Good ole 14/14

Friday, January 4, 2013 :: Tagged under: pablolife video_games. ⏰ 4 minutes.


Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄


My buddy Warren and I had a Twitter conversation about learning Zerg in the lower levels of Starcraft 2, and asked what a good beginner build would be for a low-level player trying to get the basics.

Luckily, such a build exists! The "14/14" is a single build you can use in any matchup that leaves you (relatively) safe from cheese and (relatively) set for a decent economy. It's a very old build that's been around since the release, and I got to Diamond using only this for my ZvZ's.

Liquipedia has a decent entry on it, but here's the basics:


Some further notes on this build, and the silly shit you can expect from lower-league players (since they loooooooove their gambits and cheeses):


This is a lot of information to take in, and there's a ton more I can say, but above all: don't panic, try to relax, and understand that the only way to really learn to play is to play, and stumble a fuckton. Nowadays I can look at a Protoss composition and see how many roaches I have, I can make a reasonable guess as to whether or not I can take them. But that certainly wasn't always the case: I had to lose many, many armies before I could eyeball it decently. I've also been supply blocked tens of thousands of times.

Focus on one thing (supply blocking, larva injects, larva utilization...) and focus on improving that one element, one game at a time. Regardless of what the score screen says, if you were mindful of that element, consider it a win and have a beer.

My favorite motivational quote (God... I can't believe I can say this) came from a local swim coach in Washington DC named Jim Williams, who said

"If you want to swim fast, you have to swim fast."

Which I use for anything I want to get good at. If I want to be someone who writes good programs, I have to be someone who writes good programs; I'd better start programming, and stop reading blog posts, or mailing lists, or watching streams. It's like all the people who want to be great writers, but haven't, you know... actually written anything yet.

Similarly, if you want to get good at Starcraft, the biggest (and most difficult!) obstacle is just getting the nerve to play, especially when you think you're terrible and hopeless (which in my case, is more often than I'd like).

Thanks for the read! Disagreed? Violent agreement!? Feel free to join my mailing list, drop me a line at , or leave a comment below! I'd love to hear from you 😄