Starcraft II: A Stroke of Luck

Hello all again! You’re probably all sick of me cluttering up the blog tab with Starcraft II posts, but hey, you haven’t made many blogs since, so I have free rein on making additional blogs.

Slowly Killing Me

This match is a full-fury Terran 2v2 on Discord IV. Heck, it’s the most popular map (supposedly), so why not settle for it?

The game started seemingly benign enough. I stuck with my personal build: massing as many marines as I could physically can, beef them with stim, combat shield, +3/+3, and medivacs, until I run out of barracks from which to produce them. It’s not a good plan, if the opponent plans on making massed armored units or massive units with +3/+3, but hey, I’m a noob, and I reserve the right to act irrationally.

My ally was making something more diverse, blending in with marines and medivacs tanks, marauders, and a few vikings. I would say that that’s a more sound strategy than mine, by far.

But when I decided to scan our opponents (fairly late into the game, with the ally and I an expansion base apiece), oh god, there were so many battlecruisers. I would guesstimate fourteen (14!) of them, backed by ~+3/+3 marines and medivacs. The only prayer I had was that the battlecruisers were not upgraded in any way, so I wouldn’t suffer so horrible a fate.

But it was still horrible. Despite two planetary fortresses to vanguard my medium army (one was meant for strategic defense, the other was to mine the rich mineral fields on the opponents’ end of the field), the entire thing was leveled in a matter of seconds, but not without some heavy losses, at least.

Which was good, because my ally had enough units to sufficiently push back that unrelenting force, giving us time for a breather.

With a frontal assault obviously ill-advised, I switched my tech build to banshees. These air-to-ground bad girls that essentially replaced the wraith of Starcraft I make great harassing units, and that was my intention with them. I took a few jabs at their mineral line, gutting them on several occasions, but they seemed to be more than glad to burn scanner sweeps just to catch my banshees out of position. For the most part, they worked; marines shredded the exposed banshees on land, and vikings gave terrible chase in the air. However, my ploy worked to our advantage; the opponent seemed to forget about their worker units, and ultimately they couldn’t get to any expansions beyond the one down the ramp.

But that did not alleviate my army problem. For their next trick, they went with marines, thors, and battlecruisers, which were just as lethal as the previous mix. I decided to add ghosts into the mix, going for nuclear damage. As expected, my army was (again) obliterated, but not before I could get a potshot or two in, killing a thor or two, and nuking a few marines in the process. My nuclear placements were everywhere, even targeting my own structures at times, hoping that the enemies would take the bait. Soon, they lashed out with their own nuclear arsenal, one of which unfortunately killed a decent squad of marines and medivacs of mine.

In the end, starving their mineral line worked to our benefit. Without expansions, they could only make so many vikings, thors, battlecruisers, marines, tanks, whatever. As I saw a final chance to deal some dangerous harassment (there seemed to be one base left, and the orbital command was without power for a sweep), I struck at the base. The enemies were down to basic marines and medivacs–souped up marines. I was certain that the command would go down, until a scan hit, and they knocked my banshee out of the air again. I hastily scanned every available expansion, and found their sneaky base in the corner (it was ignored the first time because when I scanned at an earlier time, it was empty). That prompted my ally to push with his superior army into the last mineral field, gutting the base, which prompted the foes to respond with full force, which prompted me to move my marines and medivacs to catch them in the crossfire.

They simply couldn’t have the resources to defeat us, nor the manpower to do so.

It was a long hour and ten minutes, but GG well won.

You Need Additional Pylons

This game was probably one of my most memorable to date. Why? Because on Discord IV, 2v2, it was a Protoss player and me, versus a Zerg and Terran player. And most delectably enough, the Zerg and Protoss players left the game! Which meant that the Terran foe and I had control of alien allies to supplement our human armies! Sweet…

Now, here’s where I (rightly) tell you that I have absolutely no training in making Protoss units. I was really all over the place, but I went forward with building pylons, a gateway and a cybernetics core, with a forge later on. My Terran build was standard–I went 1-1-1, straight for banshees for harassment reasons (and this time, HR won’t be able to save ’em!). In several forays, I managed to gut a few mineral lines, destroy the enemy spire–twice–and did a bit of harassment to the main army (that was not as good of an idea). It ended up costing the player a fair amount of scans and resources to build turrets and overseers. The double spawning pool was a peculiar sight, to be honest.

Meanwhile, I decided to build up my warp gate count to an absurd ten. Hey, I have the Terran resources to burn for it, why not? I made a ton of stalkers from a proxy pylon at their third expansion, hidden behind a natural barrier of vents. I made multiple jabs with these as well; the expansion hatchery was destroyed, and I tried (perhaps a bit desperately) to climb the ramp. Naturally, zerglings, marines and mutalisks reaped a terrible toll on poorly numbered stalkers.

However, on one of these raids I lured the enemy units down the ramp and slightly forward–straight into the crucio cannons of my aptly placed siege tanks and marines/medivacs. I focus-fired down the mutalisks, and the ground troops melted away.

I really played to the opponent’s weakness of not striking–although at late game, he did try to make some raids with a bunch of mutalisks. Photon cannons and stalkers cleaned them up quickly, though. For my final trick, I massed a great army of tanks, marines, medivacs, stalkers and a few high templars to back up the deadly mothership.

Well, let’s just say the ending was GRIM. Very, very gory and grim. Although my high templars didn’t actually do anything; I never got to cast psionic storm before he GG’ed. Oh well, I got the stalker-blink achievement and the meatgrinder achievement from that game, so I’m more than ecstatic to have won it.

Single Player Shenanigans

Playing Zero Hour on hard difficulty is a stand in its own right. To have to kill four hatcheries for an achievement is abominable at best. But I persevered; destroying spine crawlers, roaches, hydralisks, zerglings and mutalisks by the dozen, I managed to destroy a pair of hatcheries in the west, as well as that pesky nydus worm stationed there. I followed up with reinforcements (though that should be more appropriately called a second raiding party, seeing as the remaining forces melted before I could get there), which helped greatly as the Zerg struggled to rebuild the hatcheries. I crushed the growing hatcheries, netting me the requisite for the achievement. My base, however, was nearly in shambles by the last second count; the six bunkers on the lower level were gone, as were the stationed marines and medics, but the Zerg couldn’t get to the second level in time.

In challenges, I decided to brush up on my casting skills (of which I had none prior to playing Starcraft II, let alone Starcraft I) by manipulating ghosts and ravens. The challenge was to deal maximum damage with them, with seven nukes armed for one’s enjoyment.

My strategy was to bomb the left and right forces, which had a small but concentrated army of targets, while I pushed forward with my ravens to eliminate the defenses up ahead. With the ghosts, they drove on from the west, damaging a hatchery but crippling the mineral line for some juicy damage. They would then head for the center of the map to nuke the concentration of units in the center for critical effect. This approach should more or less net a silver standing, if not gold.

That’s all for now. Stay frosty!