Thoughts on rarely used units - Page 8

On October 02 2025 00:23 mtcn77 wrote:

You can see a psistorm coming from a million miles away(you play zerg and have overlords) while protoss can't(early game advantage is at zerg), corsairs are dodging scourge, or at least that is what they expect of you.
You swoop in with a queen, do a little ensnaring at 9 range and then... swoop away. If you think mutas are fast, queens come up faster. I'm not saying at a base race situation, they fill up different sections of the game which lowers chances of them meeting in the field. HTs are heavy late while queens are right after hydralisk if you dedicate yourself to it.
You can cast ensnare on multiple targets you know? Vertically you can ensnare units spread across 5 minerals(wait, I didn't assume for L shaped junctions). Given how populated the mineral patches are, you can really throw a wrench into the protoss economy with queens and that is just the surface level idea.
PS: let's say you killed 5 drones with your HT(I'm being generous). You replace the 5 drones from the same hatchery in 75.6 seconds so everything resumes to normal. Then, we have to count the mining loss, that is 433+250=683 minerals loss.
Now let us take the alternative, you go to the protoss main, or natural. You ensnare the vertical strip of minerals right at the center. You ensnare just 10 probes(again, being very generous to protoss). In 25.2s, that bunch of probes would mine 245 minerals. You can run away from a psistorm, you cannot run away from an ensnare.

On October 02 2025 02:06 RogueTheGOAT wrote:

245 minerals worth of economic damage in the mid game is not particularly impressive, especially since it requires the Zerg player to have complete air dominance. Those ensnares would be better off used in army fights where if you can kill 3 Zealots or 2 Dragoons, you've accomplished more.

On October 02 2025 09:20 puppykiller wrote:
Since we are on the topic of Larva versus Bisu, I think Bisu could really have had a much higher chance of winning his match had he just built a fleetbeacon to upgrade his corsairs. The zerg air carpace upgrades made the sairs pretty bad at killing scourge and overlords and dweb would have allowed him to blanket the enemy units on the small islands to support his drops.


It wouldn't have guaranteed a win but I think it would have opened up a lot of tactical options for him late game like:

Drop 4 reavers, dweb the area zerg can target the reavers from, snipe the hatchery, run away.

Or: Dweb the island with your control group of corsairs, kill/ chase away the overlords. Drop 8 DT and kill the hatchery, nydus and/or drones.

On October 02 2025 09:38 mtcn77 wrote:

You know, you could be mistaking it for another match. Larva kept the 4 main ones on the coastline for most of the game. Having the islands would have made zero difference which is ironically the fundamental point in a recent shine vs light game. You cannot rut out the zerg by taking the islands. It does not work that way. Either you play a leta rush, bisu fundamentally did the most of it for a protoss, or fail which bisu did since corsairs can't attack the ground like wraiths in the same rush period.
PS: TvT battlereports were very precious. There were one inwhich for the longest part of the game the mech player seemed ahead, but the player who did the leta rush before it got calles that won in the end. I really wish I could comb through battlereports again in their epic form with graphics.

On October 02 2025 10:16 mtcn77 wrote:

I kind of answered that in my reply with shine vs light commentary.

On October 02 2025 15:07 puppykiller wrote:


Well...

Correct me if I'm missing something.

Claim1:
"You cannot rut out the zerg by taking the islands."
"Having the islands would have made zero difference"

Justification:
"It does not work that way"




Claim2:
"Either you play a leta rush, bisu fundamentally did the most of it for a protoss, or fail which bisu did"

Justification: (refering to an argument I am not making about how this strategy isnt good in the early game)
which bisu did since corsairs can't attack the ground like wraiths in the same rush period


If you want to address my argument I think the best way would be to reference pro games in which Dweb is actually used (especially if you can find one played on a map that is similar to the match in question). Also I really think it's a bad idea to reference a TvZ match as part of your explanation of why Bisu lost. TvZ has a very different dynamics in the late game than PvZ because terrans and protoss interact with hive tech zerg very differently.

On October 02 2025 22:16 puppykiller wrote:
Ok good to know that I missunderstood what you were trying to say.

However, I would still (and I imagine almost anyone who plays or has played a lot of starcraft would still) say that TvZ games (let alone TvT...) are not helpful for analysis of this PvZ game between Bisu and Larva.

The late game 'win conditions' for ZvP are different than for ZvT. A map without much manuverabillity that is easy to defiler push through the center of is really busted for zerg late game versus terran so zergs don't have to worry as much about islands and a war of attrition. You can be behind on bases as a zerg and cast swarm in the terran's natural and steal a win, you cant do that versus protoss. Terrans main defence against that is maintaining map control with agression (which is hard to do on that map due to the limited avenues of attack) and delaying the zerg army with small groups of units while casting irradiates. The scary zerg units die to irradiates, mines, and roving terran armies long before they ever make it near the terran bases if the terran is playing well.

It's very different from PvZ where players can (if they like this play style) attempt to maintain even bases to zerg, camp those bases with cost effective spell casters and reactively try to kill zerg armies and drops at their bases by utilyzing preperation and anticipation skills. Have you ever watched Snow play a PvZ? If I'm remembering correctly Snow had a win versus Effort that showcases this play style in the ASL as well. This is not super advanced Starcraft theory, it's conventional wisdom for most people who have played either of these matchups at even a mid-tier level. It's ok to dispute each of these matchup's conventional wisdom about how they should be played if you want to, but you need to at the very least show examples of the matchups themselves (in this case ZvP and certainly not ZvT let alone TvT...).

On October 02 2025 23:15 puppykiller wrote:
I can't really see how any... ANY of those points have anything to do with what I wrote...

On October 02 2025 23:15 puppykiller wrote:
I can't really see how any... ANY of those points have anything to do with what I wrote...

On October 03 2025 23:27 TMNT wrote:

He may not have the intention but he's basically a troll on this forum. Presenting crazy ideas and such, while claiming progamers don't know how to play and should think "out of the box" like him. On top of that he writes cryptic sentences, sometimes grammatically incorrect, which are very hard to understand. You read but you don't know what the hell he's refferring to or can't see the relevance between his first and second sentences let alone the relevance to your posts, etc. I believe mods let this guy ran rampant on the forum to drive traffic lol.

Sometimes I read his posts as a kind of entertainment, like trying to solve a puzzle. Basically here (I think) he's trying to say:

- Bisu taking the islands won't solve the problem, referring to a Shine vs Light game in which they took 4 ground bases + 2 islands each, but Light still lost. He's wrong though, Terran's island defence power is nowhere near Protoss. Light died to mass Hydra drops on Goliath Tanks on his islands. Imagine doing that kind of drops against Protoss lol.

- Protoss should take note from the "Leta rush" (I believe he refers to a 2 Port Wraith rush or something similar). But he doesn't specify how, and then he basically admits that it's not adaptable for Protoss because Sairs... don't hit ground lol. But take note still he just wants you to.

- I have no idea what he's trying to say with the TvT game lol.

As for your question, yes. Getting dweb would be useful. Tastosis are quite spot on in their cast. Bisu either has to tech to Fleet Beacon (dweb + carriers) or take the islands sooner to win the attrition war. In fact, Bisu already succesfully used corsairs dweb reaver into carriers strat on this map against Zerg already, but for some reason he just tried to brute force his way in this game vs Larva.

On October 03 2025 23:27 TMNT wrote:

He may not have the intention but he's basically a troll on this forum. Presenting crazy ideas and such, while claiming progamers don't know how to play and should think "out of the box" like him. On top of that he writes cryptic sentences, sometimes grammatically incorrect, which are very hard to understand. You read but you don't know what the hell he's refferring to or can't see the relevance between his first and second sentences let alone the relevance to your posts, etc. I believe mods let this guy ran rampant on the forum to drive traffic lol.

Sometimes I read his posts as a kind of entertainment, like trying to solve a puzzle. Basically here (I think) he's trying to say:

- Bisu taking the islands won't solve the problem, referring to a Shine vs Light game in which they took 4 ground bases + 2 islands each, but Light still lost. He's wrong though, Terran's island defence power is nowhere near Protoss. Light died to mass Hydra drops on Goliath Tanks on his islands. Imagine doing that kind of drops against Protoss lol.

- Protoss should take note from the "Leta rush" (I believe he refers to a 2 Port Wraith rush or something similar). But he doesn't specify how, and then he basically admits that it's not adaptable for Protoss because Sairs... don't hit ground lol. But take note still he just wants you to.

- I have no idea what he's trying to say with the TvT game lol.

As for your question, yes. Getting dweb would be useful. Tastosis are quite spot on in their cast. Bisu either has to tech to Fleet Beacon (dweb + carriers) or take the islands sooner to win the attrition war. In fact, Bisu already succesfully used corsairs dweb reaver into carriers strat on this map against Zerg already, but for some reason he just tried to brute force his way in this game vs Larva.