Breakout

Yesterday, I had what I consider my first real win. I've been playing a few games with Pka, who has been really nice and helpful. He has played Zerg while I've been practicing my Terran. Usually, he beats me quite quickly with a good composition to match anything I build. I've read more about builds and macro, and in the last game we played yesterday, I figured out what my main problem was. I was trying to do way too much at once, and I don't have the macro to build banshees and harass, tech wildly, scout and respond to his units in an appropriate way.

I decided to throw all that out the window and just concentrate on getting a lot of stuff.

We played on Korthal Compound. I took my natural and built a few tech labs to get marauders, but other than that, I just walled myself in with bunkers and supply depots to concentrate on building more barracks and a few factories. I didn't even scout. Just building SCVs and getting more marines. I waited for him to attack, repelled his forces twice and then moved out with my big army of mainly marines, a few marauders and some medivacs. Everything except the medivacs died, but I managed to kill almost all of his zerglings, drones and banelings with stim and kiting, and I even took out his main hatchery and natural. At that point, I didn't worry about transitions or timing an expansion or responding appropriately to what I saw during my push. All I did was build more marines, and since I had a ridiculous amount of minerals, I scanned all his possible expansions. I threw up a third CC only when I was almost completely mined out.

I did one more big push with all my bio units after about 30 minutes. This was the longest a game had ever lasted for me, and as far as I could tell, I was way ahead in killed units but with a much worse economy since I didn't expand, and most likely far behind in tech. My factories pumped out a few tanks to protect my essential third expansion but he found it and killed almost all my SCVs while I was moving my main army out. I continued with my main army, attacked his weakest hatchery, killed a ton of stuff in my way and was only just repelled. With creep everywhere on the map except my home base and natural, almost no SCVs and both bases mined out, I just went all-in with about a dozen marines, six tanks, a few marauders and medivacs. I took down one hatchery with no real opposition, and all of a sudden he said "gg" and left.

I was stunned. I thought that this was a desperate last push before he overran me, but he had no units left to deal with my tanks. The game had lasted for 38 minutes, I had killed over 600 of his units while losing about 200. I had no idea that I was winning. But I felt so good afterwards. I was proud of myself for continuing to macro during my attacks, every time an army was taken out I had new marines at home. There were other obvious problems, at one point I had 2000 minerals for example. But despite all my errors, I managed to keep pushing and win in the end. I was exhausted, sweaty and shaking but completely overjoyed.

I'm watching these videos on Team Liquid now, made by the wonderful user Filter. They're really helping me a lot, and I'm practicing against the computer just to make a good basic build. Nothing fancy, just macro and timing. I've also begun a trial with European Fun Clan, a BF3 clan who has just expanded to Starcraft II. Being a single player gamer usually, I'm looking forward to getting to know these people. The clan leader MylilPwny has been awesome and really nice to me. But I guess that with a two year old running around the house, he is used to handling noobs :)