I am currently practising zealot rushing (with charge). By about 8 minutes I can have 4 Warpgates with a pylon outside their base and 6-8 zealots with charge, this allows me to charge in and keep sending a steady stream of zealots in order to overpower the opponent. I have found this quite effective. However I was wondering if its worth me getting zealot charge. Obviously to get it is the twilight council and then the charge tech. This is quite costly when all spare minerals are being pumped into zealots. I wondered is it worth getting this upgrade or should I not go for it and just get a couple extra zealots really early??
I wonder why you can only afford 4 gates with a mineral-only base. I find rushes to certain later tech useless. You can be scouted early on and they can prepare counters way in time. I think you'd have more luck with a standard zealot rush because it's much faster, probably more effective, and you don't need charge because there's no long wall to be run around that early. But this would be useless against T.
I recommend you don't do this strategy at all, if someone has a standard build, they will always have enough units to kill mass zealot. Please remember that zealots are not good by them self, only with support of forcefields/air units/collosi/stalkers do they do significant damage.
Zealot rushing probably does okay in the lower leagues but if you are facing a player that is aware of cheesy plays and scouts your army of just zealots they can easily get the right units to counter. Terran can just get reapers to kite them. Zerg has good defense with Spine Crawlers and Queens. Also Banelings can take them out pretty quickly. I am not sure if getting 4 Gateways is the right way to do this because whenever I got rushed with Zealots it was from 2 gateways and it was very early in the game which is probably the most effective way to execute it. But then again I am not a Protoss player.
but one void ray or banshee could own you, try going zealot heavy 4gate, i like to warp in 2zealots 1 sentry, 1 stalker, eveyr warp, makes for a very balanced army. But keep getting the charge (against z or t)
The workers on gas don't change the amount of minerals you can get off a fully saturated mineral field... 4gates are enough to almost drain all income off a single base, whatever the unit composition(if you add in sentries then you save some minerals for more zealots or stalkers, but you can still match your income well at any case)... Other than that, I also think that rushing for chargelots isn't really a good strategy, mostly because you both lose the early time window of the korean 4gate for effectiveness and mining so much gas for citadel/speed upgrades sets you back in minerals and 4gate timing. Such a rush would seem better were it with blink stalkers instead since they are more versatile than zealots and not as easily countered (Zealots can be beaten by roaches, stalkers or mm very-very easily and cost-effectively and you'll need really overwhelming numbers for it to work)... Why not try the korean 4gate instead? It's basic bo is this: gate to assimilator(mine exactly 50 gas) to core(+research warpgate asap) to 3 more gates and spam zealots. Can be done well with both a 12 gate as well as a 13gate, but I think I remember that the most efficient variation combined the first pylon+first gate both at 10/10 for some reason... You'll get your zealots much faster this way so that charge won't be needed anyway... Still, like before zealots are easily countered by all races' early units(stalkers/roaches/mm)...
