Battle Report

Untitled Battle Story by StarPirate

The map is island hop, I am protoss he is zerg. I am upper left he
is lower right. This is after the 1.02 patch. Non-ladder game.

When I start off, I know that going heavy-robotics-facility path
won't be good against zerg. I get a respectable group of dragoons and
start heading for templars, although getting a robotics facility at near
the same time (shuttles). I also got a support bay for 2 reasons: cheap,
and the shuttle speed upgrade. I head over to the left and find an empty
island. When I get there one of the first things I start to do is get
some cannons. It takes a while to get this whole thing set up, because
it is my first expansion and my income is low. After a while I get about
4 cannons and some gateways set up. I also have my nexus and I am trying
to mine. During this heavy mineral spending spree I started to go for
observers because I really needed them and they are mostly gas (neat how
that works out).

Now that I have observers I start looking around for him. I find he
has one expansion to the right of his main town. I can't explore either
too much because he has scourge and spore colonies. There is no way I
can stop his expanding at this time. A few small muta attacks come, but
they are scared off by my temps and cannons. I realize I am having a
game-control problem.

I am starting to get 2 things: scouts and more templars with
hallucination. When my first scout is done building, the first major
attack comes. It was what I feared most: guardians. They were of course
backed by lots of scourge and a handfull of mutas. One scout wasn't
enough. I hallucinated it and sent it in. At least it will delay the
town shredding. I was pulling all the tricks, mostly trying to lure
stuff into cannons. I wasn't doing bad, but I was still in trouble. I
needed backup. As I was just bringing in a shuttle with 2 dragoons he
was winning and starting to take down major parts of my town. They
unload and fight for a while, but get killed. One shuttle wan't really
adequate to handle what I needed; it required too much micromanagement
and I didn't have time. Finally a sigh of relief came as 2 more scouts
completed at the stargate. And the attack was dead.

I frantically rebuilt and started to get more temps and scouts and
upgrades for them. My scouts and shuttles (I got an extra shuttle or 2)
needed protection. The scourge raids were going to be coming, and I
couldn't watch my scouts the whole time. I was also getting observers
this entire time. They don't die real fast (at least not as fast as the
rest of my units were dying), so I had a million.

I started watching all around, and I also found a safety zone of
cannons and dragoons at my main base. I had so many templars (like 8-10)
that I was just hallucinating armies and sending them where my observers
couldn't go. I realized he was still relying heavily on scourge. I was
able to take out huge groups of scourge with these hallucinations. I was
just sending them periodically (and pretty fast) to take out scourge and
to scout. I just kept this up all the time, it worked wonderfully.

Then the next big attack came. I saw it though with all of my
observers (I had so many he couldn't attack without me noticing).
That made it easy: I sent in a group of hallucinations, took out the
scourge, sent in scouts, killed everything else. I usually ran if I
couldn't kill the guy really fast, but it depended on my site in all
directions. I knew he could have had a group of scourge hotkeyed and
coming my way.

So I did that to a few more attacks, and by this time I had 12
scouts upgraded a lot. Then he got a little wise to what was going on.
He would go "observer hunting". I tried to stop that as best I could,
using yet more observers to watch from other areas, see his air units,
and attack them and then get his OL. It wasn't always working great, he
got a lot of observers. I would rather be safe with my scouts.

I was gaining ground though. With my attack plan I was moving in on
his bases, areas he couldn't trick-attack. I was just getting so good,
and so quick, and so coordinated, he couldn't keep up. I always had
hallucinations in the right places, and real scouts in the right places.
I had enough temps to keep my supply of them up too. It was just
merciless. Evrything he killed was a hallucination. That left my scouts
able to always attack. And they took down his only minable expansion
left.

I was starting to get more expansions and seal his fate. He
surrendered before I needed to get mass carriers or whatever. That was a
great game though. I was really pleased at my own ability to use that
spell better than 99% of the people on battle.net. Coordination is the
key