Defilers, dragoons and mutalisks, oh my!

Princeton left little room for a learning curve, scheduling a high-profile MIT team as its first opponent. The Tigers fought valiantly but were short-handed and ultimately lost due to lack of depth. Playing a best-of-five format, Princeton squandered a 2-1 lead and was defeated 3-2.

Princeton was without its ace, sophomore Delmar Chen, who had previously won a StarCraft tournament hosted by Smashcraft Heroes in November but was unavailable for competition due to other commitments. Chen was scheduled to play one of the two deciding games of the match.

Things started well for the Tigers. Sophomore Alex Shih opened things up, playing Terran against an MIT protoss-player who went by the alias “Prime.” Shih aptly used the fast-expansion strategy, side-stepping a surprise shuttle that dropped zealots and dragoons behind space construction vehicles in his main base.

“I practiced a lot of the fast-expand build,” Shih said. “I got a little thrown off my build when I saw the drop come in with the zealots and the dragoons, but luckily I had a tank there that was actually originally there to combat a reaver drop.”

Shih also had luck to thank for his effective base defense, as a number of vultures and siege tanks spawned from his factories moments after the zealots and dragoons were dropped. Having eradicated the surprise attack, Shih pushed forward with vultures and tanks. Prime had no answer. The game was over within a few minutes, and the Tigers took a 1-0 lead.

Shih’s win highlighted the importance of balancing macromanagement and micromanagement.

“My macro is something that was pretty bad in general, and I worked on it when I practiced at the beginning of the week,” Shih said. “It’s important to keep your troops going and make sure you have a stream of units, because [your opponent is] definitely going to keep making units to try to push your push back. So as long as you keep rallying your units and get them to the opponent’s base where you are, I think it’s definitely a way to improve your game.”

The thrill of victory only lasted a few minutes, however, as junior Peter Liu was defeated handily by MIT protoss-player “Muirhead.” It was rumored that MIT’s player had a winning percentage of 90 percent in protoss mirror matches.

Both players started with a combination of zealots and dragoons, but Liu was outdone strategically on a number of occasions. Early in the game, he fell victim to a vicious reaver drop that eliminated all but two of his probes at an expansion. Later, one of his shuttles was intercepted by a group of dragoons after being spotted by an observer. After holding one push, Liu was defeated when Muirhead bolstered his army with high templars and archons.

With the score tied at one, the Tigers sent forward a pair of freshmen for a pivotal two-on-two match. Jack Wang and Mona Zhang, playing protoss and zerg respectively, won emphatically in a mirror match against MIT’s “Hellhavik” and “Sedraxis.”

Both teams started with zealots and zerglings, and Princeton dominated in early skirmishes. Critical to the Tigers’ victory was the decision to tech while continuing to pump units. With mutalisks in hand, the Tigers pushed hard into the zerg base following a brief skirmish in the middle of the map.

“Mutas are really hard to counter, because normally in two-versus-two, you do not get anti-air units,” Wang said.

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The strategy paid off: The MIT zealots were left in the dust, and Princeton was victorious in well under 10 minutes.

“It’s hard for the protoss to catch up with our army, so we pushed the zerg, because if we pushed the protoss, the zerglings could have caught up,” Wang said.

Then came the collapse. Junior Dan Huang was faced with the tough task of defeating MIT’s finest player, “Stryker.” With Huang playing as terran and his opponent playing as zerg, the match began. Huang placed a factory next to Stryker’s base and was able to harass Stryker with vultures quite early. The vultures eliminated a number of sunken colonies but did not kill many units. Stryker responded with a number of mutalisks that he micromanaged perfectly.

The mutalisk harassment caused Huang serious problems, as his marine-and-medic combination struggled in response. Huang was confined to his base, and his opponent occupied four expansions. Huang was then defeated by a demoralizing push of lurkers, defilers and ultralisks.

Visibly shaken following the match, Huang was encouraged by his teammates to play the fifth and final match when it was determined that Chen was not available to play. Huang lost his second consecutive match, this time to “Aischarm,” a zerg player that employed a similar strategy to Stryker’s.

While the Tigers did not emerge victorious, their performance was impressive considering the lack of depth and experience on the team. The fan turnout was impressive, and Princeton kept the match exciting until the end. With Chen back in the lineup in future matches, the Tigers will definitely be capable of surprising the elite of collegiate StarCraft.