How to Stay Positive: Thoughts on Winning

To continue my undoubtably annoying trend of posting only on SC2 stuff (I'm sure it'll end sometimes...?) more thoughts on the game!

As I suspected, that bad night was simply that-- a bad night. I've played since then and although I can't say we've had a winning streak, we've been doing well (we is vague since it usually includes some combination of Rome, Aaron, and others). It's still definitely a learning process, but it's going well.

In particular I've been falling more and more in love with Dark Templars. I've pretty much nailed down an opening build that I've been using to great success for the last couple days, which basically gets me very quickly with full resources, an observer, 4 Gateways, 4 Zealots, a Warp Prism, and the ability to teleport 4 DTs instantly into the back of a base (after having the observer check it out). It's a great build because if they don't have any detectors (which happens often) it's devestating, and it also flows well into a mid-game/late-game strategy (since you have 4 Gateways and a Robo bay, and the ability to continue either with Robos or go Starport). For instance, one particularly good game happened tonight, which has my super amusing army value graph:

As you can see, for most of the game I had the 4 zealots and varying numbers of DTs. I successfully hit one base completely (with Rome's help) and proceeded to keep running around destroying things, with the Warp Prism following around to give reinforcements as needed. What causes the odd spike was because the DTs were working so well I didn't really need anything else, but I eventually realized just how many resources were piling up, and made 6 starports and began mass producing Void Rays and Carriers since I didn't need to counter anything in particular. Alas, although I had built up a fleet of about 100 supply, due to continued harassment from me, Rome and Aaron (including me destroying about 8 supply depots because everything else was guarded) they quit before the fleet was able to be used.

I am disappoint.

The Dark Templar strategy doesn't extend only to team games, too. I've been using it quite well in 1v1 matches. I keep setting up expecting an early rush to be countered with a DT hit, but the early rush keeps not coming, I keep getting the DTs in and winning the game, about 8-10 minutes in.

Surprisingly, this took a while. The first 1v1 game I played I got soundly beaten, and didn't play any for a long time. I finally got my nerve up and tried it, and since then I've won the last 4 1v1 games I've played (with the DT strat.) I suppose this is one of those lessons to not give up after an initial failure and blah blah blah. I'm am glad I've done it though, since I'm sure it's helping my skill set a lot (especially since I keep prepping for things that don't happen, like an early rush or the need to expand after the DT hit fails). It's also in a lot of ways easier than team games, since you can focus on a lot less (no coordination, no watching mulitiple bases early on, etc.). I'm almost looking forward to a game where I don't win handily so early on, although the wins are nice.

To keep up with my usual end of the post question, what builds do you all seem to be favoring/liking? I know I "see" most of them, but in general I don't know as well as I probably should. As I was half-joking with Rome earlier, despite playing so often with Aaron, I usually have no idea what he's up to, only that he's being inevitably effective.

To close, a non sequitar image. Basically while attacking my entire base got hit, and my entire base of production gets wiped, but I still had a lot of resources and income; but no buildings to produce units with. This is desperation.

-HTMC