[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 :|

[iM yang]

Tech lab costs 25 gas, reactor costs 50 and factory costs 100 so you can generally get a pretty good read on what he wants to do although it's just an indicator, you can't pin him on any specific opening yet.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...opic_id=250379 - this is basically a compendium of knowledge on how to deal with marine/tank/banshee and will help with your reactions to scouting certain elements in a terran's build.

[nirvAnA]

For their tireless contributions to this thread, Apth and Nemo have been given 6 month TGM subscriptions. (Apth's has been extended)

[Apth]

Originally Posted by ToNYT

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replay-videos/11698

I find it difficult to go through a replay from both perspectives, so I've done my analysis from yours.

Scouting
Your Overlord spread was good, but you didn't scout your opponent's tech. At 14 minutes, you still didn't have eyes on any of his tech buildings.
While you can make inferences about what tech path your opponent is taking by looking at the units he makes, sacking an Overlord or a couple of lings is always a good idea.

Passivity
Although the game started getting scrappy about the 15 minute mark, before then there was no reason for you to have your army sitting in your base just chillin'.
You don't have to fully commit to an attack every time you move out of your base - leaving your base gives you a bit of map control, gives you an idea of how heavily your opponent is committing to units (important in ZvZ) and puts pressure on your opponent.
Even if you walk to his base, see you'd lose the engagement and walk straight back, this is better than just sitting around.

Responding to Expansions
When your opponent expands, he is gaining an economic advantage. You need to respond to this in one of two ways -

• Expand, thus evening the economic playing field, or
• Be aggressive, taking advantage of the fact that your opponent has invested into an expansion and not units or tech.

While you wern't *that* far behind your opponent in terms of expansion timings, he was consistently expanding before you the whole game. This gave him an edge.

Creep Spread
Your opponent spread creep almost right to your base. This had two effects.

• Your opponent had more vision of the map than you did
• There was a patch of non-creeped ground outside your base that your opponent consistently made you fight on, while he sat happily on his creep spread.

In this case, I would have spread a bit of creep to even the playing field.

You didn't hotkey your macro hatch
Not sure if you noticed this or not. You had almost a page full of larvae sitting at your macro hatch, because you were consistently injecting, but because it wasn't hotkeyed you wern't spending it.
There were a few points in the game where you were sitting on 1-1.5k minerals and no gas - those larvae as speedlings could have put some serious pressure on your opponent, and possibly changed the outcome of the game.

Overall
You and your opponent played very well. No gaping flaws in your mechanics or decision making that I could make out, and while you made some positioning errors, I don't think these were significant enough to have had an impact on the outcome of the game.

ggwp

[ToNYT]

[QUOTE=Apth;30821]
Passivity
Although the game started getting scrappy about the 15 minute mark, before then there was no reason for you to have your army sitting in your base just chillin'.
You don't have to fully commit to an attack every time you move out of your base - leaving your base gives you a bit of map control, gives you an idea of how heavily your opponent is committing to units (important in ZvZ) and puts pressure on your opponent.
Even if you walk to his base, see you'd lose the engagement and walk straight back, this is better than just sitting around.

Hey thanks for the analysis, im just wondering when should i be aggressive
because i am always never sure when to attack and when i attack, what do i aim to acheive when i attack, like do i aim to just trade armies?.

thanks for putting the time to analyse my reply

ToNYT

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by ThePandarine

And I'm back for more thrashing! :P These are my 15th to 20th games which I have I believe I win 4 and lose 2.

Game 15 (vs Bronze Top 8/4v4 Gold) is a 30+ minute long TvT which eventually ends up to become a Star Wars fight IMO.

Game 16 (Silver) is a large force of Marauders and Marines steam rolling in.

Game 17 (Silver) is a en masse BC group that just smashed me to bits.

Game 18 (Silver/Gold last season) is a large tank force with a few bio units.

Game 19 (Silver/Silver Top 8 last season) is a TvZ that I thought I was going to lose but I have no clue why I held.

Game 20 (Silver Top 8) is a retarded BC fight.

As you can see, I'm kinda trying to get my macro up and kinda forfeiting my scouting to be able to concentrate on it. You may flame me away for that :/

Like always, harsh criticism is appreciated. I would like a favor and know if my macro has improved or is just as horrendous as it was when you first saw my earlier 5 replays.

Thanks again and GLHF!

Game 15
Replay analysis

• When you have expands, make sure to shortcut all your CC and PF in one shortcut to build SCV permanently. You can put easily the rallypoint of all your CC to the last expansion to saturate it quickly.
• When you push, always push with ALL your army. Your defense will consist of the units constructing. At your first push you let 8 tanks in your base plus marines that was at least 2/3 of your army food.
• Control the Xelnagas with a marine.

Conclusion
That's way better than before.

Game 16
Nothing to say, your opponent don't make units, you crush him on first push because you make units constantly.
Battle for the Xelnagas !

Game 17
Don't impaled your army on enemy tanks. If you want to play bio in TvT, then attack sooner (~6 min) and after that use drops to out maneuver the tanks !

Game 18
Good. Over aggressive who impaled his army on your tanks.

Game 19
Good. Over aggressive who impaled his army on your tanks. Defend better early Roach push, don't let your marines wander everywhere.

Game 20
In this game you were better than your opponent in the beginning of the game but he was better in the long run (better expansion management), drops.

General Conclusion
Now, you play well in the beginning, your macro is good but your engagements are still very raw. You need to be smarter with your army now. Not impaled your bio on tanks, better scouting of enemy hidden expos, better control of Xelnagas, dropping.

That's way better than the last time. You just need to play now and analyse your replays.

Originally Posted by ToNYT

Hey guys this is my first time posting.
i recently switched to zerg from terran and just played a match against my bsg clan leader synchro
who started off as zerg. I am in gold league and synchro has yet to play his placement for season 3 but everytime we would play it would end up me being the loser. but this particular match is the longest game we have ever had and Synchro and my self are wondering if we could have some good zvz ers analyse this replay as we would like to know what went wrong for us and what went really well. Of course i know my faults but i would like to know more on how i could improve and so does synchro
You can find the play here: http://www.sc2replayed.com/replay-videos/11698
if there are any zergs out there that could help us out that would be great for both of us
thanks for taking your time to read this post,watch the replay and reply to this thread.
ToNYT

I have done the analysis while Apth have done his, I will put it too to give you another point of view considering Apth is and his remarks are more relevant. You will see that some comments are the same (passivity, macro hatch, creep, etc.).

I'm really not a specialist of this Match Up but I will try my best:

Replay Analysis

• More or less 14 gas 14 pool then roach then expand for both of you
• You droned harder than him at the beginning, he could have pushed you effectively during your expand. He didn't because of lack of scouting and timidity.
• You don't spread your creep. It gives you map control and allow you to place your crawlers where you want.
• I think both of you are not aggressive enough in the beginning. Is it because you chose to make a macro game ? You must check constantly the opponent army to see if there is no opportunity to make damage.
• You made a macro hatch who hatched 12:08. From that moment until at least 22m you didn't put it in your shortcut for hatches but still have made injects on it. So you were quickly maxed at 19 larvae on it without making any unit from it and continuing to inject ><.
• 19m42s : you have 35 drones on your natural, you should have made a 4rth quicker
• 19m42s : Your opponent have 8 infestors for your 4 that's a weakness.
• In the end game (30m +) you had the advantage sometime but never pressed it to make damage to his economy and production facilities. He was able to recover each time and when he took the advantage he used it to kill you immediately.

Conclusion
Quite even match, very mirrored, your opponent won mainly because he seems more experimented. You should be more aggressive when you can.

[Apth]

Originally Posted by ToNYT

Hey thanks for the analysis, im just wondering when should i be aggressive
because i am always never sure when to attack and when i attack, what do i aim to acheive when i attack, like do i aim to just trade armies?

Here are some 'triggers' that you can use to time your attacks.

Upgrades
When an upgrade finishes - Roach speed, +1/+2 etc, it's a good time to move out and see what kind of damage you can do.

Expanding
Expanding behind a push is standard. While your opponent deals with your push, you get your expo up, droned and crawler'd.

If your opponent expands
If you aren't in a position to expand in response, or if you think you could do some damage, there's usually a good window.

Here is something very important to note.

Your attack does not have to do damage.
I'm going to say that again, because it's important.
Your attack DOES NOT have to do damage.

'Pushing' your opponent doesn't necessarily mean that you kill any units or buildings. It can be as simple as moving your units into his sight range and walking away.

Keeping your opponent in his base, denying scouting and map control by having your units out on the map and not sitting next to your natural, and forcing your opponent to spend resources on defenses instead of econ or tech puts you in a wonderful position. You don't need to actually do any damage to achieve this.

If you subscribe to the Grandmaster Manual, there's a section on the Psychological aspect of gameplay that goes into this sort of thing a bit more. It's very helpful.

Quick Comments

Nemo:

This is it. What's important is being active with your units.

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by nirvAnA

For their tireless contributions to this thread, Apth and Nemo have been given 6 month TGM subscriptions. (Apth's has been extended)

Thanks again for this wonderful gift ! It sure encourages me to go on.


To people wanting to have their replay analyzed, please give those information to help the different analyzers to help you :

• League (you can add the number of victories 1v1 all regions combined)
• Race of the replay
• Very important : Your own analyses of the replay exactly as we do : That gives us about your needs as much informations as the replay itself, help us select the appropriate analyzer, and double the interest for you as we can analyze your game and your ability to understand your flaws and your understanding of the game.

TAyang and Apth, I suggest this organization :

• TAyang takes all Diamond and superior (if you want other races, just tell us, I will update in this post)
• Apth has priority for all s
• I can take all s.
• Apth and me take Platinum and lower as availability.
• Each one (and others) can add his own analysis freely or replace another if he's not available.

If regular analyzers want to participate, just tell, I will update. Apth if you're OK with this, it might be useful to add it in the OP. Feel free to modify as you see fit.

[iM yang]

Sounds good to me!

[Apth]

Originally Posted by Nemo

TAyang and Apth, I suggest this organization :

• TAyang takes all Diamond and superior (if you want other races, just tell us, I will update in this post)
• Apth has priority for all s
• I can take all s.
• Apth and me take Platinum and lower as availability.
• Each one (and others) can add his own analysis freely or replace another if he's not available.

It might be simpler to say

TAyang:
Nemo:
Apth:

as a general rule, and if one of us doesn't reply for a couple of days someone else can jump in. Sound good?

I'll also make it clear in the OP that everyone is welcome to analyse replays.

[Nemo]

Sold, but I'm afraid TAyang will be quickly bored to comment BSG, so I don't mind commenting BSG , I like it anyway, so I will do it unless TAyang really want to do it.

Hey, we have a team now !

[iM yang]

How about if you have something to say, everybody just pitches in! =o

[iMSystem]

I don't understand why there is a group system now?

Just whoever wants to review it can, no need to make it all formal

[Apth]

Originally Posted by System

I don't understand why there is a group system now?

Just whoever wants to review it can, no need to make it all formal

It encourages people to post if they know there's an increased likelihood of their post being responded to.

I've mentioned in the OP that anyone is welcome to analyse replays.

[ToRPandarine]

Originally Posted by Nemo

6 game analysis

Thanks for the analysis. I've gone back to watch these replays again and agree with everything you have said. I suppose the reasoning for me leaving so many tanks behind was to defend from any counter attack and for fear that I would not be able to replace all the units quick enough.

As per your suggestion, I've begun analysing my own replays and have realised that some of my games could have been won early game because I had more offensive units than my opponent.

Due to the lack of knowledge, I continue amassing units and then get rolled over by either tech units or superior numbers. I realise this is a fault of failure to scout and have begun sending SCVs to their doom (mwahahahaha). However, it still happens and I would like your input on overcoming this

Thanks and GLHF

[Paroxysm]

http://www.sc2sea.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=449

There are 5 games in this replay pack consisting of:

2 Games vs Aean
2 Games vs a Mech Build and
1 Random ZvP Game.
In the games vs Aean, i just want to see what I could improve on, or alternatively a few timings that I could exploit. I feel as though my game could be a lot stronger. I also snuck in a ZvP that i lost earlier today to see improvements that could be made on my gameplay. Any and all help is much appreciated!

[Paroxysm]

I will eventually get around to posting some ZvZ's as i find it to be my weakest matchup at the moment. My ZvP and ZvT are reasonably fine, I just need help hitting good build timings in each game.. Might throw in a few others of each matchup in my next upload, thanks heaps to everyone in this thread!

[Apth]

Originally Posted by Paroxysm

http://www.sc2sea.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=449

Hok -

Antiga Shipyards vs Rocksolid (Mech)
You were a bit slack on scouting - his natural and third went up without you knowing about it.
Aside from that, your mechanics in this game seemed pretty solid. Rocksolid, if you will.

What I would point towards as the main reason you lost that game is how you dealt with the Siege Tank push.

That last push killed you because you trickled groups of units in - the advantage of defending your base is that you reinforce faster than your opponent. Wait until the last possible moment before attacking - this will give you the biggest possible advantage.

As a side note - throwing down a line of Infested Terrans to tank the first few tank shots is a good idea. You can even continue to do so as you get sight on the rear-most tanks - Fungal Growth loses a lot of its effectiveness when the units you cast it on can't move anyway.

Shakuras Plateau vs Demonspirit(Mech)
You did well this game. I would like to make a note of that Neural Parasite you threw on that Thor from the cliff, and then killed a bunch of tanks -

Dear God that was sexy.

Aside from that, again for me it was how you dealt with the tank push.

You were a little too aggressive with your Infestors - towards the end of the game, you walked them into a Siege line spamming fungal and NP, and they died - all fifteen of them - without any ling support. In an ideal world, your attack sequence would have been something like

• Infested Terrans to take the first tank volley
• Lings surround tanks
• Infestors NP everything they can get their hands on

Metalopolis vs Aean(Mech/MarineTank)
You crushed the dude pretty hard, not much I can say about these two games. He sit back and let you macro, you macro'd, textbook Muta/Ling/Baneling pwnage. Good work.

Tal'Darim vs Nova(Protoss)
Maxed Protoss deathballs are scary. You will almost always lose a 200vs200 supply fight as Zerg. Here's a couple of ways to deal with it -

Instant remax - this requires you to build macro hatches and expansions as soon as you hit 200 supply, so you have the larva to throw another 200/200 army at your opponent while he's still sitting at 120ish.

Don't let him get there - If you don't feel like slowing down his macro game with worker harass, expansion denials etc, just attack him before he's maxed. Your opponent was fairly passive in this game, and I feel like going 2stargate that early delayed his deathball by a decent margin.

As a side note - when you're remaxing, don't just build Roaches. It's tempting because they're relatively cheap and cost 2 supply, so you're remaxing for a relatively small amount of resources, but pure Roach will get obliterated by FF/Collossus deathballs.

Overall
Your mechanics are good, but if I had to nitpick, here's what I'd point out.

Money - your money gets quite high in the mid/late game. Consider throwing down a macro hatch earlier - excess production is always better than excess resources.

Unit control - when you watch these replays, there are pretty clear moments when you can look at how you've moved your units, when you've attacked etc and can say "I really shouldn't have done that".

Leading with your Infestors into a tank line would be one example of this, getting your Roaches killed while your Hydras lag behind in that vP game would be another.


Hope that helps

[Nemo]

I watched one of the games tonight : Antiga Shipyards vs Rocksolid (Mech)

I will add some personal remarks:

• 6:39 : You still don't know what the Terran is about. You have not seen a single building apart from a refinery, you have one spine, 2 queens, 1 zerglings on the Watchtower, no T2, no larvae, no speed and not a very good overlord spread on the map. That's the main zone of danger against Terran where you could have been hit by a lot more Hellions, a huge Marine SCV All-in, and all sort of aggressions you couldn't have reacted to. Your scouting gling died really badly since he was sniped along the cliff. You should have paid more attention to his path to let him climb the choke. If you're greedy as you have been here scouting is absolutely vital. Sac a overlord before. Make at least another queen as you're droned to death and have not taken a lot of gas. It will make creep more quickly to give you map control and help your defense.
• 8:00 You defended really well his hellion push with one queen and one spine and boss simcity. That's ballzy and successful but I think he could still have made a runby behind your mineral line and then it would have been free murder in your main.
• 8:46 : Don't try to attack that many hellions with glings out of creep. Scout with one gling, overlords or Quicker creep spread.
• 10:20 : You waited too long to saturate your gas. That's the time to regain map control and expand, you need lot of gas for mutas or Infest to fight after 10 minutes vs . Roaches and gling can't do the work alone.
• 10:20 : You see a barrack flying in your base. That's alarm bell for Mech play. With an ovi spread you would have seen it before. You need infestor and neural parasite asap. That's what you did.
• 12:40 : His scouting was very good. He has 0 air defense because he knows you're not going muta.

The rest is covered perfectly by Apth. Nothing to add.

[TragicHero]

Hello it 's been a while! I'm just dropping by to congratulate Apth and Nemo on receiving their rewards for being really awesome with their contributions here .

I'm currently practising a build against Z but haven't really found a suitable partner to test it on (custom games player distribution kinda random) and most probably will have replays in here soon for yang to work on :P