I won WCReplays’ WCRumble tournament yesterday. I have all the replays in which I won, but I’ll just let WCR put them up. I actually did not intend to play it but I woke up yesterday and 21 told me check in just started so I was like, ‘what the heck’ and joined the irc channel to check in.

I really was just playing for kicks at that point, especially after I was placed in “group d of death”. I thought I would meet minimum in the group final and lose. Historically I have just a small edge over him and that is probably due to it being human versus orc. Plazmatic ended up beating ferfe and minimum and I then beat him pretty convincingly to enter quarters.

finals bracket

Here I still thought I probably wouldn’t win as I would have to beat Armin, who I know likes to play orc (and you never know with orc these days..), two unknown undeads (energize and xlo.joe) and an unknown orc, capu.

First game vs Armin I got a great early game versus his orc on SV but kicked myself later for calling militia for my push too late. After that mistake it was equal food again but I managed to win. Game two on TM he switched to Elf and I happily followed suit. Using a HoT-style huntress to fast bears I won easily. I think HoT’s strat on TM is really strong against conventional play and all elf players should try it.

Game two versus Joe was a little funny. After a ‘decisive’ battle in which I lost my Panda due to cold weather and sluggish brain and bad shape (didn’t staff in time even though I was consciously watching it lol..) and almost all my units, he said ‘gg’ and left. I did manage to kill his lich, but I really had a terrible battle overall and I thought I was losing so it was quite surprising.

Final match was against 21, so I decided to random. I lost when I got human anyway though.

I think Ciel is going to email me some interview questions tomorrow.

working on a present for warcraft community :D i hope to have it done within the next few days so i can announce it on christmas

I stopping playing poker a couple weeks ago and probably will not play for awhile. Que no será no será; how strange is fate!

Save yourself a lot of losses.

lost to check!

i could go on about the things that went wrong, game-wise and video-wise, but i can’t even interest myself enough. i’ll just say i was off my groove and leave it at that.

fpvs from me have been rare so even though it’s kind of bad, try to enjoy it =]

or don’t. i don’t really care.

so much for “leaving it at that”

I was going to record a video tutorial with audio commentary, but my throat is not well. So it is going to be audio-less first person videos accompanied by text commentary.

The Basics

In spawns where your workers move diagonally from the gold mine to your town hall, you can “micro them” to get extra gold with less than five peasants. To do this, select a peasant after it returns mined gold and right click the gold mine. Sometimes a peasant will be really slow when returning gold; to remedy this, hit the “return resources” hotkey on your keyboard and then shift-right click the gold mine. Note that you can’t do this last part with every single peasant, because they will start running into each other.

Also note that you will mine less gold if you micro your peasants when the spawn is not diagonal.

The following video also shows my basic build order.

Exploiting

Being able to mine gold sufficiently with four peasants allows you to temporarily not send a fifth peasant to the gold mine and use it to do other things instead. In this next clip, I send the peasant that would normally go to the gold mine after finishing the farm to harvest lumber. I also send the next peasant that comes out of the town hall to the trees. The early lumber allows me to tech slightly faster.

Adapting

Now that we’ve seen how to deal with spawns that are diagonal, in this final clip I am going to show something you can try when it is not. Because normal build orders generally build the second farm earlier than it needs to be built, I am going to send that peasant to mine gold first and start my second farm later.

just a small one! stay tuned