I've been playing zerg in SC Broodwar for about the last 8 years now hardcore. I'm 24. I watched many pro replays and watched other zerg players lose time, and time, and time again. This caused me to come to the conclusion that there are two possible problems going on here, either the game is not thematically balanced, that zerg's function was not unique enough, or, quite simply, the players were not playing zerg right. Fortunately my irritation and discussed has ended up being more toward the player then blizzard of late. People say that zerg is the aggressor... I've found this to be totally wrong. Other people will say that no race in particular is an aggressor or defender, that they are all the same. While I respect this opinion more, there is still no denying that zerg is the odder of the 3 races, and so, it has made me come to the absolute conclusion that zerg is not the aggressor, but the reactor defender race. And so they are, and so they should be. The basic points are that zerg has borrow, overlords, and defenses that can be half built in order to react to situations. The borrow and the overlord makes the zerg extremely great at knowing when an attack is coming. Zerg are good at surprise, but are also conversely, good at not being surprised. There are two fundamental ways that people play zerg wrong, and it comes down to merely two little details. The starting build order, and the fact that players don't place high priority on gas and lurker upgrades from the start. Zerg's goal, in order to have power, is to out gas their opponent by quite a margin. It could be simply put, that the difference of zerg to the terran and the protoss, is that zerg is a gas oriented race, while terran and protoss are more mineral oriented. Before I describe the right B.O. I'll just post the replay for any visual learners. http://www.repdepot.net/replay.php?id=33794 But going back to the first problem... The build order. You will either see zerg players 9 pool, or over pool, or 12 hatch, or 12 pool, but none of these build orders are the perfect standard b.o. that allows zerg to survive any cheese, but still maintain an optimum economy. Zerg are odd, so the right build order may seem a little awkward, but in the end, it is totally worth it to master. It is, 10 pool, 10 hatch. You do a gas trick before the first lord with one of the drones returning minerals while the 9th drone is almost complete. The right drone to chose is one once you have reached about 65-75 minerals. Right after you hit that many minerals, you pull that drone off that was the last one to return those minerals and use keys B, and E, to make an extractor. While the extractor is being made, you make another drone and cancel the extractor immediately using the escape key, and send the drone back to the mineral patch that isn't being mined on. With the 10th drone you make a pool, or make a slightly faster pool by setting rally point to minerals and pulling off another drone to make a pool right when you hit 200 minerals. So this is 10 pool... then you make lord after. If your scout lord hasn't found the enemy, you pull off a drone roughly half way between overlord completion. As soon as overlord is complete, you quickly make 1 more drone, and pull off a drone that has just returned minerals to go and expand at natural. The opponent may have found you at this point, and is trying to block your expo. Don't pull off another drone to fight that worker, just do what ever you can to get a hatch up at natural, whether it is in the primary position, or off to the side enough to be right near minerals but still leaves you enough room to put up another hatch at the primary position. You will note, that as soon as you make that first natural expo, your pool will be complete right when you hit 50 minerals. But at this point, hopefully you have found the opponent and know what he is up to. Almost every time you will use that 50 minerals to make 2 ling if just to kill the scout worker, or to follow through on the 10 pool 2 ling push which keeps your opponent on his toes and prevents him from expanding too early, etc. With this b.o. you will notice how effective it is as surviving the infamous 2 gateway zealot rush. If once pool gets done and you spend that 50 minerals on lings, you keep making lings as soon as you hit 50 minerals, time and time again. You will note that the 4th larvae pops out really quickly after you have mutated the 3 larvae you were holding. This shows that your timing as been perfect, and you did the b.o. correctly. You now will have 8 lings early and an earlier hatch to produce more lings faster, and to get up the sunken colony even faster. It makes it totally easy to survive the 2 gateway push. After you got the b.o. down, stuffing your gases and getting either carapace or missile for your lurkers later is key. You may want to just focus on getting to lurkers as soon as possible with out hurting your economy at this point. Anyways, here is the replay one more time to show how the b.o. and the early gas/upgrade approach works for playing zerg to their maximum power. http://www.repdepot.net/replay.php?id=33794 Remember two attack upgrade on lurker means an additional 4 damage on lurker, and once you factor how that works with splash damage, you are talking about +16 more damage per every 1 lurker if it splashes on 3 additional units. When you do a 27 lurker push, which is what I did in the replay above, it becomes obvious that this is where all the power of zerg is lying dormant and hidden right there in the obvious.
This should be put in the sc1 section actually. And I'm terran as well. Anyways, nice research, but it would be a lot more interesting if it was about sc2.
I only read the first few paragraphs but what I read was completely wrong. Another average Battle.net player questioning the people who do this for a living. Never ceases to amaze and it seems to be happening a lot since StarCraft 2 beta. The whole "gas trick being the optimum build order" got me laughing too
lol, why would you reply to someone who you have never played? You want to 1v1 so what you say actually means something? Why would you post unless you had something meaningful to say. You have an opportunity to do yourself a favor and back up what you say here.. I mean I'm giving you an opportunity... Otherwise, your above statement was more worthless then mine... at least mine has the benefit of the doubt. The bottom line is, I have the raw proof in the replay. I'm warning you, it would be very wise to watch it.
Btw, there are plenty of reps of professional zerg players doing gas trick... You are something else dude... I tell ya... Do you even play starcraft or what?
I would like to see how gaz trick work agains't reaver+corsair wich is a pvz strat. Reaver outrange lurker and corsair web ennemy that may come. of course there are shuttle for reaver that keep them safe from lurker.
