Macrohatch

It seems nearly impossible to maintain enough larva to sink all the resources generated by a saturated base with a single hatchery. Short of dumping minerals into spine crawlers, a secondary macrohatch seems necessary. Looking over replays where I've added a macrohatch, the flood of units I can pump out is overwhelmingly more powerful than without.

I have a feeling I should incorporate this as a staple of my play, especially considering the massive surplus of minerals that I'm usually floating anyway.

Defecting to Zerg

Well, I decided to try something different.

I played Zerg a bit during beta, and a lot during Broodwar.

It definitely feels far-and-away different to play Zerg over Terran.

I expected when I started laddering I'd get roflstomped, but it seems I've been matched up against only bads so far.

Live for the swarm.

Promoted to Platinum League

Well, Season 2 is upon us and after my placement match, I was bumped up to Platinum.

When I first started playing SC2, high-level play seemed incomprehensible to me. At this point in my trek to the top, I can see that through a lot of practice, at the very least Diamond is easily attainable.

I'm eagerly awaiting the end of the spring semester so I can focus on improving my game.

Game 2 - Liquid`Tyler vs mouz.Strelok - TSL3 Ro32 Match 1

The presence of mind, execution, and patience displayed by both of these players is phenomenal.  Really a beautiful game.

Build Marine

Over spring break I spent a good amount of time playing 2v2 with my brother who had recently bought SC2 and was playing it for the first time since beta.

2v2 is of course quite a different creature than 1v1.

As a double Terran team we eventually fell into a strategy where he would tech to mass banshee as quick as possible and I would mass marines with every upgrade possible. It usually plays out that I hold off early attacks with ungodly amounts of marines while my brother goes and shuts down the economy and tech of one of our opponents. It's fairly effective since the enemy is almost always out of position and can't return from their attack quickly enough to defend.

This is similar to our 2v2 beta strategy which usually involved me going M&M&M while he massed vikings and dropped into the enemy mineral line.

Fast-forward to now and I find that I've adopted the strategy of mass marine in my 1v1 matches. This invariably leads to hilarious meltdowns on the part of my opponents who curse me out for using what they deem an unskillful army composition.

For those of you that have read Playing to Win, you'll likely agree with me that the rules of a game are impossible to break, and so any strategy possible is valid (save for if it literally makes the game unwinnable, as in it's frozen).

Even so, mass marine is far and away from being an abusive or imbalanced composition. It suffers many of the vulnerabilities shared with any bio-based composition. Tanks, Psionic Storm, and especially the new incarnation of Fungal Growth can absolutely shut down a crowd of marines with even the most minimal of skill.

The composition's strength lies in exceptional mobility (especially when paired with Medivacs and decent multitasking to achieve multiple simultaneous attacks on different locations), potential for strong early aggression, and cheap production cost. With upgrades and good micro, marines can really clean house.

Despite performances the likes of MarineKingPrime, I don't think mass marine would hold up in higher level games. I'm going to keep playing it until I have a very solid build and then search for alternatives. It will serve as an excellent fallback in matches that warrant its use, and there's little more amusing than seeing 125+ marines (save for maybe 150 banelings).

Patch 1.3 Hits

So I've been playing with the patch today.

The observer overlays are slick. I'm interested to see how many casters use them going forward.

The battlecruiser is quite a bit faster, though I don't know if that'll cause it to get used more often.

The new insignias for top 50, 25, and 8 are nice, though a bit unnecessary.

One change that I really can't stand is the removal of loss counts from profiles and the ladders.

I actually don't even care if I can see how awful the people in my division are. I just want to see how awful I am. I earned those losses dammit, put 'em back. At least a toggle option would have been nice.

And here's our QQ for the day before I sign off.

TvP. I played awful against a proxy pylon contain. I still managed to pull it together and counterattack, stomping the enemy defense. Before my opponent quit, he was kind enough to let me know the following:

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind, Bananagins. I'll keep that in mind.

bm...

It seems like every game where I don't get a reply or I get cursed out for saying "gl hf", I roflstomp my opponent. It's gotten to the point where I'm happy when my opponent doesn't reciprocate.

Good manners, folks; they win games.