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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Neat tricks you can do that you probably didn’t know about…

There are quite a few casters (including buildings) in the game, and most starting out players tend to ignore them as they take quite a bit of micromanagement skill that they are not comfortable with. They are however, a good way to building your micromanagement skill.  So lets look at the first one. This is for Protoss.

Did you know Chrono Boost can be used on Warp Gates? I am talking about the morphed version of the Gateway, your primary source of building units. It halfs the recharge time of warping in units! So instead of waiting 23 seconds to warp again, you can do it again in 12! Come patch day, it will be 14 seconds, but that is still a fast way to get units out, Zerglings don’t even come out that fast! If you have an expansion and both your Nexi are pretty full in energy with say about 6 Warp Gates, you will still have spare energy remaining and have produced 24 supply worth of troops (1/8 of your max population) in a matter of 12-14 seconds.

Another Protoss unit that has some interesting tricks is the Phoenix. It can move and fire much like the Diamondback from the single player campaign. However it requires some micromanagement as it doesn’t simply move and fire automatically. You can fire, move, fire again and keep moving. It requires very fast hand speed and knowing your hot keys.

This trick is actually something people have rumored it will work but in fact it doesn’t. High Templar cannot Feedback an Orbital Command. It only works on units.

This one I didn’t know about until recently. We have all been trapped or halted by the Protoss Sentry’s Forcefield. It can be a real pain. However, if you have some Colossus, you can use them to break the forcefield! Simply order them to walk through it.

Ghosts are a unit that most people will overlook as there attack isn’t that strong, and they die very easily. However, when you add a Ghost to your unit makeup when going up against a Protoss player, the results can be lethal for the Protoss Player. There Emp Round can take down the shields of any Protoss unit. This is especially useful against the Immortal as their damage reduction only applies to their shield. Once their shield is down, no more damage reduction is applied.

Another way Ghosts are useful is against cloaked units. Most people will think that using EMP against a Banshee reduces its energy to 0, thus it comes out of cloak, or that’s at least what it did in Brood War. However, when it is used against a unit with a permanent cloak, like the Observer or Dark Templar, the EMP will actually knock the unit out of cloak temporarily! The catch is, you have to know where the unit is to use it.

And last but not least is the Zerg Queen. Most people will keep them in their base and puke Larva and poop Creep Tumors. However, their more commonly unused ability is Transfusion. This ability instantly heals 125 health. This is great to use on units like the Ultralisk or Hydralisks. They cost no gas, have a very long ranged anti air, and there is no cooldown for the spell, so you can spam it on targets who are getting focus fired. However the down side is Queens move very slow on ground that isn’t creep. So building a few extra queens and getting some Creeping going is a great way to fix that, as well as giving you excellent vision across the map.