Game 14: PvZ, ST, Loss

Link: Replay
Opponents' Rank: Gold 19
MMR Change: -11 (1325)
Recap: This is a juicy one. If any loyal readers were going to watch one game to give me advice, this would be the one I'd want them to look at.

We're in cross positions. He opens safe with gas-pool-hatch. I know early pressure won't do anything so I open with 3-gate sentry into an expansion. Once it's up I add a few stalkers and push his front while I build a robo. He has spines and a ton of speedlings.

This is probably where I start to go off the rails. Up till here we're even, or I'm slightly ahead in supply and harvesters. But so far I've seen nothing but speedlings and spines, and that screams mutas to me.

I hate mutas. It's not so much that I don't know what to do about them. It's that, in a metagame sense, they're a direct counter to my playstyle. I say "Okay, my micro is bad, but I'll have more harvesters and more units and more expansions." And mutas say, "I don't care how many units you have, you're going to lose all those probes you carefully built up unless you can play some high-micro defense."

So I probably overreact. I put down cannons in my main and natural and put down a stargate for phoenixes. Right at this point my observer gets to his base and doesn't find a spire, just a roach warren.

So I think, hey, lings and roaches, and I have a stargate up, let's get void rays to add to the colossus ball. I'm still worried that I haven't put any pressure on so I push out with the one colossus and one void ray.

That's where I lose. He's gotten a hydra den up and a few waves out. I thought I got a decent engage with good FFs so I stuck with it and lost bad.

I pull back and try to get a third up, but I get caught and die trying to defend it, but I never really recovered from that push.

Lessons:

Don't overreact on your hunches. My scouting was timed exactly wrong, seeing the mass lings right before the first roaches came out, and the roach warren right before the hydras, so I stayed worried about mutas the whole time.

I should have gone with either the cannons or the stargate, but not both. (Turns out I shouldn't have gone with either, but still.)

Pretty sure Day 9 has gone on about this at length. Adjust the build with one thing to respond, don't go swinging wildly trying to counter.

The other thing was that engagement was clearly not as favorable as I thought. I could have pushed the front of his creep, then fallen back once I put up the force fields. Worry him and let me build up my death ball with adjustments for what his build actually is. Then, I could have expanded with a big force controlling the middle instead of having to try to sneak it out.

Macro Benchmarks:
Probes per minute: 4.93
CBs per minute: 2.28
AUR: 800

I definitely let some CB build up, and there were periods of resource float that could be smoothed out. I felt like it was basically pretty good, but it might be one of those cases where it's deceptive. I'm coming back to this replay a few times.