| Snicklefritz | Date: Saturday, 2014/April/12, 6:52 PM | Message # 1 |
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Sunday, April 27th, 2014
Group: Forum Visitor
Messages: 8
Status: Offline
| Hello there, as a seasoned Protoss player who has experience experimenting with many different cheese plays, I am seeking to create a thread for the discussion of this strategy.
The cannon rush for a protoss is played very early in the game and can sometimes be a tentative strategy to complete a win. Most often scouting by your opponent presents an easy trump card to your cannon attempts.
Also the strategy can play out different, and sometimes with less effectiveness versus terran and zerg players.
Common Terran responses to an ineffective cannon rush can be floating their base out of their natural, floating or building their barracks, supply depots, and factories out of effective cannon range, making the warp time of pylons and cannons take too long as well as straining the mineral economy over its budget with cannons.
Zerg may also expand to other bases out of range of your cannon placements, or rush to mass units, roaches, and zerg/roach combos being very effective against weaker cannon placements.
Another response is that your opponent scouts your proxies early enough to retask workers to melee your pylon or single cannon before your cannons are set up. An answer to this is to place initial cannons below the cliff of a natural near where you will start your first pylon in the main of your opponent.
Cannon rush styles VS Zerg!
I have experienced some pretty amusing and effective results against some zerg by boxing in a player PvZ with cannons near the ramp to their natural. Upon early scouting and seeing a zerg player going for a greedy early expansion in their natural or a 3rd expansion. Depending on the placement of nearby overlords, I will usually build my 1st cannons at the top of the ramp in the main of the zerg base. Doing this requires a pretty substantial amount of cannons, but you will want to go for gateway research back in your main as your cannon phalanx progresses. I have found that unless the zerg player makes a large multitude of roaches and pushes out of his base very quickly you will be able to free your gameplay up for many other options. Creating somewhat of a lead against your opponent.
Another less committed but still embarrassing for a zerg opponent is to scout early, see the natural expo go down early enough, and then pylon and cannon before the creep starts to spread. It is possible to do this sneakily enough with out an overlord scout around. The Hatchery that is growing in progress and unfinished only has half visibility, and it is possible to set up your cannon positions before your opponent catches sight of your immobile artillery. If they don't scout you congratulations, your are a ninja.
A much more relaxed version of this could be to simply put a proxy pylon on the zergs two closest expansions, creating a delay on him being able to build his hatcheries, and potentially enabling you to create an economic advantage.
The proxy of a pylon on a base placement can also be used to further annoy a terran who is potentially floating his freshly minted Command Center to set up his expansion. Used similarly to a zerg burrowing a zergling or other unit at expansion sites, which will make your opponent unable to build on this site, and forcing him to move observation and units to the site.
Another aspect of the proxie that I wanted to touch on is hiding your tech trees and building compositions from your opponent. The logic is to choose a far flung corner of the map to put down a pylon, not necessarily for warping units at a location near your opponents bases, but rather to locate buildings such as twilight council, dark shrine, templar archives, and stargates out of view in a position that your opponent would not naturally scout. So what if you sent overlords and hallucinations into my base to find out where I was putting my gas! My dark shrine is in a perpendicular corner you assumed would be inconsequential to scout HAHA! Now frantically scramble for an observer while I disable your tech tree or thin out your workers.
In the advent of an early all in rush, a few proxy gateways or a few proxy stargates can give you the edge in an engagement and with some luck and micro skills you can cripple your opponent enough to move in for the win. Either an all out zlot rush, or taking a zergs supply with phoenixes, or a few oracles to minimize your opponents production.
I plan on editing and expanding upon this thread and appreciate insights. Thank you.
Snicklefritz
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