CtS-BarrakudaX's Zerg Training

Barrackudax, I can't 2v2 with you during the weekdays because I'm not active anymore in the morning. I only play during my evenings and that's 3-5am for you. Only during the weekends can I get on earlier. Anyways, when ever I have time, I'm going to watch the reps we played today, and give you advice.
We went 2-3 vs noobs. No offense but you are actually a D player. You are as slow as me with 100 apm, but you don't know what you are doing. Don't worry were going to fix that and get you to D+. Read everything I post here and don't make the same mistakes again!

Game 1
Replay (study it): REP1

You messed up the 5 pool build. Its 5 pool +2 more drones. So your psi is 6/9, and then when pool finishes ull have 150 mins and 3 larva to make lings (9/9 supply). Then an overlord. What u did was 5 pool + 3 drones, then an ovie, then lings....
Our rush was weak cuz of that. Do the build right!

Next, u made drones after the initial lings, weakening our rush even more....
When you go 5 pool you are sacrificing your economy to rush fast and kill one of them. Why make drones instead of Zergling reinforcements? Your economy is already fucked, a few extra drones isn't gonna help you if we fail to kill one of them. More lings will definitely help us kill one of them. So remember if you are going to rush, COMMIT TO THE RUSH UNTIL ONE OF THEM IS DEAD. Once we get an advantage you can play defense and mass drones. But until then you mass Zerglings!

DO NOT ever go over 300 mins as Zerg this early. Thats enough for new Hatchery, and if you do have 300 mins make the hatchery asap! You had over 500 mins while we were rushing.

I messed up here by not putting the bunker withing range of the hatchery. Zerg should have stayed in his base defending his hatch instead of attacking us. But the thing is, we shouldn't even have needed the bunker. He would have been dead if you had done the build right. He did an economic 12 hatch 11 pool build while we hit him with the fastest rushes we had. He should not have been able to survive that. This is why you need to commit to the rush. We should have won this easily with just lings+rines.

Oh God, what happened in the middle was just awful. You left me to die while your lings took a stroll around the map. How could you not see what was happening? I don't know what the hell you were thinking. Anytime we do double rush you should expect a counter from his partner. We need to use our forces to defend each other.

After all my shit dies I rage quit.

Game 2
REP2
You almost made the same mistake as first game where you made too many drones but you canceled it to make room for the Zerglings. But anyways, you larva is a bit late now. Try to remember the build.

Again you make Drones instead of Zerglings to reinforce the rush. That would have cost us if these guys weren't such noobs. Terran was dumb, he knew you went Zerg and I went Random but decides to scout late and do a Factory build. Zerg put his Sunken in a bad spot and didn't use his drones to protect it while it was building. That is why our crappy rush worked even though you weren't doing it right. And the Drones you made u have them sitting there instead of working...

When we kill the Zerg you make a ton of Zerglings after I told you to drone up. You are doing it backwards. Mass Zerglings when attacking, mass drones when you have an advantage. Anyways the Zerglings worked, but we should not have been able to march up the Ts ramp with our Zerglings/Zealots like that, but he was noob and we got away with it.

Next you go Muta and like I said in the rep. You need to save up money,larva, and make extra overlords while your spire is making, so you can make all your Muta at the same time. Building them 1 by 1 like that takes forever. Plus you need to contantly bring new Mutas to your control group as soon as they're made. Your attacking with half your Muta and the other half is sitting at home.

Your muta micro needs alot of work. Hotkey Muta with an overlord or larva and you can control them better. I need to show you a muta micro map so you can practice.

I noticed the Terran had a ton of turrets and bunkers set up protecting his workers. Your Muta were going to die to all those turrets. That is why I told you lets attack his front with my Goons and your Muta. But for some reason when we attack the front, rather then helping my goons you run past to attack all the turrets and bunkers guarding the back. What the hell? Why get all your Mutas killed when all they had to do was help my Goons bust into his base? My Goons can kill the Turrets. When someone builds a ton of Defence on one place, all you need to do is attack another spot that's less defended or go around it.

We win this one cuz they sucked.

Game 3
I'll look at it when I have time. But this is the one where we kill the P with double 5 pool but then are stuck playing 40 mins 2vs1 against the T because both our Zerg sucks ass.

Can any of our Zerg players look at the reps and give Barrakudax more advice? Even if you are just D+, You probably know more about Zerg than Barrakudax and Me.

Hello I'm a D+ Zerg. As such, nothing I say should be taken as absolute truth.

biggest advice i can give is to start using hotkeys. 120apm shows that you have decent mousespeed, but without hotkeys it's really hard to be in multiple places at once. you need to constantly use your resources/larva in order to stay in the game. with hotkeys, it's really simple to just push "5sd" or something every 10secs while microing your lings, and even if a few drones build up back at base not mining, it's wayyy better than not having built them at all. how to hotkey: if you push "ctrl"+"1" while you have a hatchery selected, anytime you push "1" you'll immediately be selecting the hatchery. if you doubletap "1" or push "alt"+"1" your screen will jump to having the hatchery centered. same thing works with units. if you push "shift"+"F2" you'll 'hotkey' the screen. anytime you push F2, your screen will jump to where it was when you pushed shift+F2 (works for f2 f3 f4). useful for rallypoints and putting at mining patches so you can quickly select workers to avoid harassment. the most common hotkey setups are 1-3units4-0hatch and 1-4units5-0hatch, sometimes using 0 or 9 for "special units" (defilers/scourge/etc). i use 1-4units now, and i find it helps a lot with flanking.

and yea, your build order was weak. follow basic opening build orders. in the earlygame especially, you need to decide whether you're getting units or workers. if you get 4 lings and 3 drones, your lings arent going to be able to do much, and your econ wont be that great either. but if you get 5 drones or 10lings you'll end up with a strong econ or strong army. later in the game balancing drones/units becomes a bit more tricky, but you'll get that with time/practice. also try to keep in mind that whenever you attack, you're always trying to get ahead, not win. sure, in a 2v2, if you're both going rush builds, the two of you probably need to kill or cripple an opponent in order to stay in the game. normally though, if you 5pool and get 8 lings, and follow it up with drones (and lings only as needed), your lings can often do enough damage to put you in the lead, and your opponent might even spend too much on defense as they panic, putting you further ahead.

which brings me to the next thing. in general, dont sunken up unless you need to. every sunken costs you 175minerals in total (an assload). zerg doesnt work like terran or protoss, which can each afford to just throw up turrets/cannons at parts of the game. every single sunken you build directly hurts your econ. if you really feel like they'll be needed, a lot of the time it's better to just morph drones into creep colonies, and then turn them into sunkens when you see shit heading for your base. and incase the idea that those minerals aren't a big deal entered your head, they make or break games man. fuckin zerg.

what else... in zvz it's really really important to get early gas. speedlings >>>>> slowlings, and if you can get earlier mutas you'll take control of the game (or even end it if they're that far behind and dont have spore/spire of their own). mutas would have cut up those zealots like nothing too. also, if you had speed, when protoss moved out with all his shit, you could easily slip lings into his base (called a backstab) and fuck him up. even if he sent zealots back, you could keep running around his base til he got other units. that kind of play will be really hard right now since you're not used to hotkeys, but if you want to learn to multitask, that's probably the most basic situation you can be in (run around with lings while macroing at base).

for map awareness, one thing you could do sometime is play without sounds on. it will hurt you at first, but after a while you'll be watching the minimap much better.

altogether, there's a lot of different things you can work on. take it little by little, and don't let yourself get discouraged! Siege said "don't make the same mistakes again!" but that's plain unreasonable, don't take it to heart. you'll get there man, just practice more ....holy fuck thats a lot of text

EDIT: just watched 2nd replay. if you feel like you won't be able to defend it, then go ahead and put 2nd hatch inbase, but in general it's stronger to put it at expo. get lingspeed, especially if you're getting a decent amount of lings. try to stay ahead in overlords, moreso if you have a lot of mins. you should try playing more standard 1v1 games where you dont cheese to build your skills. also, i couldnt tell really tell how you were controlling your units, but most of the time when you just want them to attack whatever you should 'attack move.' push 'a' then leftclick the ground somewhere, and your lings/whatever will try to walk to where you clicked, attacking/chasing everything in the way.

Thanks for helping out Pupatree. That's good advice.

Game 3
REP3

We both get Zerg vs PT team this should be ez. We both go double 5 pool but you mess up the 5 pool build again...You made Ovie after 6th drone and not enough cash to make 6 lings at once. Slowing down ur rush. I mess up my build too by forgeting ovie for a while so my reinforcements are slow, but my initial 6 lings are right on time. Im in the middle heading for the Ps base and your lings go to some random corner of your base instead of out and straight for the P. -_-
These noobie mistakes are the kind I don't want you doing.

Now Im stuck waiting for you while the P has time to make more cannons. We could have just killed the cannons if you had done this right. Anyways, I suggest we run past the cannons and it worked, but only because the P was noob. He scouted u doing 5 pool but decides not to block his ramp with probes to stop the runby till its too late. Plus he built a gateway instead of another cannon knowing the rush was coming.

Again you mass drones instead of making ling reinforcements. A good player will not just die to your initial 6 lings. They will kill a bunch of them before going down and you will need to keep sending more lings to finish him off. Once hes dead can you start massing drones. All the lings you have that are still alive we can use to stop or slow down his partners counter. Or even kill him if hes noob like in this game. If you had kept making Lings like I was we could have just killed the Terran. He only had 4 Marines when I wanted to attack him. But you said no that u were going to drone up... -_-

Anyways now Im behind because I made extra Lings that cant attack anything. Then you decide to make some more lings later, but by then he had too many MM for us to handle. So now you're behind too. Great. The thing about Zerg is anytime you make Units you're screwing your ecnomy, and anytime you make drones you're screwing your army.

This our strategy: First we screw our economy and make a bunch of zerglings really fast to kill one of them off so its 2v1. Once we know hes dead or really slowed down, we can use the Zerglings still alive and the Zergling reinforcements we made to slow down or stop a counter from his parftner, while we drone up and make sunkens if we need them. Then tech up because our Zerglings become obsolete after they get too many MM, Zealots, etc. Also, like Pupatree said, don't make sunkens unless you really need them. If you feel that were gonna get attacked, make the creep colonies but dont morph them until we know for sure who theyre attacking. The one getting attacked morphs his sunkens so they complete at the last second while the one not getting attacked continues uses his extra cash to keep teching or droning. We need good scouting to do this, but its how you need to play Zerg. You get away with teching and droning with almost no army and only make enough army/defense to stop an incoming attack you know is coming at the last minute. ANd only make enought to stop the attack. Even if you lose your army and sunkens, you stopped the attack, and now you have all these drones, hatcheries, and tech. Whereas if you had made units non stop from the beginning, yes you stopped the attack, but now you have no drones, hatcheries, or tech, and your army is probably obsolete so you can't counter either.

Anyways back to the game. The terran expoes and keeps attacking me slowing me down. Were such Zerg noobs were both playing 1 base vs a 2 base Terran. Your not under attack so you should be big with tons od drones, hatches, and tech but you're just as behind as me. You're not spending your cash (Over 2.5k), you're not using your larva, you're not expoing. You go muta but you don't have the micro to use them and they keep getting slaughtered. This is why I tell you to 5 pool. I don't want to go into late game with you. Our chances to win decrease the later the game goes on. At times I feel like ur afk...

The best way to improved this is to play alot of 1v1. Read Pupatree's advice, you really need to hotkey hatches and be all over the place. Also you have no Muta micro. You need a Muta Micro UMS Map, so you can practice your muta micro. But, we can work on this later. Our goal right now is to get you to D+. Just remember, that if we want to win we need to end the game fast. Also don't ever go Mutas. Stick to Speedlings and whenever you can, take your expo and do 3 Hatch Hydra or something. You'll be much more useful if you do this.

One thing I learned from watching this rep and reading Pupatrees' advice is that: If were playing vs a team with a Terran in it, and we rush his partner. You can just expo with your 2nd hatch. Marines alone are weak. All the T can do is try to bunker rush but I think our early forces can stop that. He'll have to wait for Medics/Bats and by that time your expo will be done and you can have sunkens morphing.

Anyways, we eventually win this with drops becuase the Terran was a big noob (over 4k mins). Was only a 25 min game, but man it felt like forever.

Check this out Barakudax. Its an audio recording by a good Zerg player where he gives advice on how to improve your mechanics.
Mechanic Basics . Let me know if you can listen to it or not.