Holding the 4gate
Been in the middle of a move so I've been exhausted and haven't played much, which has really hurt my game. Played a little after I got settled and lost a lot. It's ok tho. I feel like I'm learning from my losses. I wish I'd get more PvP though, because I really want to work on the 3gate defense. I found that I had to really rethink my defense since a well-executed 4gate was still giving me a lot of trouble. The 3gate defense is so finicky that there's little room for error. One missed pylon or one late warp-in and you fall irrecoverably behind, which means gg about 15 seconds later.
One thing I've seen is building a zerg-style wall-in to make it really hard for attacking 4gate to get a good zealot surround and increasing the effectiveness of a stalker-heavy defense. Then if it's a full on 4gate, you can even just complete the wall-in with a 4th gate that you may or may not cancel. If your building placement is good, the attacking player should never be able to get enough vision to snipe buildings without you sniping his vision. You want to block the ramp itself but leave the edges open for your stalkers to get a good surround on the bottom of the ramp. If he does want to warp zealots on the high ground, you can just back off and let his stalkers beat on buildings while you dispatch with them. Best wall-in uses 2 gateways with the core protected back at base. It's something I want to try incorporating into my 3gate build.
Terran, I've just started playing on a 1gate FE which seems quite decent. You can squeeze out 3 stalkers with a very fast nexus before a normal 3 warpgate timing. So I'm essentially trading one zealot, 2 stalkers and a few probes for an expansion. I'm afraid it's weak vs a very quick 2gate push so I'll need to practice that.
Another big thing I want to work on having watched other streams is relying less on unit hotkeys. Until I'm actually pushing with my units, hotkeys are basically unnecessary. I have a bad habit of never selecting units by hand, like if they aren't hotkeyed they don't exist. That's partly why my multitasking and spreading are so bad. I just need to not hotkey so much and break that habit.
One thing I've seen is building a zerg-style wall-in to make it really hard for attacking 4gate to get a good zealot surround and increasing the effectiveness of a stalker-heavy defense. Then if it's a full on 4gate, you can even just complete the wall-in with a 4th gate that you may or may not cancel. If your building placement is good, the attacking player should never be able to get enough vision to snipe buildings without you sniping his vision. You want to block the ramp itself but leave the edges open for your stalkers to get a good surround on the bottom of the ramp. If he does want to warp zealots on the high ground, you can just back off and let his stalkers beat on buildings while you dispatch with them. Best wall-in uses 2 gateways with the core protected back at base. It's something I want to try incorporating into my 3gate build.
Terran, I've just started playing on a 1gate FE which seems quite decent. You can squeeze out 3 stalkers with a very fast nexus before a normal 3 warpgate timing. So I'm essentially trading one zealot, 2 stalkers and a few probes for an expansion. I'm afraid it's weak vs a very quick 2gate push so I'll need to practice that.
Another big thing I want to work on having watched other streams is relying less on unit hotkeys. Until I'm actually pushing with my units, hotkeys are basically unnecessary. I have a bad habit of never selecting units by hand, like if they aren't hotkeyed they don't exist. That's partly why my multitasking and spreading are so bad. I just need to not hotkey so much and break that habit.