Blizzard has released another battle report between David Kim - the Terran component in the last two battles, and Yeon-Ho Lee - a newcomer to the battle reports.  This time it's Protoss vs Zerg.

 These screen shots are always so dramatic... of course this one has nothing to do with the video.  The Battle Report starts out like all the rest, with a weird little harvester battle that is usually ended by whoever gets their first offensive units.  It's really amazing how fast they progress when losing units.  Starcraft was pretty early in my gaming career, but I was never that good or that fast.  I'd lose against these guys in the first few minutes. 

Starcraft 2 is shaping up to be a pretty impressive and balanced RTS.  It seems to be doing what Warcraft 3 did to Warcraft 2, making units more indespensible and micromanagable.  One thing you'll see early on is the Nullifier, a protoss unit that can create a shield that can either bock enemy movement or trap them inside.  It seems to work really well versus the large numbers of Zerg ground units.  I've seen a lot of Protoss micromanagement in these videos and it seems they still rely on more powerful but more expensive units to be successful so it only makes sense.  The Zerg seemed to be more diversified in this battle.  Their infesting mind control units make an appearance later in the game that changes the momentum of a lot of skirmishes. Another Zerg tool that's used from fairly early on was the baneling.  It was also in another Zerg battle report creating havoc.  It's replaced the Infested Terran from the original in use and is MUCH easier to create.  Lee uses them several times to wipe out large swaths of Protoss.

The truly impressive thing about these battle reports are that it's very difficult to tell  who's going to win.  You'd think for nearly half the game that the Zerg have this in hand but the Protoss just do some good moves and end it in the blink of an eye.  I haven't seen many of these battles go toward the final tier of units like many of my old Starcraft battles did.  We see some of the end-game-like ground uinits like the Collosus and Infesters, but as some of you may have seen there are some really incredible end game units out there for each side and I'm really excited to see their application in real fights.  I suspect Starcraft 2 may be available by Christmas since that's everyone's goal... but that's just my guess.  We'll see what happens but I'm still sticking with fourth quarter 2009.