Back to 4 Gating

So I find myself going back to four gating. My three Gate Robo build was not working out as well as I had hoped. After three week of not playing Starcraft 2, going back to four gating just seemed natural. Its an easy build:

4 Warp Gate Build Order


9 Pylon
13 Gateway
14 Assimilator
16 Pylon
17 Cyber Core
19 Gateway
20 Stalker
23 Gateway
24 Pylon
24 Gateway

By the time you hit your 26th supply(provided you only build 1 Gateway unit and are constantly building probes) Warp Gate tech is ready and you will need to produce mass amounts of Pylons. I like to drop 3 more at once to expand my supply to 50. Then start warping in units and gradually be placing Pylons down as 4 gateway units count as 1 Pylon worth of supply. This is also a good time to put a proxy Pylon somewhere.

Chrono Boosts
Chrono Boosts play a big part in any Protoss Build. No matter what opening build you are doing, you should be going for Warp Gate research. It is the cheapest research with the biggest benefits. It cuts training down by five seconds per gateway unit and allows any Gateway unit to be warped in to your Pylon influence in four seconds. Ideally you can use 4 Chrono Boosts on Warp Gate before it finishes. Each one cuts 10 seconds off the time. However, if your timing isn't perfect you can end up wasting half of the 4th one so I tend to stick with 3. By doing this I can also use 3 Chrono Boosts on my Nexus as well.

Poking and Scouting
While you are getting your base setup, send a probe every now and again to poke into the base, yes you will lose a probe but you will be able to tell what his unit comp is or isn't. In my latest match, my opponent went for heavy Stalkers and very little Zealots, I saw this by simply suiciding a probe onto his ramp. So I quickly put down a Twilight Council and started researching Charge. Zealots with just the movement speed increase move almost as fast as a stalker.

What to transition into.
Before transitioning into Colossus or Voidrays or whatever, you need to take an expansion. Having two bases mining is so important in Starcraft 2. You will want to take you small force in and cause some trouble, make him think twice about moving out. This will allow a safe expansion to be warping in. Once you have two bases its time to decide what to do next. Two bases can support up to 8 Warp Gates and a Forge. However this way leaves yourself vulnerable to Cloaked units. You may want to grab a Robotics Facility to grab an Observer. This will also open up a transition into Colossus. You can make one Robotics Facility and get up to 6 Warp gates for faster unit production. Picking up a Twilight Council as well to grab Charge or Blink is also useful as the building alone allows you to research more effective armor and weapons upgrades.

There you have it, the 4gate build order. It is a heavy macro oriented build. To learn more about macro and how to master it check out my post about the subject here.

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