I have never seen marines win without early PG. Maybe if you play with very organized skilled players they can make this technique work by covering / welding eachother as they hold key points - but in pub games if you choose upgrades over phase tech you will lose 99.99% of games guaranteed. Don't believe me ? Go try it for 5-10 games and come post the results.
Should add in "with an average pub team" to your challenge. ie join a random server without a competitive friend.
Oh how many times I have yelled run into the blue wall and shoot whatever you see afterword.
I once had a team requesting a phase gate to go next to a room already containing a phase gate. The distance was the same as walking from one side of our base to the other! (literally I actually measured)
At the end of the day it depends on how far out your trying to expand in the early game. I have yet to see decent play out well without early phase (at least when the teams were evenly matched)
With PGs you can go from walking for 30-60 seconds to defend an expansion to being able to spawn as many marines as you like into the room with no further charge.
A squad of slightly buffed marines is not as good as an endless wave of normal marines.
You give up an enormous amount of combat power by going phase gates first, and the benefits you gain are more illusion than reality.
Just like no PGs ever working on your average pub server with anything but a massive marine stack is more illusion than reality.
Just the opposite really. Average pub marines are awful at shooting, which also means they won't actually be pushing in to anything without some level of combat advantage. Rushed phase gates simply ensure that you'll be able to (sometimes) hold what you were able to build a phase gate at. Rushed upgrades mean that even awful pub marines can usually make meaningful and significant pushes due to the gigantic combat advantage they're working with.
What makes early upgrades even more effective is the fact that your average alien commander isn't particularly smart either. Shift first is still the most common (90%+) strategy in most pubs, and building a second hive is often delayed. Meaning that it's not at all rare to see an alien team which doesn't have carapace until 8-9 minutes into the game. It'd take a truly awful team even by pub standards to not completely crush an alien team with jp/shotgun/armor 2 against mere celerity skulks. Seriously.
but the problem here is thinking that pub marines are organized enough to go to the places they need to be at and defend them. Chances are without phase gates marine players tend to wander, run the wrong way and ignore vital parts of the map they should be defending. phase gates keeps them focused in 1 area you really have to divert the flow of marines with phase gates, expecting them to use their head and actually go where they need to is asking to much of most of them.
a good example of this is locker room , send marines there and dont build a phase gate and watch them slowly start to wander out of locker getting picked off one by one or ignoring the huge skulk rush into locker whilst they all fire at a gorge wall in maintenance.
That locker room example you gave is soo true lol .
Happens ALL the time,i mean seriosly,i tell the marines like 8 times "hold locker room guys dont push maintenance or cortyard" and not once have they listened to me so far
Really there is no need to debate if either is better because its just going to result in context dependency, if you got a smart team that knows what to do then weps can be better sometimes, but if its a scrubby team then phasegates generally are better in my personal experience.
Smaller maps like Summit or Tram, it is much easier and faster to get around, so you can neglect PG untill after other research has been compleated. Other maps like Veil or Docking, It is much harder to hold ground without Phase gates, so thats why in my opinion, PG's are often used 1st.
Comments
Should add in "with an average pub team" to your challenge. ie join a random server without a competitive friend.
I once had a team requesting a phase gate to go next to a room already containing a phase gate. The distance was the same as walking from one side of our base to the other! (literally I actually measured)
At the end of the day it depends on how far out your trying to expand in the early game. I have yet to see decent play out well without early phase (at least when the teams were evenly matched)
A squad of slightly buffed marines is not as good as an endless wave of normal marines.
That locker room example you gave is soo true lol
Happens ALL the time,i mean seriosly,i tell the marines like 8 times "hold locker room guys dont push maintenance or cortyard" and not once have they listened to me so far
Word