i fear arguments are diverging from each other.ezrarh said:
ill try to set out some key ideas:
1). 4gate is an allin, its not almost, its all the way. they aren't called derpgate expands for nothing. if 4gate fails and zerg kept his nat, its over and zerg wins without some spectacular fail.
2). while 4gates do grant food advantages, that is not the only reason 4 warpgate is strong. i believe there is also an efficiency advantage at work here when the right conditions are met.
3). i think that the existence of those conditions and exploitation of them make it so that mass sentry/ff spam is not a requirement for safe protoss expands or effective aggression [in zvp].
4). i dont think 4gates are that hard to stop all things considered. speedling crawler into lair tech isnt that complex and it doesnt require a high drone investment.
5). the zerg production argument only holds true because protoss is resource limited realive to zerg in a 4gate vs 2 base situation. this is why i also brought up the 6gate because both players will typically be on equal resources, with zerg sometimes having an unsaturated third [to risky to saturate]. in this situation i feel protoss zealot/gateway demonstrate their viability in situations with low forcefield counts, in these situations with equal production, zerg needs the tech advantage to win, but has better creep to defend itself to prevent the harass weakness of typical 4gates.
6). the closing point of my vanilla zeal/stalker vs vanilla roach/ling example was that the better player wins in these early game/low ff situations. my complaints about forcefields are largely related to sentries that can throw out 4 apiece. early sentry and small forcefield counts already have a counter in burrow, but where burrow should force robo or give zerg map control, sentries reach a critical point where more forcefields just keep solving the problem because they never seem to runout, and this is where its tough to be a zerg.
