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First off, I suck at Starcraft, which is why I'm not going to present the results of my own experiments - I'm so bad in other ways, that my strategic choices are comparatively irrelevant. I'm really more of a fan than a player.
I'm watching these pro games, where the terran has to get a barracks to make factories, and has to get an academy to get comsat, but other than that, they just sit idle. You almost never see a medic.
Because vultures and siege tanks are so awesome vs. protoss ground, terran is usually short on air defense, which protoss can abuse with shuttles and observers. I think a few early medics with optic flare seem a cheaper, better, faster, and easier investment in air defense than early goliaths.
Top unseen uses for medics in a terran metal vs. protoss game:
1) optic flare shuttles - super annoying
2) optic flare reavers - blind shuttle + blind reaver = ?
3) optic flare drop dragoons or anything else spotting for reavers
4) optic flare small groups of dragoons - a pair of fully-charged (non-cadeuceus) medics can blind a group of up to four dragoons and make them near-helpless until they retreat or get reinforced - I believe this is a feasible micro task
This is without mentioning the obvious target of optic flare: observers. Flaring small carrier groups would also be very annoying. Flared dark templars would be much less useful, and there are often a manageable number of them to flare.
Small medic groups are pretty tough. Besides their bit of armor, if they take damage, it goes away fairly quickly, and they're casters, so if you keep them alive, they recharge and become useful again eventually. They can stay useful to the end of the game and open up new options.
I think they should be used in pairs at minimum, not just for healing each other, but so you have enough flare in one spot to get a shuttle, its reaver, and its pair of zealots (worst case shuttle load in terms of spotting for the reaver).
Admittedly, 200/150 is a high price to pay early in the game for a pair of flaring medics (assuming that you have the academy for scans), but it would be money well-spent if you stopped a reaver drop cold, nullified a couple of surviving dragoons after vultures took out their zealot escort, or took away his observers when he's pinned by mines.
Later on, they could prove valuable again to make zealot-bombing clumsy, keep making protoss pay for new observers and take time to shoot down his old ones (or live without the psi they took), and help make stragglers easy pickings for vultures.
They also seem to combine well with other less-used units. Sci vessels and medics can wreck observers without spending scan. Wraiths can more easily hunt down blind shuttles and pick away at blinded dragoons. Obviously they support the other bio units (firebat/medic drops into the probe line, protect ghosts by flaring observers and healing the ghost, help keep initial marines alive to pick away at shuttles).
My questions are: has this stuff been tried seriously by good players? Is the micro just too much? The cost too high?
I'm sure it can't be as great an option as it seems when you don't see it in pro games. What's the fatal flaw here that I don't understand?
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I think the observer has the full range of "detection" even when blinded, as long as other units produce the sight around the observer.
Flaring a carrier (or group of) wont do much since interceptors have vision too.
Flaring a shuttle will be hard because you don't know which direction the shuttle is coming from. And flaring reavers will be difficult because you would have to flare each one, and the shuttle.
Lastly, a terran player would be to preoccupied macroing to have a sci vessel and medics running around.
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Before anyone rams a cock down my throat, I want to say that these are my opinions, based solely on playing at D rank on ICCup and from watching pro games. I am by no means an expert.
Even though blinded units can't SEE as far, their attack range is the same. That means that once Protoss starts using both Zealots and Dragoons, blinded Dragoons would still be able to see and therefore attack targets at a distance. Your argument for small groups of Dragoons isn't valid, I think, because when that early Dragoon push may come, you have your standard 4 marines 1 tank 1 vulture with mines, at most; maybe a little more or less, depending on whether you go 2 fact or FE. In this case, I think the Dragoon is more powerful (with decent micro of course) than whatever the Terran has, so Terran is forced to be on the defensive. Because ranged Dragoons are so powerful and such a hallmark early PvT unit, any serious deviation from a relatively strong unit/defense-based opening could leave you at the mercy of that early timing push. On top of that, if you leave one Dragoon unblinded, they will all still be able to attack as long as that one Dragoon lives.
On top of that, there'd be no way to have enough medics or enoug energy to cast all those optic flares, even if it is just 4. If you opt for a really early Academy, as such a build would require, your factory would be slow, and therefore your strong anti-Dragoon units would be too late. If you opt for a biomech build, the chances of you having enough resources to spare to get things such as optic flare and to use it effectively in a game is low, I believe. This is because biomech is generally weak mid to late game versus Protoss, and is only used as a surprise tactic early on. That's part of the reason why infantry are generally unused in long games versus Protoss. In general, I think even if it was plausible, it would require quite a lot of micro.
The idea for Shuttles makes more sense, but once again, if they have an Observer the point is lost. It's just too easy in most cases to overcome an optic flare-based defense by simple increasing your view of the enemy base with other units. Sure, if the Protoss suspects nothing, they will go with a Shuttle and Reaver and both will get blinded and he will get fucked up, most likely. But most Protoss will be good enough with scouting with their Observers (unless it was a straight to Reaver drop build, which is rarely seen nowadays) to see that you have random Medics standing in your base or at the edges of it. This alone should tell them what's up, because it's not like the Medics are there to cast Restoration or something. The Protoss will then be prepared with Observers, or could just scrap the build alltogether, or strike elsewhere with his Reaver. The Reaver's range will be unaffected in a battle because there will be other units there providing the vision. The minimap skills of the Terran would also have to be high to see the Shuttle fly in and to blind anything before the Reaver possibly kills the Medics.
I guess if you make some Turrets and medics, then Reaver drops would be halted. But this would only hurt an all-in Reaver drop Protoss, as I said before. I'm not even going to get into Wraith/Science Vessels that you proposed - that is entirely too late game for this context, IMO.
MORE COMING WHEN I COME BACK FROM SCHOOL.
EDIT: Nevermind. Don't care enough + no directed response.
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before u can blind every unit your opponent has your medics will fall to pieces and it just takes a lot of time to macro/micro medics into the mix. I guess you could bring them into the battlefront and blind observers but other than that i cant really think of any other useful abilities for medics against P other than blinding observers.But then protoss will probably have more observers faster than u can blind so it wont really help that much... its too hard to set up perfectly you would have to ask boxer.
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Nevermind the optical flares, what I want to know is why noone is using restoration in TvZ. It's a sad sight every time I see a bunch of plagued vessels go down from a single muta when you could counter it so easily. Hell, using restoration on a bunch of plagued rines would probably be more mana-efficient than just waiting for it to go away.
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I'd like to clarify that I don't mean massed medics as a major part of the fighting force. I mostly mean a very small number of medics as anti-shuttle, and some other specialized purposes.
You see this fairly often, that a shuttle is running around with impunity, while the terran player is sitting there hopelessly underneath with tanks and vultures. Blinding the shuttle would help a lot, and if you run medics around underneath, you might also blind what it drops.
Occasionally, they might also be useful in a dragoon/zealot vs. vulture situation. A small number of dragoons can be a big deal when you have no tanks, but blind three healthy dragoons (edit: with the zealots dead - presumably after a fight where you lost your tank and he lost his zealots), and your two red-healthed vultures can pick away at them without taking hits, run around them and plant mines in their retreat route, or whatever.
These are the two main applications I'm interested in, the rest was just "Hey, why not?" sort of stuff.
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On November 20 2007 21:11 nitram wrote:
I think the observer has the full range of "detection" even when blinded, as long as other units produce the sight around the observer.
Flaring a carrier (or group of) wont do much since interceptors have vision too.
Flaring a shuttle will be hard because you don't know which direction the shuttle is coming from. And flaring reavers will be difficult because you would have to flare each one, and the shuttle.
Lastly, a terran player would be to preoccupied macroing to have a sci vessel and medics running around.
No, when blinded they can't detect at all, even if the invisible unit is right on top of them.
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On November 20 2007 21:47 sushiman wrote:
Nevermind the optical flares, what I want to know is why noone is using restoration in TvZ. It's a sad sight every time I see a bunch of plagued vessels go down from a single muta when you could counter it so easily. Hell, using restoration on a bunch of plagued rines would probably be more mana-efficient than just waiting for it to go away. in general, the idea was that restoration took up too much time to do before it saved you significant damage.
edit: i know you said you were not much of a gamer, but you can try this things on games to see how they work out yourself and find out how practical they are to use. Sure makes the game more fun to have some variation. The other day i discovered that having 1 queen with broodling sitting in your base is great to stop turtle terrans from nuking you with a matrixed ghost (it was FFA, don't look at me like that  ).
edit2: the best scenario i can think for this is to have an opening with marines + 1 medic and research Optical Flare straight away (plus a comsat). When you push out with and initial around 5 marines, 1 medic, 1-2 tanks and incoming vultures, you can blind their first observer and set the push in their base. They will have to suicide their units to your push or wait for the next observer, in which you may be able to have turrets and siege up. Still no idea of how the timings work out for this.
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- T normally doesn't get infantry in TvP, so no medics too. If you do, you'll just waste money on them which you need for factory units
- All micro-intensive spells which are just "nice in some situations" instead of "essential" simply aren't used because they require too much attention. Players normally only use strong, area effect spells like storm, plague, swarm, stasis, maelstrom. Anything that requires manual clicking on a single unit is usually not worth the hassle, the game is simply too fast for that, i.e. your macro will suffer too much while using these spells. The only two exceptions are Irradiate and Yamato.
(That's also why repair is only rarely used)
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Flaring observers is troublesome, but it will be even more troublesome for the protoss if you do it well. I don't think Flaring would be gamechanging in many cases though, since you could just make a couple of extra observers. UpMagiC tried this vs Bisu a while ago, but as you can see in the VOD it wasn't very successful.
One thing I've been wondering a lot more about than Flare though is why Feedback isn't being used much... I mean, with 2 dark archons you can negate all storms and arbiters fairly easily. And their range is better than the templars so the templars can't get any storms off. Sure, it's micro intensive, but nothing a 200+apm player couldn't handle. And a few storms can be devastating.
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Even if by some miracle you flare every single dragoon in a group as it's attacking, it still does absolutely nothing. When your rines and tanks start shooting, they reveal the fog over themselves and let the goons hit anyways.
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i played around with the idea of tvp medics a couple of months back. i had some success with it, but i feel i was held back by my level of tvp rather than the medics just being ineffective
at first i opened with a marine medic build with scv cutting to get the medics out as fast as possible but later i just decided it would be less risky to just expanded then build a fast academy afterward then go f went for a 1 addon 4 fact rush. when i was pushing with them i would try to grab as much ground as possible, then just contain them for as long as i could while expanding and building my economy to overtake theirs
not only did i find it a fun way to play and incredibly pimp, it also lead to several humorous occasions of players asking why their observers had stopped working
ive uploaded a rep pack, but just be warned that i was a pretty bad player when i was active a year ago and i wasnt a terran player either. also i only ever really saved the replays where the medics pretty much outright won the game
http://rapidshare.com/files/71023866/medz.zip.html
as for the idea of teching to science vessels to use medics: optic flare is only really an option in early to mid game. you dont have the window to get all that tech out and still have an army capable of threatening the protoss. and even if you did, by the time you got it all the clashing armies are so big that you dont have the time to snipe the observers before your mine field is clear
flaring units is pretty much useless as well. barring shuttles and arbiters, they will always be covered by other units to give sight for them. you might as well get lockdown if you want to do that
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On November 20 2007 23:05 SoMuchBetter wrote:
flaring units is pretty much useless as well. barring shuttles and arbiters, they will always be covered by other units to give sight for them. you might as well get lockdown if you want to do that
...
Starcraft Design Bug #2872
Scout costs too much.
Starcraft Design Bug #2873
Covert Ops is Science Facility add-on, not Academy add-on.
Starcraft Design Bug #2874
Devourer.
...
thx for replays and experience-based commentary
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Belgium6774 Posts
Actually I like this theorycraft. I'm gonna try it out!
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9934 Posts
this is one of those things that would be awesome if a terran had perfect multitask and unlimited attention to spread around. as it is it's simply infinitely easier to play standard and take care of observers and shuttles with goliaths while keeping your macro up, instead of trying to be fancy and getting raped.
basically, the marginal benefits in annoying the toss doesn't pay off considering the sacrifice you are making in other areas of your game
edit: this is similar to the 'why don't zergs use queens?' question. queens are along the tech tree, can extremely effective (more so than medics in tvp), and are cheap. and yet most zergs don't use them, most likely because there is too much going on to really apply it. chill predicts that in a few months queens will be regular in progamer zvx games as players push the envelopes more and more.
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Calgary25990 Posts
Damn right I predict that. You heard it here first!!
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I can totally see a pimpest play coming if you flare a shuttle who then blindly dies to a turret in any remotely important game  Flaring a scouting unit in stead of wasting time chasing it is kind of cool too imo, hehe.
But if a carrier lacks observer, just cloak those wraiths? Flaring a bunch of observers have been done by Boxer as mentioned, he rarely wins those fancy games though (a fanboy speaking :|).
Flaring the 1-2 observers Protoss has early in a game (with a vulture/mine build)? Why not, although I am not sure of the time needed for the research. Scanning and killing it with other units is possible too though.
Flaring random groups of more than one unit? Really situational I think, and probably not worth it for cheap units.
But to pull it off vs an evenly matched opponent you:
- need to have medics and flare in stead of other units/tech/supply
- need to have a medic with enough energy when it happens, where it happens, and not mess up the micro.
- need to neglect less macro than you win from the flares
Just go for it
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So if you research flare immediately, does your flare make it in time for the reaver drop? If so, that could be really cool, and really piss off the P player.
Later in the game, it's not worth it to try to blind every P unit (you'll need, what, like 20+ flares to do anything), so instead you use it.... ON YOUR OWN MINES
On November 21 2007 00:10 Chill wrote:
Damn right I predict that. You heard it here first!!
I dunno, hasn't drone been saying that for several years now?
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When i saw this topic i actually thought you resurected a topic that i made a while ago. My suggestion is better (from my neutral point of view) so if you want to play with medics, go ahead and read it here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=45717
To comment on this suggestion:
The clasic Reaver drop comes way to early for you to have medics without it seriously affecting you strategy.
Goon blinding = no. Toss has 6-7 goons(at least) by the time you would be able to make 1 medic with upgrade (and enough army to be able to deal with the goons).
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Optic Flare is always, no matter what, a waste of time and money. Simple as that.
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EPT
