Hey all, been thinking about this lately. Alot of players like to do certain things in 1v1's to "throw off" their opponent. eg: super early pressure with a few marines/helion harass, or mid game multi-prong attacks ect. They seem to do these just to pressure their enemy into making mistakes (not control grouping all their units, forgetting injects/overlords/scv's ect. ect.) Then abusing those mistakes ftw (see what i did there? ) Anyways, my question to all of you is: What tricks/strategy's do you have and use (with success! lol) to throw off your opponents game? I mean across the board, all races, Just shooting for a discussion about these things and how to defend/nullify them ^_^
I usually use Hellions with infernal pre-igniter upgrades and drop them in the opponent's main to do mineral line harassment. This sort of harassment is pretty good against all races. Furthermore, it's not an all-in build and you can easily transition into anything as you already went the 1-1-1 build (destiny-cloud-fist !!!) which gives you access to all the tech paths in the Terran army. However, scouting is extremely important when using this build. If you scout any sort of early pushes such as 7RR, 4 Gate or Marine-Tank it is best to either defend heavily with bunkers or not do this build. If you managed to kill off a huge portion of workers, make sure to either push out early or expand. If not you would have forced your opponent to pull his workers off his mineral line and build additional defenses to prevent future drops. Either way it works out if your favour =) Tip: - Always hide your tech buildings and the Hellions to catch your opponent off guard.
I like to play around with my mutas. It's fun to change directions where my opponent can't see and then show up somewhere he least expects me (e.g., where I was 5 seconds ago). I also like to give baneling mines a shot because if they don't notice it during a multi-pronged attack then they can easily become overconfident and move in with a smaller army than what they think they have after losing some to the mines. I'd like to get into using burrowed infestors because the result is usually either devastating or just plain funny. But probably my most successful tactic is scattering ovies around expansions and creeping them up because then they can't expand the way they'd like - they need to move (some of) their army which is basically a split, which is very convenient az Z since you can pick off the smaller group.
At the start of the game I usually post links to nude pictures of myself, so as to traumatize him early on. no rly, as a Protoss I like to fake builds and force the opponent to build what I WANT HIM TO, so he scouts something that looks like something, I then know what he will go. Its very comfortable to be in control like that. Early push forces enemy to get units rather than tech up, putting on this kind of pressure, even if your push fails miserably and you have to pull out, is important to show your opponent he can't just tech up while you sit there and twiddle your thumbs.
I like to just screw over his gas with any race with workers.. Its lame I know but that buys you time considering by the time they get units to kill it you should already have tech'd enough to kill them off since they usually focus on killing your extractors you placed in their building. Other then that i killed a guy today by landing two command centers in my base created some PF on his crap killing everything mainly then rushing in with what little units I had to finish him off. XD That is hilarious.
re I build 4-6 Voidrays and sneak behind the mineral line. But instead of killing the workers I go right for the main building.
An early poke with just a few units can do wonders to destabilize someone's build order. Vs Terrans, ALWAYS harrass their SCV builders, shift-queue attack by spamming right-click so that your dude doesn't stop attacking when the SCV paths around. Protoss players should generally do a small push with their first zealot / stalker (not vs zerg if you scout a quivering pool early on). Zerg should be aggressive with their small pack of lings, camping them outside the enemy's base to take map control. Anytime you have the opportunity, take the time to clean out your opponent's Xel-Naga control; even something as simple as this can result in psychological pressure against your opponent. My favorite - always take the opportunity to mislead your opponents on your tech. If a terran scans you, go ahead and turn his 270 mineral investment into a compounded advantage for yourself by throwing down a hydra den or stargate, only to cancel them and drop a spire or 3 more gateways once the scan expires. In TvP, just before scanning / killing his observer, let it see you drop 2 factories or a fusion core. The silhouettes of these buildings will remain on the fog of war once the observer dies; meanwhile you're adding 3 rax or a command center.
I'm a Zerg player. A few things I do: VS Protoss - I like using simultaneous baneling drops on mineral lines. What I do while my overlords are queued to drop is poke my lings/roaches outside the protoss base This keeps their attention at the front of the base while the banelings do awesome work on their mineral lines. VS Zerg - If I have a bunch of units for some reason, and I scout with my overlord that my opponent is making drones, I'll poke out with my units causing the zerg player to create units and not drones. Meanwhile I am droning myself and will back off way before I get there, just making sure that my opponent did scout me moving out. VS Terran - Burrowed banelings, burrowed infestor harrass, and of course, muta harrass.
