It is only copper league, but it was cool to see that 1st ranking.  I held it all night with several wins that put me at a 1575 ratting where 2nd is sitting behind me at 1475.  For the last 2 weeks I have played only as Zerg.  Now I feel that I am doing very well with them.  I know what upgrades to get, some basic build timings, and key strats.  I also know what they struggle with.

I started to focus on zerg because I liked the idea of quick tech shifts.  Add one building and I have several new strats that should open up to me.  But as I played them, I found that I did little of that.  I found myself sticking to hydras and banelings anyplace I could work them in.  I used roaches more as a support unit for the rest of my troops.  It never hurts to toss in a few roaches here and there.  I found most of my games as zerg where I would survive until mid game.  Once I would get my 3rd base going, I would just flood them with hydras and zerglings.  If the attack needed a little more meat to it, then I would mix in a good number of roaches.  Sometimes I would even transition into roaches for my end game.  They share the same upgrades as hydras and its a good mind game to play.

For a while it was very popular to mass roaches and run the opponent over with them.  People expect that and play counters to that early game.  I skip roaches at first so the units they built for that counter are less effective.  As the game goes on, they shift the unit composition to handle what I am throwing at them.  I find thats when I want to pull them into my mix.

Tonight I shifted back to playing protoss for a few games.  I am still very strong with them.  I found myself a lot more comfortable dealing with zerg after playing as them for as long as I did.  I can read the build orders better with my early scouts and understand what I am looking for.  I’m thinking I should spend some time as terran while I am still ranked in copper.  I jumped into the beta as protoss and switched to zerg.  I also have some ideas for terran that I am dying to try out.

I love to find creative uses for these things.

Last night in a ZvZ, I saw him taking a 3rd expansion.  I ran about 20 zerglings close to it, morphed into banelings and burrowed them in the mineral line.  Whenever he would get several drones, I would pop 3-4 banelings and take them out.  He had no idea they were there or what was happening to his drones.  I did end up losing that match for other reasons.  But it was the first time I tried that strat and I think I can add that to my bag of tricks.

Today I was in a ZvP on Blistering Sands.  I had some idle zerglings working on his back door and they managed to break the rock without him seeing it.  I quickly ran them into a back corner of the base to hide.  I morphed them into banelings and ran 1/2 of them in to wipe out the workers.  I was watching him on the replay and the attack gave him a small alert but he over looked it.  He finished setting up cannons for his expansion and then he checked his worker line to see them all dead.  He had about 100 minerals and 4 workers. He sent his troops to check on that back door and he saw nothing.  Some of his troops did get within sight of my left over banelings.

I saw them get spotted and ran them all over to the mineral line and cleared out all his remaining workers.  He called GG on the spot saying he only had 45 minerals left.  He had no workers left and not enough minerals to make another.  So I won the game with 2 well timed Baneling attacks.  His 2nd expansion was just about done. If I would have waited any longer, he would have had workers over there.

I just had a match where a few well timed banelings saved the game for me.  It was  a Zerg vs Zerg match where we were next to each other on the map.  I though I was off to a bad start.  My normal build is 13 pool, but with Zerg I tend to 10 pool.  I made a huge mistake and built an evo chamber instead of my pool.  I scouted his base and saw an early expansion so I also expanded quickly.

When the building that I thought was my spawning pool finished, I realized my mistake.  I put down my pool and got drones on gas.  I decided I was going to skip my queen and get a Lair.  I was able to get a quick 8 zerglings from my 2 hatches and rushed them over.  I had bad micro and ended up having to pull back after loosing a few.  I sent them all into the other base, but I didn’t get them grouped first.  Watching the replay, I had mine out slightly before his.

He attacked me with a few roaches and a good deal of zerglings.  Just as I was getting my hydras out.  My initial troops fell to the attack, but I was able to hold it with new troops.  He sent a bunch of zerglings as a second attack and I was able to hold that too.  I went to counter attack but pulled back when I saw 3 mutas fly over head to my base.  My hydras made short work of them.

I had full view of the map the whole game.  I made a 3rd expansion that he almost didn’t know about.  I had both watch towers on the map and I had a zergling set to patrol the rest of the map.  That patrol unit made him cancel one hatch that it discovered and killed 4 other stray drones that were going to expand.  Twice he got a drone close to my 3rd hatch but the patrol zergling picked him off.  I also had an overlord on a cliff next to the front of his natural expansion.  He would gather all his ground troops in my view and he had no clue he was there.

So I know he has mutas someplace but I see him build this huge ground army of zergling.  I am trying to build my hydra zergling to hold it off.  He keeps adding more and more zerglings.  Then I remember banelings.  I toss down the building and it finishes just as his army moves out.  My army was pooling at my natural and I pull it up the ramp when I saw his army move out.  Why he is working my my hatch, I am letting 5 banelings finish morphing.  His mutas attack my main from the worker line and I am there to clear them out.  When his zerglings run up the ramp, my 5 banelings take out 33 zergling.  I clean up the rest of them with little losses and counter attack.

I rush his natural.  My troops run into only a small group of units.  With them occupied, I send a few banelings into the mineral line and clear out most the workers.  I clear out all the units there, and head up the ramp.  I move into the base and he gives the game to me.  He had nothing to hold me with.

Well placed banelings will just melt mass zerglings.

An old friend of mine started playing wow again.  He had a mid 70′s DK that he powered up to 80 last weekend.  So he had little gold and needed to gear up his char.  I logged on and tossed him 5,000G to help him out.  While I was online I posted from my stock of glyphs.  I can see that my inventory is not near as full as it used to be.  So I know the best sellers are no longer getting posted but I posted anyway.

A few days later I logged in for something else and took the time to clear out my mailbox.  My total sales from that one posting (cap of 2, no auto fallback, 4g threshold, 48 hours, Monday evening) was 1,450G.  So glyphs are still a solid market.

I am slowly getting better.  Every once and a while I have a win where I countered everything my opponent did and I eventually won but I watch the replay and find it almost embarrassing.  I had one match last week where I countered everything perfectly.

I was Zerg and he was Terran.  He tried a drop but I spotted it on the way in and was ready at the landing zone.  He quickly turned his ship around.  He tried banshees but I already had a detector looking for it.  Both times he attacked me, I had the correct balance of troops to hold it off.  When he tried to drop 2 thors on a cliff behind my my natural I was able to get sight and mind control one with my infestor.   The MC’d Thor killed the dropship, the raven, and the other Thor.

Although it looked like I was playing a pro game, it took me forever to get the right group for an attack. Sure if he never attacked me my early army could have mounted an offensive.  I had 3 basses to his one.  He did put a Planetary Fortress up on his 2nd and then I picked up a 4th.  At the end, I was finally able to mass lots and lots of troops to break into his main.  He did hold off the first wave but had nothing left for the secondwave.

It felt very sad that it took me so long to get a solid attack even with map control and having 2 more expansions then him the whole game.  I did learn a lot from that game from the replays.  I had no macro game (none of my hatcheries were hot keyed).  my minerals and gas would build up way to high.  I had low worker saturation at every location so having the extra expansions was not all that advantageous.  I was also not collecting gas at all locations.

So how did I win?  If I did that much wrong, he should have walked all over me.  I would bet he made the same types of mistakes.  He took way too long to expand.  He focused too much on gimmicks and didn’t have good group composition.   And I did do things somethings very right.  I scouted the whole game and I played a good micro game.

I love replays.  I use that feature so much.  I can see what my common mistakes are and work on improving them.  My macro game is already improving and I have been on a little winning streak because of it.  I’ll talk about that another time.

My wife is not a fan of Warcraft.  I don’t think its WoW so much as all the time I spent playing it. This is a common issue that my friends face too.  I found for myself that the best way to handle it was to set a schedule and stick to it.  I would take the same 3 nights a week every week to log on early (raid nights).  Other nights, I would wait until everyone else was sleeping.  I would cheat a little and do things a little afk outside that schedule, but for the most part I held to the schedule.

It was important that I set that schedule.  My wife knew what nights I was free and could plan things for those nights.  it could be anything from going out, to fixing a large supper, or just catching up on the DVR. It created that balance with the game where it was not taking up more time than my family.  One thing many guys don’t understand is that time spent close to each other doing your own thing or time spent watching tv together does not count as spending time together.  Yes, technically you are together.  If you know whats good for you, thats not the argument you want to win.

I understood this and was able to get a lot more quality game time in than they did.  I can’t tell you how many times I have been running something with someone and you can hear them over vent arguing about being able to play wow.  Many times that they stay online, they spend it in a bad mood.  You hear some remark like ” she is already mad, so I may as well keep playing”.

I can’t say that I have never had an argument about how much I play games.  Lots of people have that argument. Once I started sticking to a solid schedule, that argument never came up while I was gaming.  I don’t have a Starcraft II schedule yet,  but I don’t think it will take long before I set one up.

I am not sure what to do with this space.  As you can tell my WoW time is very minimal.  All of my game time now is spent in the Starcraft beta.  I could rebrand this blog for my thoughts on Starcraft, but my current visitors are here for my comments on Warcraft.  I do expect a return to WoW at a later date and with that a return to blogging about it.  Having this blog where I just talk about either game would not be that bad.  Kevmar is my tag in both games.  I would consider changing the URL, but I just did that not that long ago.  Part of the reason I put warcraft in the url for this blog was to help with search results.

I guess it is too soon to decide that I am going to blog a lot about starcraft II.  I’m not all that good at it yet.  In the short term if I have something I want to say about it, I will just post it here.  If I end up talking a lot about Starcraft II, I will think of something then.

So just how many workers does it take to produce a Zealot?  I ask questions like this all the time about the games I play.  It helps me look deeper and find connections from one part of a game to another.  The Zealot is a key unit that the Protoss produce a lot of.  To figure out how many gateways a base can support, I need to figure out what it takes for constant unit production.

I built 2 Warpgates, a group of workers, and several Pylons.  I mined exactly 200 minerals (the cost of 2 Zealots) and pulled all the workers off to the side.  I then warped in 2 zealots and added about 10 workers back on minerals.  When the Zealot cooldown was up and I had to wait on minerals, I added another worker to the minerals.  It takes 12 workers on minerals for 2 gates to constantly produce Zealots.

I did this type of test with other units too.  The stalker (125m/50g) takes 10 workers on minerals and 5 workers on gas to constantly produce 2 at a time.  The stalker has a higher cost but also takes longer to spawn.  Thats why you can have fewer of them on minerals.

So looking at these numbers, one base can easily support 2 warpgates at full production.  A 3rd also looks reasonable to keep up.  I’m talking constant production.  You still have to keep up on your food count and invest in tech where needed.  I like to know general numbers like this.  If I want to go 6 gates, I need 2 bases for production.

Void Rays is another unit I looked at.  I can support constant production of Void Rays from 3 Startgates if I have 2 bases collecting gas.  Carriers take 2x as much gas and 2x as much time.  So the same 3 starports can constantly produce Carriers from the same 2 bases.  I test this the same way.  I set up 4 startports and added workers collecting gas on 2 bases.  I was going for 100% production from all 4 but the gas limited me to only 3 of them.  It worked perfectly for 3 ports and now I know.

This is still beta and these figures can change, but tests like this are easy to set up and give a lot of information.