The Setting(gray): This will be my last battle report before I begin my "The Twilight Zone" series, which I'm trying to perfect and come up with some original ideas for. Being in a particularly StarCraft playing mood (I am actually "allowed" to play on weekends because of my last report card bleh =/) I log on and head for my home channel of Feared Domain.

There were only a few, unresponsive (presumably dead) people in there so I decide to stroll around the block to clan -x17. After talking to a couple people, I realize there is no one in here I wanted to play with...so I went back to Feared Domain, and what to my wondering eyes does appear? But a large room of people, talking and everything. They decide they're going to have a big FFA, so I figure I'll take the oppurtunity to make one last report before I get down to my series, so I create the game. Thinking of no other 6 player map that no one would bitch about, I choose The Hunters for the game.

After waiting for about 20 seconds, the 8 player map is now completely full with: me, Seer-The-Feared, S~DWI~Leader, Arbiters, StimppackBoy, Dis-The-Feared, grimling, and sugi... Everyone was ready...so I started the game, 5..4..3..2..1...Here we go!

After I take the time to kill my own men, sugi... informs me that he forgot to pick his race and would rather just watch the game. I figure, what am I gonna say no? So everyone shares vision with me and Sugi... and the game begins.

The Map: The Hunters

Seer-The-Feared (Protoss, Mid-Left)
StimpackBoy (Protoss, Bottom-Mid)
S~DWI~Leader (Zerg, Mid-Right)
Dis-The-Feared (Protoss, Top-Left)
grimling (Protoss, Bottom-Right)
Arbiters (Zerg, Top-Middle)

All the players begin in with their build orders (that's not obvious), Seer goes a pylon and then 2 gates, Dis builds his first buildings in front of his natural expansion (building a forge first(hehe)). Arbiters builds a hatchery, and then follows that up with a spawning pool right next to eachother. Leader builds a spawning pool, then sends a drone out to morph a hatchery at his natural expansion. grimling builds a pylon, 2 gateways, followed by another pylon. StimpackBoy builds a pylon, a forge, and then a bunch of photon cannons around his main base. Dis continues to build up the photon cannons outside his base and places gateways in front of them, unluckily for Arbiters, who is right above the cannons.

While this seal-in strategy is going on, the rest of the players go about their business. Seer builds an assimilator and continues to mass up an army of zealots at the choke point of his main. grimling is almost following Seer's strategy exactly. He does however get a forge before Seer. He also continues to build up his zealots at his choke point.

Meanwhile, back to the seal-in, Dis expands to the natural right behind his photon cannons. Arbiters is completely oblivious to the fact, until he sends some hydras out of his base that are bombarded with the photon cannons. He finally learns he's going to have to shift strategies to break free.

Leader, meanwhile, is happily enjoying not being attacked, and is collecting from his natural expansion. He gets a Lair and another hatchery in his main base.

Even further down on the map, grimling sends his defending zealots out to defend a newly made Nexus at his natural. Soon after, he moves them up outside Leader's expansion in preparation for an attack.

Well, there was some blood and some...uhhh...gray smoke? grimling sends his army of zealots in to attack Leader's expansion. The zealots break through and the drones escape into Leader's main where he morphs them all into sunken colonies for defense. grimling knows he would probably do this so he doesn's take the time to completely destroy the hatchery.

The zealots proceed to destroy Leader's extractor. Trying to stall, so his sunkens can mutate in, Leader sends his drones to attack the zealots. The sunkens morph in the next second and start to destroy the zealot army as they run over to them. After getting a few hits on one of the sunkens, the zealots are killed, leaving the first attack of the game a failure.

Meanwhile, back over to "the seal-in", Arbiters keeps sending his army of hydralisks out to check how much the seal-in has built up, and if he could take it with his army, but has always thought it better not to. He does, however, destroy the gateway closest to his base, which is out of reach of the photon cannons.

Seer, at this point in the game, has the largest army (zealots and dragoons). He takes the time to expand to his natural sending a few of his zealots from his main to defend along with photon cannons.

At about the same time, StimppackBoy expands to the lower-left expansion and defends the choke point of those 2 bases with dark templars and photon cannons.

As you can see, grimling is dropped from the game. I let out a sigh of relief when the countdown ended and only he was dropped not everyone (which is usually what happens when my cable shuts down).

At this point, StimpackBoy seems to have the edge in the game. He builds 4 gateways and 8 pylons to support them at his bottom-left expansion and promptly produces zealots and dark templars to guard his two bases.

As you can see, Arbiters saves up a huge army of hydralisks and a few zerglings and sends them on a mission to destroy Dis's seal-in. The hydralisks destroy the gateways and then move on to destroy the photon cannons that have killed so many of their own kind. The seal-in was completely leveled by the army of hydralisks with more coming in all the time as reinforcements. Dis had been putting all of his efforts into building the wall in and didn't have much of an army so Arbiters moved his troops up and destroyed his natural expansion followed by his main base. After this Dis leaves the game with a "gg". Now that's sweet revenge. :)

This part of the game was mainly each player increasing their empires. While Dis's main base was being leveled, Leader sent a group of his zerglings down to destroy grimling's old buildings (presumably wanting to expand there obviously). It turns out he was planning on expanding there and builds 2 hatcheries, 1 at the bottom-right main base and one at it's natural expansion.

StimpackBoy has plans to expand for himself too. He builds a Nexus in his already guarded natural expansion while constantly building zealots to defend with.

Arbiters, after destroying Dis's base, expands at his natural and defends it by producing hydralisks and moving his leftover hydras to his choke point.

StimpackBoy sends the zealots and dark templars he's been building up to attack Seer's base. Seer was either sending his troops out to take control of the middle or going to attack StimpackBoy's base because the two armies collided just outisde of Seer's main. With the disadvantage of lack of psi storming ability, StimpackBoy retreats to the defense of his own base. Seer doesn't take the bait however and stays put at his own base's defense. It was a good thing too, because it wasn't too long before Arbiters dropped an army of hydralisks on his main base (hehe, originally my mind screwed up and instead of writing hydralisks I wrote an army of arbiters). Seer was forced to pull his army out from the front defense of his base back to the back. Not only that, many of his gateways were in the way of his big, clumsy, stupid dragoons.

While this is going on, Leader sends his army of hydralisks to attack Seer's main the front way. Poor Seer :(. Being attacked by two Zerg, one from the front, one from the back is not an easy thing to defend. Splitting up his forces, he sends half of them to the front to defend Leader's army and half of them to the back to defend Arbiter's army. Seer does manage to destroy Arbiter's first drop and now sends all of his forces to defend the frontal attack. He uses some psi storms in an attempt to take on his second attackers leaving pools of blood right outside his base.

Just when he was getting full of himself that he was going to stop two attacks at one time Arbiters drops more hydralisks on his main base. Seer is forced to split up his forces again, sending a little less than half to defend the new drop.

Leader sees that he has almost broken through the base's defenses and reinforces them with hydralisks.

Seer is not quite ready to give in. He continues to use his psi storms and dragoons to defend the front of his base while the other half of his army is moving back to defend against the drop. Of course..when the reinforcements arrive they break through the main defenses, killing the high templars, dragoons, and photon cannons. You can almost see Seer sighing looking at his computer monitor as he says "gg" and leaves the game.

After everyone has their usual puzzled look on their face when someone leaves the game and they didn't know what happened, StimpackBoy begins building 6 stargates at his bottom-left expansion. He also constructs a Fleet Beacon in preparation to build a fleet of carriers.

Leader rallies his army of hydralisks leftover from his last attack to the middle of the map. Joining them are newly produced zerglings and hydras. This army grows into a huge fleet of men, who are now upgraded 2-2-3. Later after the game Leader told me he knew he had to take StimpackBoy out because he knew he was getting carriers. He, of course, was correct in his assumption.

Arbiters, having a more peacful time up in his top portion of the map, expands to Dis's old main base.

And here comes the attack. Leader sends his fleet of hydralisks and a few zerglings to attack StimpackBoy. He breaks through the frontal defenses very easily and decides to take a left to go destroy his expansion first. This proved to be so important it's not even funny. It was in this base that StimpackBoy was producing his fleet of carriers. Judging from the time they came out of the stargates, the carriers were about halfway done when Leader attacked. After taking a left the fleet runs into a group of zealots and dragoons. StimpackBoy desperately tries to delay the hydralisks from getting to his base so the carriers could warp in, in time. He is partly successful but the army gets there when he only has unarmed carriers. The hydralisks proceed to destroy his gateways(while the carriers build interceptors). After getting a few interceptors built StimpackBoy moves them up behind his gateways which act as a blockade from the hydralisks. The annoyed hydralisks could only fire at the interceptors but after the buildings are destroyed they get some cleans shots at the carriers and drive them away to StimpackBoy's main base. His expansion is now lying in ruins.

Talk about action! Back at Leader's main base he is being invaded by Arbiters' hydralisks and zerglings that were dropped there by overlords. You can tell Leader is panicked by the attacking force since his army is elsewhere (the beauty of ffa's). He quickly builds more sunken colonies and produces another batch of hydralisks. Arbiters' zerglings almost take out all of the sunken colonies but are destroyed by the freshly mutated ones. The new hydralisks also take care of the hydra attack. Leader, "Phew!".

After his attack is stopped, Arbiters expands to the top-right starting location which has been unused until now.

With nothing better to do with the corsairs he produced, StimpackBoy sends them to Leader's main and proceeds to destroy a large amount of his overlords. He also has nothing better to do considering he has no minerals at his main base. He is forced to send his leftover probes to his natural expansion. The probes get the minerals and bring them all the way back to his only Nexus left. (I assume he didn't have enough money to make another expansion.)

These probes suddenly see an army of Arbiters' hydralisks which kill a large amount of the probes.(Note: Arbiters didn't know StimpackBoy's base was being demolished).

Now it's the teal-colored hydralisks' turn to feel overpowered. Leader's hydralisks also show up to finish off their prey. Arbiters' hydralisks turn their slimy heads to see Leader's forces running towards them. They demolish the hydralisk forces standing in their way.

Leader's hydralisks then rush into StimpackBoy's main base and leave nothing in their path to the remaining probes.

While Leader brings his forces back to his main base, he also produces more forces in preparation to finish off his last opponent.

Sadly, before Leader gets a chance to group his forces up for his final attack that would push him to victory, Arbiters sent his massive army of hydralisks and zerglings straight into the front of his main base. I took the oppurtunity to glance at both of their upgrades and what do I see? Like usual, one person has totally outupgraded the other. Leader was 3-3-3 and Arbiters was 0-0-1 (bleh, he comments on this after the game).

Despite the outupgradedness (for lack of a better word) of his army, they push into Leader's base. The sheer numbers of Arbiters' forces turned out in the end to overcome his lack of upgrades. He pushes his army deep into Leader's base, completely destroying it.

Now, with only his two bases in the bottom-right part of the map, Leader builds a group of sunken colonies bracing for an imminent attack. He does construct them in time to defend the first attack. After Arbiters sees that Leader's defense consists only of ground defense, he constructs a Spire and begins to build mutalisks. In the meantime, Leader builds about 8 hatcheries in his base and produces millions of zerglings from them (a bad choice).


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