ASL Season 5 - Page 4

On April 04 2018 07:19 Baalim wrote: macro wizard goes to the next round micro wizard goes to the next round

This is one of those logic puzzles where you are speaking of only one person...

2 weeks break now, dafuck I just got hooked on watching brood war man...

has in been 2 week yet?

On April 12 2018 03:26 Baalim wrote: has in been 2 week yet?

15th and 17th sadly

are we there yet?

two more days. cast starts 48 hours 38 minutes after this post.

you guys all need to watch group C. First three games have all been AMAZING. completely, completely amazing.

On April 15 2018 11:54 Liquid`Drone wrote: you guys all need to watch group C. First three games have all been AMAZING. completely, completely amazing.

agreed. I might say that the 3 best games of the entire season so far are the 3 first games of this group

+ Show Spoiler +

Agreed with 3 best games of the season. Maybe I jumped the gun on Transistor too quickly, there are some cool aspects to the map when it gets to late game, just been uncommon for players to make it past the 12 minute mark.

Third World PvZ is really interesting -- the transition from sair/reaver to ground army on the isolated portion of the map for protoss to counter zerg expanding everywhere and trying to hold onto 50% of the expansions makes for fun late games.

Have you guys seen any good TvZ on third world on stream? It's hard to get a feel for how much zerg can get away with on the semi-island part of the map while terran is controlling the starting area and pressuring the zerg's natural/main.

Whoever thought its a good idea to put average volume music on top of the interviews, on top of the translation isnt a smart guy :D

Otherwise, sick sick group

+ Show Spoiler +

worth the 2 weeks wait holy moly

thoughts on the maps ;

sparkle : z has started doing better zvp, and is winning like 41%. Pvt I initially thought looked rather protoss favored - mass shuttle goon reaver into carrier was beating the mass dropship goliath style that terrans tend to favor tvp island. But after watching Sea wreck Pusan with mass wraith valkyrie - and playing a couple tvps where I did that myself - I've changed my mind. Flash was also 19-3 tvp there at some point. zvt less imbalanced than it seemed at first too, although in theory zerg does dominate, there are some very tight situations, like depending on scourges connecting with valkyries, or hydra drops not being intercepted by wraiths. If Z gets to hive with several secure expansions, they're kinda untouchable. I think overall in 'sponbang' matches, which is the best indicator we have, it's slightly in zerg's favor, but not more than 55-45.

Third world I think is solidly in zerg's favor if zerg plays it correctly. Like terran should not ever win a game after 10 minutes (unless they got a really solid advantage before that). Reason? Zerg basically just has to hold one choke, and then have nydus to the other side of the map. Terran cannot transfer troops between the map-halves with even the remotest of efficiency. Generally tvz on pro level, zergs tend to fall apart when terrans apply pressure to many different areas at the same time - however zerg does not lose a battle where they pay attention and have defilers. Seeing as how T has to choose which half they want to produce units on, zerg can really, really abuse that once they get nydus tech.

At the same time wraith openings can be really strong (zerg struggling a bit with defending the other side expansion as they can't get there with hydras - and also really wanting to establish bases on the other side as soon as they can). All this said; if I were picking a map for playing zvt on out of this map pool, I would pick third world. I would open with a fast expansion in my natural, taking the closest base on the other side of the fence with my third hatchery. Then muta asap - but not very many, just like 8, to handle any possible pressure to the other side. Meanwhile make a bunch of sunkens in the natural, GET QUEENS for broodling to stop any pre-hive tank pressure, then have just a couple lurker defilers to hold any aggression towards that base while transferring into ultra ling defiler from the other side of the map. If you remove the get queen part (they have much better muta micro anyway), I expect that to be how games will play out.

Pvz, sair reaver is way more mobile than anything terran has. It's close. Pvt, terran definitely struggles with shuttle play into carrier. That is kind of a nightmare for terran here, and I'm not sure there's really anything they can do. Kinda expecting terrans to just go 6 fac desperation mode try to kill protoss before they get to change map side. Or busting out ghosts or something crazy.

Gladiator is a fairly balanced map all around. Transistor is highly volatile more so than imbalanced. I think they're both in the 57:43 range in sponbang matches for a couple matchups, which is significant, but it's nothing like pvz sparkle two months ago. (where protosses were winning like 79%)

For reference, I'm still reasonably actively playing the game. Nothing like 15 years ago, but I play a couple games every week, and on pretty high level by nonkorean standards. I am so happy about sparkle and third world. Playing those maps is SO fun. It's completely different from the fighting spirit - circuit breaker macro fests that have dominated brood war for nearly a decade. Instead it rewards good decision making and multitasking, but much less of the attack 5 control groups worth of units into 5 control groups worth of units and duke it out. It's been massively refreshing, I love it.

Makes sense re: Third World TvZ, nydus far too powerful late game. The only two TvZ games I saw were the ones in the Flash/Mind group, but both zergs struggled to get out of the opening. I guess Terran would just go wraith+marine/med on the main area until zerg hits hive tech and then switch over to mech on the semi-island part, but by that point zerg may be on 5 gas and have a shitload of ling/lurker/ultra under darkswarm. and in PvT I would assume arbiter would be tough on terran also. A combination of storm dropping, and into base recalls alongside carrier harass is really tough to overcome. In theory the narrow fighting areas should make Terran pushes more effective, but I think they just become targets for really effective stasis/storms. I could see EMP use and even ghosts locking down carriers/arbiters being one of terran's better tactics to deal with it.

I was majorly discounting the Sea vs Pusan Sparkle game because it seemed like Pusan was far and away the weakest of the 24 players who made this starleague, but Terran definitely has outs on Sparkle vs protoss. And I thought JD's ZvP game with queens on there was eye opening, but he was pretty lucky to hit the cyber core before the upgrade and snipe a few corsairs. Still, with so much gas available to zerg they can make enough muta/scourge to counter the early sair/reaver, and transition into queen play alongside late game death balls. And obviously, zerg much better at transporting large amounts of ground units between islands due to overlords and nydus.

Gladiator seems very tough for PvZ and TvP. P struggles to stop zerg from grabbing another main, and then mass producing on 5-6 bases. Same for Terran vs Protoss, by the time they push out near 200 supply, protoss can have 5 bases and 15 gates helping throw units at the push alongside stasis. Although, I do remember one game from the Flash vs Bisu semifinal where Bisu was playing perfect for about 15 minutes, then Flash started his 200/200 push and just ran Bisu over. IIRC, Bisu should have had better stasis to slow him down and that would have allowed 5 base econ macro to kick in and win him the game, but after a big battle Flash had a giant ball of units left and Bisu just threw newly produced units 10 at a time at them dying and couldn't stop him.

Where can you see the map statistics for spon matches? I played a few ladder games recently, but the maps were Match Point, Fighting Spirit, Tau Cross, and Destination. Haven't had a chance to try the new ones (other than Transistor which is in the pool), but I don't think I would be able to hang on them with players normally around my playing level with 100 apm speed, a lot of speed required on the islands.

regarding the jd sparkle game, JD played way, way, better than the protoss, and like you say, the cybernetics core dying was massive. But it was an amazing game by JD either way, he did eveything correctly, and it would be difficult for any protoss to beat a zerg playing that well. But most zergs can't play that well on sparkle. JD isn't the best anymore, but I actually think he had the best zvp sparkle record out of any zerg.

and the pusan sea one - it's definitely true that pusan was massively outplayed by sea. But he also got a solid advantage from the build order. I think the combination of build order disadvantage and just how hard sea crushed him kinda outweighs sea's skill level advantage. Checking it out, flash is currently 25-3 tvp. (39-20 tvz - which on the other hand is quite a bit worse than his stats on other maps. As ridiculous as that is. ) Flash is god - but his general tvp win ratio is more like 67%, so he has been doing quite a bit better on sparkle than on other maps.

http://sponbbang.com/race/ has statistics for the different maps.
I'll translate for the ASL maps (seen from pov of first mentioned race)
Gladiator : pvt 51.4%, zvt 43%, zvp 57%
Transistor: pvt 56.6%, zvt 49.8% zvp 54.5%
Sparkle: pvt 39.2%, zvt 52.2%, zvp 38%
Third world : pvt 46.7%, zvt 40.9%, zvp 43.5%

Some important tidbits; flash plays more sponbang matches than any other terran, by far. There's an 'elo adjusted map %' included on the site, where basically flash's victories are considered less important than other wins because he's significantly ahead of the rest of the pack. If you remove flash from the equation, terran's win % are reduced by a couple % across the board. For example pvt sparkle moves from being 39.8% to 44.3% if you remove flash.

Sparkle also includes different versions of it. They made some alterations, and zerg does like 5% better if you look at stats for the past 2 months specifically (after the newest version was released).

third world stats have much smaller sample sizes than other ones - it's a newer map. Flash is 30-7 tvz there, other terrans are 25-31 combined in tvz. tvp flash is 16-8 - other terrans are 8-13.

Honestly kind of absurd how crazy good he is. I mean the other progamers are also immensely impressive, and for flash to stand out from the pack like that? fkn absurd.

I used to try and mentally justify Flash's ridiculous win % by thinking people played worse vs him, thinking they needed to do something drastic to increase their win % but forgetting that he plays so safe and solid that he nullifies cheese. Then I saw what happened to people who played him straight forward consistently and just got run over like Bisu. It's wild. The only person who consistently impressed me vs him was soulkey -- larva is a bit stronger ZvT in the super late game, but soulkey put more pressure on him during the mid game and found interesting ways to win (like guardians), but he's out of the picture already.

Surprising that T>P on the island maps so far and that ZvT on sparkle is so close.

Where are you playing these maps at?

there's a discord for foreign brood war players, I've got some games with players from there. People here who want to involve themselves more in bw / play some games with people can pm me and I'll send you an invite. There's a lively chat during ASL matches / other tournaments, and that's also where I got the link to the sponbbang race stats. Aside from that, playing in tournaments, one tourney a good month ago had sparkle as first map for each round (I won! ) and another last sunday had third world in the map pool, and I got to play a couple zvt games. Even though I lost one of them (against Scan, a korean guy who is basically bottom tier ASL level), it reaffirmed my belief that this is one of the best maps for zvt nowadays.

I think Rain has a fair shot at beating flash. Larva too. Maybe even some other protoss. Nobody is a favorite against him, but Rain might have like a 40% shot if they play.

I think it's ridiculous how much better pros are now than back in the early 2000s. Watch at 1:00:30 of the youtube video. Shuttle drops DTs in Effort's main and Effort runs his drones away before a single drone is killed. This is while he was fighitng zealots with his hydras and maintaining 500 apm. He had no detection in his main, so he didn't see the enemy color on the minimap. All he saw was the blurred movement of the cloaked DT. That happens all the time these days. You can't even walk a DT past an enemy unit without them seeing the cloaked movement. Back in the day DTs would kill packs of lings and workers because they 1 shot them and there was no verbal warning from the game. These days the pros spot it before the DT gets a single kill. I remember Legionairre had a game where he had a DT with 50+ kills or something ridiculous. These days he would be lucky to kill 3 workers of these pros.