Interesting day. Interesting weekend. Basically I ate pizza and played a lot of Starcraft2. Loved it sooo much. I feel bad not hanging with a lot of my friends in-real-life, but this game is my thing big time.
Did JUST DANCE THREE workout today with push-ups between songs. Went for an hour. Felt awesome. Saturday I took the day off from it.
Today was different than other times playing Starcraft2. I play with two friends almost every night. One, whom I’ve been friends with since college, The other, his friend from high school. Both live in Ohio and work a 9 to 5 in the math business. Alfred, the high school friend of a friend, recently switched to my race, Zerg, a Aliens-like species that are like insects in nature—spread out, swarm, so on, etc. The point I’m getting at is that he is not familiar with playing Zerg and he’s at a point where he is experimenting with opening builds. One of which had me baffled. At that point, I was getting moody because we kept losing match after match. I blamed it on him not transitioning or being reactionary to the situation. He always goes Ling, Muta or Ling, Hydra, and doesn’t deviate. Even though there are match ups where we need Bangs, or Roaches to counter what’s coming.
I gave him some suggestions. I felt like I was trying to help, but … I’m an asshole.
He said jokingly “Mike, I’m going to 1v1 you. I want to determine who the master Zerg is.” I didn’t really want to, but I obliged.
GAME 1 - Xel Naga Caverns - Menasor (Z) vs. rndm (Z)
Alfred opened with an aggressive 7 or 9 pool. I caught it with a scout and changed my build to fend off the early Ling/crawler aggression. I went into Ling/Roach, expanded to my natural, and worked to get Mutas. I lost my natural, and didn’t scout that well. I just kept an eye on his natural to see if he expanded. He never expanded there so I assumed he didn’t cause Alfred doesn’t time his expansions in regular play. I lost my natural’s hatchery to lots of Lings, and almost did again, but i made Bangs and took care of it.
Here’s where shit gets interesting: I send a Ling up to scout some other expansions and I find he had 2 EXPANSIONS. One is saturated. The other is starting to drone up. I flipped out. I was soooo mad. At this point he had a good number of Mutas and Corruptors—most certainly trying to get Broodlords.
Over the course of the next 15 minutes, I fortified my base with 5 or 6 Queens and Spore Crawlers, and just started hurling Lings, Roaches, and Mutas to the expansions killing them off. I chiseled away at the main, and a ninja expansion at the 4 o clock position. Lucky for me Broodlords are slow as fuck. I was able to dance back and forth. I won by killing off all his buildings.
The last two minutes i was under so much pressure. I was scrambling—it was a new level of anger and mind power. When that game was over, I was out of breath, and I vomited a little in my mouth before screaming “fuck you, Alfred. fuck fuck fuck.”
I didn’t want to go on, but he insisted.
GAME 2 - Scrap Station - Menasor (Z) vs. rndm (Z)
I hate this map, but I liked knowing that i wouldn’t get too much early aggression. He sent a good number of Lings at me early. Lucky for me, I was building a Crawler, a Queen, and some lings. I held him off, and kept checking on him at the Xel Naga Tower. Knowing how bold Alfred can be when he does chose to expand, i figured he was going for early gold. I found his gold Hatch spawning and killed it. In the mean time he sent a counter offensive to my base.
My queen positioning, crawler position were perfect. The lings couldn’t get a great surround. By the time i got back, most of the lings were already dead. No expansion, no lings—I knew he was in bad shape. I expanded and took map control. Looked for other expansions and got a Bang nest. I parked my lings and bangs in front of his base just waiting. He made like 20 lings and sent them out. Two bangs took out all of them.
Knew he was in desperate shape. He couldn’t have been able to make many drones during all that aggression. I got some forces together ran around the spine crawlers in his main, and took out his mineral line. It ended.
I didn’t feel as stressed as I did after the last one. This one felt like I had more confidence, and just stuck to being very defensive, moderately droning, and then building up Bangs, something he doesn’t use and also doesn’t use the counter to them, Roaches. At this point, I really wanted to stop 1v1ing.
GAME 3 - Shakeris Plateu - Menasor (Z) vs. rndm (P)
As the game start clock was winding down, Alfred switched to Protoss. He’s comfortable using Protoss and Terran, and has practiced as one or the other most times I’ve played with him.
I knew he’d keep playing agressive and try to proxy me in some form. I sent out overlords around my base, and sent drones looking for any Probs. I caught two probs. One scouting, and the other trying to build a pylon near my base. I was able to kill both probes and eventually kill the 2 pylons and forced a cancel on a proxy gateway. I hurried for roaches, only made one and a some Lings. Sent lings out to wait at expansions for probes coming to try to build a Nexi.
I got my natural and soon after was ambushed by 2 Zealots. One Zelot attacked the hatch, the other I had run around in circles after me till my newly spawned roaches came. Three roaches took out 3 Zealots. I got tech ready for Mutas, denied a probe/ expansion, and saw that he walled his front off completely. I freaked out and build a lot of spore crawlers thinking he’s going for void rays.
What I didn’t know is that he had a few proxy gateways outside my base in the one area i didn’t check. He made lots of Zealots and a few stalkers and came back in after i was moving out to hit him. I caught them, and turned around to seal them in my base and cleaned it out without losing many units. He made lots of Zealots. I had mostly Roaches, the counter to Zealots.
In the mean time, I had four Lings working away at an expansion in his natural. They killed it, and left before I think he noticed what was happening. The game ended as I was destroying his proxy stuff.
After this game I felt really depressed. I was done. didn’t want to play anymore for the rest of the day. It made me feel so sick. I don’t know why other than I was disgusted with myself.
I need to apologize. This “Zerg Master” competition happened because I kept telling Alfred what to do, though I put it as giving him pointers. More or less i wanted to understand why he had 2 Extractors that were not being mined from while he missed sending out a bunch of early lings with Arthur and I’s Lings and him not transitioning into the counters to gate units or mass marines—Roaches for the first, and Bangs for the second. We lost a lot today. That’s why i was a little moody. I blamed him. I shouldn’t have. aaaahhhhh!!!!!!!!!
