A few EGHuK PvP builds from his stream

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I was watching a bit of HuK (go watch and support him!) tonight because I’m putting together a set of Protoss build orders as a gift. I was writing down his builds as they were happening, and though it ultimately wasn’t that useful for me (I’m looking for HotS builds), maybe it’ll be useful for you.

In the first game, he used a sentry drop to block the ramp into the natural, busted the bunker, forced a lift of the CC. I think he ended up winning

Game 1: PvT on Akilon Flats

  • Standard protoss opening
  • 19 Stalker
  • 23 Nexus
  • 24 Assimilator
  • 25 Stalker
  • 27-29 Robo
  • 31 Sentry
  • More sentries in-between
  • 38 Warp prism
  • 40 Gate, Gate
  • 42 Gate
  • 47 Gate Gate
  • Attack

In game 2, he went for a Stalker/Phoenix push. He straight up lost to an expand-DT build

Game 2, PvP on Entombed Valley

  • 16 Assimilator
  • 19 Gateway
  • 19 Stalker
  • 23 Stalker, Stalker
  • 29 Stargate
  • 34 forward Pylon
  • (has 5 Stalkers at this point)
  • 37 Phoenix

In game 3, he goes for a similar build. This time, it works, but mostly on the strength of some good Stalker micro early on while “chat cheating” his opponent.

Game 3, PvP, also Entombed Valley

  • 15 Pylon
  • 17 2nd Assimilator
  • 18 Gateway
  • 19 Stalker
  • 23 Stalker Stalker
  • More stalkers; I’m guessing he cut probe production around here
  • 33 Stargate
  • 35 forward Pylon

Game 4 was a rematch. This time, his opponent goes 1 gate robo expand and manages to defend the Stalker rush. HuK tries for a Sentry drop in the main to block the ramp, but it fails.

Game 4, PvP on Daybreak

  • 14 double Assimilator
  • 16 Pylon
  • 17 Core
  • 19 Gateway
  • 20 Stalker
  • 24 Stalker Stalker (cutting probes?)
  • 28 Stalker
  • 31 Robo (for Warp Prism)
  • 31 Gate

So the 2 strategies for the evening were apparently a Sentry drop (forcefielding the ramp) and a Stalker-Phoenix push. Both are extremely aggressive and depend on HuK controlling better than his opponent.

Let me know if you want more details on the builds. I just kind of figured that the opening and pylon/probe timings should be easy enough to figure out.

Anyways, if you guys have any references on HotS Protoss builds or favorite streamers, feel free to comment. I’ll be playing around with things myself to get a good set of simple, safe HotS builds. I’ll probably post those when I have that figured out because a quick Google search revealed nothing helpful.

Playing Protoss in HotS

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This Thanksgiving has mostly been consumed by sleep, reading for book club, and playing Borderlands with friends, but I also got in a decent amount of StarCraft. About half of it was 4v4s, but I also played 3 ranked games as Protoss in HotS for placement, all of which I won. I think the last guy I played was silver (not sure how accurate HotS ladder is, though), so I guess this is just working up from the bottom.

Overall, I didn’t get to play around with new units much. The first game was against Protoss, and I attacked with 3 gates, and he didn’t even have warpgate yet. The second was against Terran on Cloud Kingdom, and poor map awareness on his part (and decent awareness on mine) allowed me to see reaper harass and various widow mines coming in via watchtowers. The final game was against Zerg, which I will discuss soon.

I didn’t get any Oracles out, though I should try that soon. I did build a few Tempests, though I’m not really sure what the benefit of that was. And I did build Mothership Cores, but I didn’t use any of the abilities. I believe they’ve changed since I tried out the game months ago, and in a ranked match, I didn’t want to take the time to read.

One big improvement for me was that “x/24 workers” thing over the Nexus. Like most players, I do a poor job building workers; I think I often end up with about 10-15 workers on minerals per base in most of my matches, and I’m not very good at checking.  Having that dialog bit was a good reminder, though, and I think it evens the playing field for those without spectacular mechanics.

The last game I played against Zerg was particularly interesting because he went for a Swarm Host rush on Antiga Shipyard. My poor map awareness meant that I missed him taking over the space at the bottom of the ramp to my natural, where he had a few Swarm Hosts, Queens, Spines, and Spores. The Swarm Hosts continually spawned the Locusts, and when I tried to push down the ramp to take them out, the spore would snipe my observer before I could spot and hit them. Having never seen anything like this before, I got flustered and couldn’t figure out a good composition to beat this build. Regardless, I macroed well enough to rush down the ramp, break out, and get a 3rd.

Through the middle of the game, he used a lot of corruptors and overseers to kill any observers I had, and then planted the Swarm Hosts to slow me. This actually neutralized my Colossi really well, which was the best answer I got for the Locusts. Again, I managed to overwhelm him, control the center, and beat his late game composition of Brood Lord/Swarm Host with a lot of blink Stalkers and some blind storms over his Swam Hosts.

I’m glad I won on mechanics, though he clearly had a build that I didn’t know how to deal with. I guess these are the surprises to expect from a game in beta. You might be wondering why I’m playing Protoss, given that I started this blog as Zerg and mentioned that I recently switched to Terran. Since I’m planning testing all races, I thought it might be nice to make the circuit starting with the race I’m least likely to play in the long run.

The more honest answer, though, is that I’m getting ladder anxiety about HotS, too, despite the fact that I know that the game is incomplete and probably not very stable. To fight that, I’m trying to play with my weakest (well, least-emphasized) race so that I don’t feel like I need to be performing particularly well with it. Still, that hasn’t gotten me through placement yet on HotS.

In the meantime, I seem to have a spare HotS beta key as I won one with a bad joke and received another for preordering HotS from Amazon. I thought I might share it with a friend, but it turns out that NONE of my friends want the beta key (probably also a factor in my low motivation to ladder). As such, I guess I’ll hold a mini-contest here.

Leave me a one-sentence comment with a suggestion on how to overcome ladder anxiety, and if your suggestion helps, I’ll pass along the key. I say one sentence simply because I don’t trust myself to be reliable in this contest (e.g. giving it to another friend anyways), and I don’t want you to waste a lot of time crafting a response when I’m being unreliable.

HotS beta: the perfect reason to practice

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Thanks to a bad joke in a reddit HotS (Heart of the Swarm) beta key giveaway, I spent 2 or 3 hours this evening practicing StarCraft again. Yes, amidst all of the excitement of the new game, I didn’t play any games from matchmaking. I can explain, though, and this is really a good thing.

Julie and I were going to play HotS tonight since we’re both in the beta, but I didn’t know when she would be available. Not wanting to leave in the middle of a match, I instead just played some 1v1s against the computer, which is only available on very easy. This basically meant that I was practicing builds. Particularly, I have moved back into playing Terran recently, and with everything new in mech, I went mech.

After 5 games on different maps, I realized how much I needed to work on. Since playing with my friends a few weeks ago, I have been playing quite a bit of StarCraft: it’s all 2s and 4s, but still, I’m back to playing. It was rocky, and I had a sneaking suspicion that was macro was sloppy. Well, playing against a computer that doesn’t attack with more than 2 Marines was opportunity to focus on that alone, and it was bad. I

  • was not building workers constantly
  • was getting supply blocked a lot
  • was allowing my money to get really high
  • didn’t have nearly enough production buildings
  • forgot key structures

A few games in, I smoothed out a lot of this and was playing much smoother than before.

Repeating basically the same mech build 5 times was also a good way to learn to refine the build. As it turns out, a lot of my macro problems were related to minor hiccups in my play. Money can get high if I’m low on gas because I don’t know when to build geysers. Supply blocks happen because I tied up all of my money at the wrong moment. In the course of working on my build, I made some small tweaks and discoveries that really helped:

  • figured out when I needed to pay attention and not in the first few minutes so I could scout without forgetting a building
  • learned when I would hit gas shortage later and built refineries earlier for that
  • sequenced add-on building more optimally for the units I wanted
  • played around with the timings (absolute and relative) for Starport/Raven, vehicle upgrades, and another Factory for production

It’s been quite awhile since I have hammered out games against the computer, and I don’t think I ever quite did it for mech. The ironic part of this is that the focus on macro meant that I didn’t really figure out how to use the battle hellions or widow mines. That hopefully will happen soon.

Hopefully, I’ll also do some matchmaking as well. There are a lot of good things going for HotS right now that aren’t true for WoL (Wings of Liberty):

  • unranked matchmaking is less stressful
  • the metagame and balance are shifting rapidly, so expectations should be low
  • the novelty is just that much more exciting

I’ll report back on how that’s going if there’s anything interesting. In the meantime, let me know if you’re on the HotS beta and want to play. Preorders are now giving out beta keys for a lot of vendors, so they should be easy to come by.

Also, there’s a ton of good pro StarCraft happening until the end of the year. Specifically, the Battle.net World Championship starts tomorrow night, and I’ll definitely be tuned in. It really looks like WoL has matured, and I’ll report on anything interesting I see in the games.

Why I play StarCraft

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I mentioned in my last post almost 2 months ago that I wanted to come back to the game. Well, that didn’t happen for most of the time until now. I can blame it on a major transition in my life since then, but the truth is that I just didn’t really have the motivation to play. Well, I finally found it last Monday and got back into StarCraft when I played some Brood War with 4 of my friends from high school.

The experience wasn’t really optimal. We had an odd number of people, Brood War bnet has a lot of issues with latency for unknown reasons, and we were all very rusty. Despite that, we had a ton of fun playing as we sat in a Skype call together and trash talked and caught up over a few games. Afterwards, a few of us talked for awhile longer on Skype, and then David and I played 6 games of 2s in SC2, placing us into silver (while playing platinum-level players: go figure).

Earlier this evening, David and I played another 4ish games on the ladder together, which I think we mostly won. Our skill levels aren’t a perfect match, but we’re close enough that it’s fun just to play and find something to do together having not really talked much since high school.

So hooray, I’m playing again, though without the intensity I desired from before, which I’m okay with. The big point I want to make with this post, though, is about why I play StarCraft. If reddit is to be believed, the StarCraft esports scene is crumbling to pieces as inferior games become more popular, and Blizzard is oblivious to and unhelpful in fixing the situation. I don’t think it’s that bad, but one possible root of all problems is that people just aren’t playing that much SC nowadays. Anecdotally, /r/starcraft doesn’t actually play that much StarCraft, and if that’s true, it’s inevitable that a reasonably accessible game like League of Legends will win over players and subsequently, the esports scene.

So where did I get off the bandwagon and stop playing? Mainly because it wasn’t actually that much fun. Somehow, SC ended up being a solitary pursuit for me where the UI was setup to make me play stressful 1v1 ladder games. I played a ton of Brood War back in the day with my friends, though, and for a long time. I played:

  1. a lot of big team games with my friends (3v3 or 4v4)
  2. BGH (Big Game Hunters: a “money map” of standard SC but where you didn’t really need to expand)
  3. a lot of UMS (Use Map Settings or “Custom Games”)

Somehow, none of this quite happened and sustained itself for me in SC2. The big team games never happened since I didn’t quite manage to find my friends in-game early on, and frankly, a lot of my friends have moved on from RTS. I don’t think I’ve found a similar experience to BGH, and the new setup for custom games just killed the environment for it early on.

I’m not really sure how to get the magic back. For me, the key is the social experience of playing games with my friends, and maybe the problem is us, not the game: in high school, there really wasn’t anything better to be doing, but 8 years later, our lives are a little different and not as conducive to playing.

People seem really down about HotS and the changes its making. Maybe they aren’t that big or exciting to people anymore, but I think that’s okay. A big release will get people back into the game, at least for a week, and with an improved arcade, maybe we’ll be able to drive the network effect a little stronger and create a stickier social experience for players. I myself am thrilled about a good reason to see all of my friends on my buddy list come back to the game and play with them for a bit.

So /r/starcraft, don’t worry: a lot of players still have the passion, and there’s still hope as long as we have that. Let’s hope that HotS comes sooner than later and let the game get big again.

Quick thoughts after an hour of HOTS

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I personally wasn’t blessed with a Heart of the Swarm beta account, but Julie was, and we played around with it today for an hour or two. Julie played 2 games against the AI with Protoss, and I played a Zerg and a Terran game against the AI. Then, I played an unranked TvT.

The units were largely as described. Admittedly, the experience was somewhat underwhelming. The units are interesting, but they weren’t mindblowing to use after having seen them in action.

The graphical and interface tweaks are nice. The weirdest part for me was the workers being automatically sent to mine at the beginning of the game. It’s a nice touch since a lot of games will lag on entry, though I don’t know why Blizzard hasn’t introduced an in-game counter at the beginning instead. That also helps with the sometimes surprising start. Otherwise, I’m mostly fine with things.

The TvT was interesting. I went 2rax Reaper into mech since that’s where all the action is at, and yes, the Warhound appears to be the real winner here. I ended up losing after a really good start, mostly because of poor control on my side, but I was disappointed that mixing in Hellions was pretty worthless, and Thors even melted to the Warhound.

When I think about it, it all feels beta-ish and underwhelming, but I can’t deny that I’m excited about playing StarCraft again. After playing that TvT, I thought that I might try laddering WoL again to get my skills back in shape. And being able to play unranked games will do wonders for ladder anxiety. If I get back into it, I’m sure you’ll hear about it here. In the meantime, enjoy all the pros coming out of the woodworks to stream again.

Observations about the KeSPA Exhibition, MLG Spring Championship, and Heart of the Swarm

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Hopefully you didn’t miss the yet again biggest weekend in StarCraft 2 eSports, which was this time held in Anaheim. I actually managed to watch quite a bit of it, so here are some thoughts.

Stephano v. MKP in the Championship Bracket

Phenomenal. Now, it seems difficult to not be a Stephano fan because he consistently delivers great series of games. In my mind, this series showed how pro SC2 has become truly refined. It was slight mistakes in a single major engagement that really determined 2 of these games. In the first game, Stephano attacked from 3 sides but didn’t quite get the tanks killed fast enough or fungal enough Marines to death. In the second, MKP got too far onto creep without sieging and cleaning it up and got trapped. The final game went back and forth with trades and sacrifices. Great games.

KeSPA Invitational Tournament

I watched all of Flash’s games and the 2nd and most of the 3rd of Jaedong v. Bisu. Sadly, I dozed off for the apparently embarrassing parts of Jaedong’s play, but overall, I thought the games were solid. Flash was sometimes clumsy with small groups of units, but his micro in big engagements looked good, and he maintained his macro throughout the matches. I thought the early game was quite interesting, with the Marauder rushes and quick Mutas. The builds seem almost too straightforward to be used professionally, but there’s apparently some merit to them, and the games ended up playing out more normally. I’m looking forward to where they are in a few more months.

Heart of the Swarm

Watch the unit update, Battle Report 1, and Battle Report 2 if you get a chance. Overall, I like the changes they’ve made since the Blizzcon announcement and am actually quite excited to play post-expansion. The Battle Reports are somewhat silly as I think it’s clear that they were playing to show off the new units and how overpowered David Kim is. The race I’m least excited about is Protoss: the Oracle looks more annoying than anything else, and the Tempest doesn’t seem like it adds much to micro control. In any case, it’ll totally be worth playing when it’s released. Hopefully it brings a few more friends into (or back into) StarCraft 2.

Roaches and Hydralisks have a melee attack w/ no delay or overkill

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http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/upr82/til_roaches_have_a_melee_attack_and_that_this/

No delay means that Stalkers can’t blink away. No overkill means that all of your Roaches won’t waste extra shots when you focus fire, say, an Immortal. Additionally, because it’s melee, it isn’t affected by Guardian Shield or Point Defense Drone and is packaged with a different animation. It does, however, still count range upgrades.

How did I not know about this? And I thought that the Roach surround was just to stop kiting. I now have a good reason to micro my Roach-Hydralisk balls even more than just getting them all in range.

Will Proleague change the metagame?

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Brood War pros may only be Masters league on the Korean server, but you have to admit, it is fun to watch them play in Proleague.

I watched the first night of Proleague and have caught a few games here and there before heading to bed, and I have constantly been wondering whether we’re going to see something new from the Brood War pros. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before their understanding of and familiarity with the game brings them up to a competitive level against the current StarCraft 2 pros, but will they converge to the accepted play style, or will they bring new builds and looks to the game? I’m hoping for the latter, and a few things are giving me hope.

First, I have seen some strange stuff. Maybe Motive is weird, but how do you play Protoss without Colossi? But what about these guys, playing PvP without Colossi? Phoenix v. Phoenix fights aren’t actually that much fun to watch, but it’s certainly a strange game state to end up in. And proxy reactored Hellions into a Viking-Siege Tank contain? In the end, the midgame looks normal and it doesn’t work, but that early game was more fun than most TvT I watch, which maybe has some Marine pressure that gets held off by a single bunker.

Second (which the last game I mentioned is a good example of), these guys are all about aggression. Call it cheesy if you want, but 2 base all-ins are fun, unpredictable, and possibly devastating. Some of it fails and makes the player look really bad (Jaedong’s Roach play in his first game comes to mind), but it’s refreshing. Artosis made the point that cheese can be the first step in learning to get better, and to be honest, I don’t really remember what people were trying when SC2 was first released and whether it’s the same stuff that we’re seeing in Proleague now.

But it is fun to watch, and you even get a bit of both worlds in Proleague to wield against the Brood War hipster. To show Julie, I played a game of Brood War the night before Proleague. Despite funky mouse acceleration problems in OSX, I impressed myself with my play: I’m way better than I ever was now that I’ve learned how to macro from SC2. If you haven’t in awhile, fire it up: it’s frustrating, but I think you’ll enjoy it.

Apollo’s analysis of a bad engagement

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I happened to catch the last game between Bomber and Stephano in the GD Studio SC2 Arena this morning. Forgive me if I’m a little stale on the metagame, but Stephano’s style felt very similar to his ZvP. His third comes later and his tech comes faster, but he depends on heavy upgrades and just enough ling/roach/infestor to carry him through the midgame.

I agree with Apollo that he rushed into things and didn’t commit. When he goes into the last engagement with 4 Brood Lords, some Infestors, and a few lings and roaches, he probably could’ve come out much more favorably had he gone for it. Stephano does a great job running his lings by, and between that and Broodlings, he could’ve gotten a surround and let tank splash damage mop up the army.

In the end, though, the better advice would’ve been not to take that engagement. He might have noticed the lack of Vikings and felt that he had a timing there, but without his 4th saturated, he would’ve been safer getting a few spines and using that as an anchor for a push.

qxc mentioned something about this in the last State of the Game, but Zerg is really pushing to get to the late game as soon as possible, which is a little strange. Stephano especially wowed a lot of people with extremely effective Zerglings in the early and mid game. Perhaps he found that other players were locking down better, but constant pressure feels like the right way to play Zerg.

But this is all theorycrafting on my part. I’m just proud I played a few games of random 2s last night. It turns out that playing random 2s instead of Zerg 1v1 is much less stressful, and now that I finished Mass Effect, I might be playing more StarCraft 2 until I pick up another game.

Done before even starting

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I’m about 4 weeks out of school right now, and like every time before, I overestimated how much time I would have after a major shift in my life. I had many things I wanted to do, and a few weeks in, I have needed to cut various plans. Unfortunately for this blog, practicing StarCraft is one of them.

There are a few different reasons why. First, there are other things I would rather do. If you read my regular blog, you might be aware that I’m currently trying to write a book, and even just the research for that is pretty menacing (though a lot of fun). I also have had a chance to get back into playing RPGs, which were a staple of my childhood. I currently own 5 and have another 4 that I have yet to get through and hope to do so soon. Right now, I’m loving my 2 hours of Mass Effect a week, and I think that’s a healthy point to be at.

Second, I have actually drifted out of the game while having more free time. Particularly, I’m watching much less than I was during school because I don’t need to procrastinate anymore. Before, I knew I needed to be back to schoolwork soon, and it was easy to flip on a stream to relax for a few minutes. Now, if I want to do something possibly in-depth, I can.

Finally, practicing just wasn’t fun for me. Like anyone else, I have ladder anxiety. That in itself is nasty enough to deal with, but when I realized that I didn’t really want what was on the other side of practicing (in the form of laddering), it didn’t seem worth it to try to get past it.

After practicing for a few months, what would I have? Well, I would probably still only be winning 50% of my games because of the design of the ladder, so day to day, I wouldn’t feel any better. I’m sure I would be much better, but that talent isn’t particularly transferrable, and it would actually make it even harder to play with my friends, most of whom play only casually.

So this is largely the end of the spirit of this blog, which never really got started. I was waiting for the time to practice, but now I have the time, I don’t really want to practice anymore. Despite that, I’m fairly proud of my skill level and understanding of the game now. I’ll still be watching tournaments, browsing /r/starcraft, playing casual games with my friends, and maybe even updating this blog as I do those things.

But don’t let this demoralize you if you’re still practicing and working at StarCraft. This game has had a tremendous effect on me, and as I mentioned, I’m not completely dropping out. Feel free to comment on what I’ve written so far, send me messages to try to change my mind (I’m easy to find: @warstrekkid on Twitter is one of many online presences I have), and keep building probes and pylons.