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Saturday, July 24, 2010

Interesting Protoss cheese on Desert Oasis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGC0tiErMdw&feature=PlayList&p=222391E9E52F4406

It's a game with Machine (Z) playing against Idra (P). Idra won the first two games against Machine playing ZvZ, then changed to Protoss for this game.

Idra sends his probe to Machine's base and builds a pylon right outside his ramp. Idra then walls in Machine with a forge and a gateway using perfect placement, then puts down a couple cannons around the outside of Machine's (one covering the ramp, the other able to hit the end of the mineral line. He rallies his gateway into Machine's base and begins producing zealots.

Machine starts building spine crawlers within range of the cannons (standard anti-towering strategy- WC3 players will remember this) and spamming zerglings.

The cannons finish, but Idra can't hit anything with them as everything is on high ground. However, his zealots that finish building are used as vision, allowing him to attack the drones with the cannon.

I won't go through the rest of this game, but I thought this was a really interesting "cheese" tactic that's possible against Zerg especially (lack of early ranged units).

As for counters to this... Machine could have scouted a little earlier and seen the pylon (it's in a really obvious spot by necessity) and blocked the building placement using drones. Banelings would have been a risky "all-in" strategy but could yield huge gains. They do 80 damage a hit, and the forge has 400/400 health compared to the gateway's 500/500. Ten banelings (assuming none died- you'd probably want some extras) would instantly kill the forge and nearly the gateway as well, allowing zerglings to clean up. That would cost 500/250 to pull off, not including the backup units to finish the job, but would strongly swing things in your favor. It's still very risky though. The best option here would be to block it from happening.

This game was played back in March 20, fairly early in the beta (about a month in). I think the timing for forges and cannons are changed, but it's still a possibility.

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