OK, got to watch the replay, and there’s a couple things that are missing here. I can see what you mean from being a Protoss main. There were certain actions and tendencies that did or didn’t happen that would be more effective with either Toss or Terran, so it makes sense that Zerg would be your worst race. I’m gonna preface this with a half-measure apology, because I’m probably gonna come off as rude at some points, so imagine it with a comedic tone if it helps. It’s also very long because I embellish a lot. Otherwise, here we go.
I think the first thing I noticed is how queen production was prioritized in the early game over drones, which is really tempting to do given that queens don’t use larva for production. They do cost a lot of minerals though, at least for the early game. They were also prioritized before the 3rd base going down (almost 4 minutes into the game). This is an approach taken if one is expecting and early all-in and needs to defend with queens and lings only. Given that the overlord had seen a defensive forge with tech behind it indicates that it isn’t necessary to spawn so many queens. This partly contributed to the 3rd being so late. A normally timed zerg 3rd comes down before 3 minutes because we that’s when droning times out with saturation of the 2nd, making droning the 3rd start much more fluidly into an earlier, healthier economy. It also gives us the extra production/larva to build that economy and eventual army. This is one of the ways Zerg is very different from the other 2 races – we don’t just take bases for the extra resources of an inefficient swarm, we need the hatcheries to produce the swarm. Sometimes the only reason we take those bases over a macro hatch is because we need to take it sooner or later, and it can give the opponent a pseudo sense of being ahead for destroying a base that wasn’t actually necessary. Since we did take a third so late and with a slower economy, the zerg production took a lot longer to ramp up, making his proxy void into 2-base proxy carrier more effective than it should have been. ( yes, queens actually made the response worse in the long run, imagine that)
The second thing was the lack of defined macro cycles. For a Zerg player, a macro cycle consists of injecting, spending money, and producing from larva every 30 seconds. 30 seconds is because hatcheries take that long to spawn all 3 larva and also for an inject to mature into larva. Indicators of mis-macro include macro queens stacking energy, no eggs on the hatcheries from recent injects, and unused larva, not to mention the more broad indicators like supply blocks and unspent resources.
OK, mid-game now. Took some hits from running around fighting void rays, dark templar, and even a carrier, but we are actually ahead of the protoss right now as far as game state goes. Unfortunately, we are playing right now as if we are behind and have to defend against a massive protoss force that in reality is minutes away. We don’t actually know it’s that far away because the only scout is that overlord that has been sitting in the same spot for so long and no scouting lings or runbys or anything, and that overlord gets picked off. If we had seen something, almost anything else, we would have seen that he was super late on his 3rd, even later on his 4th, with only that carrier and a few adepts to defend with a couple batteries and cannons. We could have poked, scouted, runby or something, but we stayed way back at home until that 1st hydra push. They went alone, and, well, hydras are more supportive in their combat role for being so squishy, so they died. For the vast majority of the game we didn’t know anything about the protoss unless it was walking/flying out to come kill us. Effectively, we are giving ourselves no chance at being able to respond to the aggression effectively, or to even be able to accurately judge were we stand in the game vs the opponent.
We also had invested into a spire and air attack in response to seeing a carrier (off only 2 base), but didn’t make any corruptors for a very long time. Now we did upgrade the hydras thankfully, but we were putting money and time into something that overlapped with the hydra role, then went into lurker tech. So I feel this is some indecisiveness about how a zerg should respond to skytoss. When fighting such a powerful army, we need to decide on one or the other, and go after that hard. In this case, corruptors and hydras are both expensive and their roles overlap, so there really only should be 1 of them until you have enough economy for both (80-ish drones). Roaches would be a much better choice to pair with corruptors because they are cheaper with more hp and natural armor values, and morph much faster for massing and follow up attacks.
Late game, mostly taking bad engagements, but also not being aware that the protoss had been expanding uncontested for about 12 minutes. At some point I’m sure you must’ve guessed he would expand, but it was never monitored or controlled. We also often sent drones to expand without any kind of escort or scouting, but that stemmed ultimately from not being able to afford it, coming back to bad engagements with mass hydra and a slowed economy. The bad engagements really started happening once the colossi were introduced. The carrier count never got super high (maxed at 5), but you seemed so focused on them that the 2 colossi did 2x the damage that the carriers did… and then we made more hydras and a couple lurkers because hey, we’re a glutton for punishment. The corruptors didn’t hit the field until the game was long lost, but then they could have at least picked off the colossi so the hydras could help with the carriers. Nope. Instead we focused the 5 carriers that don’t do heavy damage to corruptors first, then a-move with the hydras and the corruptors together against the 2 colossi so they can be literally melt the hydras with plasma.
Ultimately, what we really need is a clean opening with consistent macro and a decisive plan of attack going forward into the match, and matching that plan with answering basic questions of our opponent like ‘what does their economy look like?’, ‘what tech are they choosing?’, or "what timing is this going to be?’. Can’t let them boys have half the map without a say in it, or at least knowing it.
