took one of the worst losses of my "STARCRAFT CAREER" before

ling/bling vs a toss. destroy his entire army + expo. he ggs so i just stop doing anything, but the nhe doesnt leave and apparently has an unlimtied amount of sentries to FF me out of his natural.

so i make more ling blings and am researching drops to finish him. i take 6 bases, get to tier 3 and get to 3/3

i lost and it wasnt even remotely close.

also just ran into the old 5 gate robo on ladder.

What's a safe toss strategy vs. ling/bling? I played against it for the first time in yesterday's WNF against the Karaker on XNC and was a bit lost. I played the game far from perfectly, supply blocking myself at 58 food and getting my FFs off really late in the first engagement (which basically ended the game in itself). I went 3 gate and tried expanding around the 7 minute mark but was no match for a boatload of lings, which again was partially due to my lack of units and bad sentry control. I think making more than one stalker was a mistake.

If I had to play it again I'd go heavy sentry zealot, expand maybe a bit later than I did (allowing for a few more sentries/zeals to defend) and FF my ass off until I could get some nice walling around my expo to make it safer to ling/bling runbys and try to get colossus tech, I guess.

Watching that engagement again makes me sad. Such bad micro on my part.

I actually had the army supply/value lead going into it.
6 zeals, 5 stalkers, and 6 sentries vs. 42 lings and 12 banes.

Indeed I will ... Jack and I have fun, albeit tilting at times...

Who again, is BarackObama on Bnet?

brag: won some ladder games
beat: lost some ladder games
variance: I played ^ ladder games between 5 and 9 am.

Way TL;DR but here goes.

I havent played a good version of the build but Im pretty solid on my PvZ ordering in general:

So you prepare your 3 gate expo, assuming zerg has not hatched first (I cannon rush all hatch first builds) often you havent been able to scout after you checked for an expo with a hidden probe which probably died. Typically around 31 food you are preparing to drop your pylon outside the ramp warp in sentries 2 or 3 through 6 then expand. So now as you go to drop this pylon there a rofl a lot of lings.

OK. So thats huge information with a ton of implications. A lot of lings at that point means zerg doesnt have a lot of drones so theres no rush to get your expansion down. So slowly start building your sim city out with your sentries safely on your ramp and expand when you have enough to do it safely. Warp in sentries not zealots IMO, zealots are almost exclusively for a push at this point in the game and when zerg has gone with a lot of lings he will counter attack and thus you should not be pushing out. Sentry zealot is used to punish a zerg who is droning up at this point in the game almost exclusively. If it takes a long time to drop your expo re-order a bit and drop the forge/hallucination before expo.

OK so now lets assume you got your expo safely up. Hallucination is critical at this point. A lot lings generally means either roach/ling or muta both which need to be prepared for. If you happen to see roaches somehow at this point you could skip hallu. So you have a really easy way to choose your build from here:

-Spire drop 2-3 more gates then either attack or twilight council
-Roach ling drop cannons + 4th gate and robo when safe
-Ling hydra robo + cannons
-Ling/bling probably 4th gate + robo

So ok basically you have seen ling/bling basically the idea is to get tons of FF (at least 9 sentries) and colossi and play super defensively, slowly a take third once you have 1-2 colossi. With drops when you are sitting in your 2 bases its the same as PvT dont let them drop your back *no matter what*. I imagine you could put the huge majority of you stalkers in the back of your base quite safely because of FF + cannons.

As for specific techniques and tricks to help deal with the specific build:
-Split your army appropriately, spend some serious time and APM thinking about what units you want where and what control groups they are in.
-Sentries + cannon in front and colossi + stalkers available for drop defense in back. Colossi can walk cliffs use that mobility.
-On maps that have air choke points, cannon the edges of your main so its hard to float OL's through there without major damage and your main army can quickly defend the exposed portions.
-Consider a post colossus stargate + 2-3 phoenix simply to scout and kill drops after colossi production has started so you can move out with your army comfortably.
-If they are launching two pronged attacks use your sentries at the front front to simply stall with FFs. A good sim city should have 2 main entrances that can be closed via FF. This allows your to multitask more effectively.
-Use all your pylons to your advantage, give yourself vision of your entire main base, create a fortress around your main base probes. Do not create obstacles for you main army with your buildings. Consider killing your ramp gateway to allow your army to move between bases more efficiently.
-Invest in extra obs, obs speed, pylons around the map when safe, or even just sit a probe in a blind spot. Mobile army vs immobile army is all about vision. I often will just patrol a second obs around my vulnerable air positions so I will have plenty of warning to move my army.
-Prioritize a third base that is close to your main base army rather than far from your opponent (for example do not take the "smiley face expo" or second natural on shakuras take the low ground third.
-Mobile armies take a lot of APM, get DTs late-mid game to drain their multitasking and aid yourself in moving out.

There was no micro that could have saved you in that situation. I'm almost always behind in "army supply" at that point in the game when doing that strategy and making the decision to go for the win, but I'm way ahead in army power because I have banelings and/or +1 lings. I've also cut all drone production. As soon as I saw you had only made 2 sentries, I said GG outloud and mashed Z. There's really nothing you can do to stop it. You need a lot of sentries and zealots and you need to sim city your natural. And you can't mess up your FFs.

Cwar: I didn't make the decision to make all the lings until his expo went down and I saw his army and realized I could easily win. He really can't wait and see if I make drones or not and then decide to expo. IF he doesn't expo and he's on 3 gate, I drone up super hard really safely and he's massively behind as he can't really pressure me and +1 melee attack is about to finish.

It's also worth noting I played and macro'd really badly in that game and usually have a lot more ****.

Where to begin...?

I really haven't gotten a good feel for gateway units yet.

Zealots are useful against zerglings and work well in small numbers as tanks for the rest of your army. They just get owned by anything that can kite them, though, and really seem bad until they get charge. And once you get to the late game, even chargelots aren't that great because they evaporate to large forces before they are able to do much damage.

Sentries are a nice support unit but I try to avoid building very many of them as they suck up gas, are poor combat units and don't have my forcefield micro down solidly. I tend to use them more for GS than FF, honestly. The idea of building an early army almost entirely out of sentries is still something I'm trying to wrap my head around. I mean I guess it makes sense if those FF are going to allow you to safely secure an expansion, tech up and get a real army, but it feels very risky and something you have to execute near-perfectly. Though maybe that is just the best option protoss has in some spots.

Stalkers I love to build lots of because they are fast, have good range and can kite, have decent DPS, protect against air, and because they're in my opinion a solid unit that stays useful into the late-game as the meat of my deathball. Though they do not fare very well against lings or marauders.

Oh I know I wasn't close to stopping that, and that army values don't mean a whole lot. I was just surprised to not be at a big disadvantage in those categories, given the sheer number of units you had. And I knew you'd been preparing some sort of 2 base swarm of death, I just have zero experience dealing with it.

FWIW that was my first 1v1 in a good while.

Sentry play is essential against zerg if you are going to do a 3 gate expand. Sentry play is basically essential against zerg always unless you are doing a 4 gate or some sort of early stargate cheese. You need to be comfortable with having like 8-9 sentries and some zealots and expoing behind that. If you aren't comfortable with using FFs, you gotta learn :-P. I play against 3k+ diamond protoss and win games all the time because they can't FF worth **** and I abuse the **** out of their expos. Guys I can't just go in and kill use cannons, sim citying and excellent FFs to turtle behind that 2nd base. (But I just never attack those guys if I see that and drone hard instead focusing on getting 2/2 ASAP and 4+ bases).

I just don't know the matchups very well yet. And I'm fine with using FFs, my problem is not having my sentries hotkeyed and fumbling with selecting them during the battle.

Most of my experience so far is in 3s, where it doesn't really matter what units you build as much (if anything, it's better to build zealot/stalker and go light on sentries in 3s). Of the 1v1s I've played, I've really never seen ling-heavy play - usually roaches. Never banelings. So the sentry being a pivotal part of PvZ is news to me.

CTRL + click one

I think sentries should be prioritized over everything else as far as subgroups go, so you should be able to FF even if you don't have sentries on a separate group. If they're not prioritized, you know about using tab to cycle through subgroups right?

I'm pretty sure sentries are pivotal against roaches too.

Yea I could have crushed your force as easily with roaches as I could have with lings tbh. Both woulda worked. You had no detection, no sentries... = GG.

I had 4 sentries and an obs on your base. I saw you move out.

I get it though. Karak wins!

Moving on...

And sentries might be pivotal to beating reach play, but its not like that's going to be super evident at gold level 1v1.

True enough.

The only pivotal thing at gold is "build more **** than your opponent, crush his ass".

this may be true, but I think it's more beneficial to learn the "correct" way to play, no matter what level you are at. You don't want to develop bad habits at the lower levels, because moving up will be that much harder on you.

Im aware of how this dynamic works. Yes the toss is almost 100% behind in food 3 gate expo'ing that is mechanically how zerg works. Often times with good "shark mode" toss gets ahead or even a bit after the expo goes up. You absolutely can pressure during the period after expo'ing its the huk zealot sentry attack.
Gateway units are quite weird, they work well in a composition but generally not so well in isolation as you pointed out stalkers being the example of the most effective unit alone. I struggled with this as well, balancing your zlot/stalker/sentry count is a very very important decision for any build order as toss. In general PvZ zealots arent so useful except for timings. Zealot sentry attacks right after expo to reign in droning, chargelots vs hydras and just general saving gas on warpgate rounds would be the best examples.

Generally you dont use sentries as the killing units. Its either stalker/sentry or zealot/sentry. It depends on your game plan however. I often get 8-9 early in a PvZ so I can have tons of FF to make my colossus ball really powerful (creating a line of FF to keep the roach/hydra away from your coll). It also has the effect of making my natural nearly invincible to attack both of which support going robo->coll. They fit into specific timing or purpose, but they do it really well. After the first huge battle the sentries often die you are correct but I usually use them to get somewhere (ie a third base with 2 robo cranking coll), attack a certain time, or defend a timing (another great example being PvT that is almost the only way to survive a stim timing attack).

This is true except stalkers are very tough units they actually have very poor DPS. Standard mid-late game PvT they arent as good as zealots except for shooting down vikings for your coll and some mobile harass. PvZ they are your staple unit

Sure... vs. "standard" play, but not vs. ling/bling. I generally win when someone tries to shark mode me like that.

u mad terran?

Hey, I'm BarrackObama (135), I'm up for 2s, 3s, 4s and I idle in the channel alot.

Just drop me a message or ask in channel if anyones looking to play.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft...29/TSL3Bracket

lol brackets