Felo Profile Blog Joined October 2010 Germany 391 Posts Last Edited: 2012-01-04 07:25:32 #1

Current version: 1.1 - 04.01.2012

please check the second post for the update log!



Welcome, friend - stay a while and listen!



The internet in general and especially Team Liquid offer a vast majority of guides, builds and strategy discussion. Players of every level try to contribute something to the huge pool of knowledge, branding a baneling bust with their name or stirring up a new discussion over topics like the 1-1-1, 6pools or the strength of marines.



Take a look at those threads – you’ll find giant posts from players that are discussing the pros and cons of small adjustments in builds and most of those posts contain true points and knowledge about the game.



On the other side there are a lot of players from the higher leagues, preaching that the only thing you need to worry about is the clean execution of whatever you like. Where does this disparity come from?



Simple. Knowledge is safety, safety is confidence and confidence is victory.



But, my dear reader, maybe you can relate to a good friend of mine? He picked up SC2 a couple of days ago and after his first few games he got placed in silver, eager to prove his worth he went on to Team Liquid and began to dig through the strategy section – 2,500 threads later he knew basically everything about anything but sadly his head was overflowing with knowledge and he began to overthink anything. Instead of simply going for a nicely executed 1 Gate Expansion in PvT as he used to he tried to correctly identify the opponents’ opener and fire up the correct response. The problems that arose from that were simple – he was too hesitant, thinking far too long instead of doing what’s necessary. This leads to situations where he has maybe (but only maybe) picked the correct opener but the simple fact that he’s not used to it and begins it far too late gets him to a point where he has far too few units, economy and/or tech to handle the situation he wanted to ace.



As a Grandmasters player, an experienced coach (100+ different students, 300+ hours of SC2 coaching) and as a friend who tries to help the guys out that he likes I always wanted to achieve a goal: to simplify the basics and the strategy aspects to a level where they are easy to apply and a useful tool in everyday ladder.



Disclaimer: English is not my first language so it might be a bit bumpy here and there, if there is any grammar or spelling mistake that boggles you then please send me a pm so I can correct it <3!









Yay ^_^



We all know it - the feeling when your opponents last base falls and you know that you are only a couple of seconds away from the sweet taste of victory. The enemies army is shattered, his bases crushed and all of his hopes annihilated.



But there are no decisions to be made in these joyful seconds - because of that we have to focus on the time before the score screen, we have to think about what actually leads up to a victory.



When I talk to my students about their games then I often hear some of those quotes:

“I won this big engagement and decided the game afterwards!”



“My build simply countered his build”



“I got caught in a bad position”



“His Colossi DESTROYED my marines in seconds”





This is a very scientific graph, showcasing something that I realized when I was talking with the players that I coached in my career: the longer a game goes on, the blurrier it gets in regards to the knowledge about why they lost a match.



The reason for that is simple: it's easy to realize that your spawning pool was late when you got tworaxed, the conclusion that a second bunker would have been helpful to hold a rush is easy to make and so on and so forth. Regularly there will be only a handful of mistakes and a very limited amount of possible decisions in a short game. An example? There you go:



I wanted to FFE in PvZ on Tal-Darim Altar.



I sent out one scouting probe that randomly stumbled over 6 zerglings in the middle of the map while it tries to get to the last spawn position. I'm already at 17 supply , forge and pylon at the front, no other buildings started yet.



Deciding that I need to wall-off I try to get enough buildings up to close the wall while cutting probes, but I'm unable to do so, the zerglings get into my base and I lose so many workers and mining time that I have to surrender.



What could I have done differently?

Send out a second scouting probe to find him earlier



If I scout him late then a pylon at my main nexus and a cannon there



If I scout him early then I can cut probes at 14/15, get my wall up and be safe

See? Thats a simple conclusion for a 5 minute game, but now try to imagine such a writeup for a game of 10, 15 or 20 minutes - it quickly gets laaaarge with all the different choices that we can make and that is where the strategy part gets complicated, because the last mistake in a game isn't neccessarily the one that lost us the whole match - if we lose a huge battle and die afterwards then our loss could be caused by unit control, lacking units, the composition being wrong, lacking reinforcements, and so on and so forth - as you can see there are a lot of different possibilites that can be spread out over the course of the whole game.



And this is where it gets complicated. Have you ever read a thread in this forum where somebody wanted his replay analyzed? Take 20 players on the same skilllevel, everybody will point out something different in a 10 minute game, will have another way to approach a certain situation - this is the beauty of a complex game but also something that is frightening when you lack the knowledge and the general idea of how to look at something.



Lets simplify it, shall we?





Minerals, #1 reason for war

(Only rivaled by vespene gas)



Lets face it, Starcraft II is very macro oriented - this translates into the simple fact that harvesting minerals/gas and spending them is the most important fact of the game. Harvesting in itself is more or less easy - you begin the game with 6 workers, build more of them and enjoy automining, the more complex part is spending.



When I say spending then I don't mean the process of pressing a button, placing a building or recruiting a unit, what I mean is making the decision what to spend your hard earned valuables on - and when to buy something.



I am pretty sure that you have seen a game of Starcraft II where it felt as if a player is nigh invincible while setting up a huge timing push - think about White-Ra taking a quick third base against a terran, deflecting his attacks with sweet storms and overwhelming his opponent after 12 minutes with his strong economical advantage. Think about IdrA, building 70 drones in the first minutes of the game just to unleash a storm of Zerg units as soon as his economy is fueled.



What makes this so impressive is not the way how they play the game - sure, their mechanics are good but its not so hard to execute a clean early game with constant injects, steady worker production and not getting supply blocked. What is impressive is the way they assess the situation. IdrA knows with how many workers he gets away, White-Ra knows exactly how many units he needs to deflect attacks and every other good pro-gamer has a general idea of when he needs which things.



And this is the critical point. In a game without an enemy we would spend our first ~8 minutes only developing our economy, expanding aggressively and producing workers as quickly as possible - after that we could tech up to the highest tier in the blink of an eye and begin to muster our army to be maxed with a high tech army shortly thereafter.



This doesn't work because, you might have guessed it, our opponent is also spending his money - probably on things that destroy our peaceful villages before our laid-out plan can fully take off. This alone forces us to make decisions - we have to pull funds away from our economy, need to spend some more on our defenses and suddenly our mapped out timings collapse - we are still at two bases at 8 minutes, our tech comes far to late because we have to get a bunch of sentries to be safe and as a result we are at 120 supply where we intended to be maxed out.



And this is how you win games. You need to know when you can invest all of your money into economy, you have to realize when army is needed and the correct tech structures should be constructed as well. And this makes Starcraft II a game of spending and pacing. The biggest challenges are to know when and how to use your money.



This obviously differs from strategy to strategy and when you read a Guide then there'll be a lot of things covered (i.e.: "How to react to a 3-Rax", "Measures against 1-1-1", "Defending quick Colossi pushes") and a lot of guidelines when to invest in upgrades, how many workers to get and when you need to produce units.



Whats the problem with that? Take a look at this excerpt about chess:



Current version: 1.1 - 04.01.2012Welcome, friend - stay a while and listen!The internet in general and especially Team Liquid offer a vast majority of guides, builds and strategy discussion. Players of every level try to contribute something to the huge pool of knowledge, branding a baneling bust with their name or stirring up a new discussion over topics like the 1-1-1, 6pools or the strength of marines.Take a look at those threads – you’ll find giant posts from players that are discussing the pros and cons of small adjustments in builds and most of those posts contain true points and knowledge about the game.On the other side there are a lot of players from the higher leagues, preaching that the only thing you need to worry about is the clean execution of whatever you like. Where does this disparity come from?Simple.But, my dear reader, maybe you can relate to a good friend of mine? He picked up SC2 a couple of days ago and after his first few games he got placed in silver, eager to prove his worth he went on to Team Liquid and began to dig through the strategy section – 2,500 threads later he knew basically everything about anything but sadly his head was overflowing with knowledge and he began to overthink anything. Instead of simply going for a nicely executed 1 Gate Expansion in PvT as he used to he tried to correctly identify the opponents’ opener and fire up the correct response. The problems that arose from that were simple – he was too hesitant, thinking far too long instead of doing what’s necessary. This leads to situations where he has maybe (but only maybe) picked the correct opener but the simple fact that he’s not used to it and begins it far too late gets him to a point where he has far too few units, economy and/or tech to handle the situation he wanted to ace.As a Grandmasters player, an experienced coach (100+ different students, 300+ hours of SC2 coaching) and as a friend who tries to help the guys out that he likes I always wanted to achieve a goal: to simplify the basics and the strategy aspects to a level where they are easy to apply and a useful tool in everyday ladder.We all know it - the feeling when your opponents last base falls and you know that you are only a couple of seconds away from the sweet taste of victory. The enemies army is shattered, his bases crushed and all of his hopes annihilated.But there are no decisions to be made in these joyful seconds - because of that we have to focus on the time before the score screen, we have to think about what actually leads up to a victory.When I talk to my students about their games then I often hear some of those quotes:This is a very scientific graph, showcasing something that I realized when I was talking with the players that I coached in my career: the longer a game goes on, the blurrier it gets in regards to the knowledge about why they lost a match.The reason for that is simple: it's easy to realize that your spawning pool was late when you got tworaxed, the conclusion that a second bunker would have been helpful to hold a rush is easy to make and so on and so forth. Regularly there will be only a handful of mistakes and a very limited amount of possible decisions in a short game. An example? There you go:I wanted to FFE in PvZ on Tal-Darim Altar.I sent out one scouting probe that randomly stumbled over 6 zerglings in the middle of the map while it tries to get to the last spawn position. I'm already at 17 supply , forge and pylon at the front, no other buildings started yet.Deciding that I need to wall-off I try to get enough buildings up to close the wall while cutting probes, but I'm unable to do so, the zerglings get into my base and I lose so many workers and mining time that I have to surrender.What could I have done differently?See? Thats a simple conclusion for a 5 minute game, but now try to imagine such a writeup for a game of 10, 15 or 20 minutes - it quickly gets laaaarge with all the different choices that we can make and that is where, because the last mistake in a game isn't neccessarily the one that lost us the whole match - if we lose a huge battle and die afterwards then our loss could be caused by unit control, lacking units, the composition being wrong, lacking reinforcements, and so on and so forth - as you can see there are a lot of different possibilites that can be spread out over the course of the whole game.And this is where it gets complicated. Have you ever read a thread in this forum where somebody wanted his replay analyzed? Take 20 players on the same skilllevel, everybody will point out something different in a 10 minute game, will have another way to approach a certain situation - this is the beauty of a complex game but also something that is frightening when you lack the knowledge and the general idea of how to look at something.Lets simplify it, shall we?Lets face it, Starcraft II is very macro oriented - this translates into the simple fact that harvesting minerals/gas and spending them is the most important fact of the game. Harvesting in itself is more or less easy - you begin the game with 6 workers, build more of them and enjoy automining, the more complex part is spending.When I say spending then I don't mean the process of pressing a button, placing a building or recruiting a unit, what I mean is making the decision what to spend your hard earned valuables on - and when to buy something.I am pretty sure that you have seen a game of Starcraft II where it felt as if a player is nigh invincible while setting up a huge timing push - think about White-Ra taking a quick third base against a terran, deflecting his attacks with sweet storms and overwhelming his opponent after 12 minutes with his strong economical advantage. Think about IdrA, building 70 drones in the first minutes of the game just to unleash a storm of Zerg units as soon as his economy is fueled.What makes this so impressive is not the way how they play the game - sure, their mechanics are good but its not so hard to execute a clean early game with constant injects, steady worker production and not getting supply blocked. What is impressive is the way they assess the situation. IdrA knows with how many workers he gets away, White-Ra knows exactly how many units he needs to deflect attacks and every other good pro-gamer has a general idea ofAnd this is the. In a game without an enemy we would spend our first ~8 minutes only developing our economy, expanding aggressively and producing workers as quickly as possible - after that we could tech up to the highest tier in the blink of an eye and begin to muster our army to be maxed with a high tech army shortly thereafter.This doesn't work because, you might have guessed it, our opponent is also spending his money - probably on things that destroy our peaceful villages before our laid-out plan can fully take off. This alone forces us to make decisions - we have to pull funds away from our economy, need to spend some more on our defenses and suddenly our mapped out timings collapse - we are still at two bases at 8 minutes, our tech comes far to late because we have to get a bunch of sentries to be safe and as a result we are at 120 supply where we intended to be maxed out.And this is how you. You need to know when you can invest all of your money into economy, you have to realize when army is needed and the correct tech structures should be constructed as well. And this makes Starcraft II a game of. The biggest challenges are to knowandto use your money.This obviously differs from strategy to strategy and when you read a Guide then there'll be a lot of things covered (i.e.: "How to react to a 3-Rax", "Measures against 1-1-1", "Defending quick Colossi pushes") and a lot of guidelines when to invest in upgrades, how many workers to get and when you need to produce units.Whats the problem with that? Take a look at this excerpt about chess: Chess is infinite: There are 400 different positions after each player makes one move apiece. There are 72,084 positions after two moves apiece. There are 9+ million positions after three moves apiece. There are 288+ billion different possible positions after four moves apiece. There are more 40-move games on Level-1 than the number of electrons in our universe. There are more game-trees of Chess than the number of galaxies (100+ billion), and more openings, defences, gambits, etc. than the number of quarks in our universe!

- Chesmayne

- Source



Can you imagine how many possible scenarios there are 10 minutes into a game of Starcraft II? Far too many to cover them with any guide. Its up to the player to make these decisions and even if he has a goal - like tinkering up a timing push at 12 minutes - it is still his duty to get there as efficiently as possible, to squeeze out the extra supply to make the attack as strong as possible or to survive against any onslaught.



Lets conclude this section:



Winning in Starcraft II relates to our ability to pace the spending of our money. We need to stay alive while getting a strong economy and the neccessary tech as quickly as possible.





INTERMISSION

Why mechanics are important







Take a look at the picture above - seems to be familiar? As we concluded a few lines ago Starcraft II is all about our ability to spend our money, we need to be able to pay for what we want while also buying enough units to stay alive. This makes it so important to have good mechanics and a good hygiene when it comes to building workers, using them, not getting supplyblocked and so on and so forth.



Whenever you do a small mistake in one of these sections you are gifting a free advantage to your opponent. You either don't get as many minerals as possible, fall behind in economy, don't get as many units, or, to put it simply, get damaged without the need for your opponent to use his own units.



We all know that nobody likes the sentence "macro better" but good mechanics make a holy difference because it's not so important if you deploy the correct strategy - when the damage you are dealing to yourself because of lacking mechanics is huge enough, then not even a counter strategy will cut it.







I made this conclusion back in the day when I was playing Brood War and as I wasn't as involved in the internet or any e-sports community back in the days I had to come up with solutions myself. I quickly realized that I could group my investments into three categories: economy, technology and army.



We have to clarify each of the three categories before we can delve deeper into the theory of this approach, so lets go ahead and take a look at the three ways of spending money.







Can you imagine how many possible scenarios there are 10 minutes into a game of Starcraft II? Far too many to cover them with any guide. Its up to the player to make these decisions and even if he has a goal - like tinkering up a timing push at 12 minutes - it is still his duty to get there as efficiently as possible, to squeeze out the extra supply to make the attack as strong as possible or to survive against any onslaught.Winning in Starcraft II relates to our ability to pace the spending of our money. We need to stay alive while getting a strong economy and the neccessary tech as quickly as possible.Take a look at the picture above - seems to be familiar? As we concluded a few lines ago Starcraft II is all about our ability to spend our money, we need to be able to pay for what we want while also buying enough units to stay alive. This makes it so important to have good mechanics and a good hygiene when it comes to building workers, using them, not getting supplyblocked and so on and so forth.Whenever you do a small mistake in one of these sections you are gifting a free advantage to your opponent. You either don't get as many minerals as possible, fall behind in economy, don't get as many units, or, to put it simply, get damaged without the need for your opponent to use his own units.We all know that nobody likes the sentence "macro better" but good mechanics make a holy difference because it's not so important if you deploy the correct strategy - when the damage you are dealing to yourself because of lacking mechanics is huge enough, then not even a counter strategy will cut it.I made this conclusion back in the day when I was playing Brood War and as I wasn't as involved in the internet or any e-sports community back in the days I had to come up with solutions myself. I quickly realized that I could group my investments into three categories:andWe have to clarify each of the three categories before we can delve deeper into the theory of this approach, so lets go ahead and take a look at the three ways of spending money. Economy describes your ability to generate minerals, gas and units.



So, in conclusion, economy is your ability to create and maintain a strong army, consisting of the following tasks:



Build a strong worker count



Harvest minerals efficiently (Splitting your workers correctly on different bases)



Gather Gas



Expand



Create enough buildings to produce units/get upgrades



You should immediately realize something important: Yes, all of those tasks actually help you on long terms, but they lack the ability to save you in case of imminent danger. Having buildings that produce units or do research is nice, but the actual usage of those buildings falls into the other categories.



So in a way this works like a bank account - you invest money for later on, sacrificing imminent strength (like early harassment) for a much stronger situation in a couple of minutes. This makes it obvious that we'd actually want to invest as much and as quickly into this category as possible to get a strong lead in the first minutes.



But the downfall of this is already woven into the last paragraph: "they lack the ability to save you in case of actual and imminent danger". When we're playing on a map on our own, only building workers and expansions, Pokebunnystyle, then its quite simple to max out in 10-11 minutes, but if you'd do something like this in a real game, your opponent would probably show up at some point and kill you.







So, in conclusion, economy is your ability to create and maintain a strong army, consisting of the following tasks:You should immediately realize something important: Yes, all of those tasks actually help you on long terms, but they lack the ability to save you in case of imminent danger. Having buildings that produce units or do research is nice, but the actual usage of those buildings falls into the other categories.So in a way this works like a bank account - you invest money for later on, sacrificing imminent strength (like early harassment) for a much stronger situation in a couple of minutes. This makes it obvious that we'd actually want to invest as much and as quickly into this category as possible to get a strong lead in the first minutes.But the downfall of this is already woven into the last paragraph:. When we're playing on a map on our own, only building workers and expansions, Pokebunnystyle, then its quite simple to max out in 10-11 minutes, but if you'd do something like this in a real game, your opponent would probably show up at some point and kill you. Technology describes your ability to unlock high tier units and research upgrades.





Someone called for a gamechanger?



One of the most important tasks in Starcraft II is choosing the correct techpath and following it through as quickly as neccessary. One of the most fun examples of this would be a 4vs4, where you defeat two of the four opponents just to get overrun by mass marines + medivacs because your basic units army lacks splash damage to deal with the strong terran force.



This can lead up to the point where one single unit decides if you are winning or losing (One Infestor with full energy to kill a large bunch of marines, two good storms, a well placed siege tank).



And, again, this leads us to a point where we have to decide to draw funds away from our army to strengthen our position later on. Infestors can be quite costly, a factory with a techlab and siege mode are huge investments for the early stages of the game but the trade-off can be quite significant if we manage to survive and one of those high tier units can heavily outperform a basic unit in cost efficiency to make up for the spent money (Wasn't there a 50-kill cloaked banshee in a GSL TvZ?).







Upgrades are a simple and straightforward way to enhance your army. For a set amount x your whole army gains strength. There is a sweet overview for the



Another important point with upgrades is the simple fact that they take a long time to be researched. This leads us to the point that we want to invest in them as quickly as possible, even when we don't have a way to profit off of them in the moment we begin our upgrades (best example would be Liquid'HerOs FFE, which begins +1 Attack when there's no zealot on the field to ensure that it finishes as soon as the own timing attack is supposed to hit).







One of the most important tasks in Starcraft II is choosing the correct techpath and following it through as quickly as neccessary. One of the most fun examples of this would be a 4vs4, where you defeat two of the four opponents just to get overrun by mass marines + medivacs because your basic units army lacks splash damage to deal with the strong terran force.This can lead up to the point where one single unit decides if you are winning or losing (One Infestor with full energy to kill a large bunch of marines, two good storms, a well placed siege tank).And, again, this leads us to a point where we have to decide to draw funds away from our army to strengthen our position later on. Infestors can be quite costly, a factory with a techlab and siege mode are huge investments for the early stages of the game but the trade-off can be quite significant if we manage to survive and one of those high tier units can heavily outperform a basic unit in cost efficiency to make up for the spent money (Wasn't there a 50-kill cloaked banshee in a GSL TvZ?).Upgrades are a simple and straightforward way to enhance your army. For a set amount x your whole army gains strength. There is a sweet overview for the critical strength of upgrades which should open your eyes on why it's a great idea to invest in them.Another important point with upgrades is the simple fact that they take a long time to be researched. This leads us to the point that we want to invest in them as quickly as possible, even when we don't have a way to profit off of them in the moment we begin our upgrades (best example would be Liquid'HerOs FFE, which begins +1 Attack when there's no zealot on the field to ensure that it finishes as soon as the own timing attack is supposed to hit). Army describes your ability to muster up an army and use it.



Okay, so, you have a strong economy, enough buildings to pump out units and even your first upgrades are started - what to do with the leftover money?



Units! After all, this is war, isn't it?



Army behaves slightly differently than the other two pillars in the sense that an army's worth is nearly immediate (except for Ultralisks) - building a unit is a quick process and your building capacity is only limited by your economy, remember?



The approach on how much money is neccessary to spend on army highly depends on your overall strategy. If you are playing a timing push or an all-in then you obviously need to maximize your army value at the time of the timing push, which often revolves around the early production of units.



When you are simply trying to play a macro game then your goal is to keep the value of your army as small as possible to make sure, that you can spend the larger amount of your money on technology and economy.



But your army does more than only consuming your money and winning battles for you, take a look at this:





funny subtitle



Your army, which includes all non-worker-units that you can build, has also the important task of scouting for you - It increases your out-of-game ressources (Which means ressources that you need but that aren't tracked by the game interface) like map awareness, informations about the plans of your opponents and how many automatons run around the map.



In case of a fight it's also your duty to maximize its efficiency which means that you need a good position to fight in, should use all your abilities as well as possible and generally do everything possible to make sure that you get the better end of the battle. As fighting a good battle is a guide on its own I won't touch that topic here. If anybody has a good link to include, then please pass it on to me - if there's nothing showing up then I will try to write my own article about at at some point in the future.







All of this seems pretty simple and straightforward, right? Good! It is very important that we have a clear idea on how the different aspects of our financial plan work. This will enable us to easily map our gameplan and alternate it depending on the things we scout - lets take a look at some simple examples!



Why fast expansions work



Allright, so, lets approach this with our ETA-Concept. Whats the actual idea that we want to realize with a fast expansion?



Economy - Invest a lot

Technology - Unlock a key technology

Army - Invest as much as neccessary



We can translate this into something like this:



E +++

T ++

A +



As we can see, we have to invest a lot of money in our economy (350 - 400 on the Hatch/Nexus/CC) and, more importantly, a crazy amount of money on workers (16-22 x 50 = 800 - 1100 minerals).



After that has happened we most regularly want to invest into one key technology and use our strong economy to use this one technology to the max (2 Colossi Push, a strong MMM-Attack, quickly building up a muta flock).



This already leads us to the point that all this crazy teching and investing into a lot of workers will strongly diminish our ability to build a fearsome army. Because of that we need to make certain trade-offs to be able to still have enough to hold on to our lives.



Examples of this include:



White-Ras famous HT-Expansion where he uses High Templars to quickly grab a third base while still being able to handle bio attacks exceptionally well. This works because the initial investment in technology may be high but as soon as he's established the templar archive and researched storm he'll be able to produce 50/150 units that nearly always kill far more than their own worth, enabling him to close the gap in army value.



Utilizing a lot of spine crawlers - they can barely walk and only attack a player when Nestea has them but they are insanely cost effective because of their large pool of HP and their relatively high damage.



Using Bunkers and repair to bolster the strength of a small army while we build up all the neccessary tech and production buildings (Terran production is special in the sense that it needs a lot more time to be set up compared to Protoss and Zerg, mainly because their building time is Building time of the building + building time of the addon)



As you can see we are either using a strong tech (high templars) or our defenders advantage with units that excel when holding a position but which are unable to be thrown at our opponent at any given point (spine crawlers and bunkers). Apart from that, every race has several defensive perks that they can deploy to further strengthen their resilience (sentries, transfuse on spine crawlers, repair on bunkers).



Now, lets turn the board and take a look at the options of our opponent:



As soon as he scouts the fast expansion he'll be able to conclude the course of the next few minutes. He obviously has no clue which technology will be deployed or whats the exact goal of the opponent in terms of army compositions or timing attacks but he knows that he has at least a margin of 5-6 minutes in which he will not be attacked.



With this knowledge he can adjust his own ETA, depending on how he wants to approach the situation - offensive or defensive.



Offensive:



Economy - Only get a basic economy going (16 workers on minerals, 3-6 on gas)

Technology - Only unlock the neccessary units for the attack

Army - As much as possible



Following this he can tinker up a strong timing attack that should hit at a time where our opponent is still busy to pump all of his funds in the long term parts of his plan. This will result in a weak army and only a couple of the advantages we discussed above to keep him alive - So, simply put, we need a crowbar to disable our opponents defenses and a gun to kill him.



Examples? There you go:



Ghost pushes, designed to render sentries useless and then bumrush a weak protoss army with a huge ball of marines and marauders to secure early victory. This is especially popular on maps like Shakuras Plateau and Antiga Shipyard where a lot of protosses try to use the ramp for defensive maneuvers.



Infestor-Ling-Timing-Attacks that hit before the first colossi are out, designed to overcome the sentry defense with infested terrans and using any breach to stream zerglings in that can quickly dispatch the common Sentry-Stalker-Composition as soon as a favourable position is no longer a given fact.



Warpgate-All-Ins, often coupled with either a smart proxy pylon or a warp prism to render static defenses useless and overwhelm the opponent at a position where his defensive measures are worthless (i.e.: streaming units in a terrans main who only has a bunker and four marines in front to defend against small stalker forces)



Defensive:



This is where the fun begins. Regularly you want something like this:



Economy - Invest a lot

Technology - Unlock a key technology

Army - Invest as much as neccessary



As you can see, this is an exact mirror of the opponents ideas but he obviously has a head start on this when you try to simply react to what he saw after beginning with, say, a 3-gate expansion.



Because of that we have to hold true to our own ideas. He wants to expand quickly, tech up as soon as possible and skip defenses? Then you should do your small army investment as early as possible so you can apply some pressure with a small army of units.



We regularly said that you want to prolong army investments as long as possible but in this special case we are switching things up, getting our army quickly, trying to force our opponent to a reaction - because he cannot know if we are going to follow up a small set of units with more units, he simply has to react, get more bunkers/spines/cannons or other things that will slow down his tech.



This will give you the edge in the sense that you can try to get back into the macro affairs - while he struggles to get his defenses up, which slows down his overall process, you can quickly pump as much into your own economy to catch up to him.



So when you had an offensive opening in mind either follow through with it or apply some soft pressure while expanding for yourself.



If you had a defensive opening in mind then you obviously simply can follow through with it while trying to figure out the exact plan of your opponent (So you don't get stuck with a marauder/hellion push against a lot of void rays).



What scouting has to offer with the ETA-Concept



When I scout an opponent then I'm always using my ETA to conclude what I should do to react to it in the bounds of my options. Let me try to explain:



Lets say I have played a FFE (No Stargate, just a Forge, a Gateway and a cannon, starting quick +1 weapons) against a Zerg player, its 6 minutes into the game and I try to figure out what hes doing. Up to this point my ETA looks like this:

E+++



T+



A+

With that in mind I try to figure out his own ideas, for the sake of pacing in the guide lets limit it to two different scenarios:



Roach-Ling-All-In:



When I send a first zealot out and let it walk directly into his main base then I regularly stumble either over a lot of workers which lets me conclude that we are going to enjoy a macro dance or I'm actually seeing a couple of roaches, happily marching towards me. If I see the roaches then his ETA looks like this:

E+



T++



A+++++

As we can see I'm ahead in economy by a huge, huge margin but he has a slight technology advantage as he has unlocked roaches, which are really strong in this situation and he has mustered up quite a lot of roaches and will shortly thereafter build a lot of speedlings to follow this up. Because of this I know that I have to adjust my own ETA to something like this:

E+++



T+



A++++++

If I had started with a stargate then this would be easy, thicken up my wall, chronoboosting void rays and holding it like this but as he's already marching towards me I need short term solutions and, as we remember, there is only one pillar that offers short-term-solutions: army. Because of that I begin to use the only tech thats useful to me and spam cannons + sentries to muster up a quick defense.



After I've done that my opponent will regularly try to macro up behind it if he realized that I scouted it - if I don't scout it then I regularly just die unless I'm lucky.



And this is where the factor comes in that we discussed earlier. I have no clue if he will build 3, 5 or 15 roaches to bust me, this means that I have to take the gamble and invest a lot of money into cannons and other defensive measures and if I do that then he has the simple option to double expand behind that and up his worker count which will give him the option to close the economy gap to me thanks to the pressure he has applied.



Macro - Quick third



When I see a quick third on his part then his ETA will look like this:

E+++



T+



A+

and it will gradually get more and more pluses in the E-section, barely none in the T-section and, when neccessary a lot of pluses in the army section to throw back my attacks.



This has some serious implications on my own strategy: I either need to quickly expand again on my own, utilizing a lot of defensive measures to be safe against his waves of low-tier-units that he can deploy when neccessary or I try to apply enough pressure to cancel his third. In this special case that is simply doable because of the way his ETA is mapped out.



We all know that +1/+0 Zealots quickly dispatch of large +0/+0 zergling groups because of the critical upgrade advantage which reduces the amount of swings a zealot needs to kill a zergling from 3 to 2, reducing kill time by 33%. This means that my army will be perfectly fine to kill his low tier army, which means that I can modify my ETA in a fashion like this:

E+++++



T++



A+++++

Everything I do is to build more and more workers and warping in zealots as soon as possible, which will a.) strongly hurt his economy and will make it unable for him to invest more into that sector but also b.) slows down my own technological advance.



Fighting the turtle





No major attacks happened up to this point



Here's a riddle - is this a good situation for the green player?



+ Show Spoiler [Solution] +

E+++++++++



T+++



A+++

while the terrans ETA looks like this:

E+++



T+++++



A+++++++++

From the terrans perspective there is no use in trying to take a macro game and because of that he's simply trying to tinker up the strongest all-in-attack that he can muster up which will result in a strong push with a technology of his choice (As it is TvP it would probably something along the lines of MMMG) - if you, as the green player, now invest so much into economy then you take the danger of getting overrun because yes, you are in general more minerals and gas worth than him, but his army is still superior.



When you already are ahead in one aspect then its often times a good idea to dump some money into other aspects.

You control the map? Grab another base to strengthen your economic part



You are already one base up on a player thats caged in on two bases? start to get army and tech, you don't need 2+ bases over him, as soon as you are economically ahead, you are fine.



You have unlocked critical tech? Either use it offensively and spend your whole money on army for a timing attack or hold your ground with those high-tier-units while expanding agressively.

As you can see its rarely adviceable to push one of your advantages further and further, instead you should try to gain an advantage in one section and then use this advantage to push ahead of your opponent in a second sector of the game. No, probably not. Try to think about it like this - the ETA of the green player looks like this:while the terrans ETA looks like this:From the terrans perspective there is no use in trying to take a macro game and because of that he's simply trying to tinker up the strongest all-in-attack that he can muster up which will result in a strong push with a technology of his choice (As it is TvP it would probably something along the lines of MMMG) - if you, as the green player, now invest so much into economy then you take the danger of getting overrun because yes, you are in general more minerals and gas worth than him, but his army is still superior.When you already are ahead in one aspect then its often times a good idea to dump some money into other aspects.As you can see its rarely adviceable to push one of your advantages further and further, instead you should try to gain an advantage in one section and then use this advantage to push ahead of your opponent in a second sector of the game.

_________________________________________________________



Conclusion



All of this basically comes down to the ETA-thought, it reveals weak spots of my opponent (I can outlast him if his economy is weak, use technological advantages (like critical upgrades or hier tier units) against someone relying on basic units or overwhelm/outexpand someone who lacks the punch to hurt me - and I can make all of these conclusions quickly, on the spot and without the necessity to plan out every little option my opponent can do.



This section will be expanded further and further so if there are questions from your side or scenarios that you would like me to explain, then please go ahead and shoot the question, I'd be glad to help out!







Well, this is it. I took a long time to write this while lying in hospital and I really hope that the time paid off. I haven't achieved anything I wanted to achieve but I'm confident that this is a good start.



I will probably revamp this whole blob of text a couple of times as I've already done before - if there is anything that you would like to be cleared up or changed then please let me know and I will try to work it into one of my revisions!



I'm grateful for the time you've invested to read this and I sincerely hope that it has helped you with your endeavours to be a better gamer.



Huge shoutouts to Neoreon, who made all the sweet headers and to Shiona, who took her time to correct a lot of my silly english mistakes.





* My Stream * - * My Twitter * - * Facebook Page * ___________________________________________ Okay, so, you have a strong economy, enough buildings to pump out units and even your first upgrades are started - what to do with the leftover money?Units! After all, this is war, isn't it?Army behaves slightly differently than the other two pillars in the sense that an army's worth is(except for Ultralisks) - building a unit is a quick process and your building capacity is only limited by your economy, remember?The approach on how much money is neccessary to spend on army highly depends on your overall strategy. If you are playing aor anthen you obviously need toyour army value at the time of the timing push, which often revolves around the early production of units.When you are simply trying to play athen your goal is to keep the value of your army asto make sure, that you can spend the larger amount of your money on technology and economy.But your army does more than only consuming your money and winning battles for you, take a look at this:Your army, which includes all non-worker-units that you can build, has also the important task of scouting for you - It increases your out-of-game ressources (Which means ressources that you need but that aren't tracked by the game interface) like map awareness, informations about the plans of your opponents and how many automatons run around the map.In case of a fight it's also your duty to maximize its efficiency which means that you need a good position to fight in, should use all your abilities as well as possible and generally do everything possible to make sure that you get the better end of the battle. As fighting a good battle is a guide on its own I won't touch that topic here. If anybody has a good link to include, then please pass it on to me - if there's nothing showing up then I will try to write my own article about at at some point in the future.All of this seems pretty simple and straightforward, right? Good! It is very important that we have a clear idea on how the different aspects of our financial plan work. This will enable us to easily map our gameplan and alternate it depending on the things we scout - lets take a look at some simple examples!Allright, so, lets approach this with our ETA-Concept. Whats the actual idea that we want to realize with a fast expansion?Economy - Invest a lotTechnology - Unlock a key technologyArmy - Invest as much as neccessaryWe can translate this into something like this:E +++T ++A +As we can see, we have to invest a lot of money in our economy (350 - 400 on the Hatch/Nexus/CC) and, more importantly, a crazy amount of money on workers (16-22 x 50 = 800 - 1100 minerals).After that has happened we most regularly want to invest into one key technology and use our strong economy to use this one technology to the max (2 Colossi Push, a strong MMM-Attack, quickly building up a muta flock).This already leads us to the point that all this crazy teching and investing into a lot of workers will strongly diminish our ability to build a fearsome army. Because of that we need to make certain trade-offs to be able to still have enough to hold on to our lives.Examples of this include:As you can see we are either using a strong tech (high templars) or our defenders advantage with units that excel when holding a position but which are unable to be thrown at our opponent at any given point (spine crawlers and bunkers). Apart from that, every race has several defensive perks that they can deploy to further strengthen their resilience (sentries, transfuse on spine crawlers, repair on bunkers).Now, lets turn the board and take a look at the options of our opponent:As soon as he scouts the fast expansion he'll be able to conclude the course of the next few minutes. He obviously has no clue which technology will be deployed or whats the exact goal of the opponent in terms of army compositions or timing attacks but he knows that he has at least a margin of 5-6 minutes in which he will not be attacked.With this knowledge he can adjust his own ETA, depending on how he wants to approach the situation - offensive or defensive.Economy - Only get a basic economy going (16 workers on minerals, 3-6 on gas)Technology - Only unlock the neccessary units for the attackArmy - As much as possibleFollowing this he can tinker up a strong timing attack that should hit at a time where our opponent is still busy to pump all of his funds in the long term parts of his plan. This will result in a weak army and only a couple of the advantages we discussed above to keep him alive - So, simply put, we need a crowbar to disable our opponents defenses and a gun to kill him.Examples? There you go:This is where the fun begins. Regularly you want something like this:Economy - Invest a lotTechnology - Unlock a key technologyArmy - Invest as much as neccessaryAs you can see, this is an exact mirror of the opponents ideas but he obviously has a head start on this when you try to simply react to what he saw after beginning with, say, a 3-gate expansion.Because of that we have to hold true to our own ideas. He wants to expand quickly, tech up as soon as possible and skip defenses? Then you should do your small army investment as early as possible so you can apply some pressure with a small army of units.We regularly said that you want to prolong army investments as long as possible but in this special case we are switching things up, getting our army quickly, trying to force our opponent to a reaction - because he cannot know if we are going to follow up a small set of units with more units, he simply has to react, get more bunkers/spines/cannons or other things that will slow down his tech.This will give you the edge in the sense that you can try to get back into the macro affairs - while he struggles to get his defenses up, which slows down his overall process, you can quickly pump as much into your own economy to catch up to him.So when you had an offensive opening in mind either follow through with it or apply some soft pressure while expanding for yourself.If you had a defensive opening in mind then you obviously simply can follow through with it while trying to figure out the exact plan of your opponent (So you don't get stuck with a marauder/hellion push against a lot of void rays).When I scout an opponent then I'm always using my ETA to conclude what I should do to react to it in the bounds of my options. Let me try to explain:Lets say I have played a FFE (No Stargate, just a Forge, a Gateway and a cannon, starting quick +1 weapons) against a Zerg player, its 6 minutes into the game and I try to figure out what hes doing. Up to this point my ETA looks like this:With that in mind I try to figure out his own ideas, for the sake of pacing in the guide lets limit it to two different scenarios:When I send a first zealot out and let it walk directly into his main base then I regularly stumble either over a lot of workers which lets me conclude that we are going to enjoy a macro dance or I'm actually seeing a couple of roaches, happily marching towards me. If I see the roaches then his ETA looks like this:As we can see I'm ahead in economy by a huge, huge margin but he has a slight technology advantage as he has unlocked roaches, which are really strong in this situation and he has mustered up quite a lot of roaches and will shortly thereafter build a lot of speedlings to follow this up. Because of this I know that I have to adjust my own ETA to something like this:If I had started with a stargate then this would be easy, thicken up my wall, chronoboosting void rays and holding it like this but as he's already marching towards me I need short term solutions and, as we remember, there is only one pillar that offers short-term-solutions: army. Because of that I begin to use the only tech thats useful to me and spam cannons + sentries to muster up a quick defense.After I've done that my opponent will regularly try to macro up behind it if he realized that I scouted it - if I don't scout it then I regularly just die unless I'm lucky.And this is where the factor comes in that we discussed earlier. I have no clue if he will build 3, 5 or 15 roaches to bust me, this means that I have to take the gamble and invest a lot of money into cannons and other defensive measures and if I do that then he has the simple option to double expand behind that and up his worker count which will give him the option to close the economy gap to me thanks to the pressure he has applied.When I see a quick third on his part then his ETA will look like this:and it will gradually get more and more pluses in the E-section, barely none in the T-section and, when neccessary a lot of pluses in the army section to throw back my attacks.This has some serious implications on my own strategy: I either need to quickly expand again on my own, utilizing a lot of defensive measures to be safe against his waves of low-tier-units that he can deploy when neccessary or I try to apply enough pressure to cancel his third. In this special case that is simply doable because of the way his ETA is mapped out.We all know that +1/+0 Zealots quickly dispatch of large +0/+0 zergling groups because of the critical upgrade advantage which reduces the amount of swings a zealot needs to kill a zergling from 3 to 2, reducing kill time by 33%. This means that my army will be perfectly fine to kill his low tier army, which means that I can modify my ETA in a fashion like this:Everything I do is to build more and more workers and warping in zealots as soon as possible, which will a.) strongly hurt his economy and will make it unable for him to invest more into that sector but also b.) slows down my own technological advance.Here's a riddle - is this a good situation for the green player?_________________________________________________________All of this basically comes down to the ETA-thought, it reveals weak spots of my opponent (I can outlast him if his economy is weak, use technological advantages (like critical upgrades or hier tier units) against someone relying on basic units or overwhelm/outexpand someone who lacks the punch to hurt me - and I can make all of these conclusions quickly, on the spot and without the necessity to plan out every little option my opponent can do.Well, this is it. I took a long time to write this while lying in hospital and I really hope that the time paid off. I haven't achieved anything I wanted to achieve but I'm confident that this is a good start.I will probably revamp this whole blob of text a couple of times as I've already done before - if there is anything that you would like to be cleared up or changed then please let me know and I will try to work it into one of my revisions!I'm grateful for the time you've invested to read this and I sincerely hope that it has helped you with your endeavours to be a better gamer.Huge shoutouts to Neoreon, who made all the sweet headers and to Shiona, who took her time to correct a lot of my silly english mistakes. EU GML P | Check my Stream (with commentary!) -> www.twitch.tv/xFelo