Victory – eludes me again

So in secrecy I signed up for a tournament hosted by www.sc2pod.com suspecting that mostly casual players would compete. I did – on purpose – not make a big announcement on the blog about it because I know I suck and did not want to jinx it. It was a double elimination tournament where each set was played as a best of 3. A ton of games. Most players were Protoss.

All games were supposed to be done on one Sunday evening, but in the end it simply got to late and the final couple of games were played yesterday. Sunday ended well for me.

Since I got so far in the tournament I didn’t get to see that many of the other games that the they streamed (you have to go to about 2h50m to see any of my games). My impression was that there were quite a lot around my own level and about as many at a level or two below.

So Sunday I won the winner’s bracket and my opponent from the final Khalleb had to play the final of the loser’s bracket. After having won that yesterday we played again and this time around I threw away the games completely. I think my main problem as a player is a lack of consistency and Sunday I played my very best and Monday my very worst.

Replays: Download here.

Improvements

I’d like to report some improvements, but unfortunately I have none. Well, my APM has gone up a notch again but at the cost of some precision I think. Hopefully that will come back.

I played 3 PvZ on iccup tonight and lost them all. Frustrated I logged on to battle.net and met up King[RCG]. He is a danish old-timers. He told me he picked the game up again two days ago, so naturally I challenged him hoping to get an easy kill. He beat me in 10 minutes on Destination – a map he had never seen before.

Sigh! I … suck … so … bad. Why can I not learn?

Map: Andromeda

I really don’t like this map. Not just because I lost three games on it tonight (I suck, I’ve told you so before), but because it is so hard to figure out where to place your buildings.

If you place your buildings around your nexus, dragoons tends to get stuck and it is hard to fit them all on one screen. This makes bookmarking all your gateways on F4 really hard.

I tend to build my buildings in the white area as it is easier to fit gateways to the left and right of a pylon as compared to north and south of one. On the other hand this means that your units have to get past your main on their way out. Not a smart layout.

Placing your gateways in the yellow area seems to be the correct answer, but it requires you to place a pylon about the center of the yellow rectangle pretty early in a game. Probably the first or second pylon depending on whether you fast expand or not.

Against Zerg this seems a bit dangerous as well. You want your buildings in tight so you can defend your base against mutalisk harassment with as few units and canons as possible. Not easy on this map.

Domination

So I play 1-on-1s on iccup and want to win. I rarely do, ‘cause I suck. Sometimes I get in contact with more casual players who are even worse than me and we go 2-on-2 or something similar. Recently I have been playing a lot of games with one guy called Darkan.

He is a 60’ish APM player and he has a lot to learn still. Today we played and won an amazing series of games. The most impressive of them were a 2-on-2 on Python, where we were Protoss and Terran vs two Terrans. During the game I felt that I dominated the game so much and that is a very nice feeling.

I especially like this “perfect psi-storm”. My two templars killed a total of 16 SCVs in 4 storms combined. I like both the drop and the use of the magic box to cast them simultaneously.

When we had almost won, I ran into a huge number of battle cruisers and got of an amazing stasis. That was another nice detail in a long game.

Most of the game I had a supply around 170 and that was almost as much as both of our opponents combined. Amazing.

Replay: Download This!