Much better than working on the car

I know that I haven't played in a little while but it's been a busy week.  And today was looking to be the same.  I was going to change the coolant in our car since I thought it was overdue.  Well I got to digging in the service manual to make sure that I didn't miss anything and I found out that this antifreeze it supposed to be good for the first 6 years or 100,000 miles!  (The old stuff was more like 2-3 years or 50,000 miles).

So how about a little laddering instead?  Yeah I like that better too.  I was feeling a little rusty and had some of the nervousness of ladder anxiety again when I first sat down.  I think it's just a fear of really sucking since I hadn't played for a few days.  Well, here's how it went.

Replay links:

• Game 1
• Game 2
• Game 3
• Game 4

I started out with a comfortable win over a random who ended up Terran.  I saw that he was gold, and not tip-top either so I didn't think too much of it.  Then in game 2 I was just outplayed by a solid zerg opponent.  When I saw that he was gold too I wasn't feeling too good about my platinum ranking.  Game 3 was probably the low point of the day.  I lost to a pretty gimmicky gold protoss by playing right into his hands and basically doing nothing smart.

Game 4 was the high point fortunately.  I fell behind after a really nasty early cloaked banshee.  My observer was on the other side of the map of course.  That's something I'll have to get better at recognizing.  So from there I was playing from behind both on income and army size.  Fortunately I made some decent decisions, and both of our macro play was about equally mediocre.  So when it came to the first encounter I was rewarded with this.

I'm getting to really like storms.

And here it is in graph form.

When watching the replay my pride at the comeback win was tempered a bit.  I saw that during the first engagement he had two barracks that weren't rallied resulting in about 6 marauders and 2 marines sitting it out.  I think I still would have been okay, but I'm not certain.  Then later he had a bunch of idle workers that didn't get sent back to harvesting after repairing a command center.  His macro was getting worse at that point and he had loads of unspent resources so I doubt that would have mattered much.

Anyway, I still got myself supply blocked a lot and didn't expand as quickly as I should have at times.  I still feel like I just need loads of practice to get more comfortable with some things, and I don't really have time for that.  Oh well, I'll keep on plugging away.