Thanks to this thread I am re-downloading SC2 (I can't find my discs so I'm just downloading it from battle.net). It's gonna take a while. In the meantime, I'll play Darkest Hour.
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Thanks to this thread I am re-downloading SC2 (I can't find my discs so I'm just downloading it from battle.net). It's gonna take a while. In the meantime, I'll play Darkest Hour.
Great post Lionx, which I think actually points out some of my main issues right now. Effective scouting and harassment. You could probably say spending my damn resources quickly too, but I'm continually improving that. In fact, I played a few games yesterday where all of that kind of came into play in either losing the game or winning it. In the first two, a TvT and TvZ, I sat back and didn't harass or scout well enough really while my opponents built up forces that could harass me fairly effectively. In the TvT looking back on it, I did scan often enough to know what he had, but didn't really know in the moment how to deal with it, so instead of simply building a ton of tanks and marine/medivac to steamroll him (he mostly had reapers and some MMM going on with a few tanks for defense) I tried doing some cloaked banshee harass and let my building my main force of Marines and Tanks fall behind. I even had tanks placed all over my base because I was worried about Reaper and Drop harass, but I think I could have easily left a few in some key locations with a few marine/marauder to back them up and been fine if I had just attacked. Same sort of thing happened with the Zerg player, except I didn't use scan much at all (don't even ask me why because I'm really not sure). And while I was building up a bit of my usual Marine/Tank force he rushed to Broodlords and Corrupters. You can probably imagine how prepared I was for that. I wasn't really building units as quickly and efficiently as I should have been either, but had I scouted what he was doing and attacked sooner he would have had a lot of trouble dealing with it.
On the plus side I finished the afternoon with a TvP that went much better. I felt more comfortable to some extent since I know that matchup from the otherside, and I just decided going in that I was going to focus on pumping out units constantly and getting a quick expansion if I could. I saw him take a pretty early expansion so felt safe taking one as well (I could wall off my natural's ramp too which was a plus). Then I just built a bunch of barracks a few factories and some upgrades and massed Marine/Medivac and Tank. I kept scanning him and didn't see too much aside from him taking a third as well so I moved out to destroy it. Parked my Tanks outside, scanned to take out some cannons then ran the Marines in. He fought it off but I took it out. He tried to counter my third with some DT's but I got it up and fought them off after some finaggling. Kept scanning as I moved out a second time and managed to catch his army completely out of position with my tanks ready in the middle of the map. The game was pretty much over at that point. I rolled up to his natural hoping to break into his base and screw up his production as I felt I had a pretty big lead and handily took the win. Now if I can just get the experience needed to do that more often things will be pretty good.
I also wanted to post something I found on the Team Liquid forums though which seems interesting and I think I'm going to try for a bit. It's essentially a guide for improving as Terran aimed at helping to get players from Silver to Platinum. The latter part of it requires a practice partner, but that shouldn't be an issue for all of us :D :[L] Accelerated learning for mid/low level Terrans
It basically starts you off with a 3 racks build and has you drill it into memory and focusing on macroing effectively at the start. Once you have that down it has you build onto that in terms of your game awareness and whatnot with the intent of building up the skills you need to play at a high level. I think it appeals to me because it includes practice for things I know I need to work on, but offers a more focused path for doing it than simply playing a lot and waiting for it to work itself out as you play a lot of games.
I figured I'd post it, particularly since Rostum is playing Terran as well right now.
And Pike, I somehow knew you may not be able to resist some SC2 after all of this talk about it. :D
"Install failed", followed by a bunch of error messages :( I'll figure it out later, I suppose.
Yeah I've been trying to scout and harrass a lot more, and notice that when I don't is the game I lose. I've kind of gone off banshee since starting the silver league, as most players love to waste their resouces on mass missle turrets / spore cannons / protoss cannons. So the intial scout will help me in determining if I should even bother.
Ah I love the Team Liquid website, I just find a lot of the information is overwhelming for me. But I shall give that link a good read.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vivi22
I decided to just go ahead and skip the practice league. The first ranking match (out of five) I won with incredible ease, then I continued to be pummeled throughout the last four matches. I've gone back and watched all the replays and it seems I'm just not expanding quick enough, or I've wasted my resources in trying to combat something that the opponent didn't have.
Still, I made it in to the silver league at rank 50. Not sure what that means, but I easily won the first silver league match I played.
I think they pretty much, in ranking battles, they slowly up the difficulty based on the guy's win/loss ratio with each match you play. So it gets progressively harder based on your performance. I remember last season I played 5 matches...each 1 getting closer and closer until I lost the last one and got Platinum...each enemy was higher in their division rank with the last guy I played being Master League.
Banshee harass is still good. It might make them over commit to static defense. Remember static defense is good but not en mass. They do not move, only protect a static portion of area around them, and cannot be refunded unless its a bunker. Resources spent on them when they are not needed, mean they are not spending enough resources on the main army. So if you see them with too much Static D, just rush them or siege down/frontline camp their defenses while expanding. Chances are, their army composition in the early game is weak. You, have map control.
Note that this might actually prompt a response from them to go air since they feel trapped (especially Zerg Muta), in which you should scout after a decent timing window and see what they are up to so you can make just enough Static D for yourself or get the right army composition.
So again, Banshee harass is still good. You don't actually have to do too much damage with the Banshee too, just having it there makes the other guy feel unnerved.
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Lately i seen more people go Reaper(or 2) then straight into Expand for a more economic build. The Reaper(s) keep the other guy honest while you do your thing. Transition to Hellion(with or without BF), then Banshee, while still expanding and on the side making your main MMM(vs P) or MMTank(vs Z or T) army.
Whelp, I've been doing the 3 rax build lately and have been winning. But only really just by a tad. I need to work on scouting / expanding more. I think I'll go back to starting out with some harrassment, despite it holding back my initial army.
I just had the most unnessecarily long league match, it went for 50 minutes for some god forsaken reason. We both had half map control, except he decided he'd go mass battlecruiser. I mean, really? You mass them? A small portion of vikings soon took them down, he had nothing else and still tried to hang on. So most of that 50 minutes was me running around the map killing off his bases.
I kept thinking throughout the whole thing "I should be smarter than this" to end it quicker.
He is probably an OG SC1 player lol. When Massing Battlecruisers used to be good..:( God they suck now.
I've been practicing it a lot against the computer and playing some team games. One thing I'm noticing is that if you don't scout some early all-in it can be hard to hold off an initial attack. But if you do hold off an early all-in and follow through well with a strong counter attack and expand, you can do a lot of damage. I had a 4v4 game last night where three of our opponents did proxy all-ins. Sadly we scouted it too late to really stop it. I didn't get attacked in the initial wave though so by the time they got to me I had enough marines and marauders that with the two tanks I also got I broke through a cannon rush and destroyed the armies of two other guys, following it up by destroying their proxy gates and forcing their barracks to lift off. Looking at the replay after, I think I could have salvaged the win had I not attacked the guy who cannon rushed first as he had had time to build up some forces by then and was rushing to void rays, with my marine count too low to deal with them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rostum
Anyway, point being that this 3 rax build is seeming pretty strong to me when I pull it off pretty cleanly. It does lose to all-ins sometimes so careful scouting is important, but I haven't really seen any all-ins in 1v1 yet.
Something else to note is that when you do hit 50 supply and move out for your first big attack (assuming all has gone to plan), you'll generally have enough minerals to slap down a command center at your natural, and it won't interfere with making more units that much, not that it matters much if you're attack is reasonably successful).
One thing I've learned from watching the Day[9] dailies is that SC2 is largely a game about managing expansions. Both making sure that you can expand and that your opponent can't. Preventing them from expanding altogether is preferred, but anything you can do to harass or destroy their expansions (or main) and disrupt their mining can put you a little farther ahead on economy, and like Lionx said before, you disrupt their plans since they now have to spend more resources trying to deal with the harass or counter your attack so they can safely expand. A guy going for BC's is probably not going to have a huge army to deal with that kind of harass early on. So even little things like dropping marines or blue flame hellions on his mineral line, or cloaked banshees can be tough to deal with. Even better if you can do it in two places at once. Blue flame hellions in particular can be so utterly devastating that a medivac loaded with four of them may kill almost all of his mining SCV's before he an react, but obviously you want to scan/scout to try and see what he has and if he can deal with it.Quote:
I just had the most unnessecarily long league match, it went for 50 minutes for some god forsaken reason. We both had half map control, except he decided he'd go mass battlecruiser. I mean, really? You mass them? A small portion of vikings soon took them down, he had nothing else and still tried to hang on. So most of that 50 minutes was me running around the map killing off his bases.
I kept thinking throughout the whole thing "I should be smarter than this" to end it quicker.
Now if only I could learn to execute this stuff half as well as I can talk about it I'd be a dangerous man on Battle.net. :D
Hahaha I have no idea what anyone is talking about when they use all this terminology from the big SC2 sites or whatever. :x
I just play like I have for years: Build/scout/expand intelligently, build a whole bunch of dragoons (or whatever they're called now), dark templars, and observers, and eventually just send 'em all in.
(SPOILER)I have won quite a few 1v1 games this way
I'll try not to confuse you too much then. We want to get you back into it so we have someone else to play with after all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pike
Speaking of, when are you usually on Rostum? I play games here and there throughout the day but never see you online. I wouldn't mind getting some practice in with you if there's a time that you usually play.
Ah, I'm in +10 GMT time zone so it might be difficult. I am on randomly too. What time zone are you in?
In fact, I'll just leave SC2 on in the background while I work.
Also Pike and Lionx, feel free to share your user name and user codes. :)
-4 GMT. But I'm terrible with time zone conversions and going to play a few games of SC2 right now so I'm not sure where that really leaves us. I tend to do most of my playing anywhere between 11:00 am and 11:00 pm depending on what I have on the go on any given day.If there's any mildly convenient time of day where we both are awake and available to play I would assume it would fall on a weekend?Quote:
Originally Posted by Rostum
EDIT: Scratch what I said above partly as Rostum and I just had 2 games. The first a 1v1 and then we jumped into a 2v2 game. Must say I was impressed not just with how you played Rostum, but with how much our builds tended to diverge after the initial 3 rax build. And well done on stomping those two zerg players. I look forward to playing with you again as those were easily two of the best games I've had yet (with the first one being something of a 53 minute epic :D).
No idea what mine is; I haven't played in months and I'm having trouble getting the game to even reinstall at the moment... I'll let you know if I ever get it working.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rostum
Yeah they were fun games! You did really well with both games. The 3 rax build is definitely a solid starting point. Later on I'll go back and watch replays of both our games, always helps.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vivi22
What's errors are you getting? Maybe we can help you out with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pike
On my Linux partition the game runs fine through Wine but I'm getting no sound, which is odd because I used to get sound with a bit of tweaking (typically by changing the sound configuration in winecfg to esound, which has since mysteriously disappeared from the menu.) Normally I wouldn't say this is a big deal but you'd be surprised how much I need those audio reminders of "upgrade complete" and whatnot.Quote:
Originally Posted by RostumWhat's errors are you getting? Maybe we can help you out with it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pike
On my Windows XP partition the game just plain isn't installing. First it tells me that I don't meet the system requirements; then it attempts to install anyway and quits at the end with a bunch of error messages. I can't recall what those error messages are exactly, as I am on my Linux partition at the moment.