Who has a starcraft notebook? I do.

In this book I try to write semi daily essays, on theories, build orders, things I've learned from previous games or replays, map notes and the like, I urge you all to do the same if you want to take the game more seriously.

It has helped me A LOT with trying to organize my thoughts and really develop my strategies. Today I'm going to share my latest article with you. I will probably work on sharing one or two of these with you guys a week, but I'm not going to make any promises.

Too often players rely on the hard counter spread sheet to determine their unit composition but there is so much more to it than just picking the right unit to counter with. Blizzard makes it more difficult than just choosing the right unit, hitting A and moving in blindly.

Other factors must be considered with each attack and unit purchase or upgrade: speed, attack rates, special abilities, numbers and positioning, simply running your units into battle, one tap A, even with the perfect unit composition will perish to a player who knows what they're doing.

Examples of hard counters we have are:

Ling > Thor Collosus > Ling Tanks > Lings

Phoenix > Mutalisks Collosus < Marauder

However this is not always the case, as mentioned before various other elements come into play.

Let's begin with the Thor > Ling example.

Any zerg player can testify to the difficulty with Thors, they will shut down your mutalisks and the 'hard counter' lings just can't seem to crush that whopping 400 Health 1(+1) armor, and why is this?

Well it comes down to unit placement, numbers and actually identifying the weaknesses of units. Let's begin by identifying what a Thor's weaknesses are and why this affects they output against zerglings.

A Thor has two major weaknesses against zerg, and these are it's large body and it's slow movement rate. With a movement speed of 1.88 and a size of 8 The Thor is the largest, slowest moving ground unit in the game, which is an interesting point, for what are the fastest, smallest unit in the game? Zerglings.

So then why are Zerglings strong against a Thor? They can work a surround quickly, having multiple attacks at once and melting away the life of those slow shooting Thors, furthermore those Thors will NOT be able to retreat quickly enough.

However are zerglings ALWAYS good against Thors? Absolutely not. A Thor at a choke, or with it's back against a wall will decrease it's surface area, you're 14-15 zergling attacks have now decreased to 7-8 attacks and that Thor will now go down in TWICE the time it would take otherwise, and thus will kill twice as many zerglings. Multiple Thors with their backs together, bunched up tightly will decrease each other's surface area but a fair margine, they will hit your units hard and it becomes almost impossible to get that much needed surround on their force, especially if those Thors are sitting in the middle of a large bio army which have very little surface area per unit.
Or even worse, what about a Thor holding a front door, with an SCV behind it on auto repair, no number of zerglings will break that Thor down.

These are the situations we need to AVOID at all costs, do not engage a losing battle, just having the right unit composition isn't always going to save you. Look for weak points, pick off stray Thors, use your map control and speed to your advantage.

So what do we do against a Terran player with all of these Thor units, and they're being really good about placing them in positions where they are strong and we have nothing to engage them with, are these Thors invincible, seem imba to me?

Not exactly, though this is often the feeling we get when we go into these situations where our hard counter isn't working. How am I suppose to destroy a unit that doesn't actually have a legitimate counter? The answer is to find a new one.

Too often we rely on that spread sheet to tell us what units to build but part of the magic involved with SC2 is the ability to pretty much do whatever the ******** we want and just make it work.

Consider throwing in a couple of infestors into the mix, a well placed infestor with neural parasite will crush that Thor no problem.

If we see a large force of Bio Thor coming our way, ready to wipe out our base, our first reaction is to rush in and defend our base with everything we got and hope our unit composition is right, but doesn't always have to be the case.

Earlier we identified the weaknesses of a Thor, and one of those was it's low mobility. A slow moving army is weakest to a counter attack.

Do NOT engage the large slow death squad, move around it, use your mutas, speedlings, burrowed roaches or nydus worms to move past the terran ball and into their main. Hitting their main will force the Terran player to do one of three things.

He can A) Pull back (SLOWLY) to defend his base again, granting you ample time to do damage and thus protecting your base at the same time, this will also force him to rethink next time before pushing out and possibly locking him up in his base.

B) He might try for an all-in base race, which is a problem in itself, however: we're Zerg, how easy is it for us to expand? We should be expanding constantly anyways as goes for good Zerg play, we have hatcheries everywhere, and don't hesitate to throw down a couple of cheap extractors anywhere simply for the sake of dragging it on a little bit longer. That slow moving ball is going to take forever to wipe out all of your bases, moving from area to area, meanwhile we're fast, we will clean them out first so long as our force is large enough to do the job.

C) If you're really lucky you might get the over confident Terran who will attempt to do both at the same time, splitting up his army, however unlike zerg forces, Terran armies don't work well in small spread out groups, we can deal easily with two small forces rather than one large one, run in, wipe them out individually, and win.

As a final note against Thors, don't forget the usefulness of Broodlords, they're expensive and slow, but if you have lots of drone, lots of hatcheries, and you're applying constant pressure as you should be, you can spare yourself enough time to build a small handful of Broodlords which will devastate your opponents 'mighty' Thors.