HotS, Liberty and the pursuit of Terran wins.

It’s been a few days now, into my own personal campaign to bring my terran win percentage up. What have I been doing? The first change is simple. I pay more attention to the terrance race on broadcasts. I primarily watch HDStarCraft and HuskyStarCraft. But where before, I’d pay attention to what the Zerg and Toss were doing, now I’m keeping my eye on the Terran. I watched DeMuslim’s stream for a few hours, again paying careful attention to the openings he used. Before I preferred watching zerg streams.

Finally, I read up on my openings on the LiquiPedia. After a few days of reading, re-reading and consulting, I feel I have hammered out all of the kinks in my terran opening play.

The essence of what I’ve learned?

TvZ, it’s okay to CC first. Coming from a zerg background, I love to CC first.

It’s always okay to barracks first.

Start your refinery after your barracks, and after making your first marine, begin your reactor. This is a big one, and I must admit, I had been doing it wrong. I had been going for Tech lab first. The reason being that I could begin my upgrades sooner. Usually I’d go for stim. But after making the change to reactor first, I can see how clearly reactor first is better.

It allows you the flexibility to make a ton of marines, or to switch out for a factory and go hellions. But in terms of resources and production, reactor first makes all the difference. What good is stimpack a few seconds earlier, if you don’t even have a medivac full of marines to use it?

Finally, after the reactor, make a CC.

I used to try to expand to the low ground immediately. I now see that it’s perfectly allright to one base until you have the resources to really secure the low ground.

The secret to holding an early baneling attack? This one eluded me for some time. While I go for a baneling bust every time I play ZvT, I had no idea how to defend against it until I studied up on my terran. The trick is to make them bust one bunker just to get in. But then have another one or two bunkers inside of your base, covering your mineral line. Then, put only a single marines in each bunker, and spread out the rest of your marines. He won’t have enough banelings to bust all of the bunkers, and with your marines spread out, he’ll be trading very cost ineffectively.

Before I was somewhere between twenty five and thirty three percent in my terran games. Now I’m solidly winning a third of them. I guess fifty fifty is my next goal.