[asdfSchnitzel]

After taking the advice from your analysis of my pvz on Metalopolis i tried to fix the point you mentioned on a pvz on antiga shipyard. I thought i played well, hard countering his mutas and making him stay on 2 base while taking my third, but for some reason i cannot identify, i lost the game. What did i do wrong?

[xGKingdelete]

Originally Posted by QEDSchnitzel

After taking the advice from your analysis of my pvz on Metalopolis i tried to fix the point you mentioned on a pvz on antiga shipyard. I thought i played well, hard countering his mutas and making him stay on 2 base while taking my third, but for some reason i cannot identify, i lost the game. What did i do wrong?

Yes, you did play pretty well by forcing him to stay on two base, but you lost because the mutalisks still did a lot of damage (killing 18 probes), and because of the way you engaged his army. A lot of people complain about protoss being too powerful because of forcefields and psi storm. It's true, in a way. Protoss is a lot more micro-reliant than the other two races. If you can place good forcefields and be quick with psi storm, then you can still beat an opponent who is macroing better than you. However, if you struggle with micro, you can still lose even if you are macroing better than your opponent. I think that's what happened in this game.

Game Summary
He does a gasless expand, you do a 3gate expand. He goes for a low economy 2base mutalisk rush. You tech up to blink stalkers, and prepare for mutalisks with cannons in your mineral lines. He picks off 18 probes with the mutalisks, and transitions out of mutalisks into roach hydra. You deny his third base and tech up to both high templar and collosus. He retakes his third. You take your third. He attacks, and wins.

Game Analysis and Tips
1)Okay, so the first issue I have with this game is scouting. Aside from your first probe scout, you didn't scout his main base for the entire game. So you didn't scout his early roach warren, which he could have used for an all-in but didn't, and you didn't scout his spire, or the nydus network.

You did end up doing the right thing (blink stalkers and cannon in the mineral line), but you did this blindly. If he went for a roach hydra timing attack, blink stalkers wouldn't have been enough to hold that off, or to put pressure on him if he decided to macro up and take more bases.

Make sure you scout what he's doing before you choose your army composition. If you scout an early spire, then you know you have to prepare for mutas. If you scout a hydralisk den, then you know you should go for your standard collosus deathball. If you scout a roach warren and no other tech, then you know you'll need a few immortals to deal with mass roach.

So after you 3gate expand, you have to either:
-add a robo and get a quick observer OR
-research hallucination and use hallucinated phoenix to scout

Another thing to remember: If he isn't taking his third base and it looks like he isn't planning to, he's most likely going for mutalisks off two base. Or, he could be going for some 2base timing attack. Either way, you have to scout his base and prepare to defend accordingly.


2)When mutalisks start to harass your mineral line, you have to run your probes away as soon as possible. A lot of people think "nah, I'm only going to lose 2-3 probes, I should keep mining so I don't lose mining time". But that's wrong. Any probe you lose has to be remade, which costs time and 50 minerals per probe. Mining time is simply not mining from the mineral patches for a short time. The minerals are still there, it's just that you haven't mined them. You're probably only going to not mine about 200-300 minerals, anyway.

Remember that the one cannon that you had wasn't to kill all 11 of his mutalisks. Its purpose was to buy time so you could run your probes away and get your stalkers back to chase the mutas away.

So run your probes away. He killed 18 probes, and lost one mutalisk. If you ran your probes away, he would probably have only killed at most 5.

3)After chasing away his mutas, you counter attack. This could have gone really well, and won the game for you, because he wasn't expecting the attack. However, you don't engage as well as you could have, and he manages to hold it off.

Don't run up his ramp until your whole army is there. Otherwise your sentries' guardian shield won't help you. Also, you want to have zealots first, so they can tank some of the damage and do a bit of their own. If the zealots are stuck at the back, they aren't participating in the battle at all.


Forcefields. Sometimes you only have seconds to react, but you just have to learn how to react and forcefield quickly. His mutas are coming from behind, attacking into your stalker sentry anti-muta ball. So what you should have done was to forcefield to block his roaches, and take out all of his mutalisks. Try to have 2 guardian shields up at all times during the battle, so your entire army gets shielded.



Afterwards, you attack again, but his hydra reinforcements spawn and you're forced to run, losing all of your sentries. This is really unfortunate, since you needed that gas for the ht and collosus you were making at home. But it's still good that you remade some sentries.


From here, you both macro up. Amazingly, you both have 38 workers, as he was doing a low economy play. Imagine how far ahead you would be if you didn't lose those 18 probes. Also, 38 probes is too low for 2 base. You want a minimum of 22 probes per mining base (6 on gas, 16 on minerals). So make sure you remake your probes, especially after being hit by mutalisks.


He tries to nydus your main, but you stop it. Good work! But you still are playing blind. You should have an observer to watch over his army, so you can prepare for any attack, or see if he's loading units into the nydus network, and prepare for any nydus worms.


Okay, so he attacks again once that fails. The first thing to notice here is that the army supplies are 135-95, in his favour. Zerg naturally make units quicker, and until you are maxed out as well, you have to be very cost efficient with your army.

Your units are not spread out, here. If you don't attack, you want to position your units defensively. So your units should have been spread out evenly in a concave along the red line. This way, all your army is able to attack, and your sentries and high templar will be able to use forcefields and psi storm without being blocked. As you can see, your high templar are too far behind.


You could have forcefield like this to pick off some of his army for free


If you forcefielded like this, all of the units in the green boxes wouldn't have been able to help in the fight. Also, this whole time your high templar are at the back of your army


It turns out you did forcefield and I just paused the game too early. But you trap too many units, and they end up killing all of your sentries. Now you aren't able to forcefield the top half of his army.



While all of this is happening (which is only a matter of seconds, starcraft is hard), your high templar have been at the ramp of your natural. It looks like you were trying to micro them, but they were out of range to storm. Keep your high templar with your army, otherwise when you cast storm, you have to wait for the high templar to slowly float in range, and then cast storm. If those high templar were there at the start of the battle, you could have easily taken out everything with the 6 storms you had available.


In Summary

• Scout better. You can't assume every game that they're going to go for mutalisks off two base. The majority of games, they won't. If you 3gate expand, research hallucination or get an observer to scout their tech so you can respond appropriately.
• Run your probes away as soon as possible. It's best if you can run them away before the mutalisks even hit the mineral line. If you lose probes, remake them.
• Engage better. This is probably the hardest one. Position your units well before the battle. That's easy. 2 guardian shields just before the battle starts. Easy. But placing goodforcefields as quickly as possible without much overlap? That's incredibly hard. Almost everyone can't do it. But you can practise and get better at it. Same with psi storms.

I suggest playing around with that micro trainer map, it's called "Darglein's Micro Trainer (SEA)". Try playing the "forcefield madness" challenge. It's pretty much 10 sentries vs a lot of marines, and you have to guardian shield and forcefield to win. If you can get up to level 5-6, then that's good. I can't remember my personal record, but I think it was level 15-16 . I also suggest the "multi ability control", where you have to forcefield and use psi storm against a large wave of zerglings and banelings.

Quick Comments

	asdfSchnitzel:	Thanks for help :)
	Nemo:	Wow wow wow and you're even improving at that !