archive by month
Skip to content

AILien > XIMP

AILien scored a fine win over XIMP. The game plan to defeat Tomas Vajda’s carrier bot:

  1. Take 7 bases and grow a huge economy.
  2. Prevent XIMP from expanding beyond its natural.
  3. Don’t bother to fight the carriers, just accept losses. With enough units on the map, the carriers chose to destroy defenseless zerg units to protect protoss bases and did not visit a zerg base until too late.
  4. When hive tech is ready, adrenal glands for the zerglings and the ultralisk upgrades, go win. Zerg can send units faster than protoss can kill them.

Ha ha, so simple! AILien made hydralisks, but I didn’t see them fire a shot against carriers or interceptors. That would have been too easy! No, XIMP is not properly put in its place unless zerg handicaps itself with buggy hydras!

I’m too busy to pull images, but watch the replay at the link. Let’s see how long the replay stays online.

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

AIL on :

Calling what happened in that game a "game plan" is quite the euphemism. :D

Especially when considering the 2nd game vs. Ximp shortly after where I wanted to test my "improvements".

But since I cannot test against Ximp locally, these games really gave some insight.

One of the things I tried and thought would be good was telling my non-anti-air-ground-units to not ignore Carriers but instead go for the attack.
This worked well for the first batch of Zerglings waiting infront of the cannons. They killed about half the cannons before dying themselves. Better than nothing, right?
Problem was the lings arriving late to the party. They saw the carriers and thus thought: "Oh, better attack immediately!", throwing themselves into the cannons without dealing damage.

The second change I made was telling the Hydras to not be afraid of interceptors anymore and instead try to shoot them down. Turned out to be a terrible idea.
Targeting interceptor just doesn't work. Apparently they are too fast and trying to manually attack them simply glitches the poor hydras.

Will likely be doing more tests against Ximp this evening. (All praise goes to the new voting-system!)
Idea is: Hydras once again try to avoid Carriers/Interceptors if outnumbered.
When not outnumbered do the following:
When Carrier is over walkable terrain => attack Carrier
When Carrier is not over walkable terrain => attack move towards Carriers to kill Interceptors (and potentially other nearby stuff)
Sounds good in theory, doesn't it? Bet it still fails somehow.
I have seen Devecka or Tscmooz do something like that where he basically pinned down 4 Carriers with a bunch of Hydras while his other units did the work.

Ground probably also need new behavior. But I'm not sure what exactly to do. Something along the lines of:
If ground-units nearby are weaker then us => attack and ignore air-units.
If ground units nearby are stronger then us => consider the Air units too and try to avoid them.
But what to do when ground units that are stronger than us are just out of range and we are attacked by the Air-units... ugh... Need a better plan.
Maybe just try to avoid them and wait for the "broodforce"-mode to kick in.

Jay Scott on :

Hydras are super-efficient at shooting down interceptors, IF you have enough hydras (“critical mass”). In the second game, AILien’s biggest mistake was allowing XIMP to take a third base. Controlling expansions is more important than defeating armies.

MicroDK on :

Yes, Jay is right. Contain your opponent and do not let him expand. I have the idea of a zergling patrol that checks every expanion and kill workers trying to build a new base. They can also serve as scouts. Or just let 2 zerglings stand guard at each expanion. :)

Ail on :

I guess I should rethink global target Priorization too in this case. Currently it considers mostly how many workers have been seen there and that often results in a focus on bases that have been seen earlier. Do going by available minerals as one of the deciding factors might be much better in order to shut down newer expansions instead of wasting effort in an almost mined out natural. Also Mutas shouldn't try to siege at all and decide differently if they know their preferred target is well defended. Joining up with the ground forces if there's no other good target could be a good idea.

Add Comment

E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

Form options

Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.