Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Broke a losing streak.



So I have been on a losing streak lately. I played 5 matches the other day and lost all of them, vs 5 Protoss. Today I finally broke that streak. I lost 2 two in a row to just early Zerglings and Zergling/Mutalisk.

My strategy had been to just try to out macro my opponent and use my 3 Gate/Robo build because I believe so strongly that it is economically sound in the early game, and in my tests it is, but when I get into a ladder game, I get so distracted easily that my macro and build fall apart. This build requires near perfect timing to achieve and get 50 food worth of units in about 7 minutes and my expansion at 7min, 20 sec. Else I'm not spending minerals like I should.

My Flaws
My first big flaw was not letting my opponent feel the full wrath of the warriors of Auir! In other words, applying good, constant pressure. For me when I am up against Zerg or Terran, its hard for me to gauge where they are at in the game. I cant look at a unit composition from my scout and tell whether they are going certain tech. I know I should be able too, and I know I should play the other races for a bit to get a better feel for it, but I feel i would do better to work on simple play and macro. Once I can do this and not miss a probe, or building, I'll expand my knowledge beyond Protoss. What good is knowing what my opponent has if I don't have the macro and faster hands to deal with it? My other flaw, which I have already stated is my macro is seriously lacking. I think the only way to fix this is to just play a some games until I can "remember" what I should be doing.

How I finally won.
My macro was bad, my eye was not on the minimap like it should, but I did notice one thing...I only got supply capped once in each game I lost. That told me I mentally rose building pylons constantly as a priority to a point where my probe production was suffering. So decided to just keep my macro from being worse, but trying to apply pressure. This gave me knowledge of what my opponent was doing, he destroyed both my advances, and if he had pushed back I would have lost, but I noticed he was massing Stalkers, probably because he saw I had 2 Immortals on the field. I already had my expansion down, probe count was lower than I wanted, but I at least had decent saturation. So I took a chance, dropped 2 more Gateways down and a Twilight Council and began warping in Zealots. In hindsight I did take my expansions two gases after I did this, I don't know why, I was just going to go Mass Zealots. I kept warping them in as I could and brought in a few more Immortals to help take the Stalkers down. When he pushed, his army was crushed. He outnumbered me by about 18 food. But because I knew Stalkers have a hard time against Zealots, I just massed Zealots.

I'm going to try playing a minimum of 3 matches a night now to help keep my macro up. Playing the AI no longer helps me.




1 comment:

  1. Stalker do quite good versus zealots if controlled properly. They _suck_ versus immortals though :-).

    ReplyDelete