Switching To Zerg
Aug. 11th, 2010 05:27 pmBeen playing a bit of 1v1 on the ladder in SC2 lately. I keep getting owned. Most of this is due to cheese rushes. The only thing worse than this is knowing that the people who beat you only have that one cheese move that they basically try to win with constantly, and you were one of the suckers that lost to it.
Up until this point I've been playing Random. This is for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to learn all the races and what they could/couldn't do. I think I've accomplished a good deal of this. Second was to use it as an advantage when playing non-Random players. They have to scout you to know what you are, and that takes time they otherwise would have to prepare for what's to come.
The problem with this is I play in Bronze league where the players simply do not care what race you are. Being random has no advantage when the player is just going to pick their handy fast cheese all-in rush to try to kill whatever you have.
For this reason being Random is actually a disadvantage to me because the tables are actually reversed. If I expect a rush, I don't know who I'm playing as until the game starts. I have to figure out in my head "what do I do in this matchup?" right away. There are 9 potential matchups that could happen, and I have to remember what to do in any of them.
Add on to the fact that the player might *not* rush (and then I'd want to be able to do a real build) and that's 9 more options I have to choose from to do. It's way too much to handle right away in the game. If I picked a race I could knock that down to 3, and I'd have the loading screen to figure out which of the two options (anti-rush or normal build) I wanted to do, and not have to wait until the game actually starts.
And so with that, which race do I want to pick? I know it won't be Terran. Don't get me wrong, I like Terran, it has so many options, and at a high level feel the most "fun" given all the different things you can do, but they're just not my play style.
I played Protoss for most of the beta and liked it. Quite a bit actually. But I think a lot of this was because it was it was so easy to pick up. I liked not having to *manage* a ton of shit. I liked having powerful units (lets face it, Void Rays are simply OP). But with that simplicity and ease of use comes some downsides. Protoss is by far the least dynamic of the races because of this. It has the least number of real "tricks" that can be pulled off. It is fairly straight forward and vanilla.
This leaves me with Zerg. I played Zerg exclusively in SC1, and loved it. When beta came out that's what I started playing but really did not like it. After playing with it some more, I'm coming around. There are so many things I do not like about it (mostly all the morphing), but it's such a different style than the other two races. It has way more potential (imho) for interesting ideas and builds than the other two. This is mainly because with Zerg you are forced to expand. You can't one-base like you can with Protoss and survive.
This also makes play way harder to pull off. I'm not worried about the difficulty, but it does mean I need to spend more time getting the rhythm of the race down. I'm not there yet. But I am excited to spend more time delving deep into one race, instead of trying to just survive at all with all three. I'm not sure if I'll like it as much as Zerg in SC1 (no Scourge, no Guardian), but I'm gonna give it a shot.
Up until this point I've been playing Random. This is for a couple reasons. One, I wanted to learn all the races and what they could/couldn't do. I think I've accomplished a good deal of this. Second was to use it as an advantage when playing non-Random players. They have to scout you to know what you are, and that takes time they otherwise would have to prepare for what's to come.
The problem with this is I play in Bronze league where the players simply do not care what race you are. Being random has no advantage when the player is just going to pick their handy fast cheese all-in rush to try to kill whatever you have.
For this reason being Random is actually a disadvantage to me because the tables are actually reversed. If I expect a rush, I don't know who I'm playing as until the game starts. I have to figure out in my head "what do I do in this matchup?" right away. There are 9 potential matchups that could happen, and I have to remember what to do in any of them.
Add on to the fact that the player might *not* rush (and then I'd want to be able to do a real build) and that's 9 more options I have to choose from to do. It's way too much to handle right away in the game. If I picked a race I could knock that down to 3, and I'd have the loading screen to figure out which of the two options (anti-rush or normal build) I wanted to do, and not have to wait until the game actually starts.
And so with that, which race do I want to pick? I know it won't be Terran. Don't get me wrong, I like Terran, it has so many options, and at a high level feel the most "fun" given all the different things you can do, but they're just not my play style.
I played Protoss for most of the beta and liked it. Quite a bit actually. But I think a lot of this was because it was it was so easy to pick up. I liked not having to *manage* a ton of shit. I liked having powerful units (lets face it, Void Rays are simply OP). But with that simplicity and ease of use comes some downsides. Protoss is by far the least dynamic of the races because of this. It has the least number of real "tricks" that can be pulled off. It is fairly straight forward and vanilla.
This leaves me with Zerg. I played Zerg exclusively in SC1, and loved it. When beta came out that's what I started playing but really did not like it. After playing with it some more, I'm coming around. There are so many things I do not like about it (mostly all the morphing), but it's such a different style than the other two races. It has way more potential (imho) for interesting ideas and builds than the other two. This is mainly because with Zerg you are forced to expand. You can't one-base like you can with Protoss and survive.
This also makes play way harder to pull off. I'm not worried about the difficulty, but it does mean I need to spend more time getting the rhythm of the race down. I'm not there yet. But I am excited to spend more time delving deep into one race, instead of trying to just survive at all with all three. I'm not sure if I'll like it as much as Zerg in SC1 (no Scourge, no Guardian), but I'm gonna give it a shot.