**** Original Starcraft 2 Thread ****

A win is a win. Just some things I think you can change to help tune your play:

1) You put down your first pylon at 8 supply, and your nexus lies idle for a reasonable while. This is sub-optimal economically. Generally putting a pylon down at 9 supply minimises the amount of time your nexus is not producing probes. The main reason you would put down an early pylon is if you intend to sacrifice economy to get a really early unit out.

2) You put down your gateway at 11, and gas at 13. Generally a standard build is 9, 12, 14. So you're just one off out of sequence, and the knock on effect hurt your early economy a bit.

3) You didn't research warp gates as soon as your cyber core was done. Unless you have a really good reason (for example v. terran, I delay warp gates to get 2 stalkers out fast) research it and cb it.

4) Queuing up probes. You had sometimes 3 probes queued up at your nexus. That's 100 minerals that could be put into getting a tech structure, unit or upgrade or pylon quicker!

5) You put down 4 gates, but weren't really using them, and your income was ~500 minerals. So you were sitting on money that could have been units to go attack with. Generally if you're going to go with robotics units, as you were, put down two gateways, then a robo, then another 2 gateways when you can afford it (while making units!). That way you can be building observers/immortals which take a lot longer than gateway units, and when the extra 2 gws come up, warp gates should be ready and you can make a push.

The terran punished you with a really weak attack, simply because you were too focussed on building gateways, and not building units.

6) I like the forward pylon, and the watchtower occupation that's good. Remember to keep scouting though, once with your 9 or 12 probe (i.e. the one that builds your first pylon or gateway) and again around 20 supply. Always try and catch when they are pushing out of their base.

7) That first expo near his base is cute, but generally that is a really bad idea, better players will scout that before long, and it's so far away from your main that you cannot adequately defend it, like you could your natural expansion. I like that you kept expanding though, this is key.

When a Terran turtles like this, really you can't approach from the air or ground. Probably in this base with such an economic advantage, you just wait for him to mine out and for him to push out. But if you're impatient, probably mass up 10-15 void rays a mothership and some templars. Against that many turrets and thors thouguh you would just have to abuse an angle perhaps coming into the back via his main.

You couldn't have known that though :)
 
Cheers Kar, all good advice. I tried getting used to a build order against AI before playing humans (as I'm so inexperienced with Protoss). I really like the diversity in builds that is quite easy to achieve if the opponent techs one way.

Duly noted about not building enough units at the start, I had to then panic defend, and realised afterwards another couple of stalkers (which I could afford) would have saved me that trouble, and saved my economy the hit.
 
looks sexy :D
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now I can take a small break from the game or take it more easy.
 
I remember reading something about Vsync not working for the menus or something in StarCraft 2? causing you to go to crazy high frames and thus overheating your graphics card and causing bad things to happen, might want to make sure it's not happening to you.

[Edit]: Here's and article about it, with a fix :)
That seems to have sorted it, thank you :)
 
Kar can you look at these replays and give me some pointers too, if you don't mind lol.

I've got a match here PvP which I won but I seem to lose control a bit towards the end, poor macro I think.

http://screplays.com/replays/milkybk/5768

I don't have a Terran loss saved but I still need help with these because I'm losing more than I win. As soon as I've got a half decent replay I'll upload it.

You did quite well here. You had a good unit composition for PvP, you saw the Dark Shrine and acted very well by putting down some cannons and getting plenty of observers, which you were very active with which is always good. There are 2 common flaws to your play though which happens to absolutely everyone when they first start playing. I was watching your camera for most of the game, and you watched every single battle that happened all the way through. So for that period of time, you weren't making units.

Even outside of battles you weren't making units constantly. You had plenty of warpgates (1 more than needed but I'll get to that later) but there were periods of time were you could have warped in units, you even had the money and the gates were off cooldown but you weren't warping in anything. Watching the battles is fine. But you need to switch back to your base every 10-15 seconds and do something. Watching the battles is useless. Switch back to your base and build a pylon, or build a probe, or make more units. Then switch back to the battle and see how you're doing. Apollo said it perfectly today during the IEM cast - macro is a rhythm, you need to find your rhythm of creating units constantly. You need to learn when the warp gates are off cooldown so you can switch back to your base and warp in.

2nd flaw I noticed was that you stopped producing probes. Again, very easy mistake to make. I think you just about fully saturated your main, I can't remember how many probes you had. But at that point in the game, you want to be oversaturating in anticipation for your expansion, so you can start to saturate that base better. So like I was saying earlier, learn the timings when your warp gates are off cooldown, and when you switch back to make units, make a probe too. You can never have enough probes.

So yeah, those are 2 things you should work on. Another small note was that you made too many buildings off just 1 base. You can't support 5 warp gates and a robo facility off just one base if you're macroing properly and making units constantly. Once you learn to constantly warp in units once the gates are off cooldown, you'll realise that you can only support a maximum of 4 warp gates off 1 base, you won't be able to afford more. 4 gates and a robo is fine, but don't expect constant colossus or immortal production - you'll be able to make a few but you'll be out of money constantly. I like 3 gates and 1 robo off 1 base personally.
 
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Kar can you look at these replays and give me some pointers too, if you don't mind lol.

I've got a match here PvP which I won but I seem to lose control a bit towards the end, poor macro I think.

http://screplays.com/replays/milkybk/5768

I don't have a Terran loss saved but I still need help with these because I'm losing more than I win. As soon as I've got a half decent replay I'll upload it.

Just watching it now, your opening was good, didn't get supply blocked, got a couple gates and a robo up then followed up with some more gates. All done fairly quickly. You built enough units to be able to react to anything you saw but didn't over do it.

Your early scouting was good, but it could have been even better on this map by taking control of those watch towers. Those three towers would give you COMPLETE vision of any incoming assaults by land or air. He was content to sit in his base, you should have exploited that to the full.

At around 35 supply you started to make some macro errors. You stopped building probes, you had 26 and visually your mineral line looked saturated. But a) it isn't, and b) you want to oversaturate your main mineral line so that when you expand you can transfer probes straight away to your expo to start taking advantage of it. Basically I try to keep building probes at my main until I have 40 odd, but this is part of my game I need to improve too as I often forget :)

You built a forge, but didn't immediately start getting +1 attack. If you're going to put a forge down, have a reason for it. Either you need cannons, or you want upgrades. Soon as it's up, start something off. +1 can be the diff between winning a battle comfortably or losing everything.

Then at 50 supply you got supply blocked, and then did the very typical reaction of getting annoyed and slapped down like 3 pylons right there. You were accumulating a LOT of minerals and gas at this point and this should have been invested into units, research, or buildings. Not pylons you don't need yet. This is a macro issue.

Your prism drop was good but as soon as he pulled those probes off the line you should have packed your zealots back into the prism and flown off. Why throw away 4 perfectly good zealots for 0 gain at that point? The objective of him pulling his workers off the line was a sufficient gain in itself. Especially how long it takes to get workers back into gas. The drop hurt him most in terms of gas. He was teching dts, and that drop REALLY hurt him in terms of gas to afford them.

His counter push that took out your expo, could have been completely stopped cold if you had control of those xel naga towers ... :) On his second push, because you had your probe there, you saw it coming.

When you pushed out with all your colossi, always send a couple probes with you to put down a number of pylons so you can reinforce your army quickly.
 
Well i've played this game for 7 hours this week with a trial from a friend so im planning on buying the full game tomorrow. Love it so far just getting used to my build order with terran (dont hate :p) but any strategies are currently lost on me. Tried protoss once and lost but not too badly and zerg once which was just a complete mess :rolleyes:
 
Well i've played this game for 7 hours this week with a trial from a friend so im planning on buying the full game tomorrow. Love it so far just getting used to my build order with terran (dont hate :p) but any strategies are currently lost on me. Tried protoss once and lost but not too badly and zerg once which was just a complete mess :rolleyes:

Wouldn't worry about it. Im app plat level terran and dont really have a build order or have any kinda of game plan.
 
Anyone got any ideas about this?

Starcraft 2 is using about 1.8 -1.9gb of memory, everything's on ultra. And the game is stutters when you first load up a level. Now, I'm thinking would more memory solve this, given that my system memory is maxed out at about 2.9gb. Would another 3gb kit solve this?
 
^ I have 8gb of ram and it stutters when it first loads up it's normal! , only last's a matter of seconds. It aint no gothic 3 that's for sure :P
 
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