"These rule. It's like a sitcom, where Aldo is the straight guy and Fox is the street-wise black lesbian with funny lookin' clothes."
- DivvyO
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| Crazy Jim Lizard vrs Ghost Lizard | | | Author: | | | IP: | XXXX | | Date: | 08/18/99 07:08 | | Game Type: | Starcraft | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 4, Max: 9, Min: 9
Lifetime Rating for Mark4: 8.6829 |  | Last night I had the privilege of watching two great players. Crazy~Jim~Lizard, brood war ladder finalist had entered nohunters and asked for challengers in a 1v1 match. Answering his challenge was Ghost~Lizard, future brood war ladder finalist =]. Ghost chose the battleground and selected the venerable, ever popular, and highly overplayed Lost Temple.
Ghost~Lizard (Terran)
VRS
Crazy~Jim~Lizard (Protoss)
Both opponents started with fairly standard builds. Ghost chose a depot rax depot gas start, scouting with his tenth SCV. This build let him get the gas he needed for early tech and the double depots gave him the ability to continually produce SCVs for a power economy.
Probe attempting to steal malt liquor from Ghost’s supply depot.
After being scouted, Ghost’s full plan was revealed. He was eager to test the “Heavy Metal Terran” strat vrs a player of Jim’s caliber! Two factories were quickly built and the add ons deployed.
Jim on the other hand went with a straight tech build. His weapon of choice is the dark templar, and his build reflected that. He went pylon, gateway, gas, core, citadel of adun, pylon, templar archives, making only a single zealot for defense in this time. A single templar and zealot met ghost’s first three vultures.
“Candygram.” “Flowers.” “Landshark.”
Ghost made a tactical decision that cost him dearly. He chose to lay mines at the entrance of the base instead of charging in. This gave Jim enough time to block the choke with zealots, and their position was such that a vulture had to be in range of their psi blades before they could engage. Disaster was narrowly averted, as Jim had nothing in his base that could catch or engage a moving vulture, and no cannons to protect his probes. Ghost contented himself with laying a minefield and retreating.
Jim took this opportunity to send a probe to the nearby 3:00 resource node. He began a naked expansion there, counting on luck and initiative to keep Ghost from finding it. Not the wisest move when vultures are ruling the map in an early game, but Ghost seemed more interested in getting quick tanks than scouting. Jim started climbing the robotics facility tech tree too, planning on using the observers to minimize the effect of minefields and the reavers to inflict some pain. Before the first expansion was even warped in, he used his shuttle to expand again on the upper left island.
Jim and Ghost skirmished at Jim’s choke. Ghost used his vultures and minefields in a battle vrs zealots and an archon. The zealots were meat for the grinder; the mines popped up and surprised them, but the archon used speed and its splash attack to deliver crippling blows to the vultures. Ghost planted more mines seconds before the archon sent Ghost’s bikers to the big harley dealership in the sky.
Next came the turning point in the game. Jim felt confident in the defense he had at his choke. He loaded a shuttle with a reaver, two zealots, and a little hard love and headed for Ghost’s base. Ghost had just begun full tank production and was starting an expansion at his natural. His defenses consisted of a bunker from the early game and a single tank. Jim spotted the wide open sweet spot and dove in.
“Which SCV should I kill? That one? Or that one? Heck, all of them sounds good.”
The zealots suicided on the bunker and tank, ending their threat early. But the reaver remained out of siege range while happily popping SCVs like a three year old with a new sheet of bubble wrap.
   
Unfortunately for Ghost his new tanks were emerging from factories located right next to the reaver. The reaver ate a total of three unsieged tanks as they popped out of the factories one by one. Finally, the fourth tank ran to the safety of its already sieged brother on the other side of the command center, taking a scarab in the process. It scored one hit before it too died, then the reaver wandered into the field of fire of the original defending tank and was destroyed. I covered my eyes in horror at this scene but kept my finger hitting the print screen button, bringing you the images above.
Both Ghost and Jim exchanged GGs at this time. Not for the last time either. Ghost tried to attack Jim’s choke with vultures, but the choke had been cleared of mines by an observer and the archon during the reaver battle. Jim once again engaged Ghost's forces with archons and zealots, destroying them. Jim tried another reaver drop, this one only killing a vulture and a SCV before being destroyed by Ghost’s improved tank positions with overlapping fire.
“How’d you like that hot love up your tailpipe?”
Ghost realized he was not having a good time of it. He decided that the best kind of pain is the kind you share. With this in mind, he sent an expeditionary force of three tanks to the 3:00 position to inflict some. His tanks quickly sieged and destroyed the single defending cannon. Then, in anticipation of a probe charge, the tanks unsieged and happily threw some arclite rounds down range into the helpless probes.
“If there are any probes down range, please beep entertainingly when shot”
Jim is a calm man, slow to anger. But when he saw his poor little probes being abused it was too much even for him. A reaver and two zealots performed an airborne insertion into the hot drop zone. If you look closely you can see the airborne wings on the zealots chest. The forces overcame the three unsieged tanks with the loss of one zealot and the reaver, while the last tank was chased down into the corner and reduced to scrap metal by the lone remaining zealot. As for the tank crewman…lets just say you don’t want to know what the probes did with him.
Ghost had performed a successful attack and decided to capitalize on his success. He sent in a few vultures to harass the probes at 3:00 again. Unfortunately for him, the first thing Jim did after the attack was get two cannons back on line, and the vultures were dispatched with little trouble.
“Watch the paint job buddy!”
Jim had recognized Ghost’s share the pain doctrine and decided he wanted a little of that for himself. In an odd move against a player using mainly vultures, he sent three unescorted high templar to the front of Ghost’s expansion. With lightning quick micro skills, Jim stormed three times in quick succession, then lost all three templar to defending mines. Another templar stormed a fourth time from the top of the cliff, reducing the number of SCVs to one.
And then Jim droped the hammer. He brought in another two high temps and a reaver in a shuttle. Ghost responded with a series of vulture raids, using one vulture to perform a suicide run and distract the reaver while another planted a mine directly next to it. Jim brought in zealots and more high templar to reinforce, but Ghost’s tactics won him enough of a respite to bring in a tank. Jim had lost his initial attackers, but all Ghost had left was the tank. Three high templar moved in and stormed the tank, killing it while losing one of their number. The remaining templar formed an archon and Ghost was forced to concede his expansion and float his command center to safety. Jim realized he had a pretty free reign on the map now and chose to colonize the 9:00 expansion's’natural, once again expanding naked. This left him with three expansions to Ghost’s zero and once more GGs were exchanged. I decide it’s time for a private pep talk with Ghost and tell him “Don’t quit, show your fighting spirit!” =]
"No salesmen allowed!"
Ghost makes a clear statement about unwanted visitors with his tank welcoming committee. The perfect positioning let him kill the archon and two zealots as they approach his front gate.
We break for a short intermission. Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the dancing probes conga line for your intermission entertainment?
Ahem. Where was I. Oh, yeah, Ghost was getting owned.
  
In a series of blitzkrieg attacks, Jim dismantled Ghost’s front door defenses and vulture attacks. Ghost despaired and asked me why he should continue. Yet again I chimed in with an emergency pep talk.
Ghost rallied his last forces for a re-creation of the Alamo. His tanks sieged, his vultures layed mines, and he passed the point of thinking about winning and went instead for maximum pain inflicted before going down. Reavers and templar came in, along with a suicide squad of zealots to take out the mines. Ghost continued with his extreme mine laying tactics, sending vultures to lay mines next to reavers fractions of a second after their scarabs launched.
“Pardon me, but would you like some gray poupon? No? How about this XL700 model spider mine?”
With his cunning and intense vulture micro, Ghost once again fought back the onslaught, giving him a little breathing room for revenge of his own.
“Bad templar! Bad Templar!”
Jim didn't relent for a second. He sent in more archons, counting on them to avoid the spider mines and destroy the tanks at close range. Ghost combated this with a heavy vulture force, loving the full damage his grenades did to shields.
“Power Overwhe…OWWW! Cut it out!”
But the constant reinforcements finally wore Ghost's army down, and exhausted his supply of mines and tanks. As the last tank fell, Jim shows just a little bit of disrespect for Ghost =[
 
As you can see on the mini map, lines of brown troops were assaulting Ghost’s main. What you can’t see is that they were all probes and they are moving to join their fellow probes in the extremely deadly conga line of death attack =[. Ghost was so intimidated by this attack his tanks ran in horror from the approaching probes.
Not that Ghost was going to tolerate that. All the probes that cared to challenge the main defenses are beaten to death by berserk SCVs. And just maybe the marines in the bunker took a few pot shots, along with a few hung over vulture drivers throwing beer cans at anything making annoying beeping sounds.
  
But this was the last gasp for Ghost. Archons and zealots overran his last defenses, along with a reinforcing legion of scouts, and a new massive wave of dragoons coming from Jim’s gateways.
Ghost expressed his disgust with the situation. Hmmm. He gave a ladder finalist a good game and is disappointed he didn’t win?
And the final stats.
Lessons learned:
o Initiative is so key it isn’t funny. Ghost had the game won if he charged straight in Jim’s choke with his first vultures. Or if he had kept active scouting on the other expansion spots he would have had a fighting chance.
o Scouting helps. So does reasoning. If Ghost had scanned and seen the reaver drop coming it would have helped a lot. Even microing his one defending tank closer before losing all those tanks might have made the difference.
o Terran heavy metal relies on taking advantage of that early minefield to tank push. Sure, Jim is godly but a good tank push with vultures would have made it a long and painful game for him.
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