Life in the Middle 30/04/2012

So this week I decided to take a break from Terran and play a little Zerg on my old account; it had been a while, so I felt a bit rusty, but I soon got back into it. Zerg is the most different race to play and it comes down to more than just how they make units. I think to play Zerg well you have to spend a lot of time on macro and much less on micro than the other races, to me engagements seem a lot easier to handle as a Zerg, but then again I am only just getting back into it. As a Terran I always felt that I had to pick away at the other races, whereas as Zerg you want to get the perfect composition and to attack as a whole. I'm not saying that Zergling run-bys and Mutalisk harass aren't important, they just have different purposes. As a Zerg I want to make my opponent too afraid to move out and take the whole map for myself, smothering them with my economy.

I used to do this a lot; thought I was so smart.

With Terran and Protoss you know to constantly build workers and get as many units as you can on top of that, adding on production when your resources start to build up; with Zerg it is nowhere near as obvious. When playing Zerg I constantly have the fear that I have over droned, as I always try to play macro games, and  have not got enough actual units to defend myself with. I think that when you get used to knowing when to build units and when to drone Zerg becomes a lot easier to play, as long as you remember to larva inject, spread creep out and scout a lot with Zerglings and Overlords. Knowledge is power in SC2 and it's easy for Zerg to have eyes on most of the map.

Trying to scoot and shoot with Roaches doesn't work out too well.

Strangely I had most success with ZvZ, I know it is considered to be like rock, paper, scissors in that the counters are extreme, but because it is so easy to have vision of the entire map I find it easy to anticipate and react to an opponent's moves. I think my proudest moment whilst playing against a Zerg was when I stopped an expansion from building with a small Muta force whilst taking out two more bases, one with burrowed Infestors and the other with a mass of Roaches. As the other races I would always worry about how much production I have, but as a Zerg it's a joy to be able to just build one structure and then mass produce that unit straight away; I hope all Zergs realise how lucky they are to be able to do that.

I'm still scared of Banelings, but less so when I have Roaches too.

As far as builds go I have been going 15 hatch in ZvT and ZvP and 14 gas 14 pool in ZvZ. I go for the safer build in ZvZ as you can still get a good economy with a slightly later expo and hold off any early pressure that is levelled at you. Also, if you see that you opponent goes hatch first you can get out early Lings to pressure it with. I only lost my expansion once to bunker pressure whilst going against the other races. I'm not very good with timings so I have to rely on good scouting to know when and what is coming and decide what I need to build to deal with it. Unfortunately you can't always know what is coming and can be taken off guard by it; I lost to mass Voidrays, mass Banshees and mass Thors, strategies that I thought the middle leagues were above.

So... what works against mass Thor? They've already ripped through the rest of my army by this point.

I'll probably go quiet for the next couple of weeks as I have my final university exams, but after that I should be back to weekly posts. I'm not sure if I'll be playing Terran or Zerg as I am really enjoying Zerg at the moment, but I started this blog with Terran in mind so I might continue with them. Thank you very much for reading, you can follow this blog from the pane to the right and find me on Twitter here.