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On October 21 2009 08:41 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:Show nested quote +On October 21 2009 08:10 musashi wrote:On October 21 2009 07:54 Another_Pro wrote:On October 21 2009 07:40 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:On October 21 2009 06:44 sob3k wrote:
150 is ALOT of energy, try this. You will be surprised how freaking long the cooldown is. I don't think any build based on expecting to be able to SB all a mech build's tanks is a good idea. To add onto this, assuming you have the queens to match his tanks with all the energy at the correct amount you would also need to micro them and individually snipe each tank, and get out of Goliath range before the queen dies. and if you miss a broodling or 3 your in trouble. It would deal a LOT with luck of him having bad unit positioning and you perfectly executing your attack when it happens. If you want to use Queen's I think ensnaring SK/bio Terran and raping the slow MnM's/vessels with lurkers and scourge is a much better plan. The energy costs are much more reasonable, and the effect is dramatic (negating stim+ inability to escape from lurkers/scourge). I 100% agree with this and it requires only 2-3 queens to be used effectively, and the spell is instantly cast. If you click directly on a unit (and the unit is still alive when the ability is cast) the spell will follow the unit and never miss. Just another Plus. (Occasionally if the queen dies the moment it casts the spell disintegrates tho) You don't have to micro them individually because you are cloning. You don't miss any because you have parasite. Even if everyone of your queens die it is still cost effective as tanks cost more than queens and it leaves their goliath's to perish fighting pure hydra. Though as I said if you clone from the correct angle you will only lose a few. Cost and time are different. Cost wise, yes queens are better than a tank, but you also have to wait over a minute for the queen to have enough energy to POTENTIALLY be cost effective against a tank, but then we come back to a queen dying before it gets off its parasite. Cloning 6+ queens requires the perfect information of his placement and still requires you to somehow not lose a few of them to goliaths because their tank count will STILL be much higher than it would have been if the Terran had seen a muta threat and upped his Goliath count and if you parasite you just put 1 broodling back around a minute. Keep in mind that cloning also has to be done while flanking with your army properly. I won't mention macroing because usually I will have upwards of 8 hatcheries and 5 bases so I can respawn an army almost instantly. Edit: and to fix any quoting issues in above post, my first /quote has the / outside of the bracket, so just fix it and the whole quote fixes.
The point of this strategy is that yes, the queen takes a long time to gather energy, but as Day9 points out, when terran goes mech he is at a low point in terms of his ability to influence the midgame. So it's abusing this time period that the queens are gathering energy. And zerg can do this because he doesn't need an army at that point since terran has nothing to push with. It is as T's army reaches critical mass that zerg's army begins to manifest itself fully and upgrades for the hydra finish as well as queen's energy.
Something that Day9 also points out and perhaps I should have stated for those who have not listened to the podcast, is that you are not without hydralisk while the terran is massing. You are not magically containing T. Before the lair even begins you have a good 10 hydra for base defense. Again, I was not clear about this in the OP, but this number at least doubles as you are preparing for queens, so that vultures are no problem and terran cannot bring out his big guns early.
As far as getting the parasite off, I usually do that using terrain. ex. at most nats you there is a nice little cliff perch for the queen to float up to and parasite from. If the army is on the move it is not difficult on most maps to find a little high ground to parasite from. Note that it is much more micro intensive to parasite a moving ball than one sitting at home. One nice thing about parasite is because a queen can do it almost immediately after spawning you can always make some new queens instead of wasting 1 or 2 of your main group that are saving for broodling. Working off 3-4 bases this is affordable.
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You keep bring up what Day said, however he never mentions queens or their viability for a reason. They aren't cost effective. There is several timing windows vs mech Terran depending on what they do. I find that right as they are expanding they face a unit deficiency. They usually have maybe some gol/tank and you can usually hydra/ling it really hard for a second and stall their expo if not kill it. That is one of my favorite methods. Usually this timing is moments after their initial vulture harass.
There mid game is decent you have to pay attention to their movement and catch the Terran attacking and flank properly when he is out of position. However even their mid game push is decently strong. The spot Day9 is talking about is the window roughly 4:30 to 7:30ish That is the time right after vulture harass is done and hes entering two base macro mode.
The point I am trying to make is, that if the Terran scouts properly and doesn't see MUTALISK he will only make turrets just so he can have time to make the necessary amount of Goliath's. Besides that he will use two base gas for roughly 3 minutes to produce tanks. LOTS OF TANKS. You would need literally two control groups to stop that. But the other issue is this. Because he is tank heavy, he will also have vultures laying mines which also hurt your armies effectiveness, they need to kill the tanks and not get blown up by 30 mines which becomes even harder. I fully understand that Hydras > vultures, however the tanks are not all going to die, in fact I think with your queen you would be lucky to gas half the tanks.
However I think the question I should be asking is this. Is your goal to crush his push using Hydra/Queen, or is your goal to break into his base before his push and kill him? I think this strategy only has place in the latter because it would be too hard to actually stop the push midgame and micro flank attacks at the same time, and that is hoping you get all the broodlings off correctly and don't fuck up your cloning of queens and accidentally broodling the same tank 6 times (I noticed in your rep your APM is barely over 100) I don't think you can accurately say how easy that is when I am a 200+ APM Player and still have trouble cloning scourge accurately sometimes before half of my 12 control group go to crash into the same clicked Mutalisk.
But if I am preparing on onslaught into the Terran expo or main, the broodling COULD be a very useful unit to take away most of the tanks that will fuck up my hydra/ling army and it might even break an expo or destroy a main. But besides that it is a very all in strategy that you need virtually perfect information to pull off properly. You need at least 3 parasites to see what is on his cliff in his expo and at the front of his choke. If you get that off without him realizing something strange is about to happen then congrats. But I know that I usually hear or notice a parasite going off, it kind of makes my unit selection glow T_T and at that point, I usually just kill the unit if I can spare it.
I honestly want to try out this strategy and try killing the Terran before he moves out and I will let you know how this works, but I admit I am questioning how effective it can be T_T I will post reps tomorrow.
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In response to Chef and Rebirth,
I apologize for the previous confusion.
You're right, if you do not see the lack of goliaths via scouting and perpetual surveillance you will probably not have time to switch to muta fast enough. However, assuming you are of equal or similar skill levels you should know if he doesn't have any goliath, or has nothing but goliath, just from well placed ovies and maybe an early parasite. Because the ball amasses slowly, it is easy to see what it's made of, and you can react accordingly.
In the OP I say to pump nothing but hydra while the queens are brooding in the corner. However, if you see that relatively few goliaths are being made and he is leaning on the side of tank vulture, get a damn spire! Pump muta, not hydra.
So as a result, even the name of my OP is flawed, it should be queen timing attack, using whatever unit is most advisable, muta or hydra, or both. I only said hydra initially because that is what you would use against the orthodox goliath tank, and it is what I find myself using most often.
And my thanks to Rebirth for trying it.
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On October 21 2009 06:42 mOnion wrote:
watch Zero vs Skyhigh from Blizzcon.
It's on Colosseum ll by the way
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if only queens have consume lol. 150 energy is too long to wait for. i prefer using mutalisks because their effect is immediate and forces terran to build turrets.
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If queens had consume, I'd call imbalance for my own race rofl. Our midgame would become so god damn strong with a high power spellcaster like that.
and Muaashi the issue with switching to muta is that you already heavily invested in your queens, and they are made almost useless with the goliath count and could of been that many more mutas if you played standard.
I will say I DO see this as having potential in a timing build, they are better for tank sniping then mutalisk, but they are a 1shot 1kill 2 minute cooldown, while Muta don't have a cooldown or limitation like that.
Also, just so you know. If he is Goliath heavy, Ensnare does NOT slow down Goliath attack, only Goliath movement speed. The same goes for Siege Tanks. So the muta switch would be down 9 Muta without much benefit (Just a few stray broodlings before the Goliath rape the fuck out of all the queens)
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On October 21 2009 12:45 RebirthOfLeGenD wrote:
If queens had consume, I'd call imbalance for my own race rofl. Our midgame would become so god damn strong with a high power spellcaster like that.
and Muaashi the issue with switching to muta is that you already heavily invested in your queens, and they are made almost useless with the goliath count and could of been that many more mutas if you played standard.
I will say I DO see this as having potential in a timing build, they are better for tank sniping then mutalisk, but they are a 1shot 1kill 2 minute cooldown, while Muta don't have a cooldown or limitation like that.
Also, just so you know. If he is Goliath heavy, Ensnare does NOT slow down Goliath attack, only Goliath movement speed. The same goes for Siege Tanks. So the muta switch would be down 9 Muta without much benefit (Just a few stray broodlings before the Goliath rape the fuck out of all the queens)
As far as adaptation is concerned, yes, if the game ends up being you with muta queen vs him with pure goliath, you lose. But what I have been saying is you watch terran. You watch him mold the ball. Then you make units accordingly. If he starts with goliaths, that guarantees goliaths. Meaning you can go hydra queen. Snipe the tanks and thats that.
If he goes tanks from the beginning and shows no sign of massing gols. Get the spire. You already have the hydra and den from Day's opening so if he starts packing gols, you can make revert to hydra. You have the economy.
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this actually has some viability vs lower players on maps like blue storm where they have to push uphill... broodling/ensnare and engage with hydras when they're just crossing the gap on the map = pretty much guaranteed win
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I tried a hydra ultra queen strategy against mech a few iccup seasons back.
I designed this strategy for God's Garden because you get easy 3 gas. The idea is to mass up ultrahydra and wait for the T to push you, then snipe his tanks with broodling and roll him.
This is definitely D level, but the T keeps his money down well enough.
http://www.repdepot.net/replay.php?id=22814
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Calgary25980 Posts
There is no way this will work. You will die to the first attack every time.
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Sounds like newbie dreams to me... a queen costs the same amount as mutalisk, and personally I'd take a control group of mutalisks over a control group of queens in any situation that doesn't involve archons. And just like others have said already in this topic, you really can't afford to get "cute" versus a mech army... the mech ball is just too strong. In order to defeat a decent mech player you're going to need as many fighting units as possible. Also, if you're going pure hydras against any decent mech player he's going to scan your army composition and know exactly what to do... he's just going to add an extra machine shop and start pumping pure tank/vulture. So basically I'm going to have to agree with Chef like 100%...
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Remember Day9's advice (and I'm paraphrasing here) - you cannot win against mech by being "cute," you simply need to have a lot of shit.
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one thing i am curious about is how viable zvp queens are for sniping the templar..i still haven't forgotten bisu losing to that build. But at the same time, muta just seems far less risky...still useful even if they push ealrier than you expect, though at the same time you typically can't snipe as many or as safely i think..maybe queens are better than muta if you know they are going mass goon + templar? like fast goon range or something? most places where they have enough goons to frustrate muta sniping and still have gas for templar seem pretty late though. So i really wonder what prompted that player to use queens against bisu.
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On October 21 2009 15:39 knightpraetor wrote:
one thing i am curious about is how viable zvp queens are for sniping the templar..i still haven't forgotten bisu losing to that build. But at the same time, muta just seems far less risky...still useful even if they push ealrier than you expect, though at the same time you typically can't snipe as many or as safely i think..maybe queens are better than muta if you know they are going mass goon + templar? like fast goon range or something? most places where they have enough goons to frustrate muta sniping and still have gas for templar seem pretty late though. So i really wonder what prompted that player to use queens against bisu.
Problem with broodling queens in ZvP is that you need to make them much earlier than muta when you don't have the resources to produce many units. The energy cost of Broodling is too high when compared to the cost of the queen.
Another problem is difficulty of actually using broodling. You need to use parasite or a cliff and even then queen might get killed. Requires a lot more APM than mutas.
The most useful thing a queen can do in ZvP is probably parasite. Zealot, goon, templar and archon all have vision of 7 or 8, so you can see a big part of the P army with just one parasite. This will help you tremendously when deciding your army composition and when you have to templar snipe with mutas. Usually the Z user will only have a vague idea where the templars are, but with parasite you'll know exactly where they are! This will help your mutas survive into another battle.
When you make 2 queens you get a new parasite charge every 50 seconds since it takes 100 seconds to accumulate 75 energy. If you create the 2 queens so that they hatch 50 seconds apart from each other you pretty much always have a parasite spell ready.
Take into consideration that you don't have to parasite only the ground army, but corsairs too. Parasiting sairs has great synergy with scourge which can now intercept the sair before they attack you.
The best thing about parasited units is that the P will not separate them from the main army. If he does that then you basically have a 75 energy death spell.
The queen cost is not tremendous (200/200) and a queen's nest. You can probably keep them alive for the rest of the game, since parasite has a range of 11.
The only problem I can think of is the timing of the queens. The smartest timing is somewhere before your mutas come out, but where exactly is a mystery.
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the ONLY way I could see this working is if you went for some kind of nat break with the queens weakening key points in the terran mech defense. The earlier the attack could start, the better it would work simply because building a lot of queens isn't cost-effective in the long term. if you went for a 2hatch lair build vs terran but went for around 4 queens instead of muta (after putting your spire down first) with an emphasis on speedlings i could see it working as a surprise, plus you'd have to build the queens before you research broodling. you could probably decide whether to have fun with queens or go for the 2hatch muta based on what you scout the opponent doing and whether it's a full bio, biomech, or straight mech, or a fast tech into something with early starport play.
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I think this sounds viable if the player can handle the queens + hydra at the same time. Queens really deserves to be used more.
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I've already stated my opinion on the presented queen strat. But I also would like to bring up the fact that going queens without a spire could lead to an earlier hive than a muta build, which is another potential advantage.
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Except hive tech isn't much of a necessity against mech as it is against bio. You are going to have to stay on lair longer vs mech anyway; getting hive faster doesn't have much meaning.
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True, but its still very nice (ultra's v tanks is a good match up, if you can support ultras earlier). I agree that the broodling vs mech is not a high/mid level viable strat. Just bringing up another factor.
I do think queen/lurker/ling/def is viable vs SK/bio, as the entire terran strategy in response to lurkers/def/scourge is to run away.
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i think queens are better used in small numbers enforcing the larger force.
2-3 instant tank kills can change a battle fairly quickly, especially if you are attacking T's nat.
-- and the left over energy for ensnare is always helpful.
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EPT
