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Strategic innovation in Starcraft 2 comes in 3 stages: first, speculation; second, experimentation; and third, refinement. Speculation involves theorizing about what areas of the game space might be more profitable based on rough game principles. Experimentation involves trying out these ideas in practice to see where they work best and what problems they face, and refinement involves making the smallest possible changes at a time to address the problems encountered during experimentation, while trying to maintain the spirit of the initial idea from the speculation stage. This blog will be entirely the first stage; in the coming weeks, as finals finish and I have time to dedicate to Starcraft again, I'll follow through on stages 2 and 3.
The Background
TvP is in a funny state currently. It's not necessarily imbalanced, and if it is, most people will say it is against Protoss; but the match-up is still somewhat awkward to approach from a Terran's point of view. Since WoL, Protoss has developed a much stronger set of early all-ins, to the point that many Terrans are avoiding the classic one-barracks expand for difficulty defending it. A few still barracks expand, relying on excellent scouting and game sense to hold off the wide range of all-ins available to current Protoss. But most choose to either reaper expand, ensuring that whatever threats the Protoss might have in store can be scouted and held off with ease, or CC first into lots of barracks units, simply accepting the risk of an early all-in and moving on. Of course, there's always a few fringe builds, but those three openings describe the vast majority of TvPs (at least that I've seen).
Because virtually every single Terran build is still built around the classic WoL timing of hitting with a lot of barracks units, stim, and medivacs around ten minutes. It's somewhat reasonable to build everything around this timing; it was such a strong timing in WoL, and it's only gotten stronger from the improved HotS medivacs. Preventing the Protoss's third is the most important way to gain a midgame advantage right now, and speed medivacs allow the Terran to spread out the Protoss army so that three bases is too much space for a Protoss to defend. In other words, the ten-minute stim+medivac push is a good goal; but if getting to it is a little more difficult now, is there perhaps another midgame to aim for that is more easily defended in the early game?
Here is where the speculation begins. Marine+ghost is, theoretically, good against most of the early pressure options Protoss can throw out. The goal would be fast 2 bases with 3 barracks and a ghost academy. Add-ons would be either one TL/one reactor/one naked or one TL/two reactor, depending on precisely how the economy timings work out. Against a warpgate or warpgate/immortal all-in, ghosts can just EMP immortals, sentries, and stalkers to help with the hold. Against stargate, ghosts can EMP oracles (or theoretically, phoenixes and MS cores) and use their bonus damage against light to defend with ease. Probably the most difficult hold would be a blink all-in, but if scouted, the tech lab barracks could favor marauders instead of ghosts and, hopefully, defend without too much trouble. (I've never had a good idea of how to defend a blink all-in, but I generally have an easier time if I'm focusing on getting out units rather than teching to medivacs.)
But what's the new midgame goal, if not the ten minute medivac timing? Most Protoss tend to rush out some X factor to defend the ten minute medivac+stim push, most commonly colossus. And of course, marine+ghost struggles significantly against colossus armies, so there'll have to be a good alternative timing in order to push out in the midgame and take an advantage. Of course, it will be difficult to find out exactly how this plays out until the experimentation stage, but the most promising window seems like it would be to push before colossi can be out. That means pushing sooner, maybe at the 8 or 9 minute mark, and trying to get some damage done before the opponent's colossi come out.
The Plan
-Take a fast natural expansion more quickly and safely than Terrans usually can
-Defend any incoming Protoss all-ins with greater ease than normal barracks openings generally are able
-Push out at 8 or 9 minutes with lots of marines and ghosts, hopefully EMPing the MS core before a nexus cannon can go down, and kill off probes in the Protoss natural. The marines might die, but try to keep the ghosts alive. Take a third base behind.
-For macro play, go ghosts, then double upgrades, then medivacs with the gas. For aggro play, go ghosts, then medivacs and perhaps a single engineering bay.
-Hopefully the fast third and early push can secure you an economic advantage. For aggressive play, follow up with ~8 barracks of MMM production, vikings as necessary. For macro play, follow up with 5 barracks of MMM production and a fourth CC.
Potential issues
-Ghosts might not be ready in time to defend some all-ins. It'd be nice to be able to gasless expand, then add on 2 more barracks, then get gas, then get add-ons for the rax, then get ghosts. But it might be necessary to delay barracks add-ons, or even to get gas before expanding, in order to get ghosts out in time. This could be a prohibitively high gas cost at such an early stage in the game.
-Certain gateway pressures might be able to contain this push at the Terran's natural, preventing a push out from the marines+ghosts and allowing the Protoss to take superior economy while medivacs aren't out. Medivacs give a MMM army the power to engage more than once, since stims can be healed again. Because of this, any MM army without medivacs is a one-hit wonder, so engaging the Protoss before reaching his base is going to be less than ideal.
-Blink all-ins will still be an issue. EMPing stalkers is great, but won't be the greatest help against a blink all-in, since they can just blink out and regain their shields again. Perhaps in experimentation it will turn out blink all-ins are surprisingly easy to hold, but I would expect this particular all-in to still cause significant issues.
All of these potential issues will be sorted out in the experimentation and refinement. It may be that there is no viable way to actualize this speculation into a real, workable build. But if it succeeded, it could radically change TvP. Currently Protoss depend on the fact that Terran almost never sends out attacks before something like ten minutes, so they use this time to expand, tech, and get out defenses just in time to defend the big push. Sometimes a Terran will toss out an anemic attacking force like, say, 6 marines and a widow mine early in the game, and the Protoss struggles to defend because it came before the Protoss planned to defend. If aggressive options exist at 8 or 9 minutes, Protoss must be ready to defend sooner, forcing them to tech less aggressively even if Terran isn't, in fact, doing the earlier ghost push. That means less stargate and DT play, slower weapons and armor upgrades, and faster colossi just in case the Terran is going to be aggressive sooner.
It'll be a couple weeks before finals finish and I get around to the experimentation stage. Perhaps by then the TvP metagame will have radically changed, and all this will be useless. But if you enjoyed this, and are curious how these ideas get fleshed out on the ladder, check out the blogs section in a couple weeks!
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not afraid of fast colsi?
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Sounds kind of cute, but I would agree with your thoughts that the ghosts would come out too late for a handful of Protoss allins, as well as ghosts are expensive as fuck so your third CC and/or upgrades and/or medivacs are going to be later than normal, so if you don't do a considerable amount of damage you're going into the late game in not the greatest position. I'd like to see you provide replays of good games if you would still argue otherwise though 
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On June 04 2013 12:10 Race is Terran wrote:
not afraid of fast colsi?
Oh, of course I'm afraid of fast colossi. On the other hand, I don't remember the last time I saw a Protoss go for one base colossus, since there's so many stronger all-ins available now.
On June 04 2013 13:45 Grobyc wrote:Sounds kind of cute, but I would agree with your thoughts that the ghosts would come out too late for a handful of Protoss allins, as well as ghosts are expensive as fuck so your third CC and/or upgrades and/or medivacs are going to be later than normal, so if you don't do a considerable amount of damage you're going into the late game in not the greatest position. I'd like to see you provide replays of good games if you would still argue otherwise though
Thing is, it's not the first time anybody's gone for ghosts before medivacs. It used to be somewhat common back before the EMP nerf, and then the little mini-EMPs were too small and the ten minute timing push was discovered, so everybody went for the stim+medivac push and ghosts came whenever you got scared of templar. But considering so much of Protoss's strength right now is built around energy-based units, it seems like the old strats might have a chance of coming back.
That said, you might be right about the timing. Back in the day nobody did fast 2-base ghosts for all-in defense, they did it for a timing push that came out a little faster than medivacs and punished sentry defenses. So it might still be a decent timing push, but it may not be as safe as I'd hope. Still, it seems like it has to be at least as safe as the usual pure barracks+medivac stuff. Certainly the third base will be delayed, but that's just because you're able to macro out a MUCH scarier army out of 3 barracks, so I can't imagine the push would go THAT badly.
Replays as I have them, but as mentioned, that might not be for a couple weeks.
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Really weird seeing one of these in blogs. Shit, this is more detailed than half of the stuff that pops up in the strategy section, lol.
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You overlooked one of the Potential issues. It is really easy to scout: "Oh ghost academy, guess time to collosi rush", or whatever the counter will turn out to be(meaning, it will only be usefull until a counter has been found, as it is very committing to go ghost). But maybe it could shift the metagame to a point where protoss has to spend 100 energy on a hallucination, that would be the potential best outcome i see.
Also, ghost buildtime is enorm, don`t underestimate, I highly doubt you will be able to reach the 8-9minute timing, because you will most likely not have more than 3 ghost ready.
Maybe, if it interrests you, I absolutly love TvP at the moment. I basicly go in the match up with a mindset of "yeah, freewin". So I stole Lucifrons build, 12 rax 12 gas reaper, second rax before orbital, straight to reaper harrass, ending up with 5 reapers. 5 is the magic number, pretty easy to snipe stalkers with it. You can outrun a mothership core. If you loose 3 of the reapers, you still have 2 to scout for all all ins.
I had a game vs proxy oracle, where I killed his frigging nexus with 5 reapers. Also, they have to use their nexus cannon to hold of the 5 reapers, which robs them of a recall poke. Now if they expanded, you can manage to force 2 nexus cannons. And then, I simply do not wait for medivacs, but rather add another barracks sooner and go out with marine maraudor, when you reach the natural they might use their last nexus cannon, you can go into the main (if protoss went sentry vs 5 reaper he should have lost by now), and do heavy damage.
And that is just the opening phase where I feel terran has a heavy advantage, also, I wish there was some other way to open up, but anything else just seems to much worse and scary.
As for evolution: I stopped using vikings. The Gas they cost equals 3 maraudors, they block one of your starports. I rather have an even more beefy bio mass and even more heal and mobility. Turns out, lots of maraudors and additional medivacs can do the job of a viking better than a viking, what a beautiful but useless unit.
Anyways, good luck, keep us posted. I might gonna start and try to add banshees into the match up once I have enough apm to controll them probably instead of the additional maraudors, but on the other hand, I really see no point in fixing what is not broken.
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On June 04 2013 17:49 HaRuHi wrote:
You overlooked one of the Potential issues. It is really easy to scout: "Oh ghost academy, guess time to collosi rush", or whatever the counter will turn out to be(meaning, it will only be usefull until a counter has been found, as it is very committing to go ghost). But maybe it could shift the metagame to a point where protoss has to spend 100 energy on a hallucination, that would be the potential best outcome i see.
Also, ghost buildtime is enorm, don`t underestimate, I highly doubt you will be able to reach the 8-9minute timing, because you will most likely not have more than 3 ghost ready.
Maybe, if it interrests you, I absolutly love TvP at the moment. I basicly go in the match up with a mindset of "yeah, freewin". So I stole Lucifrons build, 12 rax 12 gas reaper, second rax before orbital, straight to reaper harrass, ending up with 5 reapers. 5 is the magic number, pretty easy to snipe stalkers with it. You can outrun a mothership core. If you loose 3 of the reapers, you still have 2 to scout for all all ins.
I had a game vs proxy oracle, where I killed his frigging nexus with 5 reapers. Also, they have to use their nexus cannon to hold of the 5 reapers, which robs them of a recall poke. Now if they expanded, you can manage to force 2 nexus cannons. And then, I simply do not wait for medivacs, but rather add another barracks sooner and go out with marine maraudor, when you reach the natural they might use their last nexus cannon, you can go into the main (if protoss went sentry vs 5 reaper he should have lost by now), and do heavy damage.
And that is just the opening phase where I feel terran has a heavy advantage, also, I wish there was some other way to open up, but anything else just seems to much worse and scary.
As for evolution: I stopped using vikings. The Gas they cost equals 3 maraudors, they block one of your starports. I rather have an even more beefy bio mass and even more heal and mobility. Turns out, lots of maraudors and additional medivacs can do the job of a viking better than a viking, what a beautiful but useless unit.
Anyways, good luck, keep us posted. I might gonna start and try to add banshees into the match up once I have enough apm to controll them probably instead of the additional maraudors, but on the other hand, I really see no point in fixing what is not broken.
I don't think this will die to colossi rushes that easily anyway. Anything that delays the starport has a little trouble with colossi, and certainly you won't be pushing at 8 or 9 minutes against 1-base colossus, but with bunkers and a shift into marauders you could certainly hold a one-base colossus push. Not to mention they might scout ghosts, but there's no way they'd scout in time to still be on track for a one-base colossus push anyway.
In terms of "counters," I think the response would probably be just playing a little less greedy, getting defenses out earlier, and relying less on caster units to defend. That means fewer mothership core/oracle/sentry/HT defenses, and more raw gateway units. Protoss might even rush out a colossus without range in time to defend the push, but if Protoss has delayed upgrades and useful tech that much just to defend the push, I'd say the damage has already been done.
Maybe, if it interrests you, I absolutly love TvP at the moment. I basicly go in the match up with a mindset of "yeah, freewin". So I stole Lucifrons build, 12 rax 12 gas reaper, second rax before orbital, straight to reaper harrass, ending up with 5 reapers. 5 is the magic number, pretty easy to snipe stalkers with it. You can outrun a mothership core. If you loose 3 of the reapers, you still have 2 to scout for all all ins.
I had a game vs proxy oracle, where I killed his frigging nexus with 5 reapers. Also, they have to use their nexus cannon to hold of the 5 reapers, which robs them of a recall poke. Now if they expanded, you can manage to force 2 nexus cannons. And then, I simply do not wait for medivacs, but rather add another barracks sooner and go out with marine maraudor, when you reach the natural they might use their last nexus cannon, you can go into the main (if protoss went sentry vs 5 reaper he should have lost by now), and do heavy damage.
And that is just the opening phase where I feel terran has a heavy advantage, also, I wish there was some other way to open up, but anything else just seems to much worse and scary.
Glad that's working for you! Personally I've found that 12 rax 12 gas reaper openings don't go that well for me, particular going for >2 reapers. At that point I'm investing so much resources and production to reapers that I feel like I have to do damage, and whatever later midgame push I go for is going to be way weaker. The nice part of 12 rax 12 gas reaper is the scouting it offers, of course, but the problem is that even if I go into his base and don't see DT tech, I can't reliably say "He isn't going for DTs" unless I can confirm his gas is being spent elsewhere. If I just scout some gateways, a robo, and a natural expand, he could be going standard – or there could be a dark shrine or proxy stargate somewhere that I just couldn't find.
As for evolution: I stopped using vikings. The Gas they cost equals 3 maraudors, they block one of your starports. I rather have an even more beefy bio mass and even more heal and mobility. Turns out, lots of maraudors and additional medivacs can do the job of a viking better than a viking, what a beautiful but useless unit.
Obvious question: How do you deal with large numbers of colossus? Plenty of people will just go heavy bio against 1, 2, or even 3 colossus. But splash damage scales better than pretty much anything else in this game, so once there's 6, 7, or 8 colossus you can really only kill that army from the air. Generally people get vikings when they see colossi, not because it's impossible to kill a colossus army without vikings, but because in case the Protoss commits hard to a colossus army, the Terran needs to be able to respond with a big enough viking cloud to kill that off before their whole bio army is dead or their whole viking cloud is killed by stalkers.
Anyways, good luck, keep us posted. I might gonna start and try to add banshees into the match up once I have enough apm to controll them probably instead of the additional maraudors, but on the other hand, I really see no point in fixing what is not broken.
Good luck! Banshees are great and underused TvP, although they're probably not as good these days as they used to be since blink, stargate play, and high templars are all so common. I'd still say multi-pronged banshee harass is stronger than multi-pronged medivac harass any day!
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Italy12246 Posts
Ghost timings have fallen out of fashion with the EMP nerf, because straight up medivac timings have
1) An army that is at least just as strong
2) The potential of dropping.
These two factors make ghost before medivac a sub optimal build.
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On June 05 2013 08:09 Teoita wrote:
Ghost timings have fallen out of fashion with the EMP nerf, because straight up medivac timings have
1) An army that is at least just as strong
2) The potential of dropping.
These two factors make ghost before medivac a sub optimal build.
I'd agree that was the reasoning behind favoring medivacs before ghosts in the days of the EMP nerf. On the other hand, that was a long time ago. I would qualify that reasoning a little bit, talking about advantages and disadvantages of each.
Medivac before ghost builds are:
-better against colossus builds
-better against pure gateway armies
-more mobile because of drop potential
-more sustainable because of healing
Ghost before medivac builds are:
-able to hit faster than medivac timings
-better against templar and stargate play
-more defensible against a variety of all-ins
Therefore I'd disagree with a term like "sub-optimal" because that implies that medivac builds are just better than ghost builds in every regard. In reality each has its own advantages. I'm hardly arguing that medivac builds should go out of style because they're inferior; just that, in the first place, ghost timings might be good against Protoss that are expecting medivac builds, and in the second place, once Protoss learn to deal with ghost timings, the Terran will be better off because the Protoss is having to account for more possibilities in Terran play.
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EPT
