Two Protoss vs Protoss games

I’ve played two PvPs today as well as a range of other games. But those two games exemplifies some of the problems I am having. Probably problems everyone trying to improve at Starcraft I having.

In the first game I put on early pre assure, he blocked his ramp with force fields and captured some of my units and killed them. I killed some of his as well. A fairly even exchange. We then both expanded twice and the game turned into a heavy macro fest. I tried to attack his 3rd base and had significantly more collosi than him, but he had a couple of void rays. I lost that exchange by a tiny margin, but in the next major battle he had 4 or 5 void rays and my lead in collosi was completely nullifed by that. I ended up losing the game like that.

Im not so impressed with patch 1.2s upgrade of the void ray. Yeah it hit collosi harder now, but it is slow as hell and there will always be stalkers around too and they die quite fast. That is my take on it anyways.

On to game two. Early game was pretty much as before, except this time I went stargate instead my second robotics. I got out fewer collosi and a couple of void rays and was ready for the first engagement. We met and the exchange was fairly even. Hard to say who won or lost there. He was clearly pumping out collosi from more robotics facilities than me, but on the other hand my force of void rays were growing fast now. We finally met in one big battle and my void rays died fast after which his superior number of collosi wiped me out.

Wtf! And I repeat: WTF!?! What lesson regarding the relative value of a pure collosi build versus one where void rays are mixed in should I learn here? I’m baffled. Sure I may have lost du e to bad unit control or due to me just sucking in general, but I was clearly ahead in the early game and my macro was clearly better than both my opponents. How come I lost both the games then?

Knowing what to learn from a given defeat is hard. Way harder than actually playing the game. And it makes me frustrated and very much aware of my suckiness. Bah….!

Going Against the Trend

I know PvZ is considered slightly in Protoss favor at the moment. That is not what I experience. I’ve lost 9 of my last 15 games – the majority of those against Zergs. In my frustration I have probably been a little on a tilt too. Not a pretty thing.

I think that the main reason for my loses is an overall shift in the meta game. And that I feel that I am behind on the learning curve here. A couple of months back it was all about mutalisks and using the mobility of Zerg vs Protoss. That has caused me to go light on zealots which now has become a problem when mass zerglings into roaches seems to be the new standard opening.

I suck at this game and often feel that I mis-click more than I should. Or mis-judge the situation when in hindsight it was obvious what I should have done. That becomes frustrating after 6-7 loses in a row. And everything just builds on top of that.

Now I am simply dreading playing versus Zerg and at the same time I find Protoss vs Protoss a really complicated and scary matchup. I’m considering a race-switch, but I also know it is a huge change and that there is a lot I would have to re-learn. I wish I didn’t suck so much at this.

Time is Up

So I have only about 3 minutes left on my Trial Account which means that I won’t be playing any more games on it. At least not for now.

In the end I managed to get 38 games done in the 7 hours of play time. 10 games I threw on purpose, 5 I really lost and 22 I won. From a confidence building perspective, playing in Bronze is certainly good! I didn’t manage to get out of Bronze, but in the end I was mainly playing people in Silver and even got one match against a Gold player.

I think this has a lot to do with me encountering a lot of other players considered for promotion. I think the match making system prefers people of similar MMR-rating and of the same league. This means that people who are close to being promoted will more likely meet each other and those who do well in those matches should be promoted first.

Another factor is probably that you don’t get promoted before you have leveled out in skill. As long as you still do good even when matched up against higher ranked players.

So what did I learn playing these games? First of all the level in Silver is actually a lot higher than I had imagined. Or I got to play a segment of the Silver league, which is. People have decent macro and at least try to copy builds from higher leagues. I really think that the level of play that I encounter in Diamond is only slightly better than what I have met in Silver.

One difference is that barracks play is a lot more popular compared to mech-builds. Especially in TvT this is the case. There are also Protoss’ going mass carriers. Something I actually lost to once and I think my mistake was to think that I could just ignore it since I obviously was the better player. That kind of hubris will get you killed even in Silver.

I think I’ll end this post with this little gem: In my third game I SCV rushed prezemo and killed 4 of his probes, then I attacked my own in order to not win. He obviously thought that he was pro and I was not.

Download the last replays here (28-38).