https://clips.twitch.tv/InnocentTiredOxEleGiggle

I'm glad to see Cyclones are an equal opportunity WTF unit. If that Medivac had instead simply been two more Cyclones walked into the natural, Terran wins the game outright at that moment.

haven't watched past Ro8 in IEM so skipping past posts - anyone want to play tonight? I have passable TvZ if goofy wants to play too

ill play with anyone on here

add me

karakstarcraft#1924

if you're already on my list, message me to remind me who you are please

is there an updated version of the stephano 11 minute roach max? loved that build back in the day. i found that the multi-tasking trainer still works, which is great. i attribute making masters to that tool.

have a replay for you guys. opponent is a diamond protoss.

https://drop.sc/replay/6741397

my thoughts:

-barely missed my timing at his 3rd. should have had a ling there and attacked with my small amount of roaches and lings right away to deny.
-my macro was slow so my timing attack on his 3rd was slow
-under droned
-didnt scout and anticipate his tech change, although im not sure how i could afford it
-some lolbad micro

what do you guys think?

im TaylorSwift with the 2+2 tag. ill play after i watch your replay

yeah those all seem like important things. you don't scout (like, at all) so the HT tech was unknown.

tbh if i did scout the HT tech i wouldnt even know what to build

bsball v. karak

https://drop.sc/replay/6742244

So I haven't played in what seems like years but have been watching nonstop the last couple of weeks and want to try to get back into it. Haven't played regularly since HOTS.

Are there any recommendations on how to re-learn the game? Pretty sure if I jumped right in, it would be all of my bad habits returning and any good areas being lost. Are there any tutorials to read or watch (that aren't done by winter)?

If you switch to Zerg you'll have lots of help here!

If you want to keep playing T, maybe find a good solid macro build from a pro game and try to perfect that in practice vs the AI, hitting timings and stuff. That should get you a good start. Or just play the game, that works too and it's more fun.

ive started leaving won ZVPs in unranked because i dont want my unranked MMR to go too high until i can master vs terran haha

last guy literally had 1 building left totally revealed. i gg'd and left with my army surrounding it. goofy is proud of me.

My notes:
- send first overlord to natural ramp, you'll have a glimpse into how they opened sooner and with increased overlord speed they will never have anything to snipe it by the time you arrive (even vs T, if they for some reason start with marines, you can get it to a high ground spot or something)
- balance your drones, a little after taking your 3rd you have 20 drones on minerals in the main but only 9 at the natural (do you have the X/16 graphic on over your hatches?), later it's 23 on minerals in the main (with both gases taken and full) and 8 (!!) at the natural
- re: scouting, I actually am bad at this too and need to be more proactive about it in terms of scouting tech, but one thing that definitely helps a lot is scouting bases. I try to burrow lings at 3rd/4th/5th locations (don't always get burrow fast enough to block a 3rd) to know if they're trying to macro or if I'm going to get all-ined. That definitely affects when I stop droning and start cranking units. One of the things that I imagine made this game harder on you was finding out pretty late that you were even on bases for a long time.
- his unit skins are annoying and I hate them
- when you scout a gateway heavy army I like starting a lurker den (tbh I like starting a lurker den in most zvp situations but especially this one)
- get a second evo and do double upgrades, it'll make your midgame/lategame life easier when you're on 3/3
- you never got hydra speed upgrade

Micro is whatever and overrated, I think the key points for this game were upgrades (at the end he was seconds from having 3/2, you were on 2/1 and not researching anything) and composition (staying on roach ravager hydra which gets more and more vulnerable as Protoss adds charge/storm/etc, never getting your own endgame-type army with lurkers or broods or vipers). And while I've posted a lot about how much I hate banelings ZvP, one spot they are pretty good is against zealot-heavy armies like his.

Watching from Karak's perspective because lol Terran...

- first overlord -> natural, if you don't see a CC then you need to start thinking about what might be coming your way and maybe saccing an overlord into the main, if you don't scout no CC builds (which obv aren't common with good players but we aren't playing good players yet) then you're liable to get blindsided by something early
- at 7:30ish and the composition choices here are...interesting. I think you might be a little better served by picking ling-bane or roach-hydra and kinda sticking to it - you're currently forgoing armor upgrades by getting both armor and melee upgrades, you invested into bane speed in a game where you probably won't be making tons of banelings (you may want to later when you have a bank but then you can research it later too)...it's not terrible or anything and won't lose you the game, but probably not the most efficient army setup
- forgot hydra speed again, make sure you internalize that they have two upgrades you need
- in 14:00 engagement, baneling micro needs a lot of work. I generally put them on a separate control group (alt+shift+number will add them to <number> group while also removing them from whatever current group they're in, which is super useful) and do something like... (1 is my main army group and ` is banelings)
1. 1 rclick past enemy army, ` rclick past enemy army - send both groups on move command past them
2. when I'm happy with the depth of my army relative to theirs (for lings I prob want a partial surround, for roach/hydra not that deep but deep enough that lots of my units can fire at once) a-click the 1 group
3. press ` and direct ~all of my attention on move-commanding banes into the heart of their army
In this fight a bunch of banes a-moved into a tank and then it looks like you move-commanded them but then they got wiped out by a widow mine (mines OP).
- bane runby at ~14:00 was a great move even if (results oriented) that base wasn't built/saturated yet
- work harder at getting creep spread out to (and beyond) all expansions you take, that lower left base at ~14:45 is begging to get taken out as soon as he sees it because you have no warning until there's a ton of stimmed marines on top of it
- you have 4/3 drones on a gas geyser at your 3rd or 4th for a ton of the game, I think you need to turn that graphic on that shows you workers
- 15:15, yep rip that creepless base
- vipers are seriously good units and this spot (against bio-tank) is another situation where they'd be so useful for blinding cloud
- 16:30 engagement, more banes hitting tanks, gotta control those better
- upgrades again - he has 3/3 against your 2/2, I think you just forgot
- 16:50 hopefully you learned here how beastly ultras are against marines, you ran those 2 ultras away earlier against a bunch of marines in a spot where you probably could have taken the fight (ultras OP)
- no adrenal gotta get back in the habit of remembering which upgrades come when
- not a bad point in the game to add a spire to help clear those medivacs out - I think it lets him be ballsier with his drops/attempted snipes on hatches to know that it's a freeroll for him to get out whenever he wants w/o losing medivac
- detonated a pretty decent number of banes on the planetary to kill it when a surround with lings/ultras would have done the job, think this was just a case of having them all on the same group

I think key points in this one are...
- again, upgrades (both getting to 3/3 and not forgetting adrenal/hydra speed/etc)
- baneling control
- again, composition - these aren't terrible choices or anything you made and you can experiment with stuff, but you can probably re-learn how to best employ this stuff if you pick melee or ranged at the start of the game and generally stick with it. Also, one thing I didn't note above - I think the end of the game was a bad time to build banelings, he was super marauder heavy at that point and banelings weren't going to trade very well against what he had
- having some plan against medivacs/drops - I think early on that plan was hydras and static defense but eventually both kinda disappeared from the game and never came back or got replaced by anything else

yeah the one takeaway I had from that game to slightly add onto what goofy said is that at one point idk if you saw but i added two starports and started making more marines just bc i expected some sort of air switch out of ultras. then you kept making ultra/roach/ling and i was like oh okay. i suppose i didn't fully understand the status of your economy (because i am bad) but as you know tech switches are the bane of every terran's existence so that might have been helpful.

Didn't get a chance to play the other night but trying this afternoon. Lol good luck me. Will be trying goofy builds.

Placed in diamond wtf lol

That just means you were diamond in the last couple seasons and it put you back in. You cannot place above Platinum if your MMR has been reset for whatever reason or you've been away too long. It's how you wind up with platinum people playing against ByuN when he makes a new NA smurf to try for the next 75-0 streak.

Now try and snipe goofy.

MMR is like 3700. Clearly way too high for me at the moment, I lost 5 straight games and none were LOTV losses, they played out like WoL games. My micro, crisis management, scouting, macro, multi tasking, all terrible. I failed to scout or hold off a zealot one base all in because I didn't know P's normal natural timing and failed ling micro.

If there's no Nexus by or shortly after the point where your overlord arrives, there's shenanigans afoot.

I don't know map names, but there were several in the last pool that I'd always drone scout for proxy builds on. I reinstalled but haven't played a game yet. Not enough hours in the day.

Zealot cheese is always hard to respond to tbh, hard to blame you there, but wrt the bolded, here's What You Should See In Their Base 101:

ZvT: when the overlord gets there (in an average case - on something like Backwater it's longer than average, on Abiogenesis you get there faster than average) you should see a CC in progress, if you don't then check out the main - most likely case is they're squeezing out a factory before CC for faster hellion harass or something like that, but it could also signal a one base rush of some sort (usually cyclones these days)

ZvP: when the overlord gets there you should usually see a nexus in progress or about to start. The most common opening is gate -> nexus -> core, but you might also sometimes see nexus first or gate -> core -> nexus. Double gateway before nexus is not that uncommon but make sure to pay attention to whether they're producing or not - if you see two active gates when you show up then get ready for major aggression, but sometimes they're just placeholders for double adept production after the core finishes, in which case you have a minute to breathe before preparing defenses for worker harass. If the nexus doesn't show up or is late, keep in mind that when your overlord shows up Protoss will usually have two pylons (I think) - if they're both at the wall, then great, nothing is a secret to you. If there's a pylon missing then they may be squeezing an early stargate (or more gates) in the main.

Also, here's a patented original Zerg For Bad Players goofyballer tip: against adept harass, just put a spine in/behind each mineral line. Every bad Protoss in the world is just going to blindly shade adepts into your mineral line, and every bad Protoss in the world is going to be bad at focusing down drones when there are agro targets. Adepts suck against spines and with the help of your queens and a few lings, you will suffer very few drone losses while also being able to delay the roach or baneling investment that you'd want to make to defend against people who didn't suck.

idk what it is about your style of writing but i find it hilariously entertaining in a good way

I've actually considered switching a bit and playing....
.
.
.
.
toss

(ducks)

Really though.

Any tips on where to find up to date LOTV build orders? I'm sorry, this info is a lot harder to come by in 2018 than it was in 2012-13

awesome. thanks for this. agree on all points. this is all quite helpful. those 2 games are exemplary of the problems i find myself having. (of course ive been back playing for 72 hours after a 4 year break, haha, but it's like a golf swing: you remember the basics but forget all those tiny swing thoughts that add up).

ill be posting more. i really wish you'd play ZVZs so we could scrim.

of course hurricane schu wouldn't pick a real race to play

I'd probably play zerg if larvae injects weren't a thing

stupid, pointless mechanic

So is chrono though, and MULEs, every race has them