I am one of the guys who inspired by broodwar (i hardly played it) decided to play zerg. I played trough beta, followed the scene and after playing over 500 games on ladder for the queen avatar as Zerg it seems that I have arbitrarily decided that suicide units in rts is a bad mechanic.
The second I realised that I knew how scrubby of an opinion it was but to me the thought is still very much reality.
Engaging a force with banelings has no next step, whereas with lurkers, hydra and zerglings it was a constant battle of positioning, flanking and aggression, IT does not take a genius to see that with the cost of 25 minerals and 25 gas, banelings will never be cost effective because the more you make the more will blow up and the less units you will have to counter attack or fortify your position.
With the current trends however Zerg has to make retarded amounts of banelings to survive in zvt. It’s gone from being a remotely decent matchup where you can deflect most pushes with roach, zergling to require an amazing amount of banelings, because Zerg has no reliable aoe outside of infestors (lol you can spread marines to minimize fungal damage as well).
I have tried to get away with not making them but the current mass marine pushes are simply too big for roach zergling to handle, spines dont work and hydra comes too late.
With zvz as my best matchup and zvp still not improving, I have had victories with hydralisk openings but its more my opponents mistake than me doing something right.
Either i have to deal with my scrub mind or reroll race, sadly the former might not be possible. THe very thought of sacrifical units that blow up conflict with me on a very fundamental level. ;/
Here are some baneling videos, while I hate that they suicide and are morphed from the zergling, the unit in itself is pretty cute.
Banelings are awesome man what the fuck? It's the same argument people try to use with hydras vs BC's instead of corruptors "oh he can just expand when you kill his BC's because you only have corruptors" but thats just wrong you invest LESS in corruptors to kill his BCs than hydras that would be dead already trying to kill his BC's, so you end up with a significantly larger army unless you grossly overproduced corruptors.
It doesn't matter if you lose the baneling, if they're cost effective it doesn't matter. It suits the zerg style of trading units, vs army momentum. If P has a giant deathball, they lose almost nothing, zerg however, have to overrun, and they constantly lose units but have enough. to keep on rollin'
On November 11 2010 20:58 Hittegods wrote: Never watched BW enough to see a unit called scourge?
i did, and its very different from the baneling.
Zerg ground battles in zvt REVOLVE around banelings,
you dont ever go mass scourge. Mass scourge similar to corruptor is just a segment of air control battles in zvp and a good unit to scout and deny drops, killing vessels with.
its a PIERCING unit that sacrifices the gas invested for more of your opponents gas.
the baneling is a POWER unit that sacricices gas and minerals for some of your opponents minerals.
end result is vastly different in that in broodwar once a battle is won the zerg can reposition their power units and take advantage of the map.
in sc2 once the battle is over you have to make more banelings. you still dont have map control.
It doesn't matter if you lose the baneling, if they're cost effective it doesn't matter. It suits the zerg style of trading units, vs army momentum. If P has a giant deathball, they lose almost nothing, zerg however, have to overrun, and they constantly lose units but have enough. to keep on rollin'
yea but i would be glad if zerg didnt loose their only early tier power units by default i.e suicides. arguing it dosnt matter to me anymore, im done with zerg but not with sc2.
Scourge traded gas pretty evenly, 100 gas for a corsair/wraith 75 for a pair of scourge if they hit, you actually traded gas for minerals assuming you lost scourge.
Baneling tends to trade gas for minerals as well, so its pretty similar.
He didn't say gg. He said something along the lines of "my god" or "holy shit."
The real difference between banelings and scourge are aoe damage. A properly placed pair of banelings can kill 1000 minerals worth of marines, but a single baneling won't kill a single marine. Which is why when you have 1000 minerals and gas worth of banelings, you can kill 4000 minerals worth of marines with attack ground.
To be honest you are complaining about the potential of baneling, that is, they have a risk, and this is good because if not they would be totally imba. Its like saying the concept of storm is wrong because if it doesnt hit you lose so much doing the templar and the research for nothing.
This is also one of the reasons why you should fend early rines attack purely by speedlings because besides blings being a big investment early game (specially gas wise) you can end up having something like 4 blings killing 5 marines which is not really cost effective, also why they should be a small part of your army because even if you kill all his units, as you said, you will also end up with all your units dead so you are "even". The one who really wins a battle is the one that gets map control after it. And you need units for that.
To be honest you are complaining about the potential of baneling, that is, they have a risk, and this is good because if not they would be totally imba. Its like saying the concept of storm is wrong because if it doesnt hit you lose so much doing the templar and the research for nothing.
except templars dont morph into a rather expensive unit (25 min and 25 gas per zergling adds up) just to suicide.
What...? Blowing up 10 SCVs or marines seems pretty cost effective to me. People have already described army momentum and trading units. Zergs are usually a base ahead and with larva inject can remacro super fast which means they can replenish their armies faster. And that is why you have other units in your composition and not 100% banelings.
It's obviously hard to relate minerals to gas, but even just killing 2 or 3 marines seems like a fair trade, anything more than that is a bonus.
The crux of your argument seems lie on the assumption that if you have banelings you won't have anything else to keep attacking afterwards which is just not true. You don't go 200/200 banes.
There are a lot of reason why they work in this game; they make sense as zerg unit (for the swarm!), they are a great unit for sc as a spectator sport (OMG IS HE GOING TO SCAN THE BANELING TRAP!), and the same as every other unit, they have a risk/reward trade-off which in their case is just more direct than for other units.
The crux of your argument seems lie on the assumption that if you have banelings you won't have anything else to keep attacking afterwards which is just not true. You don't go 200/200 banes.
wrong, the crux of the argument lies in the fact that the more banelings you morph, regardless of outcome the less units you have left over to wrest map control from your opponents reinforcements and when you morph less banelings your roach and zergling count do not do their job at a comparable rate.
Basically the baneling is something you need against terrans and by the looks of it you might want to go banelings in zvp aswell. So here i have a major power unit that i dislike that suicides and instantly looses its potential.
They dont make sense for zerg, thats exactly one of my major gripes with it, The pinnacle of evolution doesnt suicide. The swarm shouldnt be relying on death because death is where life ends.
of course banelings make sense for zerg.. wtf.. units have no free will and do whatever they are told - there's no situation where a suiciding unit makes more sense. and they don't make you lose map control, because the very nature of zerg in sc2 is that a complete trade of forces means zerg came out ahead, as they are expected to have higher income and much greater production potential. in addition, you don't always lose every baneling, and often the banelings will be lost but the rest of your force will be nearly intact..
if you don't like the unit, fine, that's entirely up to you.. but your reasoning isn't reasonable.
I've noticed the trend for mass marine pushes as well. My biggest issue isn't that banelings are suicide units, it's that I don't have enough production to replace my army. You can hardly blame banelings for this; it's my fault for not throwing up a decent amount of hatches and/or missing injects.
When used correctly banelings have incredbile cost-effectiveness. I like throwing them into major ground battles in zvz especially because of the mind game they play on my opponent (blings COULD do a ton of damage, so I have to retreat into bad positioning!)
EPT
