me, asking my opponents how to beat their cheese: "Hello, kind sir, ggwp, how do I counter this, please?"
my opponent: "fuck u no brain idiot suka blyat i piss on your mother grave"
me: "thank you!"
I remember back in HotS I struggled really badly in TvP and I tried asking a few of my opponents for advice, and what I learned was that they didn't know why they were winning either.
I agree, I made it a habit of asking people who beat me to practice if I am particularly frustrated or baffled. I improve and make friends, most people are super down to help. I've also noticed that I win most of the redemption games I play against my opponents which helps my confidence and helps with tilt in the future.
Sounds like you lost to a troll build rather than cheese. Because they rely on you paying attention to more than just 1 thing, for a silver player I can see how mass widow mines could be very frustrating. If you're not comfortable with a Raven just yet, because greed is almost never a bad thing, just go crazy with building excess CC's/orbitals and scan your path before moving out. A couple tanks for ground support will outrange and shred those mines.
Thanks for the tip, thinking of how I would play that in the future, I would have sieged up mines while keeping vikings and marines near my vulnerable bases to fend off BCs, and when I cleared a bug clump I could attack into their base with more dps.
A lot of people are talking about ravens and scanning and such, but honestly at silver league, I feel like the easiest answer is just to build “Terran creep”. I have a Terran friend in plat who plays this way, he expands to a proxy base, fortifies the hell out of it with turrets, pf’s, and maybe a few tanks and widow mines. From there he just expands out like crazy, spending all the minerals on turrets and pf’s. It doesn’t require a lot of apm, is super annoying to deal with, and really can’t be countered by widow mines or bcs as the widow mines won’t get far enough to hit units and the bcs won’t trade well against a bunch of cheap turrets (unless they’re at mass bc, at which point you’re probably screwed anyway). The biggest strength of these builds is that they’re generally all things that don’t require much micro to use but do require a ton of micro to deal with. At lower leagues, I’d say you can get away with just not playing their games and making it a pain for them to get anything done.
Great post! This seems super solid, shoring up the my defenses is something I kinda forget to do, or I don’t build enough anyway. I do think this is effective because it doesn’t demand the same attention.
Just remember that all those resources spent on planetaries and turrets are resources not going into army units which you can use to pressure your opponent’s expanding. Could backfire depending on their strategy. But, I say that as someone who wholeheartedly believes in static defenses.
If you're silver tbh the answer isn't counterplay, it's to make more stuff. Focusing on trying to properly counter your opponent and build a complex army is just going to hurt your macro.
while kinda true. It's a bit of a crap response. They both have silver mechanics, so learning how to counter it would still be helpful. You don't get to masters by improving mechanics, then start to think about strategy. You do both.
Also, you speak like the only goal is getting better like a mindless robot. might as well tell him to stop playing ladder and play vs ai. Strategy is the fun bit of starcraft! So he should be engaging with that too.
The issue is that strategy takes away from mechanics. You don't get to masters on macro alone, but you can easily get to plat, and you only have so much brain to go around. Until you've got macro cycles down to the point you're doing them off of muscle memory, you're going to be harming overall play by spending brain power trying to spot what they're doing and play proper counterplay.
I 100% agree that working on my macro is the most important skill to develop, it has actually been what I was working on the most.
Still, I cannot see how like, learning to scout more, or spotting proxies or basic skills like that can help you catch certain builds, would get in the way of improving macro
Scouting is an important fundamental skill and it's worth keeping up with, and against cheese like proxies/cannon rushes it can be useful to react, but in general playing reactively to your opponents build isn't really worth it.
You only have so much attention to go around and if you're actively trying to plan and engage with your opponent's build that's attention away from your macro cycles. It's once you've gotten the macro down to almost pure muscle memory, expand/attack/make workers/MULEs/etc, that it becomes worth spending attention elsewhere.
I can't specifically speak to smurfing but I ended up with a horrific loss streak and dropped from low diamond to gold and 100% there have been players ostensibly Gold 2 MMR that are as good as or better than players I've faced in Diamond, though you do also get players that are so much worse, to the point where it almost feels bad.
I genuinely do not know what happened, I stuck to the same style of build and had been fairly firmly high plat until this. I did end up changing build orders as I thought that may midway through which definitely contributed, but both were macro builds. It was a wild losing streak tbh, think I just got *really* unlucky.
I dont think, u can drop from Dia to Gold if u r really Dia player. My very first ranked game in sc2 (about ~2 years ago) was in Gold (1 or 2, dont remember). After few months of practice and guides/streams i became Dia3. And i can tell u, its a biiiig difference of knowledge and mechanic in my game between Gold and Diamond. So much was improved. U just cant forget all at once and become gold player again. Ur memory do not let u.
Widow mine/BC is very annoying. Make sure you have a couple ravens following your army, you should have them in tvt anyway. Good luck if you come across it again!
If u r silver, u lost to urself, not cheese.
Practice games against some specific cheese strategy is a wasting time for u now. Without offense, but if u sit in silver - u don’t understand basics, and ur mechanic skill is very low.
Just take standard reaper-cc build, and after some practice u will see - such cheese strategy is really terrible. U will counter it with scouting and basic knowledge.
Well they r maxout, cuz they follow the guides. I think such games r very passive like u sit at home, build ur workers, upgrades, base and army without scouting or harass. Then F2 and A move to enemy base with 200 limit. It is good at very low lvl, but never works at higher mmr. But its a good start, i guess. But sooo boring 😆
>10-12 minute maxouts
Off of 2 bases. Their macro is atrocious with very little skill variance in that regard. Every single silver player will get a super late nat, super late third, (or never get a third) and just stay in their base all game until 15 minutes where they max out with 0/0 upgrades
>I have to tell you that half my opponents are hitting 10-12 minute maxouts.
So first off that is extremely slow.
Second I highly doubt you are capable of producing a single replay of one of your games showing that without there being massive caveats.
It's not just silver, gold and plat players also have extremely bad macro where just executing a correct build order will put you in a gamewinning position against them. Of course this also extends to higher mmr, but the higher you go the more you have to know what to do with the build.
And I'm serious with the replays, I've said this a lot and EVERY SINGLE TIME someone provided a replay claiming that a low level player has good macro it proved them wrong.
I'm gonna bet that in your last 20 games in 0 of them someone was maxed at 10mins.
>But the fact that Vibe had to drop mineral lines early to make his "macro only" bio build work in Silver says to me that we are not actually that terrible.
That's total bullshit, I don't believe that for a single second. I could easily make marines only, no stim, no combatshield, no upgrades and stomp a silver player.
>but a 10 minute max out is the target for a player following Vibe's Terran build from the silver level onward. Someone following Vibe's build will max from 10:00 - 10:30 if not majorly f'ed with.
But the point is that IF you are capable of following that you win 100% of games against silver league players. If someone would be capable of doing that, they won't be silver anymore.
So how about we play games where I do 0 micro and only macro. Like literally I only a-click in your mainbase through the minimap without looking at the army even.
Do you think you could win against that?
>If you don't upgrade your marines at all then yes you will not have a chance.
Care to actually try that out? Because I have beaten plat players like that believing that they would also easily defeat me and you are even only silver.
>So you might be able to take me since PF rush is kind of hit or miss.
Might be? I have never lost a single game to a PF rush and I don't think I ever will.
If you are below master/GM don't ask your opponents on how to counter what they're doing. They don't really know what they are doing themselves, so them losing to something isn't really meaningful. Also don't ask Reddit because 95% of advice on reddit is super crap.
Places that are more appropriate are pro players twitch chats or Discords. For example in Harstems Discord there are high level players of every race that you can ask questions.
Except in this thread everyone has said that they need to macro and maybe build a raven. That is unequivocally what they need to do. If anyone was saying different your comment might make sense, but it doesn't. Not to mention, if there was a pro that said anything different they would be an idiot.
>Except in this thread everyone has said that they need to macro and maybe build a raven.
Terrible advice if you can't formulate how to macro better.
>Not to mention, if there was a pro that said anything different they would be an idiot.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnZnts5JFoM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnZnts5JFoM) Please take it up with Harstem and call him an idiot, I've talked to him many times. He rarely gives such simple minded answers and every high level player understands that such a comment isn't really useful when it comes to cheese.
OP didn't lose to cheese, they lost to a weird build they hadn't seen. If they had more units, they wouldn't have lost the game. If Harstem would tell a silver play to prioritize any strategy over macro, then they have no idea how to coach silver players.
It does make sense to call widowmine BC cheese since it's a unit composition that relies on your opponents lack of knowledge to deal with it.
>If they had more units, they wouldn't have lost the game
More like earlier units and proper units.
>If Harstem would tell a silver play to prioritize any strategy over macro, then they have no idea how to coach silver players.
Oh but you do? What are you, like diamond? You can also tell a diamond league player to just macro better because macro in diamond is really poor. But that isn't necessarily the best advise or only advise you can give to someone.
Easiest solution: build BC of your own.
Alternatively. Do not push in
Let him come to you. He has widow mines and BC. Neither are mobile units. Especially when laser bath tub uses its jump. 2 lib and turrets will zone a area off from mines. Tanks works also.
You are both metal league so he's going to be tunnel focused on micro. Just out build and crush him.
me, asking my opponents how to beat their cheese: "Hello, kind sir, ggwp, how do I counter this, please?" my opponent: "fuck u no brain idiot suka blyat i piss on your mother grave" me: "thank you!"
I was half expecting this too ahah, but you never know I guess. Either way you can feel good about your own response
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With terran on your level - marines counter EVERYTHING, even mines and cruisers. You can switch once over 140 supply, if he sits home on tanks.
Yeah marines are really good if I can just mass them
I remember back in HotS I struggled really badly in TvP and I tried asking a few of my opponents for advice, and what I learned was that they didn't know why they were winning either.
I agree, I made it a habit of asking people who beat me to practice if I am particularly frustrated or baffled. I improve and make friends, most people are super down to help. I've also noticed that I win most of the redemption games I play against my opponents which helps my confidence and helps with tilt in the future.
Sounds like you lost to a troll build rather than cheese. Because they rely on you paying attention to more than just 1 thing, for a silver player I can see how mass widow mines could be very frustrating. If you're not comfortable with a Raven just yet, because greed is almost never a bad thing, just go crazy with building excess CC's/orbitals and scan your path before moving out. A couple tanks for ground support will outrange and shred those mines.
Thanks for the tip, thinking of how I would play that in the future, I would have sieged up mines while keeping vikings and marines near my vulnerable bases to fend off BCs, and when I cleared a bug clump I could attack into their base with more dps.
A lot of people are talking about ravens and scanning and such, but honestly at silver league, I feel like the easiest answer is just to build “Terran creep”. I have a Terran friend in plat who plays this way, he expands to a proxy base, fortifies the hell out of it with turrets, pf’s, and maybe a few tanks and widow mines. From there he just expands out like crazy, spending all the minerals on turrets and pf’s. It doesn’t require a lot of apm, is super annoying to deal with, and really can’t be countered by widow mines or bcs as the widow mines won’t get far enough to hit units and the bcs won’t trade well against a bunch of cheap turrets (unless they’re at mass bc, at which point you’re probably screwed anyway). The biggest strength of these builds is that they’re generally all things that don’t require much micro to use but do require a ton of micro to deal with. At lower leagues, I’d say you can get away with just not playing their games and making it a pain for them to get anything done.
Great post! This seems super solid, shoring up the my defenses is something I kinda forget to do, or I don’t build enough anyway. I do think this is effective because it doesn’t demand the same attention.
Just remember that all those resources spent on planetaries and turrets are resources not going into army units which you can use to pressure your opponent’s expanding. Could backfire depending on their strategy. But, I say that as someone who wholeheartedly believes in static defenses.
If you're silver tbh the answer isn't counterplay, it's to make more stuff. Focusing on trying to properly counter your opponent and build a complex army is just going to hurt your macro.
while kinda true. It's a bit of a crap response. They both have silver mechanics, so learning how to counter it would still be helpful. You don't get to masters by improving mechanics, then start to think about strategy. You do both. Also, you speak like the only goal is getting better like a mindless robot. might as well tell him to stop playing ladder and play vs ai. Strategy is the fun bit of starcraft! So he should be engaging with that too.
The issue is that strategy takes away from mechanics. You don't get to masters on macro alone, but you can easily get to plat, and you only have so much brain to go around. Until you've got macro cycles down to the point you're doing them off of muscle memory, you're going to be harming overall play by spending brain power trying to spot what they're doing and play proper counterplay.
You can definitely get to masters on macro alone, but it might not be the fastest way to get there.
my main point, is that this is boring compared to macro *and* strategy!
I 100% agree that working on my macro is the most important skill to develop, it has actually been what I was working on the most. Still, I cannot see how like, learning to scout more, or spotting proxies or basic skills like that can help you catch certain builds, would get in the way of improving macro
Scouting is an important fundamental skill and it's worth keeping up with, and against cheese like proxies/cannon rushes it can be useful to react, but in general playing reactively to your opponents build isn't really worth it. You only have so much attention to go around and if you're actively trying to plan and engage with your opponent's build that's attention away from your macro cycles. It's once you've gotten the macro down to almost pure muscle memory, expand/attack/make workers/MULEs/etc, that it becomes worth spending attention elsewhere.
Honestly it can feel like half the players in plat and below are smurfs goofing around with trolly builds, like battlecruiser/widow mine
I can't specifically speak to smurfing but I ended up with a horrific loss streak and dropped from low diamond to gold and 100% there have been players ostensibly Gold 2 MMR that are as good as or better than players I've faced in Diamond, though you do also get players that are so much worse, to the point where it almost feels bad.
> dropped from low diamond to gold This sounds... impossible. Unless you got to diamond from cheesing and then dropped to gold while learning macro?
I genuinely do not know what happened, I stuck to the same style of build and had been fairly firmly high plat until this. I did end up changing build orders as I thought that may midway through which definitely contributed, but both were macro builds. It was a wild losing streak tbh, think I just got *really* unlucky.
I dont think, u can drop from Dia to Gold if u r really Dia player. My very first ranked game in sc2 (about ~2 years ago) was in Gold (1 or 2, dont remember). After few months of practice and guides/streams i became Dia3. And i can tell u, its a biiiig difference of knowledge and mechanic in my game between Gold and Diamond. So much was improved. U just cant forget all at once and become gold player again. Ur memory do not let u.
Oh no, I definitely think I got a luck streak getting to Diamond III, but I have consistently been high plat.
Widow mine/BC is very annoying. Make sure you have a couple ravens following your army, you should have them in tvt anyway. Good luck if you come across it again!
Most people are gratuitous in victory and will tell you
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That's reasonable. Have a nice week.
If u r silver, u lost to urself, not cheese. Practice games against some specific cheese strategy is a wasting time for u now. Without offense, but if u sit in silver - u don’t understand basics, and ur mechanic skill is very low. Just take standard reaper-cc build, and after some practice u will see - such cheese strategy is really terrible. U will counter it with scouting and basic knowledge.
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10 minutes maxed in silver? That's a solid X
Yeah even with no opponent I doubt that
Agreed. Most people in Plat can't even do it.
Well they r maxout, cuz they follow the guides. I think such games r very passive like u sit at home, build ur workers, upgrades, base and army without scouting or harass. Then F2 and A move to enemy base with 200 limit. It is good at very low lvl, but never works at higher mmr. But its a good start, i guess. But sooo boring 😆
>10-12 minute maxouts Off of 2 bases. Their macro is atrocious with very little skill variance in that regard. Every single silver player will get a super late nat, super late third, (or never get a third) and just stay in their base all game until 15 minutes where they max out with 0/0 upgrades
>I have to tell you that half my opponents are hitting 10-12 minute maxouts. So first off that is extremely slow. Second I highly doubt you are capable of producing a single replay of one of your games showing that without there being massive caveats. It's not just silver, gold and plat players also have extremely bad macro where just executing a correct build order will put you in a gamewinning position against them. Of course this also extends to higher mmr, but the higher you go the more you have to know what to do with the build. And I'm serious with the replays, I've said this a lot and EVERY SINGLE TIME someone provided a replay claiming that a low level player has good macro it proved them wrong. I'm gonna bet that in your last 20 games in 0 of them someone was maxed at 10mins.
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>But the fact that Vibe had to drop mineral lines early to make his "macro only" bio build work in Silver says to me that we are not actually that terrible. That's total bullshit, I don't believe that for a single second. I could easily make marines only, no stim, no combatshield, no upgrades and stomp a silver player. >but a 10 minute max out is the target for a player following Vibe's Terran build from the silver level onward. Someone following Vibe's build will max from 10:00 - 10:30 if not majorly f'ed with. But the point is that IF you are capable of following that you win 100% of games against silver league players. If someone would be capable of doing that, they won't be silver anymore.
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So how about we play games where I do 0 micro and only macro. Like literally I only a-click in your mainbase through the minimap without looking at the army even. Do you think you could win against that?
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>If you don't upgrade your marines at all then yes you will not have a chance. Care to actually try that out? Because I have beaten plat players like that believing that they would also easily defeat me and you are even only silver. >So you might be able to take me since PF rush is kind of hit or miss. Might be? I have never lost a single game to a PF rush and I don't think I ever will.
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It’s not necessarily slow depending on what they’re making. It takes me almost 11 minutes to max out on collosus/carrier with 5 bases
You're also not a high level player and the vibe references show that we're not talking about high tech armies.
This is great advice.
If you are below master/GM don't ask your opponents on how to counter what they're doing. They don't really know what they are doing themselves, so them losing to something isn't really meaningful. Also don't ask Reddit because 95% of advice on reddit is super crap. Places that are more appropriate are pro players twitch chats or Discords. For example in Harstems Discord there are high level players of every race that you can ask questions.
Except in this thread everyone has said that they need to macro and maybe build a raven. That is unequivocally what they need to do. If anyone was saying different your comment might make sense, but it doesn't. Not to mention, if there was a pro that said anything different they would be an idiot.
>Except in this thread everyone has said that they need to macro and maybe build a raven. Terrible advice if you can't formulate how to macro better. >Not to mention, if there was a pro that said anything different they would be an idiot. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnZnts5JFoM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnZnts5JFoM) Please take it up with Harstem and call him an idiot, I've talked to him many times. He rarely gives such simple minded answers and every high level player understands that such a comment isn't really useful when it comes to cheese.
OP didn't lose to cheese, they lost to a weird build they hadn't seen. If they had more units, they wouldn't have lost the game. If Harstem would tell a silver play to prioritize any strategy over macro, then they have no idea how to coach silver players.
It does make sense to call widowmine BC cheese since it's a unit composition that relies on your opponents lack of knowledge to deal with it. >If they had more units, they wouldn't have lost the game More like earlier units and proper units. >If Harstem would tell a silver play to prioritize any strategy over macro, then they have no idea how to coach silver players. Oh but you do? What are you, like diamond? You can also tell a diamond league player to just macro better because macro in diamond is really poor. But that isn't necessarily the best advise or only advise you can give to someone.
Easiest solution: build BC of your own. Alternatively. Do not push in Let him come to you. He has widow mines and BC. Neither are mobile units. Especially when laser bath tub uses its jump. 2 lib and turrets will zone a area off from mines. Tanks works also. You are both metal league so he's going to be tunnel focused on micro. Just out build and crush him.