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.

1v1, 1 v 1, Protoss, Starcraft 2, SC2, Starcraft2, Protoss Build Order, 4gate, 4 Gate, Chrono, Chrono boost, Chronoboost, Nexus, Pylon, Pylons, Supply, Supply Blocked, Stalker, Zealot, Core, Cybernetics Core, Warp Gate, Gateway, Assimilator,Strategy Game, 3 Gate Robo, 3gate robo, 3gaterobo, Probes, Probe, 4 warpgate build order, 4gate build order, Twilight Council, Charge, Blink, Blink Stalkers, Stargate, Star gate, Observer, Macro

Banelings! Banelings! Banelings!

I thought this was clever and creative and funny!


It is sung by Kurt Hugo Schnieder and Husky. You can find it on iTunes, just search for banelings :)

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.

The Winner of MLG Nationals

LiquidJinro takes the win at MLG Nationals in Dallas this year! Even though he is Terran, he is from Team Liquid, and thats OK with me :) Here is a picture of the entire team. Congratulations Team Liquid!

From Left: Jinro, Haypro , Tyler, Huk, Nazgul, TLO, Ret

Head on over to Teamliquid's site to keep up with them and get some great information on how to improve your game!

MLG Dallas

So far the action has been incredible. The matches that were played have been some of the best and most entertaining I have ever seen, with the best match being QXC vs. Sen. A TvZ matchup with Sen quickly gaining a lead but QXC was able to match him blow for blow, sometimes making 3-4 drops in different areas at the same time. Unfortunately, the Zerg overwhelmed him with there ability to out macro any opponent in the late game.

Huk was eliminated this morning by his teammate TLO in a very creative match involving burrow and Baneling mines! TLO also 6 pooled on there second matchup and Huk held it off incredibly well, however the zergs ability to out macro his opponent again led to TLO taking the win and knocking Huk out of the tournament. No hard feelings though, they both shared a hug and Huk wished him good luck in the tournament.

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.

MLG Dallas Lineup

So MLG Nationals in Dallas is fast approaching and they released their Player list for Starcraft 2:

MLG

I am very interested to see who will rise to the top in this competition. My money is on Huk or Kiwikaki.

I can't wait to see Idra, TLO, Huk, Select, Kiwikaki, Drewbie, and many others live in action. Its going to be an exciting day!

Commentating on the match ups will be Day(9), DJWheat, and JP. This will definetely be one event you will not want to miss. You can watch the live stream for free or you can purchase the HD live stream here.

I hope to put some posts up throughout the weekend! I'll be keeping my eye on specifically Huk, TLO, and KiwiKaki in paticular.