Topic StarCraft Art of War — Choke Points
Takralus
Takralus
Community
Strategy, tactics, and skill. At the heart of StarCraft II are the legion of skilled tacticians and brilliant strategists leading armies of zerg, protoss, and terrans to war across the scarred battlefields of the Koprulu Sector. Knowledge is power; the greatest commanders throughout history earned their victories not merely by virtue of strategic brilliance, but also by applying themselves to rigorous study of warfare and the tactics used by those who fought before them. You too can tap into this valuable resource, and that's where StarCraft Art of War comes in.

Are you a veteran player? Are you new to StarCraft II and striving to improve your skills? In this weekly feature, we invite players of all skill levels to ask questions, share their tactics, post replays, and provide advice for understanding, executing and defeating today's most popular strategies. This week, we're analysing: Choke Points.

Choke points are significant map features that can dramatically affect the outcome of a battle. Speaking for your favored race, how do choke points affect your play against each of the other two races? How does their presence and placement on a map affect your unit compositions and defenses?


Art of War Rules:

  • Stick to the rules. All posts should abide by the forum code of conduct and the Art of War guidelines. Feel free to disagree with each other, but please do so respectfully. When you express opposing opinions, focus on the idea, not its author, their record, or perceived skill level.
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  • Ask questions! These threads aren’t just for experienced players, but also players who are learning the ropes or want to improve their skills.
  • Cirocco #226
    Cirocco
    okay, I’m just lowly gold but let’s see what I can do to start this one off.

    Again, I’m just gold and all I write here is personal experience. If more experienced people think I’m wrong, do say so because I’m always willing to learn. With that in mind, let’s get rolling.

    I play Zerg, so I want to avoid chokepoints like the plague. Zerg ground units work at low range, so you want to get as big a surround as you can. Get up close and personal. In chokes, colossi, marines, marauders, tanks, storms and all those nasty longer range units and AoE can decimate your zerg forces. Zerg are only comfortable chokes in a few situations.

    One of these situations is hellion harass and, by extension, almost any econ harass that has to run up your ramp. Your ramp is a natural choke and you can create additional choke points near your ramp with building placement. If you can force the hellions to go through one by one and take a lot of damage from a well placed crawler. A nice addition is having lings stationed at the top of your ramp leading into your main. The second the hellions run up the ramp, attack with the lings, trapping him on the ramp and getting hit by both speedlings and the spine crawler. This will shut down hellions without a lot of problems.
    There’s a similar situation in ZvZ during the early game ling-bling wars. During early ling-bling war, you can do a lot with just 3 banelings. Put one in a forward position around your natural. Put one on top of the ramp and one in your mineral line. If your opponent tries to run up the ramp, he’ll run into a choke, clumping up his lings and straight into a baneling. Remember that your opponent does not have vision up that ramp until his lings get there. Running a pack of lings into a baneling early game is going to hurt him bad. You can also engage outside your base in open ground by trying to go for a surround with lings, then using that baneling on the natural to try and blow up all his lings. This baneling placement works wonders for a hatch first build in ZvZ.

    With chokes in mind, let’s look at the current map pool and more specifically, the two new maps. I personally like cloud kingdom for zerg. Korhal compound, not so much.
    Why would I like cloud kingdom with all its chokes? Well here’s the thing: cloud kingdom has a very large amount of attack paths, even if they’re a bit choke-y. Chokes won’t help that deathball if it’s being attacked from 4 sides at a time. Korhal compound’s chokepoints are a bit wider, but the problem is that there aren’t that many of them. Wall off one with forcefields and you’re good. On cloud kingdom, if you wall off one choke with force field, you’re still going to have roaches barreling down on you from 3 sides.

    So in short, as a Zerg: avoid fighting a chokes at all times. Try to fight outside of your base in as much open ground as possible. In your base, you can create a few small choke points at your front to stop early game harass, but remember that in larger engagements, chokes work against you! Spread your creep to know where the enemy army is. For the lower leaguers: don’t be afraid to wait with engaging until you can engage at a decent, wide and open location, even if that means your opponent build up his forces a bit more. Just build up more yourself and look for open engagements and look for the surround.

    On a final note: against terran, avoid building anything behind your mineral line besides crawlers. Mineral lines provide great chokepoints and pockets for dropped marines and marauders to huddle into and take out huge amounts of zerglings. No reason to give them even more cover.

    I hope this helps and contributes to the discussion a bit :-)
    Killerfive #108
    Killerfive
    About chokepoints (please players, don't harass me, I'm explaining for people who might not know):
    Choke point is a narrow area, where ranged units can be really abused against melee, since melee units like zealots can't surround them and can only attack a few at once, while all ranged units can attack. So protoss and zerg should, in most situations, avoid these, while terrans can abuse them since they have no melee units.

    About how they affect my game:
    They play a big role, since they usually make my expo timings. If there's a choke to my natural, I can expand faster. Against toss chargelots with terran, I seek fights in chokes, so I can really abuse them.
    GedMarc #688
    GedMarc
    the perfect force fields the perfect storms... can turn the tide of any battle vs any race at a choke points..

    use force fields to make choke points, buildings with high hp and low cost can also create some nice ones, the most useful is probably the 1 zealot choke created to stop 6 pool attack and keeping him on hold inside the choke.

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