As Maxilicious from TerranCraft pointed out, I have been getting away from my roots in writing about Heroes so much recently. Good point. The posts about Heroes haven’t been brilliant: they’re just observations from playing regular games. I’m pretty sure it’s been months since I have last played a 1v1 ladder game, so I sat down and played a game. It went okay: I won a ZvZ.

http://spawningtool.com/19968/

It can be hard to read the build orders for exactly what happened in the game, but roughly, my opponent opened with a big Zergling push, then we both settled into Roach/Hydra. Eventually, I broke through with Swarm Hosts and better upgrades and won. Our macro was so-so. There weren’t really any cool micro plays. There were a few key decisions, however, that I want to touch on briefly.

First, I scouted no expansion and guys pulled out of gas. This was a pretty easy read for some sort of Speedling attack. I kept Overlords in a line and a few Zerglings sent around to scout to watch for the timing, and that came with plenty of time for me to get Roaches out to defend.

Second, I avoided the Zergling run-by by putting myself in my opponent’s seat. I knew that there were more Zerglings out on the map after I tried to expand and wasn’t fast enough to cancel the Hatchery. I figured I was ahead since I had my expansion for longer and had teched up to Roaches. I wanted to move out to push but realized that if I were him, I would go for a run-by as soon as I saw the army on the map. As such, I split my army leaving half of my Roaches uphill to defend while moving out with half. It was a good call as I crushed the run-by, got an expansion going, and went for a full attack soon.

Third, I got overconfident in an attack. I figured I was ahead and would probably overwhelm my opponent with a Roach/Hydra attack. I was wrong. Given that there wasn’t an immediate counter, I figured that it was probably close-ish, but I definitely lost my whole attacking army. Despite having slightly better upgrades, I probably wasn’t ahead in army supply, and my opponent had faster reinforcements. I should have been more careful and just leveraged my positioning into getting further ahead.

Fourth, I transitioned into Swarm Hosts and static defenses. There were more run-bys and good army movement by my opponent to pick off bases, but most of the fight was in a straight line. I knew it was a stalemate otherwise, so I went for (what seemed to me to be) an early Hive for +3/+3 and started building Swarm Hosts. My control was poor with Swarm Hosts running out to rally points and dying unburrowed, but I did get enough to slowly push in.

I think that point 2 was probably my proudest moment. I play random, so I do roughly see all matchups, and I don’t feel good about any of them. That perspective, however, is probably something I should leverage more: I should use strategies I hate against other players myself. Conversely, I should anticipate what I would do either to press my advantage or to come back in a game, and prepare against that. This might be harder for non-random players, but at least it’s something to apply in mirror matchups to break the stalemates.

And one more thing: Fantasy Proleague signups are open. I haven’t paid much attention to the last few seasons, but I made a team anyways!