Gaming and Metagaming: Thoughts on RTSs and SC2

As is apparent from the recent string of blog posts, I have recently been playing Starcraft 2 a lot, namely pretty much every night for the past week.

As stated in an earlier blog post, I'm fairly new to the competitive online RTS scene, and my strategy as such used to be non-existent. However, playing every night, and without other games to distract, means that I feel like I've been making huge leaps as an RTS player. I'm both microing and macroing decently well, I have an excellent grasp of Protoss units and am beginning to use them effectively (and get an idea of Zerg and Terran through playing against them, my APM is rising slowly and overall I'm more efficient. A huge part of this has been playing with good people I actually know (such as Aaron, Brandon, Rome), allowing me to learn without getting instantly crushed.

The most interesting thing, though was my style of play shifting. At first it was pretty amorphous, then I learned a good strategy that while a bit dairy-intensive worked wonders against the opponents we played (Void Rays + Carriers). This carried me through a couple days of gaming, and then two things happened. One, Aaron and I played a ranked 2v2 against another pair of Zerg/Protoss, and they literally did exactly what we did (Observer + Nydus worm to destroy the Protoss base) and it ended up being an incredibly close game. The second was playing against, rather than with, the previously mentioned friends (along with Jesse and Jasper).

Obviously they all know my general strategies very well, so I had to change lest I be hard countered. Thus, all those strategies I had read about and educated myself with but never used were finally put into play. I ended up doing things like fast teching to Dark Templars for an early hard harass, actually doing mass, unending Zealot/Stalker rushes, and even doing things like this:

The immature Colossi are guarded by their parents until they reach full size and trade their versatility for insane anti-ground lasers. 

This has turned out to be incredibly good for my gameplay, because before general strategies included:
-Void Rays and Carriers
-Void Rays
-Void Rays with more Carriers

And while effective, I knew it wouldn't last long. At this point, a week later, my repertoire now consists of:
- Early Zealot/Stalker rush
- Early DTs
- Stalker/Colossi (Robotech)
- Early Stalkers
- 4-Gate Teleport
- Early Zealot rush
- 4-gate with transports
- Turtle 4-gate
- And of course Void Rays/Carriers

What this means is now I have a lot more flexibility in game, combined with things that I'm learning how to early scout means I'm actually able to adjust on the fly rather than pick a strategy beforehand and hope it works. See a lot of spawning pools/barracks? Go robotech. See a lot of ground-only? Go air. See early invisible? Get an Observer ASAP.

Other skills I'm picking it is adding in appropriate units, like the occasional sentry against mass marines, observers with everything, transports on certain occasions, dark templars when no detectors, etc. And most importantly, hotkeys. Wow those are a lifesaver.

Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is playing against people who know you is incredibly different than playing against random opponents, and can super rewarding. I know Aaron was also changing up his tactics in response to playing with me, which makes me change more, etc. and etc. It's like a vicious cycle except it makes everyone involved a better player, and then when we play real random opponents we can crush them all the easier :-P

I welcome your thoughts on the matter! I think everyone who reads this is either currently playing or will soon be playing :-P

-HTMC