"Bittersweet symphony" by Verve

One thing that struck my about the Protoss zealot is how it fits so well into the mould of the classic foot soldier. You can call him the pawn of English chess, the ping of Chinese chess or the grunt of Warcraft 2 fame. The way he is warped in to your protoss base from Aiur, proclaiming "My life for Aiur", tells me that this is one lean-mean fighting machine that I must use. What a classy warrior he is J.

The zealot cost 100 minerals and has shield-points and hit-points of 80 each, making a total of 160. He has as many as 10 possible upgrades; the most important being the leg enhancements from the Citadel of Adun. Make that your top priority. In a map like The Hunters, the zealot should definitely comprise a large chunk of your ground army from the start of the game till the end. In such a situation, make a priority to upgrade their weapons strength in the Forge. Although I have never used a fully upgraded zealot which is 3/3/3, I have used zealots of 3/2/1 type and I can vouch that they kick serious butt J .

In plain vanilla Starcraft, the zealot himself is a zerg's worst nightmare, my friend Maxx can vouched for that. In Broodwar, the lurkers and the new sunken colonies really even things out for the zerg. I have also change my tactics with the zealot. It is now used as unit to take the blow, i.e. from hydras, marines and tanks. My actual killing troop now becomes the high templar, which I will explain below.

The High Templar must rank as the best unit in the entire game. No other unit can match it’s kill-ratio. It also emphasize the Protoss as a race of extreme micromanagement. It is the mage-unit of the Protoss, which means it has no direct attack, only spells. The key spell here is Psi-storm. Before you even think about warping in the templar archives, make sure you have or are going to have 2 vespene gas collecting assimilators. And please, do not waste them by warping into Archons. There will be times when an Archon can serve well but I find that it is often better to just leave them alone to replenish their mana.

This unit cost 50 minerals and a whooping 150 gas. You need to have enough resources to wrap in one of them and at the same time, research psi-storm immediately from the templar archives, which cost another 200/200.  At the early part of the middle game, I often found myself extremely stretched in resources, so a good idea would be to alternate between zealots and templars. Whatever it is, make sure you never accumulate excess gas in the game! You cannot go wrong by making more templars. I usually have around 15-20 for any game J .

The psi-storm really shine against projectile troops, such as marines, hydralisks and mutalisks, all of these die within a single storm if they remain in the area-effect for the entire duration. I often chuckle when I see zerg players continue to charge with hydras even after repeated storming. The key tactic all those budding protoss players must learn is to always use the hotkey "t" for storming and always upgrade the +50 mana storage from the archives. A high templar with 250 mana can cast psi-storm 3 times and that will cause many opponents a serious heartbreak J .

As I have described above, zealots and high templars make a potent combination for all kinds of ground troops. For example, most zerg players mass hydras in their attacks. To these players, they cannot see where the high templar is until they hear the crackle of storm. A good tactic, when you see hoards of hydras or marines/medics combo charging at you is to engage them first with zealots. Your templar behind can get off a good storm on these forces without them being able to respond due to the zealots. You can then sit back and imagine the frustration of your opponent J .

The Corsair

    Finally, the Protoss executor has a ready and cheap answer to those pesky zerg mutalisks.  As a bonus, those 'flying zerg farms', or overlords, are now very much vulnerable to these aircrafts.  I remember one particular 2v2 game that I have played in battle net.  The opposing team consists of 2 zerg players.  After fending off the initial zergling rush, I went for corsairs and found both of them, surprisingly, rushing for mutalisks without any air cover.  My four corsairs found one zerg player still evolving his spire and I then proceed to destroy all his overlords.  I switched my attention to his partner, who already had about 6 mutalisks.  My four corsairs managed to destroy them without having a single casualty.  You should have seen him muttering some explicit vulgarities at me J.  I guess the greetings these corsair pilots make when they are warped in from their stargates, "It is a good day to die!"  is a suitable warning to all those mutalisks lovers.

Some tips on corsairs usage

    It goes without saying that, when you are facing a zerg player, you will never go wrong with corsairs in the middle or late game.  However, exactly when you should get them needs some judgment calls.  Any experienced protoss executor will have had an experience with the 'protoss mid-game trilemma'.   I have coined this term because I have noticed a remarkable similarity between this and the "open-economy trilemma" introduced by Obstfeld and Taylor (1998), where central banks can only choose 2 out of the 3 desirable features: liberalized capital movements, fixed exchange rates, and monetary independence.  The protoss executor's trilemma is similarly as follows:   We like to go for the templar archives warriors, the robotic facility's automatons as well as the Stargate's aircrafts.  The trilemma exists because a protoss executor can choose 1 of them in the early game and the most 2 out of these 3 desirable technologies later in the midgame, due to the high cost of the protoss troops.  How do we choose effectively?

    A good scouting probe in the early game might provide some answers.  Supposed your probe detects a zerg hydralisk den and an evolving zerg lair, it is safe to conclude that they are going for hydralisks or lurkers.  In such a scenario, do not wrap in the stargate first.  Instead, wrap in the robotics facility and start training dragoons.  You will need observers to detect the potential lurkers and zealots and dragoons make an excellent army against an enemy's hydralisks.  As a bonus, the large size of the dragoon and its anti air capability would help greatly against the lurkers and the mutalisks.  Otherwise, when you see an evolving spire, you can be safe in going for stargates.

    Secondly, if you intend to go for corsairs, try not to let the zerg enemy know what you are doing.  If there is an enemy overlord at your base, make sure he cannot see your warping stargate; chase it away with either a dragoon or a cannon.  Do not launch your first corsair immediately.  From my experience, it is good to wait until you have about 3-4 corsairs before alerting your enemy that you have them.  In that way, the overlords get destroyed much faster and they are a better match against mutalisks due to their splash damage.

    Finally, if you want to disrupt any protoss cannons and zerg colonies, remember that the web need not cover the entire object in order to disrupt it.  One skill to learn is how to disrupt multiple objects with a single web.  Always aim your cursor and activate the web when the cursor is green, not red.  With proper aiming, you can often disrupt many of such static defenses with a few corsairs.  That is another lesson to newbie players not to rely on such static defenses in the late game, remember, in a RTS game, nobody ever wins games by defending, except in maps like Big Game Hunters.

References

Obstfeld, Maurice, and Alan M. Taylor, "The Great Depression as a Watershed: International Capital Mobility over the Long Run." In Bordo, Michael D., Claudia D. Goldin, and Eugene N. White, eds., The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 353-402.)