SC2 beta and DOW2

I played 5 games of SC2 beta last night, finishing off my free practice matches and playing 2 ladder placement games. Correct macro is without a doubt the hardest thing for me in this game at the moment. I float massively in just about every game from not building enough buildings or units fast enough. I get distracted controlling my army and then realize that I have 3000 minerals sitting around doing nothing. Sometimes this doesn’t matter because of the skill level of my opponents, but I had at least one game this time around in which it did.

Game 1 TvP:  I went fast reapers and got into his base way before he had an army. I think he was trying to fast tech, although he had a small group of zealots and stalkers. I was able to use cliffs to dance around them and harass both his main and his expansion. He conceded after losing most of his probes.

Game 2 ZvZ: I’d heard that massing roaches is imba in the ZvZ matchup, so I gave it a shot. My macro was horrible though, and by the time I managed to mass a small ling and roach army he’d already got basically and equivalent number of hydralisks, which were a tech tier above my crappy army. He then proceeded to completely dominate me with them. Watching the replay, I saw he was on top of his economy the whole time and built maybe 1/3 again the number of drones that I did. I need to learn to use my queen properly and build gas earlier.

Game 3 ZvP: Having just been smashed by hydras I decided to try it out myself. My opponent went zealot / stalker and was crushed horribly in our first engagement. From there I contained him with my army, harasses his ramp, and expanded, whilst pumping hydras. Eventually I got a critical mass (despite floating huge number of minerals), pushed up his ramp, and destroyed his main.

Game 4 TvP: This one was interesting. I felt it could have gone either way for a while, but micro and macro mistakes from me, along with a lack of scouting, cost me the game. I went marines and marauders, which was a decent match for his early zealot / stalker / sentry army. He expanded and I pushed against it, but he repelled and went to my expansion, which I also successfully defended. I teched to siege tanks and medivacs then tried to push against his expansion again, but my tank micro was terrible and I lost a chunk of them to flanking zealots. He pushed and managed to get into my main, but I repelled him with marauders and tanks. I was just about to set up another push on his expansion, when he hit me with a force of void rays and I had no air counter.

Game 5 PvT: This game was on good old Lost Temple and was over very quickly when I scouted him with my first zealot and discovered he hadn’t blocked his ramp. I walked straight into his base and started killing SCVs. He tried defend with a small force of marines, but my zealot reinforcements arrived and killed them off. Unable to get my zealots out of his worker line he conceded.

After the stress of SC2 I needed to unwind with a bit of DoW2. I played two random team 3v3s.

The first was SM/SM/Ork vs SM/SM/Eldar on Angel Gate with me as Warp Spider Exarch. I did a variant of my usual build, which is fast rangers, in which I experimented with only building 2 guardians rather than the regular 3 and it worked well. My rangers came out substantially sooner than normal. Rangers are completely imba in this map and managed to snipe an awful lot of units out of their buildings. After winning the early attrition war we got to vehicles first and I walked a wraithlord into the enemy base, which died eventually to a missile tac, but tied them up enough for my team to capture the field. From there they were screwed and we ticked down their points quickly.

I played SM apothecary in the second game, in which I ended up fighting two Eldar players in the north that used banshees to push my tacs around. I was forced to retreat twice before pushing them back from the center of the map with the help of an SM team mate. Once ASMs hit the field things were looking up. I spent the rest of the game pouncing a lot of platforms. I had an annoying loss of my dreadnought to a wraithlord and falcon combo that I couldn’t hold off with my army and then later lost a plasma devastator to a singularity charge. Seriously: I saw the indicator on the ground, hit retreat on the dev immediately, and they still got gibbed - singularity is totally imba. Other than that though, I preserved my units well did some sneaky stealth capping with scouts. My team manage to hold the center and bottom, whilst ninjaing the top occasionally and we came out on top.