@goofyballer

i'll help, master zerg here. i'm just going to watch and write things that come to mind.

g1

15 hatch is standard vs terran, never any reason to open with a 15 pool or whatever. i do it pretty greedy with 15 hatch 17 gas 17 pool. it times it out so as soon as your pool finishes you have enough to build 2 queens and get your speed up not long after. there are gasless 6 queen style or whatever but i haven't bothered with that yet. either way 15 hatch it.

hotkey first overlord ~ small thing, helps a little. fun to tab around with it and also quick when you need to micro it.

drone scout ~ do it, as zerg you gotta know whats going on otherwise you are just pushing buttons. information let's you know if you can drone or to make units

second overlord ~ send it somewhere else, in this case to the left. you wanna set these up in positions so later you can sac them for scouts and have them in the right places for vision the first few are very important to get into the right places so that you can get a 6-7 minute overlord sac scout off on your opponent

first 100 gas = get speed ~ baller upgrade, get it asap don't skip a beat

okay so you have no information you finally find out where your opponent is but you've seen nothing. you made 2 blind spines which coulda been drones or lings. 1 spine woulda been better. always always always leave a ling outside your opponents base so that you know when he pushes out. this is your signal to make a f load a units so stuff doesn't blindly come in and own you

ninja base is kinda okay. in general its not but youre behind and the positions suck for you. better to expand away from him. another thing you can do is break the rocks at that right center base and take your 3/4th there.

when you have ridiculous number of minerals ~ it's hard to keep up on injects. if you find yourself with alot of money like this drop a fload of hatcheries, hotkey them. and in a couple minutes youll have the production capabilities to at least spend that money.

your end game composition is good.

the theme of this game is you need information. ling in front of his base. overlords around it. sac overseers keep getting your scout on.

hope that helps some

Drone scout and scouting in general is what is most important for moving up IMO. Zerg is a reactionary race and needs to know what's going on at all times or the only one to blame for losing is yourself.

I was struggling my first couple of weeks back and I attribute it to bad scouting. Starting to string together some wins now. Still barely know maps and units though

macro is the biggest problem, and not making enough drones, injecting properly, build them nits.

I remember starting out I would be paranoid as **** and always try to have some army up and therefor underproced drones, and then when an attack came I just couldnt produce anything fast enough cause I underproduced drones

Thanks for the feedback chun.

Isn't hatch before pool a little greedy? I thought 14pool/15hatch is standard. Is it specifically vs T that you can get away with a later pool?

What about being able to get some vision on my 2nd hatch/ramp so I can watch for any bunker building/rushes/etc before they get into my base? Especially vs P, where you might have a probe wandering around cannon rushing you or something.

And yeah, my scouting in that game vs T was awful. It was slightly better in the game vs P I think.

I'm pretty sure you can get away with hatch first in all matchups now.

i hatch first vs zerg and terran
vs terran your fine 100% if ur good enough to pull drones and control if they 2rax bunker rush
vs zerg its a tossup, only time u might be in trouble is if they 10pool or less

with vs protoss, if u hatch first ur susceptible to cannon rushing and pylon blocking and stuff, so pool first is still standard.

Hatch first, for the most part, has been proven to be safe and optimal against T. If you face early aggression, then you can hold with a drone pull 'til you have lings/queens/spines out.

Pool before hatch doesn't really serve any of the purposes well that you would like. Early aggression doesn't work versus T because of wall ins, and having lings out at a 14 pool is actually way too soon for aggression. Along with the increased possibility of having your expansion blocked and falling behind economically, pool before hatch can really cause you a lot of problems against T.

You can hatch first in all matchups, but it's only absolutely standard and safe against T. Quick pools and cannon rushes make it risky in the other matchups.

Cool, thanks for the breakdown

15 hatch is standard/safe

and if you are worried about being bunkered or canonned just take a look around with a drone to make sure that theres no funny business. it's just crucial to get those early overlords moving to the right places so you can sac one between 6-7 minutes to see whats going on. the maps are pretty big so it's gonna be one of those early ones that make it there on time.

if you do find that you are being bunkered bring like 6 drones and shut it down. 6 should be fine as to not over react of course if marines start streaming in and you need more than pull more. cannons are tricky because they get in tight places that you can't attack so you need a drone attacking the probe others attacking the cannons or pylons and say theres just a pylon down and you want to stop him from getting cannons down in those tight places patrol a few drones in each of the tight areas so he can't build anything there

Today, in LOLSilver hilarity:

http://drop.sc/252309

Cliffs: I 4gate (badly, my early macro is awful) PvZ and he holds. I build a twilight and forge as a backup (since PvZ I'm only building zealots when I rush, so I have lots of extra gas) and get charge and +1 attack. I mass zealots. He flies an overlord over my base and sees like 12-15 zealots chilling at which point I decide I should move them out (since the jig is up), which he also sees. My zealots DESTROY all 3 of his bases pretty easily, didn't even have a forward pylon.



I think when 4gating zerg I should wait for a couple warp-in rounds before attacking maybe...like, in this game he has queens/spines, and it's tough for 4 zealots and a stalker to take that on. 8/12 zealots would work much better, and if he's still droning at that stage that's raw firepower I'm adding that he won't be able to match.

4gating a zerg is going to work less and less the higher up the ladder you get. Its really easy to scout, and its really easy to defend. (allegedly)

fyp

2012 season 4, for me:



WHY AM I STILL IN SILVER

are u going against gold players yet?

Well, droning up to 60 or so takes 8 minutes. If you're hitting zealot warp-ins at like 6:00 6:30 7:00, and they haven't scouted your 4gate (which is prob the wildcard cause they SHOULD scout it), it seems reasonable for them to still be droning at that point.

Yeah, been playing a mix of silvers and golds for awhile (though mostly silvers this season, perhaps the guys in the lower end of gold I was playing before got moved down when the season reset?).

idk but just keep it up. its so frustrating to not get promoted but sooooo awesome when you do
and it takes a while

that is and isn't the wildcard. in that they don't need to scout your 4gate, they just need to scout no expo. at that point there's really no point to go over 44 drones(2 base saturation) until they get a good OL scout into ur main as even if you're going some wonky SG build and they've overmade ground units, their econ will still be miles ahead of yours and, in the words of Day9, when you bring your SG units to attack they can just go ****ing kill you.

So given what they said about how they're reorganizing divisions for this season, I'm basically the best silver player in the world now yeah?

All these pussies below me even stick to a single race.

4 gating starts working less and less the more you move up v zerg imo.

What's the general Protoss response to 2rax marauder + concussive shell pressure? They tear through stalkers, zealots can be easily kited, immortals are 2nd tier tech and expensive...

wtf is with the start talk in bbv thread? ban goofyballer!! more templar and skater rage please!

Are you talking 2 rax, both with tech labs, or reactor/tech lab? Either way, I think the way to go is either gate-robo-gate as a reaction (Or even stargate if you see a tech lab, but I never do that), or do a normal 1 gate FE but chrono up warpgate to get a quick warpin, pull probes if necessary to make sure your unit count doesn't fall too much. If the toss is patient on his warp ins and pulls probes right, any pressure can be crushed rather well.

what happened to sentries :V

Two tech labs, I guess? I've tried that build as a Terran when messing around (it worked iirc), and don't think I've faced it as a Toss, but it came up as a possibility yesterday when I scouted early gas and a tech lab on my opponent's rax. Obv I was 4gating, and when I was like "aaahhh my stalkers will be countered" I went mass +1 chargelots, and my opponent turned out to be going mass reaper (lol?) instead of marauders so I won, but I was thinking about how screwed I would probably be if he built marauders instead. So you def want to mass up immortals when you scout that sort of thing? How many Protosses are actually good enough to react quickly and decisively to do that? Wondering if marauder rushes should be my standard TvP. I should practice it more.

It's funny in general playing XvP as a random, because anytime Toss goes forge first against non-Zerg (which some of them do as a default vs random) you have a huge advantage, and they either are like "oh **** I need to cannon rush" when they see your race or just continue normally with their FFE and then roll over and die because they have no army and their wall-off doesn't mean anything against marines/stalkers.

Sadly I'm not good enough at Zerg to really take advantage of the Tosses that don't FFE vs random when I roll Z.

Is there an echo in here?