Just had a rather epic struggle against a terran player.Seemed standard enough and thought i'd lose at around 10-15 minute mark...but wow it just kept going.Nothing like a 5 minute battle (go to 39:00) Good to watch if any zerg players wonder how to beat MMM or Siege tanks, he screwed up a few times but so did I haha. Zerg air is a real terror if your not ready for it. http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/84856-1v1-terran-zerg-desert-oasis I think i've hit my limit of efficiency at 75-80 apm...need to learn how to use control groups well :S Any tips would be helpful if someone saw an opening I missed that could've finished it faster. I realise my expansions aren't at max, I didn't upgrade much but I was mainly focusing on destroying every attack as it came. Desert Oasis is a great map for practising surronds and getting your opponent where you want to fight him (Essential in ZVT)
I'm watching the replay now.. just gonna mention some things as I watch it.. Your macro coulda been a lot better. You had two extra hatcheries not producing anything or mining anything. Definitely wasted. You should have increased drone production a lot as well. Upgrades, especially on your mutalisks, would have made a big difference. You harassed a lot which is good, but you missed a lot of spots that had minimal defences and seemed to only attack where he was heavily fortified. If you didn't notice, his macro was terrible, he had 200 energy on two orbital commands for a large portion of the game.. how he averaged 140 apm is beyond me.. You lost hatcheries multiple times and did not replace the lost drones from the hatcheries. You also let a lot of drones die that did not need to. 35 minutes into the game you had 35 harvesters, you should've had 70. You did a good job tech switching.. he did not. He had MMM virtually the entire game. Don't get used to that At the end of the game you still had no upgrades for your air, big mistake there. I know you said you need to get better with control groups, but one big one that oyu need to do is hotkey your hatcheries and queens (you should have at least one queen per hatchery) so you can reinforce your army much easier. Just some things I noticed, overall you did well. You played twice as good as him with half the APM. Just shows how unimportant that is.
The Terran should have switched to vikings when you got brood lords. He also built a reaper for no apparent reason and stayed MMM the entire game.(I don't use MMM Personally, there are funner strats) Like Zaner said, you should've upgraded. It would have made the game a lot faster. His Macro was bad. You were on 4 base when he had 2. That is all.
To be completely honest I thought diamond level games were much better. Now I might just have the confidence to play league games again. Interesting how you managed without control groups, but each to their own I guess. Sometimes I liked your tactic (e.g., where you backed away with your main army until the 2-3 of your lings you left behind destroyed a tank, then went back in), other times I didn't (e.g., you sent banelings and zerglings together against tanks, which was a waste of banelings). Zaner, could you suggest a few methods of assigning groups? Currently I use 12 melee 3 ranged 4 air 5 infestor 6-9 hatcheries, and while I can get reinforcements and micro this way I need to go home for larva injection, which I sometimes forget. I've read about grouping all hatcheries and queens to a key each but then I can't cycle through them and I wouldn't want all my queens to crawl to the hatchery I inject to. If that makes any sense.
I should probably invest more time into the hotkey-ing of my army(s), but what I do now works alright. At the start I always hotkey my Nexus (or CC or Hatch) or 4, simply because 4 is close by to the rest of the hotkeys. Since I play Protoss I add the rest of my Nexuses to that hotkey so I can quickly chronoboost. I hotkey my first scouting probe to 1, then typically leave that probe to a xelnaga tower if it survives. Later on I might hotkey my gateways to 5, but I typically have warp gate tech up before it really matters. Once warp gate is up I hotkey Robo facility to 5 and stargate to 6. I hotkey an observer, which I like to leave in the enemy base, to 1, and my army to 2. I typically spend most of my time watching/controlling my army so I don't hotkey it as much. I use hotkeys to control stuffs that are otherwise neglected. When I play zerg I hotkey all of my hatcheries 4, and queens to 5,6,7, etc. I've never played high level zerg tho so I don't really know what a good idea for control groups would be. Remember that your choice of control groups is totally.. well your choice. Some pros use hotkeys between 1-10, others use hardly any, maybe just a nexus and their main army.
Yeah Kuvasz it wasn't exactly the best match i've been in :S When i got the broodlords i should've held back my zerglings and banelings because attacking the tanks stopped them bombarding their own marines (and of course wasted all of my banelings and zerglings). Thanks for the advice guys, I will start dabbling in custom games with my hotkeys because atm i only really use them for caster units. I'm only in diamond because i'm good at judging army compositions on the fly (whether or not i'll win) and make sure i know what my opponent is doing.
nice i usually hotkeys all my hatcheires to 1 and my scouting drone to 2 and later on i hotkey my army to 2 and spellcasters to 4 BUT i dont kknow how to make my queens spawn larvae without looking at my base and its so annoying :C i once cronoboosted my nexus as protoss without looking at it.... maybe i have to do something like that but i dont remember how i did it *sadface* XD
You can do that by selecting the hot key for the nexus, clicking chrono boost, and then click on your nexus from the mini map. You can do the same thing for queens but I don't think it is very effective. My favorite hot keys are 1-3 army units 4 all my hatches 5 and up is a queen depending on how many hatches I get (1 per hatch) Another popular one i've seen in diamond play is 1-3 army 4 queen and hatch 5 queen and hatch 6 queen and hatch etc. and to select your hatches you just press tab.
Keep in mind replays always tend to look "bad" because your second-chairing after the fact, and that is ALL you have to/are doing. Even if you look at replays of pro tournament level replays you can note a lot of so called "mistakes".
I know what you mean, but that effect is minimised if you watch the replay from a player's perspective, which I always do. Though I know that even then I miss their keystrokes and commands via the minimap.
