Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Zerg Strategy: Stupid mistakes even pros make

I've watched a couple of Day9 dailies and GSL pro games lately, and I was struck by the following mistakes by Zerg players:
  • Making a Spine Crawler wall without any Spore Crawlers for detection
  • Making Spines to protect against marine drops, but no Spore to kill the medivac, such that the marines can just pick up and fly away again.  Spines also suck against upgraded marines, by the way!
  • Poor building placement, and not using buildings to wall off against hellions, for example
  • Failing to spread creep in one's main:  for vision, Queen movement, and so that Spores can be placed to ward off drops and air units
  • Forgetting to retake Xel'Naga watch towers
  • Not building a single Overseer to accompany one's lategame army.
  • Attack-moving up a ramp with one's whole army, leaving all the units except one to dance around trying to attack the one cannon at range instead of mowing through the wall.
  • Overproducing Hydras.  Seriously - Hydralisks suck for almost everything (other than perhaps defense against a Gateway army by Protoss), and even if they help you defend a push or air attack, they are terrible at counterattacking due to their low speed, and should be considered more of a slightly-more-mobile fixed defense.  I think they are even worse than fixed defenses because of their low hp.
  • Moving your Infestors with the same hotkey as the rest of your army.  Nothing gets these expensive, awesome units killed fast than letting them A-move to the front lines and get pulverized without doing a damn thing.
While I don't advocate working on this at the expense of your macro if you haven't hit Diamond yet, if you're going to fix a few last things about your game play, do these too.

2 comments:

  1. They are, in my opinion, not stupid mistakes. Common perhpas, but not stupid. And I advice you to refrain yourlsef to use that word again. This because no player, be it noob or pro, can keep a perfect coordination at macro, micro, scout, map control, stop/make harrasments, etc.

    Also let´s not forget that everyone has their own strategies & own style of gameplay, and if controling a Xel'Naga tower is not part of it (or any of the above mentioned), then you have no right to call them "stupid mistakes".

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  2. Wow - kinda defensive, aren't you? Keep in mind that the title is MEANT to draw attention, so that people want to read it, and even to respond!

    Like I mentioned in my bio - I've watched a TON of replays and pro games. Most of those... failings(?) can easily be fixed by forming some good habits, regardless of your APM, and almost all the points I mentioned frequently result in situations that can lose you the game, and cost very little to fix. These aren't stylistic points - they are THINGS YOU SHOULD BE DOING (or not doing). Yes, I agree that we all let things slip from time to time, but if you're focused on improvement, you should try to follow what I'm mentioning above, or at least ignore it FOR A REASON (such as you're trying to hit a really tight timing and don't have the resources/APM/whatever to spare), not just because you didn't think it was important.

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