Cheese vs. VERY Aggressive play (KR vs. NA)

On April 11 2012 23:50 adwodon wrote:
Holy crap its been how many years?!

ALL-IN =/= CHEESE

A cheese is an all-in before the 6 minute mark (ergo no tech), why do people still get confused?!
2 port banshee is an all-in, not a cheese, although it does fit some definitions of a cheese (being easy to stop if scouted).

You can roughly classify builds by the following types, obviously its more complex, but the general rule applies to roughly all builds and play styles.

Cheese includes stuff like 6 pool, proxy 2 gate and proxy 2-3 rax with a lot of scvs pulled. Its almost impossible to recover if you fail.

All-ins are different, they come later, often involve tech and generally just rely on brute force to win, ie being scouted, while being less than ideal doesn't mean you've lost if its a good all-in build. Generally being all-in is a difficult state to define, however an all-in build will generally be considered something which has no plans for an expo, this can be deceptive at lower levels as players don't have good macro or defend properly or counter so people can recover after an all-in fails.

Aggressive play is different still, aggressive play often involves delaying an expansion to put pressure on, but still having space for it eventually in your build, aggressive play often forces the other player to compensate and play safer, if you scout they don't you can often just throw down more production instead of an expo and go all-in. Or your objective might just be to trade.

Harrassment is when you are 'annoying as fuck', that involves the smart use of units, or abuse of mobility to do damage in a situation where you either have less units, or you can't do direct damage, like in TvT against a tank player. This can be used to keep a player pinned, similar to straight up aggression (the difference being where you hit and with what units), and often allows you to play greedy in some sense if your harassment is effective. The best example I can think of is going for a drop style vs 2 collosus push in TvP, you harass them with medivacs to keep them pinned until you can get enough vikings to deal with the push, rendering it much less potent, and potentially risky for protoss.

Passive play is when you use a small number of units, often including key tech units, and you do not move out, you position units defensively to protect for things like drops, usually done when you are being greedy with econ or tech.

Both passive play and harassment styles should generally include some kind of aggressive timing as well, not all-in or even to do damage, but just getting on the map and flexing a bit to ensure your opponent isn't being overly greedy.
A passive or harassment play can also lead into a 2 base all-in. What makes really good players is being flexible in what they choose, allowing flexibility in their builds to switch from one path to another.

These principles are what you should be worried about once you've got things like macro sorted, so yes, players under high diamond / masters have more important things to worry about. Once you get to that level of play you'll start to notice players using smart aggression more and the dynamics of the game open up more. Smart aggression can include cheese (at least in a BoX series).