Game plans

After giving myself a pat on the back for a good run, I hit the dreaded wall I was afraid of. Hard core. I dropped 9 games in a row one long night of terrible laddering and knocked myself all the way back into bottom of diamond. If it weren't for the locking of the leagues, I expect I'd have been demoted again. I don't know why I go on such streaks. I know I played a few games that night where I was doing OK but lost to dumb mistakes. And then I played a terran that marine-SCV rushed me. I held it off and still lost to just non-stop marines. I was raging after that and my bad run ensued. I think part of my game is just managing the rage. When I hit that rage wall, I need to walk away. I didn't even intend to ladder so long but I just kept going and going and it got worse and worse, like a train wreck.

I feel like what I need to work on are clear winning strategies. My set of openings is pretty good and gradually expanding. But something Day[9] often says is you need 2 things: an opening and a mid-game plan, in other words, how you plan to win. I don't really have that. My "plan" is really just:

1) have a bigger army than him
2) defend myself
3) prove my army is bigger by attacking his front periodically and forcing an engage

Almost all my mid-game decisions are ad-libbed. I have a few mid-game compositions I favor, and I usually just pick one as I see my opponent's early comp. Last year I ad-libbed my openings and I've gotten a clearer set of opening and early goals now, but I lack an over-arching game plan. I feel like my play would be a lot cleaner if I had a set of goals I was working toward after the opening plays out. Here are some of the possible mid-game plans I can play:

1) 2-base Collosi timing: 2 or 3 collosi with range
2) Blink and +1 timing
3) Chargelot Archon with +1 armor
4) Warp prism harass: Poke in a WP at any vulnerable point I can find, while turtling and expanding
5) Gateway army with 2-2 upgrades off double forge
6) FFE 7-gate

I don't know. There's probably more. I don't really "play" these strats. They just kinda fall out of my mid-game ad-libbing. I need to pick a few to work on and just do them over and over. Collosi and blink are the 2 I do most often, but I mangle my priorities and timings because I'm not really "planning" to do them. Maybe I'll say PVP: blink, PvZ: collosi and PvT: archons and then work on discovering the timings and weaknesses of those hard-core. If my mid-game plan was better thought out in advance and refined, I wouldn't be spending so much time thinking about what to build and could spend more brain cycles on army positioning and defense.