I have returned: StarCraft II

[Kaylia]

I dunno, if you don't have queens on individual keys or hatches on individual keys, one or the other, how do you get back to your base. For me, if I want to do something particularly with hatch at my expo I go to that hatches queen for example and click the hatch. Otherwise if you are grouping both hatches and queens you're going to have to click that minimap to get to those spots?

Grouped queen on minimap doesnt work. Tried it a few time, but everytime, i ended up with one queen walking accross the map to go lays some larva on a distant hatchery.

[Ferien]

The only thing that really irritates me about having all of my hatcheries on one hotkey is that things like upgrades and queens tend to all queue up at a single hatch. It's not a difficult issue to cope with, but I just don't understand why it doesn't prioritize the inactive ones like every other building in the game.

It only does that when you have Lairs and Hatches in the same group. You have to tab through them just as you would a Rax with Tech Lab or Reactor.

Grouped queen on minimap doesnt work. Tried it a few time, but everytime, i ended up with one queen walking accross the map to go lays some larva on a distant hatchery.

This only happens if the nearest Queen doesn't have energy. If the Queen that's standing by the Hatch has the energy for it, she will be the one to cast it. If your Queens are synced up so they're only a second or two apart, either get used to the timing or click a bunch of times so you eventually get the one that's there.

[Kaylia]

Yeah, I know why it happens, it's just hard to keep track to in the middle of a match (especially if you used some queen energy for heal or w/e).

[Thulius]

It only does that when you have Lairs and Hatches in the same group. You have to tab through them just as you would a Rax with Tech Lab or Reactor.

I'm pretty sure that's not the case with barracks though. I was just messing around with terran last night and the only time it's necessary to tab through your selection to produce units is when you have completely different buildings in the group. If you queue 3 marines on 2 barracks it's going to put 2 of them in the reactor rax and 1 in the tech rax, then back to the reactor for the next 2 and etc etc.

Considering the only functional difference between a lair and a hatchery is what it upgrades to next, I don't see why they can't work the same way.

[Misuicide]

You don't have to tab through reactors and techlabs anymore, the reactors will make 2 marines each before moving to marines in the tech labs.

[Bweigelt]

You actually never had to tab through tech lab/reactors on barracks, you just had to make the units you wanted out of the tech lab rax first.

[Falaras]

So I just had someone steal both my gasses followed by the "Get a shit ton of cannons at my ramp" strategy into 1 base 7 gateways and lost when I was on 2 base almost all game with 6 barracks. He decided to say "well balance" instead of "gg", bitches be crazy.

[tonyg]

So I just had someone steal both my gasses followed by the "Get a shit ton of cannons at my ramp" strategy into 1 base 7 gateways and lost when I was on 2 base almost all game with 6 barracks. He decided to say "well balance" instead of "gg", bitches be crazy.

You can't even imagine how much I fucking hate cannon rushes, it makes me so fucking angry I yell at my computer and ragequit soon after. Only once have I had a fun encounter with that strategy, where he only built on one side and I just fast expanded and made 200 supply worth of banelings and oneshotted his entire setup+base. But that was against a shitty player trying to have a fast and easy win and if someone who knows what they're doing I simply have no way of beating that.

[Kaylia]

Never ragequit a canon rush, lift off, build another hatchery outside, save 400 for a nexus (if its too late to block the push with canon)...you can almost always break even considering he wasted ton of money on canon

[Avelain]

I don't really have many problems with canon rushes, but more-so with canon contains. The toss just throws up two pylons at the bottom of your ramp and builds a canon or two behind it. It's really tough to deal with as zerg, but the most effective thing I've seen done is to just throw down a spine crawler, poop creep with an overlord near the pylons, them move your spine crawler just out of range of the canons and poke away while continuing to pump drones.

I think this video really highlights how to deal with it effectively. http://www.youtube.com/user/hdstarcr...19/Or50ilBh9BM

[Kaylia]

If you have a drone out and he blocked your entrance, build an hatchery somewhere he wont check and backstab him with ling. If not, just rush muta and plant spine like you said. People who canon rush rarely have a solid follow up.

[Falaras]

Oh I didn't mean a cannon rush, I meant he put cannons on his ramp defensively because he didn't have a gateway up and I could kite zealots anyways.
And what Avelin is talking about isn't a cannon rush really, its a very nice opening versus zerg. Best way to block it is to patrol a drone at the bottom of your ramp.

[Kaylia]

I know what he is talking about, but I never thought it was an issue. The only thing it does is preventing me from fast expanding...if i didnt have a drone out there already.


My favorite opening against zerg that fast expand is canon behind hatchery. If you scout the expand early, you have plenty of time to build a forge, and drop 2 canon behind mineral line. Hatchery have shitty vision when they are building, so they wont see it until the hatchery spawn (and if you timed your canon properly, they will end 1 sec after it hatches). It always throw off the zerg build order.

[Falaras]

There have been plenty of ZvP pro-level replays released of Double pylon + cannon actually killing a 14 hatch so it is definitely dangerous if done right.

[Ferien]

I'm pretty sure that's not the case with barracks though. I was just messing around with terran last night and the only time it's necessary to tab through your selection to produce units is when you have completely different buildings in the group. If you queue 3 marines on 2 barracks it's going to put 2 of them in the reactor rax and 1 in the tech rax, then back to the reactor for the next 2 and etc etc.

Considering the only functional difference between a lair and a hatchery is what it upgrades to next, I don't see why they can't work the same way.

There was a patch that changed it a while back, just realized I was referencing old info. Regardless though, Hives, Lairs and Hatcheries all function as different buildings when they're selected together if you're trying to make Queens or Upgrades, so you have to tab to get it to different buildings. You can tell by the fact that when you have them selected, the Lairs get highlighted separately (much easier to notice if you have multiple Lairs). If you want larva though, you'll get all of them. It's dumb but it's just how it works.

[Not Kuno]

I've been on a fierce losing streak in silver. I can't seem to get to gold. D:

[Maguspk]

Try the 7RR Kuno

10 extractor trick to 11 drones
11 overlord
11 spawning pool
15 extractor
16 queen (stop drones)
18 overlord
18 roach warren
17 another overlord
spawn larva when queen pops
make 7 roaches and win the game

Protoss cannot stop this quite literally, especially not if you bring like 8 or so drones and only leave a few behind to reinforce with 3-4 roaches during the push. Your roaches will be out at around 4:45 and at your opponents base much sooner, it is very hard for them to stop unless they react quite well. This doesn't work great against Zerg but I bet you can make it work if you make a few spines in their base during the attack, I haven't run into any zergs to try it on. Obviously since you're going to want to be attacking right at the mark you'll need to use your overlords to scout for opponents or sacrifice a drone early on and get the attack out a bit later. If they do successfully defend the rush just expand or get lair tech, the attack will force them to defend and once they're being defensive it's the perfect opportunity for you to switch to mutas or expand and out macro them. Keep this in mind because even if you don't win with the attack you can cripple them by forcing them to defend, use SCVs, etc. and macro safely.

[Salodin]

That seems kind of all in, especially if the toss has at least one sentry to FF their ramp. Once they see the roaches they'll be spamming stalkers to deal with it too.

This is assuming they scout your base or see your attack coming from xel naga towers etc, and prepare for it. Again, seems like a general all in and nothing most toss can't handle if they're expecting it; which they should now that roaches are even more popular with that range buff.

[Maguspk]

It's only an 'all in' if you bring your drones, and you'd only do that if you were sure about the attacks success with the drones.

[Not Kuno]

How do I deal with stalkers as Zerg anyway? That seems to be all people make. They have longer range which rapes en masse, and hydras die fast too. Especially if you blink micro (which everyone I vs seems to do).