PrintF’s ABUSE of the Carrier Change is GENIUS | King of Cannons #23 - StarCraft 2 

Fun fact, if you watch my opponent's perspective in game 2, you can see he gg'd as a direct result of the mothership. He got an attack indicator when it attacked his overlord on completion, moved his camera there, sat there for a bit dejectedly, then gg'd out

I wonder how many keyboards Printf has indirectly destroyed.

I love that Printf doesn't hide behind a barcode. Boss move there.

I’ve seen a thousand cannon games but not a single one with straight carrier transition. Love it

15:42 that Queen Sheila trying to 1v1 a carrier.

I've been a fan of PrintF since his days in the collegiate SC2 league on team Uconn (I'm from CT). I'm super hyped to see him getting recognition from larger personalities in the scene. Just saying, The game he made named "Elemental Conflux" is awesome. More people should check it out.

I was going to say "Florencio" 😂😂😂😂😂

It's more impressive that it's on this map too - a map explicitly designed to nerf cannon rushers and their adjacent cheeses

Dont fear the man that has practiced 10,000 moves one time, but rather fear the man that has practiced one move 10,000 times.

I just started eating pork again because beef is too expensive now. Thanks Pig!

Props to Elroye for the gg at the end, showing that he does have the nuts required for Starcraft.

What a nice thing that he wants to share it, thanks. I would love to see vs Terran and Toss as well!

As much as I hate getting cheesed I like how printf is open about everything, even handicapping himself by not playing as a barcode and by never expanding, and I like even more that he sends in a significant amount of losses, so we can get all the justice boners we want (which isn't possible with the Flo files, but I did watch all of them). I especially loved watching his game against Showtime, because it shows the gap between someone who works hard at doing just that one thing literally all the time and getting close to perfection, but as a hobby for fun, and someone who plays on a professional level and has to be almost perfect at literally everything. Looks like training 10-12 hours a day for years will let you defend a near perfect cannon rush into Void Ray SB as if it was just routine. That's how freaking high the skill ceiling is in this game. Being at 1.3 Void Rays by the time printf started producing his first Void Ray when normally victims of a cannon rush into void ray sb are 1-2 Voids behind on production and have to rely on Stalkers shows just how much those pros can squeeze out of the game.

Ah cannons and carriers. The ultimate chad bronze move!

Nice to see someone who is known for cannon rushing doing the same sort of initial placement and quick tech to carriers I did years ago. I never played enough to really master the game, but I was beating high plats and low diamonds with cannon rushes while averaging an apm of 69.

"I'll solo you mate. come and fite me you freaking coward" oh my god I laughed so hard

lol, love to see it. Cannons to carriers was actually the way I played sc2. Practiced it enough to take on 2 or 3 brutal AIs (too long ago to remember). But 1. I was never much into competitive play (we're talking like 3 career matches) and 2. I'm pretty sure my micro was garbage and wouldn't have gotten anywhere anyway. Still, really happy to see my "concept" at least works... ignore that it took over a decade for it to be viable 😆

printf every game: " Ichi no kata: Hekireki Issen - Kiwami"

it's like if you're playing normal games of chess and then suddenly you're challenged with a chess puzzle

1:49 putting a cybercore before canceling(assumed) the gateway so he doesn't get slowed down in tech is actually 200IQ from printf

As a plat Zerg I’ve found the best way for me to deal with rushes is to go 16 pool and rush gas to make ravagers. It combines having a bit of eco but also it gives you zerglings (6) to help keep them off of high ground. From there the more the Protoss spent on cannons and pylons is a complete waste since you can bile them for free. If you remain calm and punch the Protoss in the mouth most players don’t have much of a plan beyond the rush.

You should of shown the Mothership. The zerg must of felt printF was flexing.

I appreciate you keeping the content coming. Hope all is well with you, sir.

12:05 printf is florencio, confirmed !

I would like to see more cannon rushes they are fun to watch!

I love printf casts

I cannot wait to see zergs and terrans rage like "NO! WE JUST DEMANDED THIS CHANGE! NOW WE DEMAND IT GET CHANGED BACK!!!~"

Great, every toss watching this is going to cannon into carrier rush for the next year now.

Based on the title I knew he would tank with carriers and let the non low-priority interceptors would do the damage. GG.

the change: units with AA now target carriers more aggressively than ground units in range printf uses carriers to tank hits from hydras to let his turrets stay in fight longer

didn't know carrier and genius could go together.

Love this!! So sad that cheese is continually nerfed out of professional play :(

Lmao Elroye was my classmate back in HS

Mass spore and infestor is a better counter. You go for burrow, don't bother getting pathogen glands, and crank drones to replace the spores. Once neural is researched, the game is over. In the meantime, you can use microbial to help out the spores. 14/14 or 13/12 is a better opener vs a guaranteed cannon rush, since it makes it a million times easier to track down the probes that are hiding out on the map & gives you complete map control, e.g. the carrier proxy wouldn't even get up in the first place. Hidden bases are common strategies with these kinds of styles, and the ling speed helps out with that too. Printf isn't the only person with forge first styles. Rocker comes to mind, too. If you do find the probe, don't kill it and don't reveal that you know it's there until after he commits to the proxy. That's a guaranteed win.

Have you used the name prison bars or progress bar for barcodes?

Omg omg omg omggggg. THE KING IS BACK

Love carrier builds.

First time watching from Australia 🦘 have a nice day mate 😆

You could use the name of the invisible man in the novel for those barcode players. It's Griffin. =)

PrintFlorencio

TLDR on the carrier change: High tier players can do interesting things with carrier micro and low tier players don't get to a-move an overpowered unit comp to win anymore? I see literally no drawback here. I've played a few team matches vs double protoss where both protoss went air and I just spammed vikings while my team mate spammed hydras. This is only plat level play mind you, but low enough where f2amove'd carriers used to be quite powerful. Now that the vikings WANT to attack the carriers and the hydras zone out the interceptors, their fleets vaporized. I've still lost matches vs protoss air because of bad play on my part/getting behind earlier in the game/other various reasons, but the counter to carriers in low leagues is definitely "Just build the thing thats supposed to be the strongest air vs capital ship unit, the viking, and go at 'em." Such a small change that makes the game so much more fun to play again.

So the new update has like the old mechanic from Brood War 1.16.1? i.e. A unit can only attack the enemy Carrier when in range

Cannons and carriers straight to standard out.

Whats the point of building tech buildings with your proxy production buildings? Wouldn't it be better to build the fleet beacon at home so you still have it if your forward position gets over run?

I really wish cannons had slow warp without nexus near like regular unit warps.

This was always my fear with the change. Blizzard have nullified hydralisk as a legitimate response to carriers, which--at one point I feel they were. They gave us microbial shroud and told us to deal with it, but those very few of us who did were punished by this patch. I perfected a midgame centered around swarmhost, hydralisk, and infestor to fight against skytoss midgames and held a highly respectable winrate up until the patch, which meant it was impossible to fight interceptors to the same degree anymore. Sigh.

i had a game where someone did that to me but just mass expanded behind it and safe to say i eventually broke it but got over ran shortly after seemed unbeatable

This is super common in low-rank matchups.

Hey at least invisible man KNEW why his units were being shit and didn't take out his frustrations on the opponent.

You could said that 2nd game was CARRIED by a single unit :VVV ayy lmao

ive seen his stream and channel and printf honestly has pro 6.5k+ level micro and understanding of the game, he just likes to do his one base cheese and without barcoding so he's peaked, otherwise he could be much higher.

if this is really Gm with more than 200 apm, why zerg does not just send a nydus to take down the toss main, or an ovie carrying drones to expand??

Printf is to cannon rushing what Serral is for stracraft

Come on Stormgate!!!

So i need to know, the worker harass he talks about where the drone is grabbing minerals but doesn't mine long enough to grab a stack. Whats the piont of that, does it waste some minerals off?

I used to absolutely hate cannon rushes, they are tricky to defend, but tbh they're not that bad. I've seen plenty of videos and watched the series you did on how to fight em. I rarely lose to them now. Cannon rushers are easy to beat and if you don't really have a good follow up like printf, it's a waste of resources.

1st game would have been much easier if he built 1 or 2 tempests to kill the spores and bait the hydras out.

Someone should tell zerg there is such thing called Nydus. Try it sometimes

Hydras hitting interceptors: "fk ai" Hydras hitting carriers: "fk ai" Terran IMBA, toss IMBA, zerg IMBA. People will always complain.

Woah

I feel like the zerg in game 1 hurt himself with that hydra ranged upgrade, allowing his hydras to get trolled and baited to target carriers more easily Also would a good strat be to just hold-position the hydras back far enough where they can only shoot interceptors?

What did he do to abuse the change?

I feels like ravagers should of been the better tech choice to destroy said cannon so he can easily get the Stargate before it started pooping out carriers.

A Printf vs Florencio game could be a fun shitshow

Ahahahahah

like in all games if there is a cheese then people will use it if there is a hack people will use it the only way to have fun is to not play people lol but this is pretty fun to see

On King of Cannons #21 you said you're not casting all his games against pro gamers because they're too straight-forward, but tbh I'd love to see his winrate against pros. When I saw him fail against Showtime's textbook defense I was like "ok, so that's the limit", but then I saw him winning against Shadown and TLO and now I really want to see how many of these big dogs he was able to take down even if the games are nothing special. printf, if you're reading this, can you maybe upload those games yourself if PiG doesn't want to cast them?

What did they do to the carrier again? I forgot.

this is exactly one of the reasons why i dont think the carrier target priority change is that big of a deal lol. it's suppose to make it _easier_ to deal with carriers, but it doesnt really accomplish that at all. sure it might make _certain_ situations a little easier to deal with, but it 100% is going to make an equal amount of situations _harder_ to deal with and frankly all that kind of does is just railroad people into using those easier options to deal with the carriers instead of addressing the carrier's actual problems. the carrier is objectively "balanced" as far as stat/cost-wise goes, but that's not the problem with the unit. since the beginning of SC2, the unit has been far too EASY of a unit to use because of how fast it launches interceptors compared to the BW Carrier. the BW Carrier didn't launch interceptors fast, but to compensate as long as your Carriers didnt move in the direction of your Interceptors the interceptors couldnt enter the carrier when they get leashed. this made the Carrier a micro-intensive unit that required some skill to use most effectively, because you could keep all of your Interceptors out at all times and bypass the slow interceptor launch speed, but it required you to actively focus on doing this. the SC2 Carrier does not have any new micro techniques to compensate for this mechanic being removed in SC2, all they did was objectively buff it over the BW Carrier, and that has caused every single problem with the Carrier that it has ever had in SC2, from points where people considered it to be way too weak of a unit to being way too strong.

Is PrintF like Gaulzi? sry, im old school.

Didn't know you followed mma

Interceptor should be free

First game was zerg’s auto win if he built corruptors fo shoo

This is not the content I usually see under a headline with the words 'printf' and 'abuse'.

"I have a barcode name, because I don't want to be recognized and have people know my builds" - Meanwhile PrintF well known player for cannon rushing on the highes level - wins anyways. GigaChad behaviour.

I always wonder, could you just do a contain with a smaller cannon rush and transition into a very fast second base, for example ? I know printf would not do this because he always stays in one base, but is it possible ? Also, is there a reason why the Fleet Beacon isn’t built in the main base but in the proxy instead ? It seems like it adds a bit of risk, but there is probably something I’m missing.

Good content but gd I can feel the frustration, especially game 2.

I am a simple man. I see PrintF, I watch.

I love you 🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖🐖

Average Protoss player not earning his win

pig has a problem with smurfs ruining the ladder experience yet cannon rushing every game is cool? okay

Protos = No Honor

Spoiler: Executor Carrier carries the game! :)

just call him ihhhhhhhhhhhhh

People are frustrated by this because of how much easier it is to play than to defend and if you don't scout it, it becomes almost undefendable. Just because there are some silly mechanics in play in sc2 like air units being very strong and zerg having bad anti-air on hatch tech...

I hate this change, before u had a choice between attacking interceptors (default) or carrier (targeting), now u can't choose because u can't manually target every interceptor... so dumb.

I would honestly be more interested in printf games if the outcome wasn't a forgone conclusion, we know since he sent it in he won the game. Casting some losses > always casting wins

looks like a super effective strategy, cannon rushing, but its probably more fun to play the game normally no?

BAN ALL PROTOSS PLAYERS

Stop it with the carriers, I don't want to see more carriers, why does he keep making carriers?!

There is nothing creative about cannon rush into the carriers ... And it makes it pretty difficult to even play a normal macro game, beacuse you expect this basically every time you play agains protos on a ladder ... It is braindead strategy relying on the fact that it is just slightly faster than zerg being able to produce units.

The zerg is just really bad ... He focus bad units late for decision making ( I'm not comparing myself to him he is way better than me but ... Its painfull to watch )

I think carrier is stupid unit and it should be nerfed eaven removed