[TragicHero]

Originally Posted by TAyang

Alright TragicHero, I'm gonna type this as I watch the replay.

Your probe gets in his base but you try to harass his SCVs, you should immediately check gas to see what the timing on it is. You saw that he had gas but not how much he had mined, if you had seen his gas count you would've seen he had mined ~60. You can poke up the ramp a little later to see whether he's been constantly producing marines or not and this will give you a big hint to whether he's gone factory or reactor.

Wow I've never really thought of checking gas counts during games, I'm going to have to get used to it... Are there any guidelines that I could put in my head? Like maybe... if he's already mined x gas, he's most probably going for x etc etc

Originally Posted by TAyang

You poke up the ramp and lose basically all your shields indicating 4 marine + you saw another. This basically means he's going factory so you want an expansion and a robo. (he can't kill your expansion with early mm pressure if he's gone factory and you want the robo for obs in case of cloak and to see exactly what he's doing)
Instead you throw down a twilight, forge, a cannon. This will straight up lose to cloak banshee builds, your mineral line is not completely covered, neither is all your buildings, this is why you want an observer, they are mobile. Since you throw down all these buildings, your expansion is delayed by about a minute, this is huge if he is doing marine/tank/banshee/raven all in.

To be honest I have no idea why I threw down a forge and tc lol. In my head I was worried about a mass bio army coming in (I dunno why) so I wanted quick ups and charge out - but obviously I was wrong. Usually I just throw and expansion first and then get a robo quickly after. I'm not entirely sure how to react to stuff yet, eg. Should I put down a robo straight away after scouting that? Should I stop probes? Should I warp in more units? I'm never entirely certain what to do :/

Originally Posted by TAyang

Once your expansion goes down you are still not at all sure what he is doing, he could be doing marine/tank/banshee, he could be doing a siege expand, he could be doing a delayed 4 rax all in. The observer is ESSENTIAL for this scouting information, you also NEED a unit outside his main, to spot an expansion that could come down or when he moves out, your initial scouting probe is great for this.

6 mins after your expansion, you don't even know if he has his yet.>_<

I also am not entirely sure why I didn't do persistent scouting in this particular game, because I usually do, with obs following opponent's army and also patrolling my base to prevent drops. I... I have no idea why I didn't do it here.

Originally Posted by TAyang

Ok so 16 minutes is the first time you get a look at his composition. You see 1-0 blue flame hellions and tanks + marines. This basically tells you you want to have a really expensive composition; Archons, immortals, colossi. Spend your extra minerals on bases, cannons for protection against blue flame, and zealots for harrass. Mech is super amazing cost efficient, you just have to be more-so, basically archon/immortal/colossi is unbeatable, zealots are largely ineffective once he gets a massive tank/hellion number.

I need to get it in my head to make more higher tier units as opposed to gateway units. I'm too used to keep spamming gateway units as much as I can (stalkers, sentries) hence why I did it here against a meching Terran. :/ Come to think of it all those gas would have been more useful used on immortals archons etc.

Originally Posted by TAyang

18 mins you see him set up in a way that indicates he has the gold base, this means you immediately want to take your gold, MULEs on gold are !@#$ ridiculous so you need to keep up. You also have like 40 probes, you never hit the golden amount of ~70 and when he hit some of your probes with blue flame you didn't produce many more, this is a huge problem.

I have this problem where sometimes I will play really good, expanding on time and not forgetting to macro up, and probing almost non stop. And in those games I'll feel really good knowing that if I trade armies I have 15 gateways to warp in stuff. But other times I just... Don't. It's really weird, do you guys face this as well? Maybe I need like a note at the side of my monitor as reminders lol

Originally Posted by TAyang

You engage at 21 mins with the biggest ball of zealots I've ever seen, whenever you have a lot of zealots against tanks you basically want to attack on at LEAST two fronts, you can select a few zealots and just right click to the back of the tanks to get the tanks to fire on themselves or at least a smaller group of zealots.
After the engage you lost a lot of supply but it's definately not over since you banked a lot of resources. This is the time where you want to reinforce with heavy duty units, use some zealots to deny bases but use all your gas on immortals/archons/colossi, that composition is ridiculous. If you find yourself with a LOT of minerals, use warp prisms and drop a bunch of zealots everywhere. (zealots are awesome)

I've been trying to make use of warp prisms but I can't seem to multitask optimally (as you can see in the replay). I realise I would only do zealot runbys if I have a hidden proxy pylon somewhere near my opponent's expos. But I guess the warp prism is better and I need to practise using them more

Originally Posted by TAyang

To sum up; SCOUT SCOUT SCOUT, when you see mech you want an expensive composition, use some mid game army to not die to timing pushes. This also means you want more bases earlier for the >GAS<. Use zealots/cannons as a mineral dump, having one warp prism and ~8 gateways to harrass a terran's main or his additional bases is really useful!

Thank you thank you thank you so much for this really detailed analysis! It's definitely going to help me play better as a whole. I need to work on my reactionary moves :/ any ideas on how to improve on that?

Wow okay this is taking a lot of space in this thread :|