This one is a pretty hard to put into words, as it’s very circumstancial. There are not that many hard and fast rules about it, but it’s something every StarCraft player should know.

Time for some theoretical situations!

Situation 1, you are Terran, he is Protoss.

You open up with a standard build in mind: 1 rax gasless expand. When you get to your opponent’s base, you find that he is going for the Nexus first into Forge expand. (for those of you who don’t know, it matches up favorably against 1 rax expands from Terran, getting a fast economy as well as fast upgrades – it does what you are doing, but a little bit more.)

You have a lot of choices from here. Here are two that I see a lot of Terrans choose, but in theory are not the best choices:

1. You can switch into (if you haven’t started the cc yet, and sometimes if you have) some sort of Marine/SCV allin.

2. You can go right up to Medivacs with Stim as you were planning to before the game started, and try to pick him apart.

You can and will pick up a decent amount of wins with these responses. As I mentioned before in another article on SCDojo, people make a lot of mistakes in this game. The problem is, if you choose one of these two routes, that’s exactly what your opponent has to do for you to win. Yeah, you might be able to force mistakes (Infact, how that I say that, I think I might write something on that later), but it really comes down to him making mistakes which allow you to take the victory.

He’s put a build out there that gives him a slight advantage vs you. Theoretically, the best counter is to do it right back to them. To do a real counter to the build, one that now gives YOU the slight advantage, and forces him to either do it back, or to do a strategy that requires you making a mistake. (ah, the beautiful dance that is high level Starcraft S2).

So, to quickly analyze the situation, he’s getting a really good economy + fast upgrades against your passive fast expansion, by being even more passive. (you have very little chance to attack or do damage to him in the early game with your build, thus allowing him to give away any chance of doing any damage to you, to take an even bigger advantage). The counter strategy? Make a fast 3rd Command Center in your main base. Add a couple of Engineering Bays as well.

Bam. More upgrades, more economy. Ball’s in your court, Protoss. A good example game for this specific scenario would be ThorZain vs Alicia on Antiga Shipyard in the NASL season 3. It’s a bad and anticlimactic game, but ThorZain shows beautiful choices based upon what he scouts.



Situation 2. You are Protoss, he is Terran.

I’m going to take this one directly out of a game I’m watching in the background as I write this. I was actually watching HasuObs vs Demuslim from the NASL, game 1 on Shattered Temple, and the play I saw made me want to write this.

HasuObs decided on Colossus tech. His observer scouted that Demuslim was not going for a 3rd Command Center at a normal time, and was instead adding some additional Barracks, going up to 7 on 2 base. This always means they are going to try to either A: kill you the second you leave your base, or B: kill you while you are in your base.

Now, this was a perfect situation, in theory, for HasuObs. He had 1/1 upgrades on the way. He had some Colossi out already. It was 2 base vs 2 base. He had amazing scouting intel, knowing that Demuslim was focusing only on his army.

The in-game scenario: both have 1/1 upgrades, both have 2 bases. Demuslim made the choice to not follow a “regular” flow, by not getting ready for a 3rd base. Since he made the choice, and HasuObs scouted it, it’s time for Hasu to react and do what Demuslim is doing, but a little bit more.

Since Demuslim is focusing so heavily on his army, Hasu must do the same. Colossi and Sentries are the key here. They will allow Hasu to shred through the army of Demuslim. He needs a bigger and better army. Now, in this game, HasuObs kind of did that, but also started 2/2 and Blink upgrades. That is doing what your opponent is doing, but doing way more. If Demuslim had chosen to just wait outside of Hasu’s base, this could have been a good call. But that was not the plan. A little bit more in this case would have been to continue pumping gas into units, but maybe get 1 more upgrade, certainly not 3. That’s overkill.

HasuObs did lose that game. And then while I was writing this, I got to game 3 on Tal'Darim Altar. It was basically the same exact builds from both sides, except this time HasuObs only got Blink, and put more money into his army. He crushed Demuslim’s army and took the series. Mad props to HasuObs for identifying the tiny mistake he made in game 1 and fixing it in time for game 3. Huge respect, doing something like that against a player the calibre of Demuslim mid-series is such a difficult feat.

There are so many more examples, but my brain is getting tired.

Some other examples, without going too in depth include:

PvP: Remember the days of 4 gates only? If controlled correctly, the 24 Probe 4 gate matched up very well against the 20 Probe 4 gate. Same thing as your opponent, just a little bit more.

ZvZ: Remember NesTea’s first ZvZ loss? Me neither. Never happened. But if it did, it was because DIMAGA did just slightly more than NesTea (and NesTea ended up doing a bit too much in one game iirc).

Ok, sorry, I’m better at talking than writing, and my brain is completely taxed by trying to not jibber jabber here.

THE END.

P.S, gl!