zealot produced + core finished
4.10: 1 Stalker finished
4.30: warpgate tech half finished
4.40: 3 more gateways added
5.15: warpgates are done.
5.25: All gateways are now warpgates.
6.00: The attack can start commencing at this point
7.30: Your enemy now has low minerals and gas, slowing down, or stopping, the 4-gate

A typical composition would compose of 4-5 stalkers and 2-3 zealots on the first wave.

Failure of the 4-gate leads to either a twilight council OR a robo-to-collosi. Day[9] has demonstrated that the robo transition allows a good amount of time for you to attack/expand/tech up. I imagine that twilight council transitions are less common, but nonetheless should not be a problem as the enemy would have fewer units to attack you with.

THE 1 GATE 1 ROBO BUILD

Note: Throughout this build, units should be constantly, or near constantly, flowing. For example, once your gateway's up, you should have enough probes to be able to mine, build more probes, and constantly make zealots. Similarly, once your robo's up, you should have enough resources to constantly make Immortals, so keep making immortals.

9 pylon
Use all chronoboost on nexus when available
13 gateway
15 pylon
16 assimilator, probes on gas the moment it finishes
Cyber core the moment gateway finishes

Train a zealot as soon as you can once gateway is done (depends on how smooth your play is) and from then on, constantly train zealots

Halfway through your second zealot, you should hit just enough minerals and gas to build your robotics facility. Do so. Save your chronoboost for the immortal.

Reminder: When your core is done, DO NOT RESEARCH WARPGATES. Don't even bother.

Important: Your robo should be coming up at around 20 harvesters, or around 25/34. You must remember to build a pylon LATEST at 30/34. I have found that it is easy to underestimate when that pylon should really go down, as has day[9].

When your robo is down, build an immortal and chronoboost it. At this point, pylons need to come out faster to support your 7-food production cycle (1 from probe, 2 from zealot, 4 from immortal). Don't worry, your probe count at this point should be high enough to support it.

At this point, production would most likely be 1 probe, 1 zealot, 1 immortal, 1 pylon, constantly.

-You may choose to stop probe production at 27 probes, with 24 at minerals and 3 in gas. This is however, not advised, for it reduces the econ advantage you have

The end result is that once the 4-gate comes, you should have 5 zealots and 1-2 immortals to be able to defend yourself.

I have attached a replay showing this build

http://www.sc2sea.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=237

TRANSITIONING OUT OF THIS OPENING

Congragulations! You have held off the 4-gate! Your opponent is reatreating and you have maybe 2-3 immortals, with a few zealots left-over from the attack. At this point, you can create an observer and send it to your opponent's base. You have a few options:

-Build 1 or 2 more gateways. He has 4 gateways, while you only have 1.

-Expand. At this point, your minerals may have been building up, perhaps because you were focusing on the battle and forgot to macro like I do. If not, however, it is easy to quickly save up to 400 and throw down an expansion.

-Counter-attack. Remember, however, your units are quite slow. Reinforcements cannot be counted on.

-tech up. You have your robo, while your opponent still has to get his up. If you choose to tech up to collosi, there is a small window of opportunity where your opponent's collosi/range would not be up.

For the above, it is advisable to get your second gas and research warpgates. You should have ample time to finish warpgate research before anything deadly happens to you. There is one more option you can take if your opponent goes for a stargate:

-Build a second assimilator and a startgate simultaneously, emulating the 1 1 1 build of the terrans. However, with this transition, you'll barely have the gas to continuously make phoenixes/void rays, while zealot production may have to be cut here and there to support the buildings, and warpgate research would be impossible. If you scouted the opponent's stargate too late, build a few stalkers to defend

FROM HERE ON

It's your game. If you decide to stick with zealots/immortals for the remainder of the game, perhaps with forge upgrades (although you'll die late game if you dont' deal enough damage), you'll need some units to take care of air.

Stalkers: Its fast movement speed will ensure that it moves ahead of your army if you fail to micro properly. However, it does come from the gateways, cost only 50 gas, and has 1 more range compared to your immortals to support them.

Phoenixes: Way, way faster than your zealot/immortal army. However, it is created at half the time it takes to build a void ray and has the advantage of being able to lift pesky zealots up, allowing your immortals to wreak havoc

Void Rays: The exact same speed as your zealot/immortal army. This ensures that you will have a tightly knit army. This does render it vulnerable to stalkers, but if positioned behind your ground army, will really help against zealots.

EPILOGUE:

I hope you'll take this build and test it out yourself I play on the SEA server often enough and I normally hang about the protoss channel. However, at the time of writing, I am unable to access my account for some odd reason (EDIT: Totally fine now, will be playing more games to show how this defense works)

Good luck!