"Hey, what the hell, I might as well expand here too."
-[JC]JonaGoo
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| Slapping Around Another Toss Player: 101 | | | Author: | | | IP: | 24-90-13XXXX | | Date: | 10/03/02 06:10 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 7, Min: 7
Lifetime Rating for YourButteredBiscuit: 6.7500 |  | Before I start with the report, I’m going to let you know that there are no fucking images, I don’t remember my password, so I didn’t get a chance to test my abysmal html skills. Its also incredibly long. This sort of shit happens…
Still here? I guess you don’t give a fuck either. Well here it is….
Shit went down when my Sunday drinking buddy said his (cheesy) Protoss game would beat my Powerhouse Protoss (powerhouse against cheesy players at least) like his Cheesy Kansas City Chiefs beat my Hapless Jets in the football game viewed while my drinking buddy lived up to his name. Now it was time for a showdown of Protoss of cheese on Protoss of biscuit delivery at Lost Temple. My probes stumbled into a 12:00 position, and his wandered into 3:00. Our early build orders were mirror images, pylon, gateway, gateway. Both of us felt content to cram our ramps with zealots for awhile, with him building more zealots than me because I had begun a slow crawl up the tech tree. I made up for this by using one of my zealots and scouting my conventional “check the closest spot first, if empty send zealot to next closest, send another zealot to whatever the hell else is around”. My opponent stayed true to his cheesy nature and sent a zealot off into the furthest possible spot from his base and was punished by taking many minutes to find me.
If there’s one thing I know about this guy, its that if you let him, he will macro you into the ground. To counter this, I decided to be aggressive towards his expansions and make my attacks costly to him and cheap to me. The first one I landed on him came about 10 minutes into the game. An observer spotted a drop spot from the northern approach on his worker line. With all haste I loaded a shuttle up with a reaver and a DT. While everything died but the shuttle, he lost many probes, leaving him with 3 on minerals and 3 on gas with a nexus warping in at his natural that was spotted by an observer. He decided to attack me from my ramp with zealots and dragoons but all were wiped out by zealots on the ramp, cannons, dragoons and reavers on the cliff. This farce was repeated many times throughout the game, I'm not going to mention them again because they were mostly inneffectual and had the same outcome everytime. He lost a lot more units than I did and wasted a lot of money. He was digging himself into a hole now, and the only way out was holding down the expansion at the natural.
The natural was in his control long enough for a couple of cannons, an assimilator and a bunch of probes to be built. But a cannon wall I had constructed on the cliff overlooking the natural chased all of the probes away and wrested control from his hands. I had begun building an expansion at the southwest starting point, which he spotted with a shuttle carrying a probe. He dropped the probe off at the 6:00 starting point but a roving probe of mine caught drop as soon as it happened by a stroke of luck. His probe killed mine and he began to build a nexus even though I knew he was down there. A couple of zealots marched in and flushed him out. I started warping in gateways and cannons at my expansion and warping in a nexus at my natural. As soon as the gateways and cannons were finished being build, he dropped 4 zealots and killed many probes and destroyed my nexus before his zealots died. I gasped as a I looked at my mineral counter and saw it was at exactly 95 and my main was mined out. Was my rout turned around in a sick twist of fate? Not at all, I saw green dots at my natural on the minimap. A profound sigh of relief was heaved. Oh yeah, I was building a nexus there wasn't I? Soon a nexus was rebuilt at the southwest expansion and my natural was humming with activity. He had gained himself reprieve enough to expand into his mineral only and defended it with a sizable number of dragoons and zealots. My spotting observer is shot down quickly and before any real weaknesses can be found. I decide the best thing to do would be to make one. I set up an ambush outside the mineral only with a high templar casting psi storm on probes and dragoons. The dragoons take the bait and charge after the high templar only to run into a reaver and four dragoons laying some serious hurt on their superior numbers. As soon as the reaver is endangered he is extracted by a shuttle and the dragoons retreat back to base, and the pursuing enemy forces are cut down. This attack had cost me a few hundred in gas and minerals, it cost him thousands.
His mineral only is the only place he is getting minerals from and he is getting all of his gas from the depleted site in his main so he expands into the natural of the 6:00 main with due haste. I spotted it after he got a few cannons and a small group of zealots defending it. His mineral only is defended by a large force of dragoons and zealots, but they’re concentrated in the northern side closest to my base. I load up a reaver into the loyal shuttle that’s been doing all of the ferrying the entire game, and I flew it around his defenses and dropped it on the southside of the min. only. The reaver killed a few probes and 2 zealots. At the first sign of his countering attack the reaver is loaded up into the shuttle and flies around the defenses again and is dropped on the north side, it pops off a few shots at some dragoons and retreats back into my base. Using this as a distraction, I built four cannons on the cliff overlooking his new expansion, but only one fires. It kills a few probes but the expansion remains in his hands. He tried dropping a reaver on the cliff but the shuttle flew too close to the cannons and got shot down. The advantage is clearly mine but he isn’t out yet.
At this point I was managing an expansion in my natural, at the southwest main, the north western island, and various attacks requiring a lot of micromanaging, so I wasn’t too surprised that he found a gaping flaw in my main base’s defenses. What did surprise me was how long it took him to capitalize on this defect and that he didn’t jump all over the other ones. He dropped 4 DT’s in my main by my nexus and kills the only cannon in the area, with my closest observer being on the other side of the map watching his expansion and the nearest cannon is a full screen away. He kills a pylon, my lone forge and a bunch of zealots. As soon as my observer spots the sneaky bastards I click on one and see that he has 3-3-3 infantry as opposed to my 3-1-1. This is no good, especially when he outnumbers me so heavily despite an economy that was out of the doldrums for all of 5 minutes the entire game. His fleeing shuttle carrying a surviving DT flies into cannon fire as he spots my island expansion. This expansion was very lightly defended, with only a couple of cannons by the nexus, a reaver drop would level it before I could counter. But he has bigger fish to fry because I came after his last functioning expansion with great intent and purpose.
My cannons weren’t doing much on the cliff, and the templar I dropped couldn’t get close enough for a psi storm without getting shot at by cannons, so I decided to stop trying to finesse the expansion away and just burn the shit to the ground. 6 archons and 10 zealots destroy the whole thing, including his counter attacking reaver and zealots without a single probe escaping. My surviving invaders conduct a “why not?” raid on his natural expansion, which he has yet to attempt to reclaim. The cannons are destroyed and the nexus is heavily damaged, and as he countered with the units defending his mined out mineral only he discovered the true purpose of the raid. At the first sight of the defenders my few archons and zealots retreated as close to the cannons on the cliff as possible and they killed way more units than they should have. While he was still dealing with the surviving attackers, a fresh group of archons charged past the bulk of his defenders and ran up his ramp unmolested. He had 2 dark templar that began chopping up the archons, but he saved me the trouble of spotting them because he psi stormed them along with my archons. Thanks for the hand. In typical archon fashion, they shrugged the psi storm off and did heavy damage before they were taken down. Realizing that doom was closing in, he retreated all of his forces into his main to hold the high ground for as long as possible. He still had a lot of forces, and he wasted no time in turning them into a series of highly mobile fortifications. So what.
My biscuit had been a long time in the making. I wanted to make it extra cheesy for his cheesiness along with a side of bacon because I like bacon. The cheese was the zealots I massed. They charged at the ramp and took heavy casualties, but they started breaking through his choke defenses, forcing many of his mobile defenders to reinforce that position. My spying observers (he was surrounded by them) saw his units leave their positions on the cliffsides to defend the ramp. The spot for the bacon had been found, and in this case, the bacon was 4 dropships loaded up with reavers. Big damage was done on both fronts. He was left with about 3 teams of dragoons, which he put in a horseshoe formation around the choke, but I had more than one biscuit ready from him. I conducted the same attack again with a couple more teams of zealots and a few more dropships with reavers. The killing blow had been struck.
Post Game Analysis: This is a textbook case for fledgling players to learn from. It came down to the fact that my opponent failed to achieve a proper balance of the basics. His macroing, even under so much economic pressure was excellent, his map control was decent enough to defend his expansions for awhile (except for the natural.) but his scouting was positively awful. The expansions he spotted were stumbled into, and he didn't give them more than a glance and hardly touched them. Had he been scouting properly, he would have found a way to destroy them and even the score. He was out scouted in everyway. My bases were pretty vulnerable, but his attacks were mostly ineffectual frontal assaults. “Build-em Send-em” was the watchword for him, and he paid for it. A Protoss choke can be every bit as formidable as a terran one. All the dragoons and zealots in the world are going to pop if they’re charging up the ramp into cannons and dragoons holding higher ground, a relatively small number of zealots soaking up damage on the ramp so the dragoons and cannons can do the serious damage. Once the reavers and psi storms start going anything running up that ramp is in a world of shit. And that’s without shield batteries. My seemingly sparse choke defense held its own against overwhelming numbers time and again. Had he dropped these units around this defense into one of the holes I had in every base, it would have been an entirely different story.
Chances are, he would have done the proper amounts of reconnaissance if I didn’t contain him like I did. Expansion hunting is key to crippling an opponent. I had observers watching many of the resources nodes and zealots scouring the map so I could spot the expansions in their early stages and take them down before he made any money off them. Even so, I could have been more aggressive and taken more advantage of my superior economy. He held onto his mineral only until it was mined out, which is a big mistake on my part. I punched open a sizable hole after he took the templar bait. It wouldn't have taken much to destroy it after that but I didn't want to commit a sizable chunk of forces anywhere I didn't have to. The mineral only kept him in the game long enough to build the expansion at the 6:00 natural, which he held onto for too long. As soon as my cannons failed to prevent him from mining I should have attacked it outright. Its mistakes like that that made the game last longer than it had to.
The Prima Strategy guide for SC says that you should never retreat and that once you attack you have committed your forces and should never let up. This is wrong. Very wrong. As soon as it was obvious he couldn’t break through my choke, he could have pulled back and regrouped and tried something else. But he wasted units on a fruitless attack. I retreated reavers and had them dancing around the map. In that fashion, I made one reaver do the damage of several. Often, my retreating forces led his units into a trap of some form. So you see, retreats can be your friend. But by far the most important lesson to be learned from all this is that all the macroing in the world won’t win you the game without finding the right ways and places to use your forces.
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