Life in the Middle 17/12/2011

This week being the last week of term I have been extremely busy at university finishing off coursework and being dragged into socialising (yuck) but I still managed to play 26 games. In a couple of days Season 4 should end and Season 5 will begin and I am hoping to go straight into Platinum. Out of the 26 games I played 19 were Platinum and I managed to beat 10 of them, which is over 50%, and each loss helps me in my next fight. Overall I won 62% of my games and have ended this week as top of my league, though it seems like whoever of the top 3 or so players in the league played most recently is on top. I am mostly going to talk about TvP as that is what I have played and improved in the most.

Top of my league again.

Last week I was having major troubles against Protoss, only winnings 33% of my games, however that has changed now. My first two games this week were against Platinum Protoss and whilst I lost both games I started to try out a new build which led me to victory against the next 7 Protoss I played. The third game I played was against the same person as in game 2 and I really wanted to win this time and knew he would attack early on so I prepared for the attack and macro'd really hard. The attack never came but I had a lot of bio with stim, combat shields and concussive shells so I decided to attack him instead and easily destroyed his army; it wasn't even close. It's one of the most satisfying feelings to win against someone who just beat you.

Being back home for the holidays means playing on low settings again,

The build I have been using against Protoss is a 1 Rax FE but instead of expanding straight away and not being able to defend it I just use the Command Centre to get out extra SCVs, call down M.U.L.E.s and use scans for scouting; I actually use it as a base when I go for my attack or I have held off their early Pressure. With the high SCV count you get you can easily support 5 or 6 Barracks and produce a lot of Marines and Marauders and all their upgrades. Since using this build I have never gotten into the late game, I have only lost once with it and my first attack has won me the game every other time, so I don't know how well it would deal with lots of Colossus.

6 Rax and upgrades can easily be supported by one base with a lot of SCVs but you have to expand soon after.

In PvT I am never sure when to start producing Vikings because a big bio army can deal with a couple of Colossus in the early game but after there are more than that Vikings become necessary really. However, to get out Vikings you have to build a Factory and then a Startport so the tech is a bit out of the way and takes time and resources which could be spent on more troops instead and those troops could be what win you the game earlier on. It's not like Vikings are the only useful unit from a Starport, Medivacs are great too, but in getting up to Starport tech you sacrifice getting out more bio units to win straight away; so when does just bio stop being enough?

You need a lot of units in the early game in TvP.

In both TvZ and TvT I lost a couple of games simply because I didn't siege up my Seige Tanks on the front-line and was unprepared for sudden attacks. At the beginning of the week I was struggling against Terrans, which is normally my best match-up, because I was consistently surprised at how much better a Platinum's macro is compared to a Golds and how quickly they can rebuild after an early attack. Now that I am much more confident in TvP TvZ has gone back to being my worst match-up. In TvZ it seems to me that the onus is on the Terran player to prevent the Zerg from macroing but leaving your base means that the Zerg can easily counter you. I was supposed to stop rallying to the front-line but when I sense I'm near victory I can help but push and it often costs me the game. Next week I need a new build to try against Zerg so any suggestions? I tried a similar build to what I use against Protoss but with Siege Tanks instead but I found that by time I was ready to attack I was ridiculously out macro'd.

Unsieged Tanks on the front-line can spell doom.

If you enjoyed this article then you can follow me on twitter at @RobinTerran. Check out my other articles including my Updated Terran Impressions and my article on the Season 5 Map Pool. Thank you for reading.