How I got into platinum...

[Aynjell]

~ *Backstory* ~​

Recently I got a wild hair up my arse to learn to play all three races, so I started to roll random. I figured with better skill in the other two races, I'd be a better zerg player. So I set out to get into a lower league, and determined that the best way to do this was to simply quit out of a LOT of games over and over. I'm guessing is it was about 200 losses later when I finally landed squarely in Bronze. Okay, cool, I thought; Now I can have some fun learning the other two races. Thankfully I didn't get banned because I've since learned this is called "smurfing" and punishable by Blizzard. I personally felt my intentions were purer than your average smurfer, so I think I could use that in my defense if neccessary.

So now that I'm in Bronze, I decided to set rules for myself, so as to KEEP my intentions pure. We're not here to roll over newbies, there's no point or sport in that. I'm here to learn Protoss and Terran at a pace a normal person would learn it, and when you're playing at extremely high levels per your skill it can be hard to learn what helps you win and what doesn't, so I set the following rules for myself:

• Only play as random. Occasionally I broke this rule to roll as protoss or terran to get my skill up...
• If i rolled protoss or terran, I tried to play as normally as my fail skill allowed. if I rolled zerg I would worker rush.

Now, remember how I said I thought I'd be playing against evenly matched players when I was playing one of my two off races? Boy was I wrong. I found out that I could flounder my way through the protoss or terran tech tree and just decimate anybody I was playing against. It seems that my just having decent to better than terrible mechanics was enough to make me roflstomp against bronze players... I won almost every game (my guess was 98%). I felt sorry for the bronze leaguers. I really did. Finally, after amassing some 700+ points in bronze in one day, it ranked me back up to silver. So here we go, this is where it gets hard, I thought...

Thankfully, silver is leagues better than bronze and players were starting to have a decent understanding of tech trees and unit production. My win rate dropped to 50-60% but this was what I was looking for. An even playing ground for me with protoss or terran. After a few weeks of only kinda sorta playing random, I ended up in gold, sunday morning, actually.

That's when it hit me... I had actually gone from bronze to gold in one season, and gotten to a point where I could play all three races at a reasonable level... so let's take things to the next level, shall we? I started to roll zerg again. I wanted platinum so badly I could taste it... but I realized there was only two days left to get ranked up (the ladder actually locked this morning at 3AM PST). So how does a player win the most games possible in the shortest period of time? We needed fast wins and we needed a stronger chance of victory, and in my opinion, 6 pooling just isn't strong enough. 6 lings doesn't do the damage that 10 lings does, and there's no way to get 10 lings out fast enough to beat the wall in zealout or the first cannon... so how do we manage enough things that bite to ensure victory more often without extended the gametime too much? All in, that's how. you know those guys that normally eat minerals? They can eat stuff that bleeds too. So I figured out the perfect build order to achieve a 70-80% win ratio against protoss and zerg.



This strategy only works on protoss and Zerg. Zerg can not wall in, and protoss rarely does a hard building wall in.

(6) Drone
(7) Drone
(8) Drone
(9) Drone
(10) Spawning Pool
(9) Drone
(10) Overlord
(10) Zerglings (6)
@Zergling pop, all in with everything including the drones.

Now, why is this better than a 6/7 pool? Because it's a cheesy all in that actually commits, 6 pools usually can't afford to send the drones because they need to keep producing lings, but due to transit time the game is typically won or lost with the first 6 zerglings. Also, opponents tend to scout you earlier when you're zerg, because people are afraid of the 6 pool, so when they scout at 8 or 9 and see 9 drones, with a 10th coming up, they're like, "Eh, whatever?" and go back home. What they don't realize is the build is designed STRICTLY to guard against that sort of early scout. When you're 6 pooling, you're scout-able for a larger margin of the time, and EVEN when you're fast pooling at 10, you're still not doing anything THAT extreme to most people's eyes.

In gold league, this strategy wins approximately 70% of the time (against platinum players, too). You box everything and A-Move to victory. For you lower level players, if you don't know what A-move is, it is where you box your units, click the Attack button and then click behind everything you want to kill. Your units then based on priority, kill everything between where they are, and where you want them to stop nomming on stuff.

Just keep in mind though guys, this is NOT a strategy that should lead to a macro game and it was designed for fast, CONSISTENT wins. It is not an over powered strategy because anybody in gold league with a brain can beat it... in fact I lost 100% of the time if they erected a static defense of any kind. but 10 drones and 6 zerglings can be really scary when it comes at the point where you might have 13-14 drones. I'm thinking though, and maybe this is just a guess but, I'm thinking that trying to put down spines in their base is a bad idea because mainly the enemy tends to focusing them down and you lose a bit of dps while the spine is going down. Instead of being the attacker you become the defender and while I haven't tested it too much, I found any time I tried it, I failed.

So anyway, what I knew ahead of time was that you can't really use this on terran because any decent terran walls off versus zerg, so the next order of business was to figure out a fast way to beat terran. What I figured out was there isn't one you can really rely on. Terran can repair their wall so you have to kill it in one fell blow or else you're out. So I just went for an 8 baneling burst and bringing in 20 zerglings or so for a nice well rounded 7 minute game ending attack.

Overall, with these two strats I walked away from any game with a 70% chance of victory (really close to 80 or 90 against terran) in 7 minutes or less. After what was probably 100+ games I popped into platinum and before the ladder locked. ^_^

 

[Aynjell]

I actually ended up adding one person I played during this whole sordid affair. His comment struck me as being especially true and we agreed to play practice games against each other.

His username was Hreidmar and he said "it's really sad that zerg players hate zvz so much that they'd do this."

I don't think he realized I was doing it against toss also, and it was strictly to get me into plat (where let me tell you, the games are just that much more fun).

 

[Janus67]

Or you can win 3/5 of the placement matches and get placed into Platinum like I did (as Toss, and I didn't rush during the placements)... and then didn't play again, lol. (all I did to prepare was watch some matches and some Day9 dailies)

That is a pretty cool story though, congrats on getting to Platinum. From what I understand about the earlier levels is that if you can macro at all you will win the matches. Bronze is full of people that are just learning the basics of the game, if you already have an idea of hotkeying and keeping production up then you shouldn't have any trouble for the most part. Silver is pretty much the same, just against people that can keep their unit production up a bit better. Gold turns into more macro of knowing when to expand (again, we are talking about non-cheese/rush games here), and then platinum is just more of that. Then Diamond breaks into a lot of the micro vs macro vs expand.

 

[Aynjell]

And last night I got roflstomped almost every game. I won ONE game, and that game, I massed roaches against my zerg opponent who was also massing roaches. One miss rally and I had killed 3-4 roaches, which is enough to sway the game in my favor, plus I was working on roach speed and burrow at the time, which I'd of followed up with roach burrow movement.

I think the thing here is, that I had a plan and executed that plan. I need to start a plan tonite, I'm thinking against protoss and terran I'm going to go speedling/baneling/infestor/muta, as it's a powerful combination that offers a lot of counter harassment options. Against my zerg opponents I'm porbably going to go muta roach infestor.

Always gotta have the infestors because they win wars singlehandedly.

 

[Janus67]

That sounds like a pretty good plan to me. Do you watch your VODs after the games to see what the other guy did to find out how to improve your game? That always helped me with learning. that and watching high-level play from the pros to see how they see the game and try to learn the way that they do (mainly watching HuK). I assume Idra and Nestea would be two good ones for you (I've been away from SC2 for a while so I assume those names are still near the top) and I thin MVP is a Terran player?

 

[Aynjell]

That sounds like a pretty good plan to me. Do you watch your VODs after the games to see what the other guy did to find out how to improve your game? That always helped me with learning. that and watching high-level play from the pros to see how they see the game and try to learn the way that they do (mainly watching HuK). I assume Idra and Nestea would be two good ones for you (I've been away from SC2 for a while so I assume those names are still near the top) and I thin MVP is a Terran player?

I'm actually going to do that every game going forward. But the problem is, I'm failing so hard at everything it's pointless. I can't say, oh **** I got supply blocked too much. For some reason last night my last game I had like 20 zerglings to his 10 stalkers and 2 collossus. Don't ask me how that happened. :\

 

[Janus67]

I think you need to focus on only a couple things at a time and make sure you have it down pat.

- Scouting + economy would be extremely helpful to be good at. And the ability to just keep making units (and not get supply blocked).

How would he have 20 collossi and you only have 20 zerglings, did you have 3/4 of the map in expansions? What were you spending money on? I assume you are expanding pretty quickly (pretty normal as Zerg)?

 

[Aynjell]

I think you need to focus on only a couple things at a time and make sure you have it down pat.

- Scouting + economy would be extremely helpful to be good at. And the ability to just keep making units (and not get supply blocked).

How would he have 20 collossi and you only have 20 zerglings, did you have 3/4 of the map in expansions? What were you spending money on? I assume you are expanding pretty quickly (pretty normal as Zerg)?

Holy derp, I meant 2 collossi. Still bad though when they two shot all you had.

I'm going to be employing spanishiwa's build tonite, going speedling into muta and then baneling. That way I can keep my opponent pinned down or else he's gonna lose his WFB.

BTW janus, you think you'd be up to practice with me sometime?

 

[Aynjell]

I'm still working on my normal game build, but what I'm realizing is I'm missing overlord timings, and on top of that, adding a spire is really aiding me. The more damage I do to his economy, the less units he has.

Against a fast expanding protoss, I start the game with a roach push. Against a zerg no matter what, a 7 roach push. Any zerg who fast expanded will die outright. If they're making a crap ton of lings I'm still gonna make that zerg sweat... and while my roaches are dying I'm replacing them back home and forcing a long game... which usually goes in my favor seeing as how given the roach and the ling, the roach is the superior unit.

For you to kill 1 roach, it will require 4 lings. In a roach ball, lings can't get a surround on all the roaches, so that number gets exponentially worse as time goes on. In short, if you went ling first against this build you better hope you got some big hits off.

 

[Janus67]

Sounds like pretty good strategy there.

With regards to practicing.. I think the last time I played was about a year ago (maybe a bit less), so I would be beyond rusty, and I think I've played all of 6 matches against other people so...

I'm more of a spectator when it comes to SC2, I enjoy watching high-level matches and see how each side handles what they find (especially when it is casted).