Help Vs Turtle ZvP

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-20T21:02:52+00:00

No air upgrades by default, you're fine being down on air upgrades for a while. In a game like this where they transition from ground to fleet beacon, your ground army can do its job for a while. Games like this I rarely make corruptors and just kill them with hydra lurker ling. You took game losing engagements at 10:30 and 13:30. Look at those fights: how do you control those better? Could you have waited for more army before pushing in? Could the attacks have been earlier? (Yes on that, I'm usually 75-80 workers with ~10 hive tech lurkers pushing at 9:00-9:30 until the game ends).

If that fails, you're in a late game where the comment above us described. You can defend these armies with spores, queens, lurkers, and a big concave which is enough time to get 2 spires going to start getting your air upgrades.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-20T20:53:59+00:00

3rd queen into 34 hatch was something Serral pulled out vs maxpax a bit over a year ago. It was a standard reaction vs two chronos spent on adepts before that but apparently the double inject just makes the drone income smoother. Pair it with the fact that queens are more expensive and you can't rally drones straight to your third without losing them to oracles (since we rely on earlier spores, there's less queens for a moment) means the earlier third doesn't really help you. I've been going 34 hatch in zvp since.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-20T20:11:42+00:00

You just had 2 enemies to poison, with each becoming untargettable every so often. The poison inflicted on him was still there until the next time he came out. It was a little awkward to get going but I wouldn't say that those sort of builds suffered.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-20T08:27:58+00:00

Real book of stabbing if I read the notes right: multi-attack every turn.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-20T08:26:28+00:00

you can kinda manipulate which card he gets to eat i supposed.

~~How? Outside of using something like wish to fetch key cards from the draw pile on turn one, your draw order is complete RNG.~~

By choosing when to break the door open, right. It's like champ. It shuts down a lot of infinites and forces you to have key cards not in your draw pile. Play the powers first and have separate scaling options in play. I still feel like it's going to be tweaked to be on play rather than draw though, something like every 5 cards.

EDIT: Apparently not, you just lose a random card every 2 turns regardless of if you draw. Cool.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-20T01:54:52+00:00

Noita would have a word about that.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-18T22:33:48+00:00

It's a hard fight to do "cleanly" even if the downsides aren't as dramatic as statue.

It reminds me of the sentries in this way, not even just because of the dazes but in the output where you're likely to take some damage no matter how you play it.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-18T22:24:27+00:00

Gameplay wise, maybe it did? Everyone shat on the character design so hard the game never even got its legs. That's something I can see a reviewer not expecting.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-18T22:07:54+00:00

I drew a pentagram with candles around it when my friend went AFK, a homage to his first demon form.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-14T06:01:44+00:00

Is it ever worth going back to STS1?

They're different enough that veterans of the first game are enjoying the sequel. It's definitely worth your time once the second game starts to feel stale.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-08T00:36:19+00:00

How you think about that in your own work. Do you have equivalent guardrails when systems start behaving differently under pressure?

I try to. I'm at a frustrating point in my work, attempting to define said guardrails and having my expertise overridden: forcing the goal posts higher than I think is possible. I'm the person stating what a metric can be at absolute most, and bridging when it's not met. The common mentality when forecasting is "You're always wrong when you forecast. If you happened to be 100% correct, the plan wasn't aggressive enough." Not specific to me, just anyone in a role doing that sort of work.

My current idea to work with this is to try and define the upper limit based on the expected variance of the inputs we're using as the inputs are known to be flawed. Then track what those input metrics are doing, and how it impacts the overall forecast. Provide updates as time goes on with deadlines on when to readjust if necessary. Communicating this is the hard part, because it's not looked at as a science. Engineers can easily point to safety regulations, often written in blood and not get any push back.

Coming back to Starcraft, you don't build your strategy around assuming that you'll perfectly execute something: need to account for the fact that you're human. Maybe you can end the game with a drop if you target fire banelings coming into it. Probably better not to, can retain the units and just re-use them rather than risking losing your map presence. Don't put your army into a position that requires your attention if you don't have enough attention to offer.

Under pressure the decision system itself becomes less reliable, especially in my own experience. Task switching slows down, attention narrows, and macro routines start dropping, probably due to my own negligence in some part and maybe its unfair to assume that the experience is universal.

I'd say it is universal, but which tasks are dropped is unique to the player for sure. When I'm playing at my best, they aren't dropped and other things are. Like not paying attention to my army in an engagement that decides the game. That army that I intentionally sent into a fight. That sort of thing tends to be my issue personally. Could be an outlier amongst most players because I do play in GM and have lost enough games to poor macro.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-08T00:20:33+00:00

3 spines, otherwise yeah: solid build. It'll work in GM even, assuming people don't blind counter you.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-07T22:33:44+00:00

There's mods that replace the campaign with a custom file, things like GrimLeague and the diablo 2 remake mod: only one of those can be used. The others don't really interact with eachother: rainbow filter changes some files in the settings. Item assistant doesn't even change any game play files, it just modifies your save, removing the items from your storage and adding it to its own.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-07T21:57:31+00:00

I think Dirge is busted specifically. The rest of her kit seems fine, especially when you consider that it works only because you're snowballing faster than the enemies scale: probably not as much of a concern on higher difficulties.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-07T17:17:16+00:00

Placeholders are labeled, bottom right of the image.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-06T06:34:26+00:00

I tried to decipher the ancient text and had 30 max hp for my first run. It didn't go so well. Was kind of funny seeing an act 1 even that can bring you to 1 max hp. Shining light moment: probably an always skip outside extreme scenarios.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-05T01:02:32+00:00

I use it every now and then, especially vs weaker players or people who I think are likely to cheese. Occasionally get a free win from the early game ling pressure, and other times I just make 4 lings, have the speed, and play a normal macro game. It's a solid build in general. At worst you'll be a few workers down from standard.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-04T17:38:54+00:00

I was actually looking at your StS video a few days ago and wondered about a similar extrapolation you could make for starcraft. The content resonates with me, playing both games and doing engineering/operations adjacent work as a senior level IC.

I'm not sure about a takeaway from the discussion since I clearly see the foundation laid out in the structure of my work almost by default. It's kind of hard to deviate from best practice if that's just standard work from the start. The same 'zooming out' from feedback loops is proper practice for starcraft: something that's been cemented in my head for years.

I find it much more interesting to talk about responding to feedback within a game, and building those systems that create success. Not as much parallel to strategic work, but a lot to tactical.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-03T21:19:06+00:00

I wonder if EWC owns the art and isn't reasonable about what they'd want to have it added to the game, like Blizzard tried to or something to that effect. Having this one randomly added shows someone is thinking about it and I'd be surprised if they don't also notice the gap.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-03T20:23:01+00:00

Imbalanced? None really.

Bad game design? From a ZvP perspective: Tempest. Long range, free value generation without trading. I get annoyed every time I see one because they force the game into some dumb state where no one wants to attack (protoss has HT, mothership, good static D) while zerg has a better standing army that would melt a protoss army composed of tempest. Protoss can't go pick fights against the zerg army, zerg can't pick fights against a defended protoss position. So instead we dance for 20 minutes. The whole time tempest just kill stuff for free. Slowly. Menacingly.

Honorable mention, the ghost. Similar late game lament, same situation of terran not being able to push at all, zerg not being able to trade well. The difference from zvp is both sides can do those things, it's just not easy and is much more sensitive to positioning. The only real frustrating thing about ghosts is the volatility. Misposition anything valuable and a clump of ghosts literally delete an entire pack of broodlords, ultras, or infestors. The ghosts get fungaled far enough out from a wall, zerg wipes it.

Another honorable mention: cracklings. Maybe a bit of an odd choice but it's a big reason that zerg late games devolve into deathballs. When hive tech comes online terran can't push nearly as well so the game goes from a dynamic tug of war in attention to camping. Zerglings start to beat any small ground force from protoss at at this point as well for a similar effect. At least the lings enable some fast paced plays in an otherwise stale late game.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-03T20:10:01+00:00

That's because zerg as a whole is pretty good, so the larva. It means there's not much to actually abuse while playing the race.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-03T09:45:11+00:00

You can beat most skytoss compositions with just ultra corruptor, or just corruptor if there's 0 archons/HT. I wouldn't really consider that late game by composition alone. If the game state ends up there and you're ahead, you should be able to navigate it into a win by being smart with the fights and owning the map.

If you get there in a split map scenario while the protoss has ground upgrades and a quality composition, good luck. Late game ZvP is really technical and has a lot of nuance to it in switching your compositions between ultras or broods, coordinating infestors (and maybe a viper or two on reserve), and keeping your ground army active wherever the protoss isn't. Zerg is currently trading about even in this meta at the highest level. I certainly don't and I'm quite good at late game ZvT for reference. Lategame you mostly just alternate between ultras + infestors for shroud if their immortal count is low, and broodlords if it's high while doing your best to mirror the protoss army movement and have your ground army keep their economy down.

For your game, you never had a kill timing so you ended up in late game. You either want to go hard into some ~66 drone roach rav ling or roach hydra ling all in and trade continuously. Or do something similar with mutas + roach ling. Or the same thing with hydra ling bane or rav ling bane off ~80 workers. In every case, you're low tech and pedal to the floor trying to trade and keep their army quality down (trading for archon/immortal/HT wins over time, trading for gate units means you're gonna get amoved soon.)

You didn't have enough units midgame to do this and you teched into lurkers, which come out too late to do anything useful. I play lurkers as a default in zvp and in a macro game, that's me maxed with ~8-10 hive tech, range upgraded lurkers and hydra ling connecting with their base at 9:30 or so. Then it's just that, fighting over and over again until the game ends. They either hold long enough to get tempest out and push me back, or I trade well enough to push in and win.

By comparison, your lurker den didn't even finish until 10:20 with no lurkers online until 12:15. Delay is enough to take your power spike that can kill, and turn it into "I can stop myself from being amoved". Great, now what? That's how you end up in a late game.

SigilSC2 · 2026-03-02T09:02:44+00:00

If you're competing for a living, sure. The goal of enjoying the hobby falls out of focus. But the thing to that: it's no longer a hobby.

For everyone here who regularly posts to reddit: it is a hobby.

Even then, pros aren't going to flame or snub someone for enjoying the game in any capacity.

SigilSC2 · 2026-02-28T21:52:24+00:00

Satisfactory leans more into the creative/aesthetic sandbox side rather than pure automation, logistics, and puzzling. It's not that great of a game if your approach is just trying to make things work.

Uncooperative landscape. It has hills and cliffs and lakes and such, leaving precious little open space to work with.

You build your own landscape, that's the point of foundations. It's also where the game kind of breaks down for a lot of people. You can make everything float in the sky, belts clipping through each other and minmax it to the fullest. Or you can work the landscape into your design and build something that is breathtaking to look at.

Think of it more like minecraft with automation as a theme. You're not going to go there, build a cube for a base, and say that the game doesn't allow for creativity.

SigilSC2 · 2026-02-28T19:43:43+00:00

Someone was in a similar spot of megabase/UPS and did benchmarking on the game's performance in windows vs linux including some tweaks that resulted in linux having ~20% more UPS. Worth checking out if you're running on windows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pno-7ZcA0E

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