Balance Discussion: ZvT

This is probably the most important thing. Drowning the teamliquid forums in cries of imbalance and feeling the need to take every jab available at anyone playing the stronger races, is definitely not the way to go. The place to complain about balance is either Blizzard's own forums, or simple blogs like this one.

And in order to have anything valuable to add to the balance discussion, the first thing you have to do is correctly identify and define the problem at hand. We have people shouting at different levels of the game, but not realizing that they're not even discussing the same topic.

The reason why professional Zerg players are suffering at tournaments aren't the same as why a platinum level Zerg is unable to advance to the diamond league.

So the first thing I'm going to try to do is take everyone's favorite bastard matchup, and analyze what makes everyone, from the lowly drone to the mighty IdrAlisk, shake their fists in anger, break their keyboards in frustration and cower in fear.

The matchup is of course... Zerg vs Terran.

And for the sake of discussion, I'm going to assume that there is a balance problem in need of fixing.

You're going to read so many posts as to why certain units are overpowered, but that is not the correct way of dealing with problems, as we already saw in Brood War balance. There were tons of overpowered units in brood war, yet the game was still balanced.

We don't want to identify a single situation that feels very hard to deal with, we're going to try to analyse why we get into that situation, and how to make that less likely.

I would like to add at this point, that I have no problems with a race being technically harder than another, as long as the difference isn't huge, and the gap can be covered by smart play and skill.

First off, I am going to sum up why Zerg players are losing to terran players. I've had a look at many professional level replays, as well as many lower level replays. The first thing I'm going to do is to try to identify through generalization why Zerg players lose.

High level zerg players lose to the following:

- Early aggression (5rax reaper, 3rax, tank/marine push etc)
- Early Harass (banshee, hellions)
- Mid-game Harass (Drops, cliff drops, overlord sniping)
- Bad engagements (getting your army stuck in chokes etc)
- Cheese (bunker rushes and other superfun stuff)

I am going to leave low level players out of this for now, but for the most part you should add poor decisions, lack of scouting and bad macro to the list above. Notice how this is a very, very simplified view, but it still allows us deeper analysis.

But now I'm going to do something that almost no-one ever does. I'm going to touch on what Zerg players don't lose to. This is important because we need to understand what it is that allows Zerg players to still come out ahead, because it's not as if they're losing every game.

- Tech rushes (rushing one BC, one Thor, a nuke or something like that)
- Big midgame pushes (except when severely behind after harass, or when losing due to bad engagement)
- pure rushes (lings fend those off quite easily)
- Lategame clashes (Zerg generally feels okay in those)
- pure macro (it's quite easy to expand if you're not under pressure)
- mid-game contains (the map is usually the zerg's for taking)

Of course, youtube heroes can find an example of Zerg players losing to all of the above, just in an attempt to prove me wrong, but what I'm doing is not discussing specific games, but much rather trying to identify a trend.

Now I'm again going to go outside of the usual frame of discussion, and try to identify why terran players lose to zerg players. This is very important because it highlights the difference between the races, and it will in the end help us identify and thus solve the problem at hand.

Terran loses to:

- Mid-game harass (generally mutas)
- Bad Engagements (zerg catches his tanks in motion)
- Early bangling all-ins (BANANA GRIN)
- Contains (the zerg takes complete map control)
- Cheese

And once again, we follow up with the things that the Terran doesn't lose to:

- Standard rushes (the wall-in simply blocks this)
- Tech rushes (HIGHFIVE FOR BROODLORD RUSH)
- Midgame pushes (my theory is the hydra is not strong enough for this to work)
- Early Aggression (the wall prevents that)
- Lategame clashes (Good positioning is the key)
- Macro (with orbital commands, flying buildings and awesome static defenses, terrans can keep up in the expanding game)

None of the lists above are complete, they're just to give a reference, and I'm sure they can all be expanded upon, and changed around. But after reading through those lists, and given the presumption that there actually is a balance issue, Let us try to sum up what problems we want fixed.

If zerg survives the early game more easily, he can transition better to his winning strategies.

This, is what I get from everything I just wrote. Cheese, bad engagements and mid-game harass is something that both players need to deal with, both races can potentially outmacro each other.

But Zerg feels hard to survive in the early game.

In fact, I'm going to go that far and claim that if mid-game is entered on a reasonably even footing, the imbalance has significantly diminished.

But even diminished I still think that positional advantage is relatively easier to achieve as a terran player, than as a zerg player. Both players lose in a bad position, but it seems easier to get into such a position as zerg.

This I feel is not because terrans have an easier time getting into a good position, it's becasue they're harder to break when settled in a good position. This is why terran tank drops are very hard to break, but mutalisk harass is easy to push back.

The second big thing we'll have a look at is:

Zerg has a hard time holding and breaking positional advantage, even in their own territory

Now we'll enter the actual balance discussion, we are aware of the glaring problems that need to be fixed.

We are ready to move on...

If zerg survives the early game more easily, he can transition better to his winning strategies.

This is the presumption we're going to work on, this is what we're going to fix.

Let's have a look at few select favorite early game winners for terran players, we'll then try to identify why they're a problem, and how could we change the game to deal with this problem.

3rax push: This push is very easily defended with a ling/bangling force, but if you don't have banglings, it can be a pain in the ass to deal with, especially if you went spore crawlers or roaches.

Tank/marine push: This push is very strong, although lings do better against it after the patch. The golden composition to defend is roach/bangling. Mass lings deal with this fine too.

5rax reaper: The epitome of Terran early pressure builds, this is ridiculously hard to deal with unless you go roaches followed by fast roach speed and good creep spreading.

Fast banshee: Safe because of the fact that the wall-in denies early Zerg aggression, only a fast lair and extra queens will save you from the wrath of the banshee.

Hellion Harass: one of the oldest tricks in the book, can be countered handily with speedlings, roaches, spinecrawlers or any combination of these.

Reaper harass: Can be dealt with by speedlings.

Notice how most of those can actually be countered by early speedlings, but that doesn't mean that the issue can be solved by simply "build more speedlings". Every Zerg player already does this and still they lose.

Why do we lose? It's because although "speedlings" is a good general answer, every type of early harass has it's subtle differences in how it must be answered. you're not going to build the same mass of speedlings to defend a single early reaper harass, as you'd build if you wanted to defend a 3rax push, that'd put you behind for the mid-game.

And that's where I want to turn everyone's heads away from unit composition and towards a much more glaring issue.

If the Zerg only knew what was coming, he could prepare better.

This is the first pillar of my re-balance suggestion. I do think that Zerg scouting in the early game is severely lacking. A solid wall and some patrolling marines make dead sure that you won't see anything the Terran doesn't want you to see.

Once fast overseers are out, you can scout all you want, but early on, it's like playing poker.

Let's assume that the Zerg player can at least have a moderate chance of discovering the Terran player's intentions. There is still a need to look at all those early openings. If you look at the counters, there was a general theme, with slight differences.

Except if... a wild banshee appears.

The banshee is a unit that I simply do not agree with by design. A banshee is so scary, and requires such completely different response than the other early attacks mentioned, that it becomes a class of it's own.

So, while the first pillar is not a direct combat buff, I feel the banshee needs to be dealt with differently.

And the way to deal with the banshee is quite simple, spore crawlers. But sadly, spore crawlers suck against banshee, this is because of the terribly long range banshees have. The spores can hardly even defend each other if built in a cluster, nevermind defending the entire base.

So the second pillar in my balance analysis is that the banshee needs to be dealt with on the fly.

I think every Zerg player can agree that if they could deal with banshees in a reasonable fashion, and had a way to get a better glance at what the terran is doing, they would be fighting a completely different game.

We have, in my opinion, defined what needs to be done in order to solve the presumption given earlier.

If zerg survives the early game more easily, he can transition better to his winning strategies.

Next up, I will discuss a touchy subject. Almost everyone agrees that Blizzard's maps are terrible, at best. So this issue could be solved completely through better maps, but I think we'd like to keep some of the dynamic high ground terrain and chokes offer.

Zerg has a hard time holding and breaking positional advantage, even in their own territory

This is twofold in my opinion, first off is that once contained or threatened by tank/thor drops, a bunker line and tanks, or any other positional defense, the zerg has a very hard time re-taking that terrain, even if the terran has a much longer reinforcement distance.

The second part is less obvious, but the best way to display it is to point out how lurkers/defilers could constrict movement through a key location in Brood War. It's very hard to set up strong keypoints that are hard to break at the moment, even with the greatly improved creep spread mechanic.

The first issue is usually solved by fast mutas, spine crawlers in clever locations, or overlord drop, but it takes a significant time to respond in any of the those ways, and you cannot build spine crawlers under fire.

The solution to this problem forms the third pillar in my balance suggestion.

The second issue is much harder to define, and could warrant a thread in itself. The solution to the former problem will definitely help, but more needs to be done.

Currently creep, spine crawlers, speedlings and brood lords are our best tools to create a positional advantage. The fourth pillar in my balance suggestion deals with how to possibly allow Zerg to maintain a positional advantage.

And thus we conclude the discussion, and get right to the solutions part.

We're working on the assumption that in general the ZvT matchup can be greatly helped by fixing two very vague issues.

If zerg survives the early game more easily, he can transition better to his winning strategies.

Zerg has a hard time holding and breaking positional advantage, even in their own territory

I've already stated that there are four pillars to my balance suggestion, and all of them should cross over to help fix each other, without further ado, I present the balance changes.

1. Allow Overseers to be built once Evolution Chamber is finished
2. Reduce the range of Banshees to 5
3. Reduce the burrow time of Spine and Spore Crawlers to 3-5 seconds
4. Allow Overseers to generate creep, when generating creep the overseer creates an aura that increases the damage of spore and spine crawlers (think reverse guardian shield, but for buildings).

Balance change 1 won't break anything, it's just an earlier scouting unit, balance change 4 is not significant enough to be very useful early game, but it will help Zerg fortify positions and defend early pushes. Balance change 2 is simply because of the really strong cloaked flying dark templar of doom, and in combination with balance change 3, they should be easier to deal with.

Evolution chamber suddenly becomes a very tempting choice for early game Zerg players, with the better spore crawlers and the scouting/defensive overseers.

Dealing with cliff drops is much easier if you can just build three spines and move them to the cliff without taking 12 years to burrow.

All in all, without terminally breaking any of terran's options, we have given Zerg slight edge to help defend until mid-game and maintain their positions.

We have... hopefully made the game better.