Life in the Middle 5/02/2012

I normally write this every Saturday but I thought that if I wrote it then it would be too negative, because I was stuck in a rut and no one wants to read about that, so I left it for an extra day before writing this. I played a lot of games this week, more than I have every played in a week before, and despite losing around half of them I feel like I've learned a lot and will perform well next week. I end this week as a rank 7 Platinum and, though I wont be promoted before the season lock that is starting soon, I don't think it will take too much longer to get into Diamond.

Still about where I was last week but I think I have solved some issues with my play.

At the moment I feel like I'm pushing at the base of Diamond and Diamond is punching me back; a continual cycle of being knocked down and having to pull myself back up; but from each set back you can learn something new. I realised that when going into TvTs I would mentally think to myself that I'd already won; this is a terrible attitude to have probably only hampers my success against higher league Terrans. Similarly, against Protoss I always think that I have already lost; but at least this normally makes me want to try all the harder.

A lot of Platinum/Diamond Terrans go purely bio but don't have the control to do damage and die easily to tanks.

My PvT has gone through something of an identity crisis over the last week but I feel like it's in a good place now. A couple of lucky wins with a 1/1/1 build gave me a sense of hope that I would be able to do well in TvP, though many loses later it became apparent that this was not the case. I switched back to using a build devised by Drewbie and just worked on my late game macro, making sure that I had enough Barracks to use all my minerals, and overall I have been doing much better in TvP, and hopefully wont struggle so much with it in the not too distant future.

I frantically held off a proxy Stargate and upon leaving this message came up and I nearly died; thankfully it went away.

Watching some of Drewbie's replays I noticed that he was often just sitting in storms and not trying to dodge them, is this normal? I often find I still lose most my health when trying to dodge storms and lose attack time. From Drewbie I also learned to spread out my troops more against storms and Colossus to minimise damage and to scan more when going into an engagement; it's a lot more hazardous for a Protoss to take your army by surprise than for a Terran to take a Protoss by surprise. I think I was focusing on drops too much before and forgetting to macro behind it, which hurt me more than it hurt my opponent.

Returning to bio feels good and familiar and learning to control them better has helped loads.

In general I think that my late game macro is pretty poor in all match ups and that simply remembering to build Supply Depots extra production facilities would probably improve my mid to late game massively. Something I've never understood is why it is so important to build so many Supply Depots anyway? Is it just another exercise in macro designed to block the unworthy from access to higher leagues? I see a lot of aspects I need to improve in, so hopefully by time the next season starts I will be ready to go up to Diamond.

Bunkers are great at defending against 1 base Protoss players.

Next week I promise not to talk about Protoss as that is what I have focused on for the last two weeks but as a Terran I find Protoss to be my biggest problem. If you enjoyed this article then you can find me on twitter at @RobinTerran or follow the blog from the pane to the right. Thank you for reading. Check out my Game of the Year and come back soon for reviews of Puzzlejuice and Resident Evil: Revelations.