SillyCraft: played on UMS map AlternateStarcraft

I like to play SC. Quite simply I really enjoy the game, whether it be playing, bitching about imbalance, or hanging in my fave channel and discussing the esoterics of life with my friend Angelife (who has submitted some reports here which were given high ratings, I suggest you read them after having read mine). The other day I had a bit of free time between classes and decided to hop onto Battle.net and play a little silly SC. Usually I play really serious 2v2 or 1v1 games where the object is to win. Sometimes this gets stressful and people yell at me and I pee my pants. I don't like to wet myself so I decided instead of playing seriously to log on as my silly losing account (noobitius) and play on maps like BGH or UMS maps. After a game on Temple in which I won a FFA (and earned the ire of two not so good players who had specifically had "only newbies" in their game name) I decided to go and see if there were any interesting UMS games going on. As I strolled through them I decided on playing a game of Alternate Starcraft. This is a silly map that besides making some simple adjustments to how each race works is also set on BGH. So besides the inherent silliness of BGH, I also have to deal with Zerg having 2x all stats, Terrans having no build time, and all Toss costs are 1/5. Silly, silly, silly. I didn't really have time to think about the comparative advantages of each so I decided that picking Zerg was the best option, I mean with parallel production and Hydras that start out with a 20pt ranged attack, I figured I could not go wrong. I get partnered with some guy who I shall from now refer to as "The Hacker" for reasons that will shortly become obvious. The Hacker was Zerg as well. Our opponents, whose names escape me, were Terran and Toss. From now on they will be referred to as their respective races. At the beginning my two opponents say something about no rushing for 10 minutes. I plan on ignoring this message because I don't keep a timer next to me for SC time limits and I don't believe that doing fast Hydra drops or getting Mutas quick is "rushing."

I started out in the top left corner and my partner started at top mid. My partner wants to do something silly like 5 pool. I consider such a tactic to be vile and loathsome (therefore I only do it on small maps with no ramps) and completely not worth doing on this game. I therefore rat him out to everyone. Sure it was vile and despicable but hey, I wanted a slightly longer than 2 minute game and I wasn't worried about hurting his feelings. Well our two opponents have quite a huff and after about 30 seconds of yelling everyone pretty much agrees to not turbo newbie rush. I decide to be silly and put down three Hatcheries before I even put down a spawning pool because I figure hey, if they aren't gonna rush, I should punish them by using the "turbo powering" Zerg. As I finally start to get my base pumping I add a spawning pool, start getting gas, and add a Hydra den. I also send out some drones to scout since my starting overlord has not found anything yet. My partner sees me scouting and decides to help me out by telling me Terran is in top right corner and Toss is at midright. Hmmmm, I look at what he can see with shared vision and notice that he has not sent one unit out of his base, in fact he has not even moved his overlords out. Since neither Toss nor Terran seem to have scouted (which might have given him a hint of how close they were) I conclude that my partner is hacking. This upsets me, this really, really upsets me, I hate hackers, they ruin the balance of the game, and they are fundamentally flawed human beings. I feel there should be little knives attached to keyboards and as they detect someone who cheats at multiplayer, the knives should flash out and cut off the fingers of the cheater. Simple, quick, and efficient. I also as a general rule do not back stab my partners, even if they are retarded newbies who build only two Lots, two DT, a carrier, an arbiter, and a Sair over the course of a game, thereby forcing me to try and win essentially a 2v1 as Zerg vs two other Zerg; I really wouldn’t have minded sending about one control of Lings to his base and watching it fall, (this was like an hour long game) but I have honor and I dragged us both along to victory (despite the other guy acting like a twenty ton dead weight). This game though was different, I was playing with a cheater. I decided that as soon as he attacked and wasted his first big force of guys on the enemy I would patrol some Hydras through his base and give the cheating bastard a one way ticket to hell. Unfortunately for me, our opponents had decided that we were lying bastards (about the whole no rush thing) and decided to rush us, my partner got Rax floated, and a controls worth of Lots came in the front and about 8 Marines and 4 Bats came out of the dark on the side and completely razed his base. I honestly don’t know how a person who is map hacking could get Rax floated, but somehow he managed. I personally don't think I have ever seen a more sorry sight in SC than a map hacker getting Rax floated. It boggles my mind.

I happen to find this amusing and because I have been powering off by myself I have nothing to help him, nor do I want to help him. I am quite content to watch him die a slow painful death and as they waste time killing him, I use my 5 Hatcheries to start pumping Hydras and Lings (Lings delay the incoming Lots and Marines and let my 20+2 Hydras reign in death from behind, oh did I mention that I have been upgrading too?, well I have and my Hydras are ready to rock and roll) for defense. As "The Hacker's" base is going down under heavy attack, I message everyone and tell them that he hacks, this upsets my partner who denies this and generally whines and bitches like the worthless person we know him to be. The Terran and Toss player then try and overwhelm me with their attack force but by using my choke and my ungodly powerful Hydras I am able to vaporize the incoming force. Content for the moment to hold my choke I send out my Lord to scout the path into my base and what do I find but a huge number of cannons warping in. Hmmm, I don't like this, tons of cannons at el cheapo rates and I am confined for the moment to my main. I immediately start the upgrades for transportation and speed. I also start to amass Hydras and continue to pump drones to keep my economy revving at full steam by saturating my minerals and gas. As the cannon encroachment slowly creeps in I make several surgical strikes out to kill warping cannons out of range of other cannon support. I also manage to destroy an incoming Gateway. This upsets Toss and he throws some Lots at me. This amuses me because with my 22 pt attack Hydras the Lots tend to vaporize before they can even get near my Hydras. So after I kill his laughable Lot attack, Terran decides to join the fray (notice how gosu they are, they attack in waves, one right after the other, and straight at my heavily guarded front door, I wish I had skillz like that) with Wraiths. There is a fairly sizable force of cloaked Wraiths that is trying to kill my Hydras, I retreat them a bit and bring in an Overlord and boom, Wraiths just start blowing apart as fast as you can imagine, damn, Hydras with a 22pt attack are just vicious. Terran wisely retreats and I continue preparing for a drop. I am at this point beginning to get a bit worried, Terran has an expansion at the bottom right start that my overlord is peacefully observing. I am also contained. This is not how I like to be in a 2v1. Luckily this is BGH so I have plenty of resources and with my 5 Hatcheries I can make gobs of units in no time at all. I decide to attack Terran's unguarded expansion figuring that if I don't get that BC's will soon make my day take a sharp down turn. I load up a couple of Lords with about 8 Lings and 4 Hydras and drop them off at the left mid start. I then send them on attack move to Terran's bottom right expansion. Nothing interferes with their progress and as they arrive they proceed to tear everything apart really quickly. Normally SCV's can do a decent job fighting off Lings but when Lings do 12pts dmg per hit, SCVs lose any durability they might have had. I completely raze the expansion and decide to send my small force at Toss's main hoping to find it unguarded. Well Toss is gosu. He has another huge cannon wall blocking the entrance to his main and all my force dies a quick death. Worrying about tanks and other nasty things that might harm my only base I load another wave of Hydras and Lings. This time I get about 4 full Lords worth of Hydras along with 4 Lings. I send this expeditionary force south out of my main and across the map so that they will land in the West side of the Toss main. I have not scouted this area at all but I do know that at least it will be more effective than trying a suicidal attack on his cannon wall outside his main. My Lords have an uneventful flight and land on the outskirts of his unguarded interior. My merciless swarm immediately begins to go to town on his base like Mike Tyson did to McNeeley (for those who don't follow boxing McNeeley just got clobbered). There is nothing inside his main to defend since like the gosu player he is, Toss has been rallying his troops to outside of my base. This leaves the way free and clear for me to do my best imitations of the Romans razing Carthage to the ground and salting the earth to ensure nothing would ever grow there again. Unfortunately before I could really start the unhampered pillaging I got a :45 sec countdown. Now usually I have a pretty good connection and I am not the one responsible for lagging games, my isp had been acting a bit touchy that day, but I assumed it was one of my opponents, so I clicked on drop player, hoping to gain a more fair 1v1 game. Whoops, I dropped both of them and got a disconnect. Curious to see how they were doing I clicked on Continue Playing and proceeded to look around.

I found that Toss had no troops in his base. What he did have was a 3 forges, a couple Gateways, a Cyber Core, 2 Stargates, and 1 warping Stargate. Looking at the lack of internal base defense and at my 12 Hydras and 4 Lings I concluded that I would have effectively given him a near death blow, the tons of Cannons he had and couple Probes he had building them at my choke would have allowed him to rebuild but for a good while he would effectively be out of the game. I had my Olords float over to Terran and check out his main, he had no internal D, but would have had some by the time my force at Toss got done pounding every non-cannon structure into the ground. I probably would have done some damage considering that 2 hits from a Hydra would kill a Marine, which makes my 12 Hydras very lethal to a terran base. Who knows though as mental masturbation accomplishes very little. I personally feel I had the game in hand and would have won. Maybe I would have not but either way I was in very good shape.

Right as I got disconnected I also had to go to class. The class I had to go to was a class in Nuclear Reactor design. I am a Military history major, guess how much I like my Nuke class. I hate it. It makes my life miserable, I haven't been able to do any of the homework in the class for months and the only reason I am passing is because for group projects my intelligent partner carries me (much like Angel when we 2v2) and tests are open book (so I can have example problems written out that make a test more like transcribing than actually thinking). The only reason I even go to the class (because I don't learn anything) is because I would get in a lot of trouble if I skipped (whether it be once or every time we have the class). So the other day as I contemplated my 55 minutes of hell I decided to pass the time by writing out an account of the game I had just played. The above BR is a direct result of my efforts. I had hand drawn some pretty pictures to help the story along but I decided to be lazy and not scan them. Plus I felt I could do just as good as job without visuals. I also thought this would be a good test submission for BR.com as I have done several other reports but not for this site.

Closing thoughts:

1)Play SC to have fun. The above game was completely pointless to me as as player development is concerned, I did a stupid early build, I planned on killing my partner, and it was on BGH. It was fun though, a simple clean romp without worrying about victory. I suggest people play these types of games every once and a while to unwind from the otherwise tense world of ultracompetitive SC.

2) Shamelessly self promote: Go read my other BR's at http://go.to/angelife They are all written under the name [WP]BlacKnight and all of them are good. There are also several other good reports there by Angelife who is by far and away the best looking Battlereporter out there that I know of. Oh yeah, her reports also have great content and much better (more practical) lessons than mine do.

3) Give me feedback, I as a human being (some people doubt this) know I exist because people acknowledge my existence. Validate my existence by letting me know what you think of this report and my other ones.

4) Have a good day, no matter what day it is.

5) And finally in closing, the greatest truth I have ever known, and I cannot stress this enough: "Life is to short to waste on bad beer."

Thanks and have a good one,

This has been a Crazy Cadet Production (goto http://go.to/angelife to see the picture that normally is here)