Complacency and TvP

It feels like I am playing nothing but Protoss players right now, not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Actually overall my TvP win rate is not terrible, but it’s not where I want it to be either, so how do I get to work on solving that problem? Well first of all I need to categorize the reasons for losing vP games and I can pretty much summarize it into three different ones.

Army Control
I rarely lose TvP games because I am outmacroed or because I miss essential tech or upgrades. The most common reason for why I lose TvP games that has gone past the first 15 minutes is because I just get rolled when our armies eventually clash because I don’t emp well enough or because I don’t dodge storms or set up a good enough arc.

Over committing
One of the harsh lessons to learn about TvP is that because of how cost effective +3+3 chargelot/archon is and because of how differently Terran and Protoss re-maxing mechanics works you will often trick yourself to believe that you should push for  the win after you crush a Protoss deathball. So many times I do pull off excellent army control and I destroy the Protoss army, but even then it is usually risky to push too aggressively and I will end up over committing.

All-ins
Still 50% of my TvP losses are probably to various all-ins. At least from a Terran perspective, Protoss feels like the race with the most all-in options. I can think of a multitude of cheeses and all-ins that will in fact kill me if I don’t respond properly.

So looking at my last 20 games and at these three categories I can definitely tell where to focus my energy first. In my code of Starcraft in rule 6, play to your weaknesses I go into how when you practice you should always go after the improvements that will give you the most actual impact on your game with the least investment of time and energy and for me that route of least resistance is definitely on the all-in category. There are so many dumb losses that I can cut out just by not being so god damn lazy.

Basically there are two kinds of cheese/all-ins. The ones which you can easily hard counter and just straight up win if you just go for the right unit comp, building placement etc. As long as you know that it is coming and you know the reaction you should win 100% of the time. Then there are the all-ins which even if you scout them, it will still be down to control and split second decision making to stop them. Many Protoss all-ins such as blink stalker 4 gate belong to the latter category but that’s not the ones I am going after. The fact of the matter is that I lose way too many games to the first category, all-ins that I can identify in advance and that I know how to stop, but I still lose to these because I play in zombie mode and just ignore doing all of the things I should do in my games.

6-8 gate warpgate all-ins without templar or warp prism tech for example. This is something my build should never ever lose to because it is an all-in that can only come through the front and if you have enough bunkers down, and you pull scv’s in time you should not die. Yet I do, constantly because I just don’t scout for it, then when the push comes I don’t see it until it is all the way up at my front and my bunkers get instantly force fielded off. This only happens because I get complacent and skip essential steps.

So to remind myself, what is it that I need to do EVERY game to make sure I don’t get dumb losses to this?

• Gas count. I always do the easy thing and scout for double gas with my first scv. This is fine and helps me rule out a lot of one base all-ins. If the Protoss takes 2 early gases I am almost certain that there be shenanigans on the way. However I should make a point to check if the Protoss has 2 probes on each gas. If they do that is a very plausible sign of an incoming sentry bust.
• Don’t relax because you see 1 gas expand. This is probably the reason why I lose to this, I just get into the mindset that as soon as I see the 1 gas and the nexus go down I just assume macro game. This is obviously retarded because this is precisely what you should see if a heavy warpgate push off two bases is coming.
• 8 minute scan timing. So this is probably the easiest way to relieve this unless I am able to re-scout in some other way at 8 minutes, there 6 warpgates won’t be finished but they will all be building. If I scouted the pylon locations there is a relatively good chance that I should be able to scan a 6-8 gate at this point in time.
• Spotting. I should have spotting units way outside of my front to be able to spot the enemy early enough to pull workers to repair. Most of the times I lose to this because I am too lazy with spotting and end up not seeing the push until there already is a forcefield wall around my bunkers at which point the game is already over.

All of these are really easy things, in fact to dumb it down it all really boils down to the fact that if I can’t rule out a 2 base warpgate all in I should scan at 8 minutes and that should be the only change to make to cut out a lot of losses. It might sound dumb and it sure is. This is not about skill this is just about not skipping the small things in my play and I have a feeling that this is actually why a lot of people lose to stupid shit, not because you don’t know how to scout it, or because you don’t know how to stop it but because you just get complacent and don’t scout for it, or skip in the defense.

Short update

So no I am not dead, I have also not given up on the blog, nor have I stopped playing sc2. I have however not been writing many blog posts because I have been writing so much other stuff that I have not had the time. But new posts will start coming again now, one later today.

The Code – Part 6

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
4. Stats are irrelevant
5. Approach your game without emotion
6. In practice, play to your weaknesses
   This is something that I take a lot of flak for from some of my clan mates, I think partly because they might be misunderstanding what I mean with this one. First of all let us acknowledge that there are two types of Starcraft 2 games, competitive games and practice games. The setting of the game you are playing does not at all decide which category it falls into, there are people who approach playhem tournaments as practice and there are those who see the ladder as their main source of competitive play. Whichever kind of player you are I think it is important to set aside time for both practice and competition and to actually draw a distinction between the two. If you are in a team or have practice partners then playing custom games with them is a good way to practice. If you participate in online tournaments it is probably a good idea to consider those 100% competition. For the ladder it is a grey zone. I think it is impossible to not compete on the ladder, most of us do not participate in enough tournaments to quench that competitive thirst but if you do compete on the ladder then I suggest having two accounts if you have that option. One where you compete to get a high rank, and one where you just don’t care about points.
   The reason why you need to separate these games is because competing and practicing have completely different goals and unless you know the goal before going into the game how can you possibly achieve it?
   When you are competing, winning the game is everything and that goes back to rule number one of the code. When practicing however the goal is to improve in whatever way we set out to.
   As I mentioned previously my clan mates tend to make fun of me for not vetoing maps that are unfavorable to my race, or for going with a build or play style that is harder than a different one. For example I prefer to play bio/tank in TvZ over mech, and I prefer to play on Tal’Darim Altar against zerg even though I have a horrible winrate on that map in that matchup.
   My reasoning for this is that while playing mech might give me plenty of wins, it is considerably easier to play, not suggesting that I am in no way a perfect mecher by any means. But bio/tank puts a lot more strain on my micro and multitasking and as a result, playing bio/tank FORCES me to improve on that. When I play mech that is not the case. The same goes for bad maps, people tend to be more creative when they have restrictions on them. I personally happen to think that old video games are often superior to new multi billion productions because back in the day the limitations of the systems that games were developed for forced the developers to be creative. In the same way I feel that occasionally playing on a map that does not favor me forces me to adapt and find different ways to deal with problems.
   This is not because I hate myself or want to make things as difficult for myself as possible. The reason is just that when you practice you should force yourself to play to your weaknesses. If multitasking is the weakest point of your game, then when playing practice games play a style that relies on multitasking.Winning should be irrelevant in practice games anyhow.

   There are so many aspects of your Starcraft play that you can constantly improve upon, if we were to make a list of every single “skill” in Starcraft 2 from hitting every scv cycle to engaging a ling/baneling army correctly then that list would grow quite long. We all have very varying levels of accomplishment on each little element of our play and reason dictates that we can’t practice all of them at the same time. So which one do you focus on? Well the rational choice is to pick whichever our improvement of will have the most impact on our game. This will almost always be whichever thing you are worst at. Generally when we practice something specific our skill does not grow evenly with time, when you start learning something new from scratch you will improve very fast with very little time and then the more we practice the more time it will take to get a little bit better, this is just because as we get better the things that can be improved becomes more technical and they have less impact on our overall talent.
   For example, let’s take the “skill” of scv production. The art of hitting your ideal number of workers (usually 70-75 for terran) in the shortest possible time, not letting a single cc be idle for a single second, and never queuing up a second one for more than a few seconds. Imagine that you always hit 70 scv’s and you just miss 1 second of procution here and there. At the same time imagine that you do not know how to control your army against a zerg going ling/baneling/muta. If you have one hour of practice time to invest which one should you go for? Quite obviously smoothing out the tiny flaw in your scv production will require way more time for much less impact on your game than learning to split your marines even moderately well and focus firing banelings with tanks.Yes you could say that my macro is my strong point and I can’t micro against zerg, so I will play a style that does not require me to split marines and you would probably have a lot of success but that does not really make you into a good player.
   The bottom line is that the things you are worst at will both be the things that if you improve will be noticed the most when you play, and will give you the most improvement in the shortest possible time. So focus on what you are worst at when practicing and playing to your weaknesses forces you to do just that. As soon as you improve enough to realize that something else is now your weakest point just keep switching your focus and in this way bring all of your talent up in unison. Perhaps you won’t win as much if you forces yourself to play to your weaknesses on the ladder, but then again if we only wanted to win games on the ladder, you could just all in every game and you would be the best all inner in the game, but most of us realize that this is not very sustainable.

The Code – Part 5

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
4. Stats are irrelevant
5. Approach your game without emotion
   Yeah, it is almost like these get harder and harder to follow right and this one seems almost insurmountable. Now remember that the idea behind outlining a “code” like this is not to set up a list of things I think a Starcraft 2 players should do perfectly. The reason why I drew a line between this and the Bushido of ancient Japanese warrior culture is how the Bushido is nothing that you learn and then just do, it is a lifelong process of constantly improving on each aspect of it and the same goes for this code. You should strive to follow these steps, and to get better at better at following them for every day. This one is a particularly difficult one.
   I have already covered some of the reasons for you to be emotionally neutral in other earlier steps of the code. Like how being mannered and not raging over balance is an important move to not open the floodgates of emotions. Because floodgates is a very fitting word. When you start raging over balance it is really hard to stop, you will start doing it every time you lose and you will start to look to balance all the time. Not venting your emotions through balance rage or bad mannering or what not is an important first step to not let your emotions sweep you away, but that is only superficial, the important thing is to deal with the inside.
   There is never a situation where emotions will improve your capability to play Starcraft. The game is based on mathematics and logic and the only way to deduce the correct moves is with reason and emotions invariably clouds your reason and makes you take incorrect decisions. Fear is perhaps the most devastating because it will manifest in ladder anxiety where you don’t dare to play games which obviously limits your progress but when in games fear makes you hesitate. You should always respect your opponents capabilities but never fear them, if you fear your opponent you are going to overcompensate for things and you are not going to be swift and decisive enough when you need to make a move. Fear might cause you to hesitate and delay a push that you thought were rationally correct, then when you finally go for the push the timing has changed and you get crushed and you wrongfully interpret the push as being bad when in fact it would had worked perfectly if you had just gone for it straight away.
   Anger will cause you to rationalize your mistakes and blame it on outside factors, when you are angry you also become defensive. Not only may you make the wrong decisions in game because you want to punish your opponent but most importantly anger does it’s damage when you are not playing games, it incapacitates your ability to analyze your games and to learn from your mistakes. Unless you fight to control your anger you are not going to be able to improve efficiently because you will overlook mistakes in your own game.
   Frustration or annoyance is a manifestation of anger but has different impacts on your game, especially it causes you to lose focus and to hurry things. When in a game being frustrated by an opponent who harasses often and well is going to cause you to make mistakes, the harass itself will cause you to make mistakes because you physically have to deal with it but it is the frustration that does most of the damage, it is also likely to cause you to overreact and put way more defense than you need to thwart off the next harass just to avoid that frustration. In between games frustration leads you to feel an urge to get back in game and get revenge, get a win or whatever making you leap into a new ladder game with your head still in the previous game and then you mess up your build because you were thinking about the last game, or you skip analyzing your replay because you are in too much of a hurry to move onto the next game.
   Pride and all kinds of positive emotions we feel when we win games are just as problematic because they will make you overconfident and again distract you from learning from your mistakes. If you crushed your opponent you are probably going to go and watch the replay as a spectator rather than an analyst, looking at all the awesome moves you did and miss your mistakes, mistakes that might get your crushed in the next game. Building up pride and too much positive emotion when you are winning is also to blow up a bubble that will inevitably pop when you go on that losing streak.
   Despair or desperation is the worst because it will completely unravel your game and almost make you incapable of playing, making you mess your builds up and gg prematurely and just flat out skip important steps in your game.
   All of these emotions feed into one another which is why it matters if you ragequit games or not, because it is all a storm of emotions that is hard to stop once you get it started.
   Now just being aware of all of this and being mindful of it is a good step towards controlling emotions in games better, but to improve from there you might have to set up your own rituals. Maybe when you are at the end of a game don’t gg but sit for a while and just spectate your own emotions if you will. If you are angry, sit back and experience what that anger feels like, try to deconstruct it and ask yourself why you are angry and just use your reason to pick it apart. Don’t leave the game until you have cooled off. If you start to feel yourself going off on an emotional spree just step away from the game and go and do something that helps you, get fresh air, drink water, bash your head against the wall, listen to a song that is calming to you. It will be individual to everyone, just find ways to untangle your emotions and then go back and analyze your loss. 

The Code – Part 4

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
4. Stats are irrelevant
   So you are playing some games on the ladder and you start looking at your points thinking about how many points you need to get that top rank. You go on a loosing streak and you start to think about how many games you need to win to get those lost points back. You lose a game and you look at the rank of your opponent and realize he was a league below you and you are devastated, or you realize they were a league higher and you feel very confident. Feel familiar?
   The next thing, just as difficult as learning to ignore game balance is learning to ignore stats and metaprogress. I’ve already repeated this before but as the first rule states, the only goal in a game is to win, everything else is insignificant. But the second you leave a game that game is gone, it is played and over. You will never ever play that exact game again. What you have left is a replay though and a learning resource and that is exactly how you should approach a played game, as a resource. You should not even think about your replays as you playing, they are no different than all the replays by other players that you might have. When not in a game, the only goal is to learn and improve.
   Keeping track of wins and losses, and more importantly who you won or lost to is a distraction from your capability to improve. It is completely useless information, even if you lose to a player a league lower than you, that does not really tell you anything, it could have been a smurf, it could have been a player who is in that league due to being bad at the other match-ups and good at the one you played. You actually can’t draw any real conclusions about your own progress from knowing your win rate or who you won against because of how volatile the game is. The only facts that are constant and useful are those in game, the mistakes you made, and the things you could have done better, faster, more precise. Those things are not changed in any way by the skill of the player you played, they do not change in any way if you lost the previous game. Remember the previous game does no longer exist, it is played and over and if you won or lost or how many ladder points you lost or gained does not tell you anything useful in how you should improve for your next games.
   This reasoning extends to you needing to drop games from your mind when you leave them. It is way to common that people go into a game with their head still in the last game, this is why it is important to start thinking about played games as just a resource and not a game anymore. Try making clicking the surrender or leave game button a ritual where you leave the current game behind. If you feel emotional or frustrated at the end of a game, just stay in it until you cool down and then leave the game, the second you hit that leave button the game is gone and you change your mindset from win at all costs to winning and losing does not matter, and then only when you go into a new game do you switch your mindset to winning THAT game no matter what it takes. Swapping between your competition mindset in game and your learning mindset out of games is crucial and they should not cross over each other. Take whatever time you need between games to make sure you complete this transition, before you go into a new game. Make up rituals for yourself if you get really emotional in games, get up and walk for a moment, put your head in the freezer, whatever it takes to drop the competitive mindset and go into learning mode where you can look at your replay as if it wasn’t even you playing.

The Code – Part 3

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
3. Game balance is irrelevant
   We have already established that when you are in a game, the only purpose is to win (unless it is a practice game), likewise whenever you are NOT in game the only purpose is to learn and improve. Meanwhile I’ve also mentioned how important it is to not be influenced by emotions because it impairs our ability to accomplish both of those two tasks. As most of you have probably experienced, game balance is one of the primary sources of emotional influence, every player will at some point feel that the race they play is to weak in some sense or that a specific build by another race is too strong. Not only do these discussions take up massive amounts of space on teamliquid or other forums, it is a constant source of rage on the ladder and a means which most of us use to rationalize our losses at some point.
   Now Starcraft 2 is a complex game and it will never ever be truly balanced. Not to mention that the game works on asymmetrical balance which means that even if the game were completely balanced overall a certain race is meant to have an advantage in a certain situation, on a certain map or at a certain stage in the game. The only thing we as players need to know though is that all of that is absolutely irrelevant.
   There was a famous debate on state of the game between IdrA and Day[9] about the balance of Zerg. Nearly everyone jumped into the fanboy boats instantly and declared that one or the other “crushed” the other in the debate. The fact of the matter is they were both talking about completely different points. IdrA was making the argument that zerg was not balanced and too weak. Day[9] was making the argument that maybe zerg is but unless you work at Blizzard it is irrelevant, and Day[9] was right.
   Even if we ignore the fact that it is almost impossible to ever actually talk objectively about balance because it is so hard to even measure balance, you can’t say that race x won y% of gsl finals and is thus stronger than the others. Because you need huge samples of data and with the metagame constantly shifting and there being patches and what not getting an actual read on game balance is near impossible. Imagine for a second though that you had 100% proof that your race is weaker than the others (unless you change race every time one is “op” which would be stupid since the next patch might change it back anyway) what are you going to do with that information? Unless you are a developer at Blizzard knowing the balance of the game has zero consequence to you. You can only play and practice with the means that are in the game, the game is what it is and if Protoss is op then Protoss is op, your unit stats are not going to improve to compensate for that just by you knowing it. You still have to play your games to win with every means, and you still need to practice by looking at the mistakes you make and improve on it. No where does game balance help you. The only effect thinking about game balance has is a negative effect in that you start to rationalize your losses to imbalance and much like how in rule 2 bad mannering becomes an outlet that allows your emotions to take over, so does balance whine. If you start to be convinced that your race is weak, then you are going to attribute things to balance and miss out on things you can improve on. In fact, even if your race is weaker, unless you are Grand Master on the Korean server, you could probably compensate for that balance just by improving anyway. If you lost to a race you feel is overpowered, ask yourself if DRG, MKP or MC would had lost to that same guy you just played? Ofcourse not they would had rolled that game by massively outskilling their opponent because their play is so much more refined than yours. Unless you are playing the game perfectly, balance is not going to be your concern, and as already established even then knowing the game is imbalanced still does not help you at all.
   So in that state of the game debate, Day[9] was not arguing at all that the game was balanced, he just tried to convey to IdrA that being consumed with thinking zerg was too weak would just be an obstacle in his game.
   So whenever you are tempted to blame a loss on balance, or to get dragged into a balance discussion try to make it part of your practice routine to put such thoughts out of your mind and instead focus on improving YOUR game, let Blizzard worry about theirs and remember that the question is not whether or not the game is imbalanced or not, but that it is irrelevant if it is.

The Code – Part 2

1. Do whatever it takes to win
2. Be respectul to your opponent
   This one sounds a bit of a fluffy cliché but there is more behind it than that.  Naturally this rule helps to build a more enjoyable community. If no one bm’ed or raged in games a lot less negative energy would go around because it does go around. You rage and make someone annoyed in game who is then annoyed and rages in his next game and so it goes around. But this is just a nice bonus, even if you don’t care at all about that stuff this rule is here for a whole other reason.
   You should not be emotionally invested in your games and that is something that will span over numerous rules. The only goal in a game is to win that game, and once you are out of the game the game is done and over with and irrelevant. There is no reason to get emotionally involved in any way in your games and pretty much every kind of emotional influence you can have in game be it satisfaction, joy, irritation, anger, frustration etc is going to have a negative impact in some way on your game, even positive emotions have a negative impact on Starcraft play. There is going be a whole rule detailing this later on more specifically though.
   The question is what does this have to do with being mannered and not raging etc? Well glad you asked. With being respectful to your opponent I don’t necessarily mean that you need to say glhf at the start of every game and gg at the end, those are just customs. I don’t think that not saying glhf is in any way rude, there are a lot of people who just don’t talk in games. I happen to feel that wishing glhf at the start and saying gg at the end is a good way to enforce good behavior though for yourself. I think you should use those two not for the sake of your opponent but as a means to have a constant reminder for yourself to stay neutral and not let your emotions carry you away.
   The important thing though is to not be rude, not to rage in chat, don’t offensive gg, don’t whine when you lose or be rude to your opponent. The reason is that it while controlling your emotions in game is vital to your success and your progress as a player, it is really really hard as anyone can vouch for. Learning to be emotionally neutral is a lifelong process. When you bm or talk shit in games you are opening up the floodgates and allowing yourself to be emotionally invested in the game. Even if you feel like the other race is imbalanced and are already emotional, typing it out is only anchoring that emotion to the game and allowing it to take control. If you can’t keep yourself from typing out rage text when you lose a game, then how can you even begin to keep yourself from getting angry in the first place?
   Remember that the other player is just another player that is following the first rule of the code, he is doing whatever it takes to win, the other player did not balance the game. If you lost to cheese or all in he legitimately executed a strategy that you failed to stop and won and the ladder system is not going to give you a lower point loss because you feel it was “unfair” or an easy build. If you feel really annoyed at the end of a game just stay in the game for a bit and calm down, just stop macroing and cool off before you type gg and leave. If your opponent is rude just ignore it and focus on the fact that he is letting his emotions get in the way of his progress while you will be better than that. Which reminds me about being rude when you are winning, this is no difference, it is just as important to stay away from. When you offensive gg or bash at someone who you beat you are just trying to make yourself feel superior emotionally, that superiority is 100% psychological and has nothing to do with the actual game you just played and thus just like any other bad mannering it is just distracting you.
   A calm and neutral mind will win you games and make you take correct decisions and it will better allow you to study your replays.

   Oh and bad mannering people on the ladder is also a way to reduce your options, if you got stomped by someone, rageing at that player will get you on his permanent ignore list. If you are respectul though and ask for advice you might just well have found yourself a new practice partner for the future.
   If you get all inned by someone who does that all in every game, well then you have someone who should have a pretty refined all in and that would be an excellent player to practice defending against it right?

The Code of Starcraft

So let’s talk mentality once again, one of the most important aspects of Stracraft 2 and one of the most overlooked aspects. I don’t mean that it is overlooked in the sense that people don’t think mentality is important, I am sure people do think that mentality is important but they don’t really understand it enough.  Here are some of the common pitfalls when it comes to mentality that prevents people from improving on it.

• A lot of people just don’t realize how complex a topic mentality is, it is not ONE thing and you just fix it, your mentality when playing and practicing is a pattern of many different things that all need to be worked at individually.
• People think that mentality is a fixed trait as if it is some unchangeable aspect of your personality that just is and you can’t change it.
• A lot of people think that their mentality is fine (this is probably the largest group) and this is a result of not understanding how many things are involved in mentality, it is usually people who don’t rage or bm at all or much and they think that since I don’t rage, I am fine. But in fact saying your mentality is solid because you don’t rage is like saying your macro is perfect because you hit 80 workers consistently in every game.
• People fail to realize that mentality is something like anything else in the game that needs to be practiced. Anyone can say out loud how you should approach the game, but good mentality takes constant practice, and to say otherwise is about as meaningful as improving macro by just saying I am going to macro really well.

The main reason I am interested in this and why I know a bit about the pitfalls is because I practiced martial arts for a long time and when you do that, structure and mentality is a huge part. All of the Japanese martial arts still carry the principles of Bushido (the warrior code) of old. The bushido was essentially a code for how to conduct yourself in swordplay and combat, not just practically but mentally as well and from that code strictly followed by the samurai class, an entire culture eventually grew. The codes of chivalry in western medieval times is also an example although they are somewhat different in that the knight codes mainly focused on how to behave honorably towards others, while the bushido has this too, it also adds in how you should practice and hone your mind to ensure victory. In ancient Japan during the days of the Samurai a duel culture dominated the lives of these warriors, when not serving their masters or being in battle they would duel each other to the death, and hone their art throughout life.

Interestingly if you look past the superficial aspect of things, Starcraft 2 is not that much different from the dueling culture of ancient Japan. Starcraft 2 just like their form of sword fighting requires infinite practice and you will never be truly perfect.  You need to work as much on the smallest physical mechanics and you need to polish your mind just as much as anything else, and you are always dueling, always measuring yourself up to someone else, playing the mind games to beat them.

So why don’t we have a bushido of Stracraft? I don’t know but to improve my own mentality in playing and practicing I am going to create one. Basically a code of a number of “rules” regarding how to practice, how to think and how to compete. That might sound stupid but from my experience practicing martial arts one of the most important steps if you really want to fine tune your mentality is to have a strict structure to fall back on. Unless you have a code to measure yourself too, and to use to remind you of what you need to do you will inevitably falter and stray from it. You might be able to keep a good mindset for a few days without anything to fall back on but you will fail. It is sort of how if you start to work out at a gym or even at home, unless you have a strict schedule for yourself of when and how much you are going to work out, you will last a week or a month at best before you start to lose your discipline. This is how I have failed at improving my mindset so far, I have not done it step by step.

I am going to try and make my Starcraft code as universal as possible, while I am making it for my own benefit I will not make it personalized, anyone could follow it. I will make sure to explain the reasoning behind every part of the code and I will make it include all aspects of play, both from how to practice and from how to think. You might ask then who am I to be able to tell which way to think is the optimal? Well partly because it is not just me telling, it is going to be based on a lot of insights from the greatest minds in Starcraft 2, because all of their knowledge is already out there, but also because it is actually not that hard to just state what is optimal, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to say that it is detrimental to think about stats or win/loss ratio when you are playing ladder, and to explain why it is detrimental. The hard part is to actually improve on these aspects. But the first step is to state them out loud, which is what I am going to do. I will probably be adding on to the code day by day for some time, typing out only one rule or statement a day and working to incorporate that into my practice, rather than just typing it all out instantly.

And we are starting with the most obvious one.

The Code – Part 1

Starting out typing out my Starcraft 2 code of conduct which I am going to use as a framework to improve my mindset and thought process, I think something you will find that each rule sound rather obvious and self explanatory when you read it out loud, but the description coming with it is what carries the important lessons.

1. Do whatever it takes to win
   This obviously does not apply when you are playing practice games with a specific practice goal, but when competing or playing games without a specific practice purpose the only thing that matters while in game is to win, no matter what it takes.
   A lot of the aversion people have towards cheese and all in’s are actually hurting their versatility in games. While it is true that when practicing, working on macro is going to be the fastest way to improve, this has led a lot of people to look at anything that isn’t pure macro for late game as something ugly and to be avoided and people constantly shy away from plays they think are gimmicky just because of that. Not going for all in, cheese and gimmick play when you don’t think it is the best move is fine, but never ignore plays because of some vague notion of it not being fair. The game does not care in the slightest what is fair, only one person is going to have the win after it is over.
   When you are playing a game whichever way is most likely to give you the win is the way to go. If you are in a situation where you are behind and you feel like you can win by going all in, don’t force the macro game just because you think that you are supposed to. Fight tooth and nails and be as gimmicky as you need when the situation demands it, everything but winning is irrelevant. For the same reason you should not give up until it is 100% over, even when you think that there is no way you SHOULD be able to come back, never rule out your opponent making a mistake.
   This rule should also be helpful in learning to not rage or bm at someone who cheeses you or goes for a gimmicky play, it does not matter, it was just an opponent who did whatever it took to win.

One of the most famous Samurai in history is Miyamoto Musashi, a master swordsman who participated in countless duels but was never defeated. Musashi gained fame especially for a set of three duels against highly regarded Samurai where he broke all rules of courtesy and made his opponents lose their mental discipline. For his first two duels against two brothers, one known for his amazing mental discipline Musashi showed up hours late to the duels, this extreme breach of honor had made his opponents enraged to the point where they had lost their amazing discipline and focus, ultimately costing them the duel and their lives.
For his third duel on a small island he once again showed up late and having carved a wooden sword out of an oar, the level of disrespect this time too caused his opponent to leap into combat in anger, fighting in the shallow water with the sun in his eyes, Musashi proceeded to outmaneuver him and then brutally beat him to death with his wooden sword.

The bottom line is that the person who sets psychological limits to his play is going to be a much more limited player.

 

 

Raven Musings

Ah the raven, another one of those mysterious units that has so long gone completely un-used but for a narrow range of 1 base TvP all-ins but then just out of nowhere or out of necessity has come into standard play.

The reasons for the Raven’s appearance in the current metagame can decisively be traced to terran versus zerg, a matchup that really has been driving terran unit compositions for a long time. You have to go as far back as to the infestor buff where the duration of fungal was cut while the damage remained the same, a seemingly narrow buff that has ended up shaping all of the current meta game. The fungal change immediately resulted in infestor/broodlord absolutely destroying the terran late game of the time. TvZ was pure marine/tank/medivac all the way to the end with the addition of vikings to deal with broodlords. But with a stronger fungal this lategame composition became increasingly powerful. People tried to adapt by splitting their vikings but the fungal change really had nothing to do with vikings, what the fungal change did was to create a buffer zone for the broodlords where marines could not just stim in under the broods and target them down anymore, leaving only the vikings alone to deal with the broods. This in turn meant that zerg could now spend more on corruptors and since vikings were the only thing that could actually kill  the broodlords, maintaining air superiority assured victory.

Enter the ghost, so this is where terrans figured out that the ghost is really good. This is how it usually works for all races in sc2, either a buff or a necessity will bring out a unit that has previously not been used much at all and even if a unit like in this case comes into play due to one matchup it usually has fallout on the others and ghost usage increased substantially in TvP as well. First terrans attempted to use ghosts in late game TvZ as a means of emp’ing or sniping the infestors but this method just was not solid and pretty much relied on zerg lacking detection. But then people figured out that snipe was really damn good against broodlords, and ultralisks as well solving both the broodlord problem but also another problem late game TvZ suffered from, the dreaded broodlord into ultralisk techswitch where you were stuck with 30 vikings when the ultras came rolling in.

But then yet another patch changed the scenery once again by effectively making snipe an anti caster ability only where the only cost effective thing to use it on was infestors, which had already previously been tried and failed. At the same time though the raven seeker missile was given a subtle buff by being given increased speed. This change has gone unnoticed for quite a long time and only relatively recently has the raven started to come up more and more as the solution to many TvZ issues.

Basically I would argue that the Raven is the best terran tech unit. All units with energy are extremely valuable in the late game if you can retain them but the raven is both a flying caster and also a very versatile one. People figured out very soon that seeker missile was amazing against broodlord tech but the switch to a raven based late game has still not really come around mainly because it is awkward to make the transition into ravens when you only make them against zerg’s tier 3. Ravens take a lot of time and resources to make and you need 2 upgrades and I think this is why we are only now seeing ravens done the right way, specifically people are trying to incorporate the raven much earlier into the general game plan, way before tier 3.

This brings us to why the Raven is most definitely destined to replace the tank in terran versus zerg. Let’s talk about the problems with the tank for a moment. In fact in any situation where terran is not going mech, tanks are actually pretty damn useless. Terran’s and zerg’s alike started to figure this out when the heavy ling styles started to become popular, the only real reason people make tanks in TvZ is because of banelings. If you don’t make tanks you will die to 70% banelings no matter how well you split, beyond this though the tanks is very bad at killing almost anything else unless you are fighting in an extremely favorable position. Bio which should be the go to unit composition for terran against zerg just as it is versus protoss gets crippled by the necessity for tanks, the amazing mobility of bio can’t be utilized because the army needs to move with the slow tanks which reduces the mobility of the bio to harass drops.

So if the tank really is only there for banelings, and the seeker missile deals just as much splash damage to banelings as it does, why are we not replacing the tanks with ravens? This is what Bomber has started doing, going for an sk terran style from bw consisting of bio and ravens and I think this is going to be the standard very soon. If you just skip the tanks completely you can add in the ravens much more naturally and much more early on. The ravens are fast and allow the bio to be as mobile as it can, meanwhile the raven is good against a lot of other things beyond just banelings. I think that one reason why people are hesitant to use seeker missile against banelings is that you convince yourself that because the missile does not hit instantly like tank splash, people will just run away from them and they are useless. Well, considering the fact that if you unload 4 seeker missiles against a ling/bane clump rolling down on you, it takes a magician to be able to tell which units are being targeted and split them away. The zerg can really only chose between taking the damage or pull everything back, if you wait long enough to fire ze missiles, running away is surely going to be a bad idea, in an ideal engagement you are probably dropping zerg in more than one location at this time, and if zerg turns around all of the stimmed bio is still going to be chasing stuff down.

If the Raven can work as a core unit for the terran army this is in time going to make players really utilize the unit to it’s full potential. Once you have ravens in your army you are going to find more ways to use them since they are already there. Seeker missiles on saturated mineral lines, constant and incredibly annoying auto turret harass all over the place etc.

I am currently trying out the bio+raven style of play myself to get the feel for it but I have a strong suspicion that this might be more and more common on the ladder.