Starcraft – Replay analysis: Why opponent got bigger arthe and why psy storm is so weak

starcraft-2

Recently I played PvZ and lost (http://ggtracker.com/matches/5047035). Trying to analyze reasons, I've figured out that at the beginning of the 1st big engagement (around 16-30) opponent had army which had 40 more supply than main.

I analyzed replay and cannot understand how did that happen.

I do see mistakes from my side:

  • non-used resources (but opponent had poor resources usage as well)
  • non warping units during the battle (neither opponent did)
  • etc…

But still, if opponent has such a big advantage in quantity, it is hard to beat him.

Question: what did I do wrong so I had so smaller army?

Side question: looks like psi-storm is not really effective vs hydra/roaches… should I better start with Colossus?

Thank you for any advise!

Best Answer

I took a look at the first half of the replay, since most of your questions were about the setup to that engagement. In summary, your opponent had more units because he had a stronger income, you made some micro mistakes during the fight, and you probably could've done a bit better at macro. As you mentioned, you didn't warp reinforcements in during the fight, even though you had resources and supply.

Economy

Red ended up with more resources invested into his army going into that first major encounter. The game totals up to 16:30 (when the battle starts) are 7600 for him and 5900 for you. You invested more into technology with your High Templar, which might have balanced it out, depending on how you used them (more on that later), but in terms of pure unit attack power, he had the advantage.

How did this happen?

  • You tried to cannon rush him, and from the resource graph on ggtracker, your rush gave you a 500 mineral advantage when he pulled his drones to fight back (he dropped to collection rate of ~500 minerals/minute less than you had for a minute). The only problem: you lost 661 minerals to canceled/destroyed buildings and didn't really do any actual damage.
  • Red expanded early. His third hatchery finished right around the time your second nexus finished. Your rush probably set his expansion back a bit, but with all the extra larva he was able to quickly catch up. Around the 7 minute mark he overtakes you on mineral income and at 12 minutes he overtakes you on gas.
  • He used his workers more efficiently. You had more workers, but you saturated your base a bit. Going from 2 workers to 3 per patch offers less return than going from 1 to 2. You can see this at 8:50 where you both have roughly the same number of workers harvesting minerals (29 probes to 30 drones), but red has his spread more evenly among his bases and you have 20 on your main and 9 at your expansion. This gives him a 1280-1080 minerals/minute income advantage and he was able to keep that +200 income gap for most of the game.

Micro

  • In addition to the rush, you lost three zealots around 9:30 and barely killed anything in return. That's 300 minerals/6 supply down.
  • You split your army a few times. Your zealots got sacrificed at 17:00 while the stalkers, templar, and archons were running back up your base ramp. Later, when you pushed out, you had one or two archons in combat while everything else was out of range. This let him pick off your units a few at a time and would've cost you even if you had equal army sizes.
  • You wasted a couple of storms. The first storm was on roaches (more on this below) and the second storm missed entirely.

Psionic Storm

Psionic Storm deals 80 damage over four seconds, if units stand in the storm for the full duration (they rarely do - you were getting about 2-3 seconds worth). That makes it good against lower HP units and not-so-great against higher HP units. Your best storms were against the lings and hydras, but the ones you dumped on the roaches weren't as effective because roaches have 145 HP.

Red probably knew this because right after he scouted your templar (at 16:00), he tripled his roach count - reinforcements that showed up at 17:15 in time to finish your army off. (Without those extra roaches, you might have even won.)

You can see the effectiveness of your storms against the hydras: the third, fourth, and fifth storms brought most of them really low into the red, but at that point your army was mostly gone and you didn't have much to finish them off. Another storm or two could've slaughtered at least half a dozen hydras.

Would Colossi have done better?

Maybe. The colossi could have certainly torn through those hydras as long as you kept his units at a distance and would generally be more effective than high templar against roaches. They're also a bit easier to micro in battle.

However, red scouted you just before he attacked, so he might've seen the colossi and retreated until he built up a counter unit. He had a spire built and the resources to switch to mutalisks or pick up some corruptors. If you saw his army there and attacked him with colossi around that 16 minute mark, you probably would have won that first encounter, and the rest of the game would be up to who responded better.