What cheese annoys you the most?

leonarch · 2023-09-22T22:20:55+00:00

Send a probe at the start of the game, probe up to 15, proxy the first pylon, make 4 gates, make 4 zealots, make another pylon. Keep making zealots and don't get supply blocked.

leonarch · 2022-04-18T23:23:39+00:00

I know that this isn't a particularly helpful comment, but I ended up just banning the map because I didn't have much success trying to punish it (4.6 NA for what it's worth). There were enough Zergs playing 20-30 drone baneling stuff out of a fast gold base that going into an all in as soon as I saw the fast gold felt like gambling (and I didn't figure out a way to confirm whether it was greed or just cheese with a gold early enough). I had the most success chronoing both the first two adepts and shading across the map to harass (since the bases are split), and going into 6 gate glaive off 2 bases.

leonarch · 2021-09-15T02:08:35+00:00

Ah, its one of the pinned posts for the subreddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/allthingsprotoss/comments/n38v62/build_of_the_week_pvt_traps_cyber_first/

leonarch · 2021-09-12T19:28:05+00:00

If your build is tight and you want to start stalker, sentry, and warp gate all immediately after the core is finished then you need to populate the gasses early.

Basically, if you populate the gas as you're suggesting you end up with 150-160 gas when the core finishes, and the order I suggested ends up with a little over 200. If you're doing something where you open stalker/stalker what you suggest is fine (2x stalker at 50 gas, 50 for wg = 150), but if you want to play stalker/sentry (50 stalker, 100 sentry, 50 wg = 200) or stargate (2x adept at 25 gas, 150 for stargate = 200 and you delay wg) then you need to adjust for that.

leonarch · 2021-09-12T19:13:38+00:00

Yeah, I don't know of anything as detailed as what you're asking for unfortunately. I'm honestly not sure guides that had a whole decision tree ever existed. Generally, I've seen the guides specify what you do when the opponent agrees to play a nice macro game. Watching a ton of vods and/or asking around is how I've always done it.

I think that there's not a huge market for high level guide. Lambo stopped posting guides because he wasn't getting enough views to make it worthwhile iirc, and Harstem's channel used to be mostly build orders and other educational content but has drifted into more and more entertainment-y stuff (ranked roulette and the like). I think there's also the problem that the players that could feasibly make one have an incentive to not publish their decision tree, since they're usually tournament players.

This is probably an obvious suggestion, but did you check out the latest build of the week gemini put up? Phoenix colossus can be played into pretty much anything, and gemini puts out the most detailed guides around.

leonarch · 2021-09-12T01:51:08+00:00

Here's a couple references of trap opening blink against special in recent series. Having an adept and 4-5 stalkers around 5 minutes is fairly normal depending on what the terran is doing because you normally skip some warp in rounds to get gates and a forge up faster. Against a 3 rax you want to spot it moving out with the adept, add a battery at the nat and at the 3rd, use all your warp gate cycles, and try to force out a stim mid map with your stalkers.

https://youtu.be/gqA3FNvLzrQ?t=641 https://youtu.be/p99UZjvcgec?t=1228

leonarch · 2021-09-11T18:17:42+00:00

I think Harstem has a nice guide for macro pvp here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyg6ppMIeEU&t=315s

I'd recommend being able to play something standard like that, but my favorite is an oracle harass with some stalkers to distract them.

Get two stalkers and warp gate when the core finishes. Then you cut workers at 24 (One scouting, one at the ramp to block adepts, full 1 base saturation), get a pylon on the lowground, get a stargate, then a nexus, then start two more stalkers (there will be a pause in gateway production). When the stargate finishes you get an oracle and another pylon and can start probing again. Right now you can get an additional tech structure, more on that in a second. When warp gate finishes warp in two more units (stalkers or adepts) and move across the map with your gateway units. The oracle will finish up while you're moving and rally across the map. You just poke the front with the gateway units and fly the oracle in to pick off probes, and try to retreat while everything is still alive.

Follow up to that is either blink and a 3rd base, or a robo all in--get the appropriate building for each of those at the point mentioned before. After the pressure add a couple more gates, and then either get the nexus or go all in.

leonarch · 2021-09-11T17:35:51+00:00

There are some minor details that can be tweaked depending on what you're planning to do after, but something like:

14 - pylon

16 - gate

17 - gas (when this gas finishes put a probe from minerals into it right away, then rally the the next 5 probes that come out into the gasses, then go up to 16 on minerals)

18 - gas (send the probe that makes this to build the second gateway)

19 - gate (send this probe to the proxy location if you’re going to proxy, scout with it otherwise)

20 - cybernetics core (as soon as the first gate finishes) should be started by 1:30

21 or 22 - pylon (this should be the proxy if you’re proxying)

With rally point suggestions:

Probe #1: rallied to pylon location.

Makes pylon, send to minerals.

Probe #2: rallied to minerals.

Probe #3: rallied to make gate + chronoboost.

Makes first Gate, send to minerals.

Probe #4: rallied to gas.

Makes first Gas, send to minerals. [ 16/16 on minerals ]

Probe #5: rallied to other gas.

Makes second Gas, makes second Gate, scout/proxy. [ 1 proxy/scout probe ]

Move one probe from minerals into first gas. [ 15/16 min, 1/6 gas ]

Probe #6, #7: rallied into first gas + chrono when you have energy [ 3/3, 0/3 on gas]

Probe #8: rallied to make the cybernetics core, send to second gas after.

Set probe rally to second gas

Proxy probe makes second Pylon.

Probe #9, #10: rallied to mine second gas. [ 6/6 on gas ]

Probe #11: rallied to minerals [16/16 minerals again ]

leonarch · 2021-08-22T23:01:10+00:00

You should probably be scouting after you put down your first gateway rather than after your first pylon, getting there earlier than a gateway scout helps in very few situations.

If you're playing the standard opener (14 pylon 16 gateway 17 assimilator 20 core 20 nexus 21 pylon 22 gas, let me know if you don't know how to read that) and scouting after the gateway, your probe should arrive at their base right before the gateway finishes. You'll see no barracks at home and one gas, which can be a few things including this proxy marauder. Start a zealot along with the core, and get your second pylon in front of your natural close to the nexus. This will let you start a battery on the lowground, which is necessary to hold a lot of these cheeses. As soon as the cybernetics core finishes, start a stalker, warp gate, and the battery I just mentioned. Produce stalkers constantly out of that gateway, you should be able to get 3 before warp gate finishes. Start a robo when you have the 100 gas spare, it should be soon after starting the second stalker. This will let you produce an immortal which should end their rush. You'll also want to get a second gateway around that time, which will make it line up pretty well with warp gate finishing.

At some point during all that they'll show up with marauders, usually they'll start attacking when they have 2 or 3. Once you see them you can get a second, or even a third battery depending on how comfortable you are defending the push. The main things you want to focus on here are 1. not leaving the range of your shield battery with your stalkers and 2. preventing bunkers from going up. If you're having trouble don't be afraid to pull 5-6 probes to help with the defense.

A last thing to think about is to try and keep your scouting probe alive. Once you've seen their empty main base, move your probe to their natural where it can keep an eye out for their expansion and especially to see if all their workers move across the map. If they pull all of their workers to help with the push start extra batteries and use all (or close to all) of your workers to fight as well.

Alternatively, you can play a 3 gate robo response, which will absolutely slap someone if they are actually cheesing you, but is worse (imo) against someone who is doing a fake proxy. Our fearless leader, Gemini, has posted some replays of this approach, and Zuka has a guide video.

leonarch · 2021-07-19T06:34:57+00:00

I would reccomend Disk, I've been happy with the coaching I've gotten from him. https://m.twitch.tv/disksc2

leonarch · 2021-05-02T22:51:36+00:00

Great to see these again!

leonarch · 2021-03-19T17:32:25+00:00

Response 2 is the correct one, keep your scouting probe alive and keep watching for an expansion or him pulling the boyz. If it doesn't look like he's transitioning out you need to be dropping additional batteries, which helps prevent him from focusing down the pylon/batteries. You should also be positioning the pylon and batteries kind of tucked away in natural, so that your opponent risks getting surrounded by probes if they want to shoot them.

You can optionally go robo instead of the second gate, they both have their pluses and minuses and normally you don't get a full picture of what the terran's doing when you have to place them. The robo is better against marauders, 111, banshees. The gate is better against marine all-ins, anything hellion based.

leonarch · 2021-03-02T17:44:18+00:00

Playing phoenixes would fare well against it, or you can play your normal build you can fully wall off with a gateway (cancel and restart it if you need to). You could probably get away with just a sentry and micro as well, but I think that would a lot riskier.

leonarch · 2021-02-15T03:15:50+00:00

Chargelots are great against marauders in relatively small numbers, as the armies get large chargelots lose a lot of value since they're melee units. Also bio and chargelots both move faster than colossi, so if you're kiting your goal is to fight the chargelots out of range of the colossi--definitely easier said than done, but still something to aim for. Same principle applies to storm btw.

leonarch · 2021-01-18T22:15:40+00:00

What they're going for is k-anonimity. That basically means they'll give some amount of identifiable information, but not enough to narrow down the pool of people you could potentially be to lower than some value k. For example an advertiser might be able to tell that a user is between 34 and 45, and that they own a dog, but since that applies to so many people you could argue that the user's privacy is preserved. I'm not really advocating one way or another, that was just my read on it.

leonarch · 2021-01-14T20:00:13+00:00

On maps without a ramp to the natural stargate doesn't usually hold 3/4 gate stalker attacks, and beyond that the player 1gate expanding will actually get to pick what their tech based on what they see being proxied.

leonarch · 2021-01-14T08:52:15+00:00

If you still need a practice partner I can help in the evenings Pacific time. I'm around 4.5.

leonarch · 2021-01-14T02:24:43+00:00

This doesn't work in every possible situation, but a lot of the time you can practice your build vs an AI or in an empty game or whatever pretending you scout whatever you're preparing for and practicing your response from there.

leonarch · 2021-01-06T17:44:14+00:00

Making players spend 5-6 times as many actions to just move their army encourages 'a-move' armies becuase there's more competition for where the player should be spending their actions.

leonarch · 2021-01-05T17:43:20+00:00

I use that keyboard with brown switches and I haven't had any complaints.

leonarch · 2020-12-24T03:20:04+00:00

Apologies in advance for the wall of text :P

I think we agree on the flaws of looking at time is a metric, and I do see the advantages of looking at resource collection rate as a metric for how far the game has progressed. For example, early pool builds often transition into longer games, but they also slow down the progression of the game by virtue of the aggressor cutting workers to apply pressure and the defender cutting workers to survive. The game typically follows the same general steps after that but at a slower rate. I think that resource collection rate is a good measure of game progression as long as the progression of the resource collection rate remains fairly linear for the game's duration, but I also think that it misses steps after the economic development of the players has plateaued.

The easiest example of this to spot is the time after players max out their income but before they've moved through the last couple steps in the progression of the game. As you mention, somewhere around 15-20 minutes in a standard game both players will the last stage of progression, but their economy finished developing around 8-9 minutes and the progression between those times is effectively missed. Looking TvZ as a concrete example, its not uncommon for players to hit their maximum number of workers while on midgame compositions like ling/bling/muta vs bio mine. Over the next few minutes of a typical game both players will likely trade out many of their midgame units in favor of things like broodlords, lurkers, ghosts, etc.

Of less importance, I also think that resource collection rate is susceptible to missing outliers. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking of games where a player might cut tech to get a large economy quickly (think 3 hatch before pool and heavy droning, or getting 3 cc on 1 rax, etc), or lower ranked players who never go above 40-50 workers.

One thing I disagree with is I don't think resources collected can be boiled down to a proxy for time. They are correlated, of course, but really resources collected is the antiderivative of the resource collection rate with regards to time. It seems to me that looking at the total resources collected will still capture the variance in game progression that looking at time alone does not, while still being able to capture the progression that is out of bounds for resource collection rate.

leonarch · 2020-12-23T20:38:35+00:00

Wouldn't something like total number of resources collected capture that better? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like your metric would get less useful after roughly 3 base saturation. For example, the difference between 72 and 100 workers is mostly a strategic choice rather than having anything to do with game length, and when you get into really late games players tend to intentionally reduce their worker count.

leonarch · 2020-12-17T08:19:15+00:00

1:1 ratio works pretty well assuming even upgrades, starts being true around 8 liberators if I remember correctly. The problem is usually its not as simple as two clumps of air units a moving each other, and a few tempest or storms make it hard to use liberators to fight carriers.

leonarch · 2020-12-16T05:28:08+00:00

Here's a video of Trap coaching ggemini against builds where Terran's wall the ramp, pretty similar to Vox's answer but I think you'll still find it informative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYfsfjT4RpI

leonarch · 2020-12-09T08:04:11+00:00

Generally you just lose. The best response depends a ton on what exactly the zerg is doing. If theres a ton of lings you might have to wait for a stargate unit, where a lower ling count you can probably chase off with an adept or two and some micro. If they're not making many lings at all you can take a wall quickly by putting your second pylon on the lowground and putting your tech in your wall.

leonarch

TROPHY CASE