The Trustier 2 Rax FE

So last week I tried a 1 Rax fast expand build that I had limited success with, I found that most of my failures could be traced back to not having enough units at the start, meaning that it was easy for me to lose to early pressure or for my opponents to macro uncontested. This week I tried out a 2 Rax build, which can be found here, to greater success. I may have only won 53% of my games but I feel that the games I did win I won comfortably and the games I lost were down to me playing poorly rather than the build. Most of my losses were today and they were from stupid stuff like me not reacting to a Nydus Worm in my base fast enough and not building more production facilities when I was floating a lot of resources. Getting out more early units meant that I was more likely to go for early attacks and force the enemy to produce units or at least do some economic damage. The build said to get a number of bunkers early on for defence but I preferred to go for early aggression only building bunkers if I absolutely had to.

I went for a base race when this happened not knowing he already had a third.

Terran has always been my best match-up but I found that this build left me very vulnerable to early tank pushes, though applying early aggression often gave me enough time to get my own tanks out and by that point I could normally produce off of two factories. The 2 Rax also allowed me to get out a lot more marines in the early game which helped fend off Banshee rushes which I have been struggling with a lot recently. I played a game against a Norwegian fellow who went straight to the gold on Metalopolis and then went for a 1-1-1 build; maybe if he'd pumped out Marines he would have had a better chance. When I was scouting I was thinking to myself "it's always the last place I look" then I get to the last base and he's not there, but it was quite obvious where he went. Bunkers at either side prevented me from getting in until I had Siege Tanks and after that it was pretty one sided. Even though he went for the gold we were still pretty even on economy, because I had an early expansion, but as he said before he left it was just a bit of fun.

It was a cute idea but I managed to get out lots of siege tanks quickly.

I've been doing much better against Zerg, possibly because I have been making a lot more Marines, or maybe just because my mechanics are improving. Previously I wasn't building many Marines because I was constantly loosing them to Banelings, but recently I have gotten a lot better at splitting my units so I feel more comfortable using Marines and I'm a lot more likely to retain them; often I found I didn't have enough Marines to deal with the first Mutas. I played a game against a Zerg who didn't fast expand and didn't have an overlord at the top of his ramp so I built a bunker at the edge of his creep and sent a bunch of Marines to apply early pressure and he went down quite easily; this was only possible because I had more Marines than I would have usually. I thought I was hilarious when I called him comrade on account of his Cyrillic name but he didn't seem to agree.

I'm definitely getting a lot better at splitting up my units to avoid Baneling splash.

Apparently Protoss is the easiest match-up for Terrans but I am finding it the hardest at the moment; if I do no damage in the early game, normally because of sentrys, or if it becomes a macro game I always lose. I only won one game against a Protoss who went for early DT pressure into Zealot Archon. I had MMM off of two bases whilst he was on one base and I kept denying his attempts to take a gold. At the moment I am preferring this build, to the 1 Rax, in my games against Zerg and Terran but I still think that going 3 Rax is the best build to use against Protoss. Like I did with the 1 Rax build I am going to stick with this over the next couple of days and see how much better I can get at it. I think that I still need to improve at constantly producing SCVs and taking an earlier third but in general I'm getting a lot better at constantly training units and getting relatively fast upgrades. I did get as high as rank 16 but for now I am rank 23 up from 35.    

Slowly going up.

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