Wrath of Patch 1.2

I’ve been playing quite a bit since 1.2 hit and I’m already seeing some of the serious implications of it…. more cheese.

Generally speaking diamond level zerg and protoss players play rather passively.  They look to defend and might do a little poke.  But really diamond zerg/protoss do not do any all in or cheese tactics.  But all that has changed.  After the patch that’s really all I saw.  It was tones of 4-gating, 2-gating, cannon rushing and 6-pooling players.

Normally I can defend all of these fairly well but for whatever reason I just couldn’t come 1.2.

The big problem is that with rax being before supply depot there’s never a reason to cut SCV productions and get more structures up.  Diamond level cannon rush is sorta weird.  They get cannons going and hope you throw your units at it and then send some zealots in at your front door.  So the best tactic to fend this off is usually to kill the zealots, build a bunker at a different mineral field and move your stuff there.  And then from there you get a quick command center up (fast expand) and just build up a tonne of stuff.

It’s worked for me in the past quite well but something about this patch was just jarring.  Instead of fast expanding I went for more rax and before long he was DTing me.  Without the extra command center I just didn’t have enough scans to deal with it.

Similarly in another match up a zerg didn’t 6-pool but he did an all-in zergling attack.  Usually when I lift off a building up front I’ll send an SCV out to scout and see if there’s any lings out there.  However this time I didn’t.  So when I lifted up my buildings for the swap a bunch of zerglings started attacking a supply depot.

After the match he told me he never saw the lift off until afterwards.  That is he just got extremely lucky that I didn’t scout out his ling positions, otherwise I would have popped out one hellion and two marines instead of two hellions and one marine.

I’m hoping that the cheese ends soon.  When I’m tired I seemingly can’t deal with it.  Just so many spots to look for proxies.  So many misreads on scouting information.

Hope all of you had better luck post patch.

How to Beat 4 Insane Terran AI

I looked all over the Internet and couldn’t figure out how I was supposed to beat 4 insane terran AI, it seemed… unbeatable.  I tried every possible race composition  for my insane AI computer team mates and just couldn’t get it to work.  One of the big problems is that your computer allies just end up being so stupid.  Really it felt like you had to win the game all by yourself… so I did.

The Setup

You want 3 insane AI terran team mates and you will be selecting yourself as terran.  Yeah it’s kind of cheesy having a TTTT v TTTT but that’s how I got it to work.  I suspect you can play as protoss with similar success as well.  Make sure you choose Megaton as your map.  This is the one where you start off in close distance with your allies with only two mutual entry ways.  It also has access to 4 easily accessible natural expansions that will be easy to defend.

Build Order?

The goal here is a very fast factory and some very fast tanks:

10-supply depot
11-refinery
14-barracks
15-refinery
16-factory
16-supply depot
17- tech lab on rax

Switch the tech lab for the factory and immediately get a tank out, once you have the resources get the siege tech.  Pump out marines with your rax.

Strategy

Your team mates as I said are kind of retarded.  While the computer seemingly works together and moves as one the other team seemingly works as one and picks off individual armies.  As soon as you see your computer allies move out build a bunker at the entry point closest to you.  You want to rally 4-5 SCVs up here as well.  Take whatever siege tanks you have and siege them a decent distance behind your bunker.

The computer will send his entire army in to die.  He may pick off some SCVs but just keep spamming them into repairing this bunker.  If the computer runs away he’ll rally his units to the middle.  You move your tanks up to top of the high ground in your base.  Every time the computer tries to poke at you you’ll take a chunk out of him.  You want to get down a second factory when you’re on one base.  As well you want to work your way towards an expansion for more gas.  Always build your expansion on the west side of the map, computer players attack there far less often for some reason.

You want to get out a starport (no addon) and just keep pumping out vikings.  Yes if you’ve caught on it’s a tanks and vikings build with some marines.

Why?

The computer player builds SUPER HEAVY bio with some tanks and a bunch of banshees.  He will only change his build order if you attack with a unit.  He builds the tanks to deal with all of the other computer’s bio, the banshees to deal with tanks and just marines/marauders for vikings.  So composition wise you’ll be superior.

Big key here is to continue to macro up.  Constantly building supply depots.  When you’re high minerals get more rax down.  When you’re high gas get more factories down.  The timing of your push is when you’re near max supply.  That’s 170-180 food.

You move your entire army to the west side of his map.  You’ll need to scan the front of his base and see if he has any units there.  If not move in.  If he does just wait a little bit until he moves them out.  Once in you just siege up and push your way in using your vikings to protect your tanks from banshees and give them sight of the things they’re hitting.

Computer players quit very very quickly to mass tanks.  The first one nearly instantly quit after the second round of tank fire.

Protoss?

I suggested that it may be possible to do this with protoss as well.  My thought was that with colossus/stalker and an observer you could do this as well.  However I think mass tanks is going to be your easiest way of achieving this.

Good hunting.

Edit: I put up a video of me doing this a second time around.  This second time around my build didn’t go as well as the first time however the mass tank result is the same:

http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/91249-4v4-terran-megaton

What this basically shows you is this isn’t an all-in strat as most achievement cheeses are this one has sustained power.