z0rtopia

I took a long, long break from Iccup. The start of the season was brutal and I think I went like 4-12 or something like that, and it was just bad.

Well, the few months off apparently helped quite a bit... I still played my friend, and during this time my muta micro improved to the point where I was bludgeoning him in most of my ZvT's, which I had usually lost before. I still lost to the occasional sunken break, but that was about it.

So using my newly found muta micro, I played 11 games today and went 9-2 on Iccup. About half of the games were ZvT, the other half ZvP. I used to feel like I couldn't beat Terrans unless they were vastly inferior, as they would always build a huge ball of doom that I couldn't crack.

The only games I lost today were to a mech build that I scouted late (I almost won anyways, but I got a bit greedy and lost all my hydras and couldn't replace them), and to a Peruvian (the lag was terrible... he also stimmed his marines and already had them in position which was a little suspicious, but I botched some other things anyways). Both of the loses were on Longinus.

So I am at D+ again... with a 11-3 record. I have never had a winning record on Iccup, so this is kind of new. In fact, I consider myself to be doing pretty well if I hit 40% wins. I got to D+ last season, but it was a struggle to win even on the D level, more often than not. I feel like C- might be in reach, if I fix a few things. On the other hand, I am not really sure I have the time to dump into games at the moment.

Unfortunately, my apm is still lower than pretty much everyone. Averaging 110ish-120ish at the moment. It has been rising somewhat steadily, but I really need to work on my macro.

At the moment, I feel the Allies are pretty balanced with respect to the Rising Sun. Some slight tweaks are needed, but I feel like the Allies can compete with the Rising Sun on even expansions, and that's fairly doable.

I've been playing Soviets the past week or so, who I have neglected. I've come to the conclusion the faction balance in the game as things are is something like the Allies are greater than or equal to the Rising Sun, and the Rising Sun is a lot better than the Soviets. The Allies are also probably greater than or equal to the Soviets.

The problem with the Soviets is there's really only one obvious way to get things. You have to get a crane early or there's no way to build quickly enough or repair (it does repair insanely fast and a lot of units at once however). You probably should get two ore refineries after that, and then a barracks and a factory.

From there it's a mandatory to get a nuclear plant to unlock the airfield and the battle lab. This thing costs 2000 ore. That is a ton of money to unlock the rest of the tech tree. Herein lies the real problem: it is insanely hard to expand and tech as a Soviet.

The main reason for this is because most good Soviet units are insanely slow. There are ways around this, but even a good harass doesn't feel as strong as a weaker Rising Sun or Allied harass.

There are three units that are good for harassing: sickles (they can jump over cliffs, quite good for getting into bases), bullfrogs (they can act as an amphibious infantry carrier and can parachute infantry somewhere...), and twinblades (an air infantry transport, hit/run air unit).

The problem is sickles die really easily to almost any resistance and are expensive, bullfrogs don't even have a ground attack and infantry get mowed down very quickly, and twinblades are really late in the tech tree. You can use terror drones, but any defending units or a dock/factory nearby and your investment just went down the drain.

One can quick tech to the airfield to get twinblades and do an engineer/infantry drop on their base, but if this doesn't work you're more or less screwed economically. You've also sacrificed ground and naval superiority in the mean time, and probably haven't had time to expand.

Whereas if you go sickles against the Rising Sun, they get their expansion up way before you can get your sickles there, so even if you do significant damage, you've probably lost economically.

None of this is really game breaking by itself, but the problem is the Rising Sun has a much better navy, their ground anti-armor infantry is strong, and they have good mobile anti-air. I feel like against the Rising Sun the Soviets almost are required to get Twinblades to slow down the Rising Sun economy. But they slowly become worse and worse.

What really breaks the matchup is the Soviet navy is terrible relative to the Rising Sun navy. A single Rising Sun cruiser can eat through a ton of Soviet ships. I think I threw like 15 or so of cheap electric ships against 2 cruisers (12000 ore vs 3600 ore) and lost badly. It wasn't even close. He didn't even need to use his torpedos to win. I used twinblades to help try to shrink his navy down, but the Sea Wings (Rising Sun anti-air) can't even be targeted by anything until they're firing against air units. Not even sea units can attack them! Their range is roughly one screen wide in one direction (this is an insanely large distance) while the twinblades range is like a quarter of that. They only get rockets for one attack, so you have to clone off all your twinblades on the proper targets while they're getting shot at, which is obnoxious and not easy given the UI. Even worse they could bring Tengus as backup and then you'd need anti-air air units and twinblades to take down the seawings.

Even if you win the air battle, you can't do enough damage quickly enough to matter. You only get rockets every 10 seconds or so on the twinblades, and each unit in the Rising Sun navy has a ton of hitpoints. Kirovs would work, but they're too slow (any Rising Sun ship can run away). Natasha gets hit from a mile away by Shogun battleships. Terror drones? Sea wings switch to their ground bomber mode and they kill them.

On top of that, I'm not even convinced Soviet ground is necessarily better. King Onis do a ton of damage to tanks, and while I was trying to win the sea battle all of my apocalypse tanks died to King Onis in their little Super Saiyan mode (press button and dominate)

So with all of this in mind, I manged to kept a Rising Sun player on even resources with me for an entire game (like 30 minutes) and lost on every single front in spectacular fashion at the end. It wasn't even a micro issue or even unit composition issue, I just got steamrolled.

What really annoys me is something is borked with my account on EA's website so I can't even give feedback. -_-

I guess it's still beta, but this particular matchup is ridiculous. Also seems like this argument is hardly anything new.

The Red Alert 3 beta was recently opened up to anyone with a fileplanet account (and then promptly shut down... sorry :x), so I've gotten a chance to tinker with the game.

Overall, I'm very impressed and I've only played about 10 games (balance wise I have no idea where the heck the game stands since there's like 50k plus testers and most of them are new, but the core of the game is good and so it can be balanced with time if it isn't).

The basic balance concept of the game is that each faction has one thing that it is strong at, so... going by which they're strongest at:

Soviet:
Ground
Air
Navy

Allies:
Air
Navy
Ground

Rising Sun:
Navy
Ground
Air

This might sound potentially imbalanced since naval forces usually get the shaft, but you can build most buildings on the sea. And a few ground units (most notably the Tsunami Tank) can take to the seas. And there are resource points at sea, making it so obtaining sea superiority can be huge. On the flip side, some naval units can get on land (Allied destroyers... believe it or not) but move much more slowly.

The Rising Sun faction is particularly flexible. The Allies and Soviets have to build their stuff next to a MCV or crane. The Rising Sun has these little deployable drones that build extremely quickly, but then can be deployed anywhere (the deploy time is longer than the build time... it takes an additional 10 seconds or so once you've placed your structure), either land or sea. This allows for a lot more flexibility than is usually granted in C&C. This allows the Rising Sun to fast expand immediately if they want to and set up a forward naval base, or whatever.

Resources have been reworked. You need an ore refinery right next to a resource node. Your ore miner goes the mine, mines, and comes back. Near as I can tell, ore mines never deplete (and it doesn't take longer and longer to get more ore because the physical distance is static).

You end up with a lot more resources than you would previously. However, teching is really expensive (for instance, to unlock a final docks upgrade you need to invest in 3000 in a tech lab and then another 2000 or so to actually upgrade the dock, not to mention previous dock upgrades). On top of that, units are pretty expensive as well. The end result is you generally want 4-5 resource nodes, minimum (and the maps they've put out so far have it so you generally start fighting over resource nodes right around the time you hit 4-5).

There's no need to invest in unit upgrades. Every unit comes built in with a single ability. The last C&C game I played was Generals, I did feel like there was an overwhelming number of upgrades one had to get in that game and a lot of them were felt like they should have been on the units to begin with, so maybe this is a step forward. Given how expensive teching it is, it's almost like they did that so you had to pay a price to get to the unit, but once you're there you don't have to waste any more economy on it.

Unit abilities range from next to useless (a lot of allied units have an ability that increases their defenses and gets enemy units to focus fire on them... near as I can tell, all it does is make your units die faster and automicros for your enemy -.-... strangely the Tsunami version of this seems to be a lot better) to pretty useful (the Rising Sun in particular has a lot of ship to ship abilities that makes stuff blow up reallly quickly).

Also making a return are general abilities, but instead of unlocking them from pure battle experience, they also seem to unlock with time. This means you have at least two of them fairly early. There's also 15 abilities per faction, some of which are upgrades of others (most have a bombing ability that has 3-5 upgrades). There's enough unique ones to make them interesting and three different branches to take. You can have a max of 8 abilities I believe. They're always useful.

On the whole I love the game. I have a few things against it... chiefly visual clarity. A pet peeve of mine is in every C&C game the infantry seem to get smaller and smaller. This one doesn't seem to be much different. Secondly, it uses Gamespy. Getting into a game made by someone is pretty much impossible, so I can only play random matches.

Other than that, the game has a lot of promise. I'm a huge fan of the Rising Sun.

I took a long hiatus from Iccup because I had become so frustrated getting destroyed by Protoss as a Terran. I'm not that great, I've hit D+ as Protoss while playing Zerg against Protoss (I hate PvP). But after playing another two months of games against my friend, my apm rose another 10ish to 115-125, so i decided to give it another go.

I went 2-3 winning two games on Andromeda. They were the first games I've won on Iccup in TvP where I wasn't cheesing. (I also won a TvZ in which I fast expoed, also a first for me on Iccup... my early game micro always failed me before).

I'm surviving the early game against Protoss a lot better than I was before. Partly because they're letting me and expanding, but also partly because my early game management is better. I'm still entering midgame a lot further behind that I would prefer, but that's better than not even getting there. I'm not a huge fan of being behind, because it makes harassing pretty difficult. :/

The one game I'm really proud of that I won tonight is where the Toss took his mineral only at 13 supply or so. I panicked since I was going 2 factory and I scouted 3 gateways, and I built a ton of marines and sent as many tanks and vultures as possible. It failed miserably since he scouted it a mile away and he had way too many dragoons by the time I got there anyways (I should have just backed off when his probe saw it). Instead of going for the kill, he was content to expand. I tried to make up for this (since he didn't seem to be in a hurry to cross the map) by expanding immediately.

Things continued on pretty uneventfully (except a shuttle with a reaver running into a turret line above my gas natural) until I scanned carriers at around 150 supply. I swore, because I wasn't at all prepared for them and I saw three of them. He ended up swarming in with everything, and despite not having charon booster initially due to thinking I had it but not(I wanted to scream), I pushed him back. And then very slowly managed to beat him back despite him having a ground army and carriers, and a 30-40 supply lead most of the game.

I think I did a pretty good job after he attacked my expo. I managed to minimize damage from his templar and his ground army pretty well (I did eat one storm that looked like it hurt a lot, but watching the replay I moved my goliathes out of it pretty quickly), which I think contributed to him going pure carrier (well, almost pure). But eventually I bled him dry and killed them all with goliath/wraith.

I think his big mistake was not targeting two of my expos at all, but after a point he couldn't really because I eventually clawed my way to a 200 supply goliath army vs his 200 supply carrier and if he did, I'd just run over his expo or main.

About 2/3rds the way through he asked me my real rank. I guess I handled it pretty well, but goliath micro isn't that hard once you know how to do it and you have the economy to support it. And Andromeda is a terrible map for carriers (especially when my vital expos were cross positioned from his main). I'd be going arbiter every time as Protoss.

Anyways, die carriers! I remember when they used to be an auto loss for me regardless of how big of a lead I had. Revenge is so sweet. :0

http://tdzk.agadak.net/zer0das/0384%20z0rzergT%20FrozenCP.rep

Also, if you don't want to watch the whole thing, he loses about half a dozen carriers in about 2 minutes and 30 seconds starting at 23:00 or so. I felt like this prolonged battle gave me the advantage.

I've been experimenting with biomech against my friend... he's beaten me a few times, but he hasn't found a good counter for it yet. So I decided to try it on Iccup.

First game: managed to get to the guys expo and get up his ramp, but the bad positioning of my marines while moving up the ramp killed me... a dt and the goons just ripped my marines apart. I think going bbs and messing up the initial attack badly hurt my marine count to the point that I'm surprised I made it as much of a game as I did.

http://tdzk.agadak.net/zer0das/0257%20nmg1984P%20z0rzergT.rep

Second game the guy doesn't scout me at all (he left his probe outside my expo after scouting my spot last). He starts goon harassing me right before my medics pop, but I lose very few marines. He immediately started a robotics bay though. He then camps outside my expo with about 8 goons before I break out and kill a decent bit of his goons. He has two reavers though, so I don't attack. Right as my tanks reach his expo, he drops the reavers on my depots, academy, and ebay, but I decide to go forward with the attack. I think his big mistake was not sniping a turret and then attacking my scvs... the game would have been over then. Long story short is, he moves his reavers back to try to save his expo, but he loses most of his goons and his reavers. He continues to try to break my little group of marines and medics with tank support, but fails.

http://tdzk.agadak.net/zer0das/0259%20z0rzergT%20FirSt4uP.rep

The guy was B- last season, and my first TvP victory on Iccup... >_>

I got up at 7:25 am to drive to Target to make sure I could get a Wii Fit. There were like 8 people or so who showed up before 8 am, and almost all of them were women. Not really all that surprising giving that it's Wii Fit, but they seemed to know more than me when it came to the availability... that is weird.

After an hour and a half of working out, it's better than I thought it would be. The stretching and balancing pushes me a lot more than I thought it would, and some of the strength training stuff is downright grueling. The games are fun, but are more of a workout than they are fun (but it'll help motivate me more to workout when there's some tangible goal and fun involved).

Probably the best thing about it is that it tracks your weight, bmi, and balance over time. I started exercising during two semesters ago, but the most difficult part about it was the difficulty in tracking my progress. I didn't have access to a scale, so the best method was using the same machine to run, and then any increase in resistance or time meant I was making progress. But sometimes it was hard to tell if I should have been pushing myself more or easing up...

So anyways, I'm happy with my purchase. I don't have a gym membership and I'm currently at home. I dislike running outside due to the heat, and I have allergies that can flair up rather easily and make it difficult to breathe, and running on roads is really rough on my joints. So I haven't been exercising at all since the semester has ended. I think Wii Fit is pretty much exactly what I need to keep myself working out, so it's all good.

My one big complaint is you can't input a custom amount of time or reps to do things. There's presets you have to follow. You can do the exercises as many times as you want, but after finishing once, you have to restart and it eats up time. This really sucks since the longest running track is about 5 minutes in length.

Nevermind, I'm an idiot.

I played a PvZ against a zerg who was one win away from D+. It felt like a pretty close game, despite the fact that my first push almost broke him- he managed to completely destroy my second push (in retrospect it was because I built way too many dragoons). He made a few errors in judgment one was not being nearly aggressive enough with his mutas. The second was attacking my natural instead of my second expansion... he probably could have killed it.

So at this point he was a bit behind, despite my second attack faltering. He decided to doom drop. Moments before his ovies cross over an island base, I see a blob of yellow seemingly appear on the screen. I move my 4 or so sairs to where I thought I saw the ovies appear. Nothing is there...

About 10-20 seconds later his ovies plow into my sairs and with a little micro, all but 2-3 die before dropping anything. So apparently I'm either seeing things or I had a bit of premonition. I never even build sairs unless the zerg goes muta...

Here's the replay for anyone who cares to watch.

http://tdzk.agadak.net/zer0das/0067%20promontesZ%20z0rzergP.rep

I've never ever played competitive Starcraft until the past week. I usually stuck to playing with a friend and when he couldn't play, US East (yeah, yeah). He used to beat me all the time... like 95%. Eventually my APM increased from around 75 or so to about 90-95 on average. I still didn't win, but 2-3 months down the road something clicked and I beat him about 75% of the time now.

Within the past two weeks my apm rose another 10 or so to 105 as Protoss (my main race). So I decided to dive into Iccup partly due to TSL and see how I fared.

I went 1-7 the first 8 games. I did win my second game, but it was pretty atrocious. Two things became clear: players are quite a bit smarter than on bnet, and my PvP is atrocious.

First game- a loss in a game I should have won. The guy was zerg and straight teched to hive. I killed his third expo but he sent a ton of lings and ultras to my natural and mauled me because I made too many goons. He pressured me a lot with lings early so I couldn't really scout, and I figured he was going hydra. He only had 68 apm.

Eventually I started winning and I'm currently 14-19, with most of the wins coming in my past 10 games or so. I still suck atrociously at PvP (I've probably played all of five PvP's against my friend since we random, and we've gotten maybe 5 mirrors in 200 games). I either die to zealot rushes rather quickly (after losing to the guy with 68 apm, I lost to a Protoss with 62 apm... how does someone with few actions beat me with a zealot rush? >.< ) or I'm too conservative and I get rolled by dragoons. In the event I survive that far the guy has probably suicided all his troops to kill my cannons so his dts can rape me. My observers never, ever pop in time to deal with dts (hence why I started going cannons). I honestly cannot figure this matchup out, and I thought I had a decent grasp of it (although I know in practice it has always been my weak point).

My PvT is quite a bit better, but I still struggle to scrap together a win. Terrans seems to be much more aggressive and though I can usually secure a third expansion, its later than I'm used to, and I never seem to be able to have the resources to devote to arbiters. What used to be 200 apm Terrans without a clue on bnet are now Terrans quite capable of rolling me if I'm not constantly on my guard. I can smash FD's and pressure pretty well now, but occasionally I botch my timing a bit (usually on the attack).

PvZ I'm quite a bit better at than most mediocre Protoss. I feel like I have to fast expand though, and I never did that on bnet. On the plus side, I never ever seemed to win fast expanding on bnet and I've gotten more than a few wins out of it now. One of my recent losses in the matchup was to a bunch of lings slipping past my cannon/partial wall-in on Katrina thus screwing my expansion. The other was to pure muta that I tried to scout but couldn't, and by the time I did it was too late. There were some suspicious moves by the guy, but it didn't register at the time.

My solution to PvP has been to play ZvP instead. ZvP is probably by far my best matchup, so it doesn't make much sense not to play it when my PvP is so terrible. My apm is on average 20 higher playing as zerg (and I hit a high of 141 for an entire game tonight), and my hydra micro is such that I can beat most D level players easily by just going pure hydra. My only loss in this matchup was to someone who zealot rushed me and sealed my choke off before I had any lings to harass his zealots.

The one thing that's struck me as quite different is everyone has a much better sense of timing and tends to exert much more pressure than any bnet players I've ever encountered. I'm always super jittery for matchs, but I think it's helped me keep my apm up. Occasionally it has interfered enough to hinder my macro, but hopefully with time that will go away. At any rate, I'm well on my way to D+.

And here's my profile if anyone wants to look.

http://www.iccup.com/iccscprofile/294473/

So I played a random bnet game today, haven't done that in forever. It was on the hunters, and I spawned next to the guy. It started pretty normally... some inital zealot/ling battles. Then the guy started building creep colonies from his main all the way to my expo. Okay... no big deal. I eventually cracked it with zealot, archon, ht, and a reaver for good measure. I killed his main and figured it was game over.

Wrong. Apparently he had an expo top left with like 10 ultras (this was probably the first suspicious action, as we were on relatively even economies and he had wasted so many drones on sunkens). Okay... I start trying to kill that, making sure to check every expo so that he didn't expand anywhere else. I end up trying to break it with two 150 supply armies and fail. I'm starting to get very, very suspicious. He hasn't used any lurkers, and he's made like 50 sunkens at this point, and still had cash for lings, hydra, and the occasional guardians (what).

At some point he expands to his old main, and builds like 20 sunkens there, and this is after I reaver dropped his new main. He's had like 4 drones the entirety of this, and yet a steady stream of lings, hydras, and guardians keep attacking and killing my new expos (I have the middle and another expo secure though).

Long story short, I kill the top left eventually using carriers, but he somehow manages to kill me using his four drone economy. Uh huh.

Replay shows he used his first drone to mineral hack and expanded top left pretty much as soon as he could. I'm shocked! He ended up making 126 creep colonies and like a thousand units compared to my 152 buildings (most of these died to his never ending army) and 561 units. Fun. -_-

http://tdzk.agadak.net/zer0das/uhhuh.rep