[SLCN.NXZ]

+ [Brief introduction] +

About a month ago, I was sent a replay by Swarmstika who wanted some critique on his play. We do lack strategic content on this site, so I think it may be beneficial for more people if I instead make my comments here.

Hopefully everyone can learn something!

Swarmstika chooses to open with a drone scout, a very strong approach to the zvp matchup. I'd highly recommend this kind of play if you struggle with proxies or cannon rush. In reaction to the protoss player's low ground pylon, he chooses to begin with a proxy hatch. (take that protoss players!)



The protoss player does well to clear his natural while Swarmstika goes up to 3 bases. Good moves from both sides here. My first problem with Swarmstika's play in this game is his gas timing, here we see him dropping his geysers just after 6 minutes at 34 supply. After opening with an investment like a hatch block (similarly, after a cannon rush defence), a player has to remember to change his timings to fit the altered game state. In this case, it would benefit Swarmstika to wait till he reached the regular 40-46 supply mark before dropping his double geysers.



The protoss player decides to make first a robo, and then a stargate as his nexus finishes up. Obviously, this is a sub optimal choice for him. The big thing is not to overthink this, let's see how it goes.



In this image, you can see that Swarmstika has chosen to be very active on the map with his overlords. A noble endeavor! However, with the threat of phoenix, I would highly recommend having a maximum of 3 overlords on the map until another tech choice is scouted. Rally all your overlords to a safe position in your base and once the threat of mobile air has been discounted; the overlords can be sent to key vision ares at the edges of the map.



As the game progresses, Swarmstika moves to a roach hydra viper composition to fight the colossus based army his opponent has chosen. Here, we see Swarmstika takes his first major fight, and it goes absolutely terribly BibleThump. But! We can definitely learn a great deal about control in this battle.

The first problem is taking the fight about 10 seconds too early, about a screen away are 2 vipers, with enough energy to do some very good work in this battle.



The next mistake is the move to flank the colossus. It is almost always better to keep your army together in one big arc with the potential to disengage when necessary than dive in like this. The end results speak for themselves, all the hydras at the top are lost due to poor buffer and the aggressively diving units are surrounded and easily cleaned up.



So this brings me to my thought process in regards to roach hydra viper engages.
1. Vipers are the single most important unit in your army
2. It is better, therefore, to have your roach hydra not controlled at all than to have a perfect arc at the loss of thoughtful viper control.

So in my opinion, I encourage a zerg player to a-move their roach hydra and then completely focus on using their vipers to the max effect. After the energy is spent, only then, go back to controlling your roach hydra. Engages will benefit massively from this simple change in priorities and you'll find that over control is often more damaging than no control at all (as it was in this case).

Lack of detection!
I won't show a screenshot for this but I personally recommend keeping at least an overseer on the same hot keys as your spell casters. You inherently spend more time controlling your spell casters and are very unlikely to be a-moving your infestors or vipers past an army, meaning that you won't lose your overseers as they dive over the huge number of stalkers in every fight you take.

At this point the protoss has stabilized after 2 poor fights and roach hydra viper will really struggle in dealing with the protoss army. In the third fight, swarmstika again focuses on the big units, the colossus, the archons. This is not good! You have to let your army clean out the buffer and once you have overwhelming numbers, you can then start to try catch the expensive units as they try to retreat. Don't overextend! Let the fight play out, then you can make a well informed choice to either back away or clean up the entirety of the army.

From here the game is slowly lost and we can't gain any more information for our purposes.

Zerg players! Let your units do their thing! 90% of the micro you do in big fights is done before the engage, spreading out units, making a concave etc. Once this is done, an a-move will get more done than most of the fancy control you might try to implement. If you have spell casters involved then you can focus your attention there but otherwise, production and injects are far more crucial to the game ending in a zerg victory.

Thanks for reading guys, let me know if you'd like to see more of this and feel free to post some replays below for me to take a look at