Starcraft 2: A Children's Story, Part 3: Of Tactics Large and Small

Three races, three men, one team. Rome, Aaron and I banded together for an epic night of Starcraft 2-ing, and although 2 of the more memorable games were when Rome dropped, I now present to you the second of 3 parables designed to inspire young minds to greatness. And by that I mean there's going to be lots of pictures.


After Aaron left us for the night, Rome and I decided to try a ranked 2v2 match. All seemed well and good, except Rome dropped 2:21 minutes in. Still hearing Aaron's voice in my head to believe in him that believes in him, and because I wanted to try out the early Void Ray rush strategy, I decided to try and play anyway, controlling both Rome and my own units, despite knowing nothing about the Terran tech tree. Rome's advice? Just spam Marines.

Rome drops and we all offer our condolences.

What to do, what to do... well, those barracks there looks good. All unspent crystal goes into Marines and Supply Depots to feed them.

Meanwhile, all my base has been doing period is harvesting Vespene like a madman and maxing out two Starports to build Void Rays. I get about 6, then decide to launch the offensive

The surprise Rays catch the bottom player completely off guard (Blaykakudori) and I proceed to wipe out his entire base.

Meanwhile, his small Reaper force sits there, unsure of what to do and impotent against air units. This will be important later.

While I'm busy annihilating his companion, top player wisely starts mass producing missile turrets, which at the time I can't see.

I find the small force, my Ray explodes the one Marauder and the rest of the Reapers take flight and fleeeeeee.

A couple reinforcement Rays arrive, and I attack the upper base to find a line of towers. Nooooo. Some of my rays go down.

However, enough survive to get fully charged, and then the missile turrets cease to be a problem.

Pew pew.

Meanwhile, the Reapers arrive and find a lonely supply depot they decide to attack. I don't think they can see any farther.

"Oh man, killing these supply depots is easy. Oh hey, wait, what's that in the distance?"

"OH EMPEROR WHERE DID THEY ALL COME FROM" And thus ends the saga of the Reapers.

Having stripped the defenses, the Void Rays (reinforced for the 3rd time) wreck their trademark havoc on the base.

Good end!

So despite my lack of faith in myself, all I had to do was believe in me who believes in Aaron who believes in himself. I can't say I two managed two bases super well, but it did end up working. I'm also proud to say my APM shot from about the usual low 30s up about 44, which while still a far cry from Aaron's average of like 80, is a noticable improvement. I've also since this game become a large, large fan of the "Cheese" Rays and Carrier combo and have used it to large effect in a number of games. I feel like in general in a two player match having one teammate go lots of tier 1 and the other mass tier 2/3 units can be good as long as you don't get rushed by both enemies. In any case, I've found that I do well as Protoss, but only if I have good teammates covering for me during the initial phases of the game (Luckily Aaron and Rome fit that description more than adequately). But for now, I hope you enjoyed this trilogy, and expect something that's not SC2 next time (maybe).


-HTMC