[Tom]

Originally Posted by aztecx

seeing as zerg often needed 4-5 spines to defend a 4gate, shouldn't u think maybe about the same amount?

Not really comparable as protoss needs to commit to a forge. The first, and least significant issue is the cost of the forge. The more significant issue is the additional reaction time required for a protoss player to defend this sort of aggression. The player needs to decide whether or not to commit to defence far before it is possible to determine whether early aggression is coming, so that the option of actually making cannons is available if aggression is detected. By comparison, a zerg player will always have the option of throwing down spinecrawlers, and this is significant as it allows the player to "power" their economy for that bit longer.

This is why the forge after 3rd gate has become a virtual necessity in the match up (and always was, its just people "cut corners" in the match up, to paraphrase some high level TL posters). I'm not complaining about the need to make a forge, I just wish people wouldn't make silly or irrelevant comparisons.

I also think there is a fundamental problem in comparing the Roach/ling early agression to 4gate. Contrary to how some have described this, the build is not an "all in". When 4gate fails you're toast. When roach/ling aggression fails, the zerg player generally have a playable game because he has expanded - assuming the protoss player isn't killed outright, the aggression may have had varying effectiveness, ranging from doing nothing (in which case the zerg player is clearly behind) to killing all the protoss player's sentries and possibily killing some probes in addition to those that were cut by necessity in defending the aggression (in which case zerg is clearly ahead).

Please don't take this as a balance comment - it isnt. All I'm saying is 4gate is a bad analogy - it doesn't really make any sense to say "zerg needs 4-5 spines when protoss 4 gates, therefore protoss should have to make the same amount of cannons when zerg does the roach/ling aggression vs 3gate exp".