I completed my placement matches (4-1) and got placed in the platinum league. My first four games I got absolutely destroyed by a mix of races. I began to wonder if I was really cut out for plat. Since then I adjusted my build order and have been able to win the last three in a row. I'm still having a lot of trouble combining my micro with macro skills, when I am moving my army around and fighting my macro tends to slip badly. I also become far too focused at the task at hand and don't scout effectively. One of my major problems is I have a tendency to be a little more defensive and cautious, so I fall back when I should be pressing sometimes or get trapped in my base by an aggressive player when I should be expanding. I have a replay here of a recent platinum TvZ I played, which I won, but I feel like I had a lot of room for improvement in my game. Watching the replay there are a lot of things I did wrong, especially not keeping up with my macro towards the mid and endgame when I was focused on dropping his expansions. Any tips on my play at all would be highly appreciated. Be as brutal as you want. One thing I'm really worried about is that I really have only one solution to most situations - siege up early in my base and then go for a slow siege expand. I don't like doing that because it allows my opponent map control but sometimes I feel like I have no choice. What are some of the things I should be doing to move out, harass and generally put pressure on my opponent? http://www.mediafire.com/file/2fjcg3mzooawu1j/Drakhl%28T%29%20v%20DirtyBombs%28Z%29.SC2Replay
Ghosts are ALWAYS effective when playing against protoss, because of the EMP. You could easily harass with a couple ghosts and siege tanks.
Usually when I do a ghost academy I will be doing a 1-1-1 build then cut the starport for ghost academy then use that to harass probes and EMP their army. But that delays my medvacs and tech usually and I don't do enough damage early with the ghost to warrant it in most cases. I know I've seen TLO do it quite a bit but his macro is far superior to mine. Any advice on how to make this work? Also I am experimenting with a 2 or 3 Rax opening build and making a timing push once my stimpack is done. Seems to work very well on zerg for early pressure, not sure how effective this will be against protoss though.
Deny his expansions. Siege/turret/bunker up in front of his base. Terran is verrrry good at forcing people into 1 base, but too many Terran players prefer to wall-up and turtle.
I do like this strategy especially vs a zerg player with some helions mixed in, did it recently in my last game worked perfectly. Though there is something to be said about going early pressure with 2-3 Rax MM like Chow mentioned. Mech has the same problem it did in SC1 - so immobile. Its very difficult to exert map control with a handful of men and siege tanks unless you lock them into one base early. Another build I'm experimenting with is a 1 rax, 1 fact, 1 rax. Seems to allow me to exert a little more pressure than a standard 1-1-1 while allowing me to get decently fast siege tanks.
