When and what to push

In the early game, Zealots are the slowest units,
but make excellent meat shields to Marauder fire.

Immortals are great to use for early pushes in all
match ups. They do 50 damage to Roaches,
Stalkers, and Marauders

Pushing is something I have been having trouble with recently. I am still in the mentality that if I want to win, I should be pushing really early on, something that carried over from all those matches I four gated every time. In fact I rarely had a match that lasted longer than 18 minutes. I would always push when I felt I could do enough damage. What I didn't take into account was things I should wait for to make my push 100% better.

What to wait for
Things like waiting on a Forge upgrade, or a couple of Immortals, or even Charge. Things like that can make that push that much more effective. So now instead of pushing with a large force and surprising your opponent, you know have an upgrade that makes that large force much more powerful, and that upgrade isn't even noticed until after the battle starts. You might see 6 Zealots assembling at your front and think oh all I need is 3-4 roaches and I can kite em around, but what you don't see is 6 Charged Zealots assembling at your front and suddenly kiting is suddenly near impossible to achieve.

You never want to push into your opponents base without scouting what he has or what he was going for. Constant scouting can help you determine what you should be making or if that push you were making was going to work.

Also, don't plan to defeat your opponent early unless you know for 100% you can. In most cases its more beneficial to wait on that upgrade and do small pushes to help you establish that expansion. However waiting to push until you have a higher tech unit is generally Ok. Good units to wait for would be the Immortal, Collossus, Hydralisk, Siege Tanks, Medivacs.

So far we have  two elements that should be considered before pushing, upgrades, and scouting. Going for specific unit counts before you push is only useful if your going for a build where all of your resources are going straight into unit production, like the 4 warp gate build because your objective with pushing is gaining an advantage, not losing it.

Defenders advantage and the proxy Pylon
Another problem with trying to push early on to win the game is something called the defenders advantage. No matter how many units you have, your opponent will be able to reinforce himself faster if he is defending against your push. This is why proxy Pylons are so GOOD! I tend to always build a Pylon near the Watch towers. They are usually the half way marker between our bases and cut my reinforcing time down by half.

New Maps in 1V1

Desert Oasis and Kulas Ravine have been removed from the 1v1 ladder pool and replaced with Jungle Basin and Shakuras Plateau, respectively. While Desert Oasis and Kulas Ravine are no longer available for 1v1 ladder games, they remain playable in custom games.

We got some new maps coming into play. I am glad Desert Oasis has been removed. I like using primarily ground based units and the distances between the base as well as the multiple avenues to each others bases was very problematic. Kulas Ravine I was just getting use to, but one thing I noticed that was so much of a huge change, was ALL THE FRICKEN XEL'NAGA TOWERS. Most maps have 1-3, this one had at least 8! The expansions looked to be creative to take and convenient in places, but for the most part, in 1v1, it was just too big of a map.

I still plan on doing a series about the different maps and matchups in the game. I cant wait to start it, but I am also super busy with work and life, this week especially. My computer will probably be in in about 2 weeks, it still has not shipped. I am still practicing in AI games, but for the most part I haven't played a ladder game in about 2 weeks.

One thing I want to seriously practice is my macro. I'm starting to see what causes pro players to decline in certain games and what the purpose of your strategies should be. These little attacks and harassments into each others bases aren't for a win early on, its to mess up the other players macro to a point where his money overflows or his income is so low he has to take a step back to continue.

So this is what im going to do, I am going to concentrate on macro, and only macro. Ill build an army, but only after I am making sure I am building probes, I am expanding, and building Pylons. If I get supply blocked, or miss building a probe, That is a leak I need to plug, if you are making one of these mistakes within 2-3 minutes of the game, chances are your making a ton more later on. The chances for you missing something grows exponentially as the game progresses. Work on those little things, treat looking at your HUD (Minimap, Supply, Resources) the same as checking your mirrors while driving. Its the same concept.