EPTAre stalkers really useful? - Page 5
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GoldenH
1115 Posts
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Msrobinson
United States138 Posts
You want to abuse their 6 range against a roaches 4 range when you go colossus and he goes roach to counter in PvZ. In PvT, you want to abuse their blink to kill ravens before the PDD drops, and also to abuse their blink to get a better surround on the army if you skillfully place your units. Blink stalkers are also helpful vs tanks. | ||
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Dfgj
Singapore5922 Posts
On November 18 2010 15:09 Rkie wrote: Personally, I believe that the stalker has filled the role of the dragoon very well. It may have less range, but it is much more mobile, not even counting blink. I agree that the DPS is a bit lower, but I would still take the stalker over the dragoon any day. But can't the Protoss go Immortal/Stalker depending on the situation? Besides cases where you're using a composition of pure stalkers, mobility is irrelevant. The rest of the Protoss army is at 2.25, and the bulk of it cannot fire on the move or exploit mobility. The Protoss style of engagement, furthermore, tends to be heavily static - locking parts of the enemy up with forcefields and destroying it. If you use pure stalkers, then the mobility is valuable - but you run into the issue of your units simply not being that good at killing the enemy. Blink stalker rushes work because P gets a massive amount of unit investment at a point Zerg has nearly nothing - with even army values, P will have severe trouble doing anything. On November 18 2010 16:00 Msrobinson wrote: Stalkers have 10 damage normal, 14 vs armored units. You want to abuse their 6 range against a roaches 4 range when you go colossus and he goes roach to counter in PvZ. In PvT, you want to abuse their blink to kill ravens before the PDD drops, and also to abuse their blink to get a better surround on the army if you skillfully place your units. Blink stalkers are also helpful vs tanks. Theory. Blinking to kill a Raven is generally suicide as it places your stalkers in the heart of a marine/banshee(/tank) ball that will result in you losing all your units. The range vs roaches argument works... if you're off creep, with no upgrades on the roaches, in the open field. Not so helpful when roaches are pushing in your nat, or when you're trying to break Z. | ||
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Lazyass
4 Posts
There have been so many questionable claims made in this thread that I will simply focus on basic comprehension, which will displace several claims. Two obvious claims (of many) that are countered: “It's [stalkers] not GOOD against anything.”, and “they somewhat counter zelots (sic) if zelots (sic) don't have charge” (1) Good matches are: Zerglings (normal speed) Zealots (without charge) Roaches (off creep) Marines (even in moderately large numbers) Neutral (to slightly favoured) matches are: Roaches (at the edge of creep) Small groups of charge lots (the cool down can be triggered by a single target and kiting can recommence) Small to moderate sized groups of Mutas Moderate sized groups of Speedlings (4 Zealots are enough to wall to set the kite on groups smaller than 20 Zerglings) Bad matches are: Marauders Roaches (on creep) [This is a new development. The longer range has combined with speed bonus to make effective micro impossible on creep.] Similarly sized groups of Banshees Mutaballs (30+ with 2-0 air upgrades) Immortals Moderate sized groups of Chargelots. (2) “What are the benefits that stalkers offer compared to roaches (and more broadly – other units of equal tier value)?” is another common topic of the thread. Range, speed, shields, and the ability to hit air. (3) The problem with your direct cost to cost comparison is that it completely ignores the game states and player abilities. Many different posts have hinted at various aspects of this, such as the Zerg player that pointed out that Zerg has to produce combat and econ units from a single structure, and therefore (A) the larva management is the hard cap on early roach numbers, and (B) the cost difference is mitigated by the fact that competitive production of combat units restricts the Zerg’s economy. Ignoring racial mechanics devolves even further into ignoring the game state. The double production cycle of the four gate (and the stalker costs allowing for a double cycle) allows for a timed push on an expanding Zerg. I challenge the notion that the only value of a unit comes from it behind cost effective in generic small scale microless engagements. Want more proof? Dark Templers prior to opponent getting detection – excellent... afterwards – hopefully you get the point. The unit doesn’t have to be universally cost effective if it is dominate at some period within the game. Undoubtedly the question of whether stalkers really are dominant at a particular time or favoured in the match-ups I have listed is going to reassert itself, because of this naive insistence on privileging theorycraft results from absurd situations over actual game results. When a Zerg player sees an early Stalker push, he is going to respond with Zerglings (hopefully Speedlings). Your next warp cycle is going to be spent on Zealots. Four Zealot wall with 6-7 Stalkers can manage a moderate sized group of Zerglings (which I must remind you, are limited by larva production and cost the economy). These three Zerglings take a Stalker scenario are stupid, because real players (good players) are not going to stubborn mono-Stalker 1a into a Zergling ball. (some of the posters on the forum might, but that is... the problem) I think that the failure to understand this has lead to a drastic underestimation of the Stalkers abilities. Only two more range than a Roach? Can move slightly faster? But three Roaches take two Stalkers! Give me a game state – near my base, so off creep on a long map? My four Stalkers will take seven of your Roaches and three will probably live. Assessments on the straight up fights are dumb, or more likely perpetuated by bad players that tend to fight straight up. People who don't (or can't micro) don't understand the power of the range and speed, cost isn't as important if my units never get hit. And this absurd comparison has led to overlooking a considerable strength – shields. Stalkers are heavily recyclable. If a Stalker isn’t killed, then it is back to 70% in 10 seconds. Which means, in realistic situations (like a four gate timed push) a slightly larger army with range and mobility will be recycling units against successive waves of weaker units. When there are cumulative returns involved, micro makes all the difference. If you want to compare Roach v Stalkers - fine, but do a real analysis. One that follows roughly the way it is going to play out in a game, with consideration of micro, timed pushes, production limitation, and not some stupid 1a three to two scenario. (btw - The solution to the three to two fight is to refuse to fight. Yes, speed means Stalkers can walk away from Roaches.) P.S. For the original 1800 level poster that rarely builds Stalkers and thinks they only “kinda” counter slow Zealots, I would like to verify your rating in game. Please reply with the appropriate information. | ||
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Satire
Canada295 Posts
If you're good with them, then you can keep that group of stalkers alive for most of the game. I think the biggest pain in the ass about stalkers is that you really do need a certain amount to compliment your army, but in the mid-game they are pretty terrible by themselves unless you are able to use them to snipe a ton and contain your opponent - similar to the concept of mutas. The biggest issue with stalkers is that they don't benefit much from upgrades. Blink is an absolutely key upgrade for them, but +1 attack really doesn't do much for them. I think at some point Protoss will just have to learn how to transition into air support with robo bay and gateway in the late game to adapt to this fact. The future of Protoss will probably revolve around the heavy use of air units in the late game such as Speed Rays to replace the much weaker stalkers. Still, I wouldn't complain if they buffed the stalker to benefit more from upgrades. >_> Theory. Blinking to kill a Raven is generally suicide as it places your stalkers in the heart of a marine/banshee(/tank) ball that will result in you losing all your units. The range vs roaches argument works... if you're off creep, with no upgrades on the roaches, in the open field. Not so helpful when roaches are pushing in your nat, or when you're trying to break Z. Depends on how you do it really. I think Stalkers are pretty effective at splitting off from the main army and creeping up behind to snipe things such as tanks, ravens, colossi, or even brood lords. Obviously this requires some thinking and some information about the impending attack, but if you can get them in position and blink them out, or blink into the back end of the army you can circumvent a lot of damage to your main army with just a small army of stalkers. | ||
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Tobberoth
Sweden6375 Posts
Protoss often consider their AA weak... but they have a better hydralisk as a T1 unit. I wouldn't mind roach being as expensive as a stalker, but they better get the ability to shoot air then, which is a huge bonus to any unit. | ||
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Liquid`Nazgul
22427 Posts
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brningpyre
Canada4 Posts
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tetramaster
Canada253 Posts
You can try to go air like T or Z. However, toss Air takes up SO much gas and TIME for arguably mediocre results, except if you catch your opponent off-guard (double starport guess vs mutaling, for example), or take wayyyy too long and leaves such a large timing window that any half--decent opponent will KILL you before you get them(aka, the carrier). Proper micro with use of unit positioning and forcefields are argually, required to make use of stalkers. The poor scaling of damage means that the instant upgrades start kicking in, stalkers become less effective and then you're just slamming your head against a wall called "Stupidly cost-ineffective but necessary unit". Hence, I find I end up abandoning the stalker in 2/3 match-ups vs T that make it towards the mid-late game. At most, you'll run maybe 6-10 stalkers? in a 80 food army, with the rest of your resources going towards templar, zealots and sentries. | ||
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Prinny-tai
United States71 Posts
On November 18 2010 18:05 Liquid`Nazgul wrote: You simply cannot compare one unit in SC to the other and use it for balance discussion. You can't compare stalkers to roaches or hydras because of infestors, sentries, upgrades, immortals colossus etc etc. Whenever you find yourself comparing one unit to another and using this for balance discussion just give up immediately and admit you do not understand the game. As a result, do not press the post button in the Strategy forum. . This should just be a sticky in the strategy forum Stalkers are solid units, but aside from a few cool timing attacks they're a support unit meant to fill gaps in your main army most of the time it feels like | ||
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mangsky
51 Posts
but I WISH that they gave the stalker +1 (+1 vs armored) per upgrade instead of the fixed +1 that would probably remove any complaints from most stalker haters  | ||
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bashalisk
102 Posts
On November 18 2010 12:06 TossNub wrote: it's VERY rare for me to use a stalker heavy army(excluding PvP obviously). I can't remember any 1v1 games where I used stalkers. Spider sense would indicate that there's a lesson to be learned in those two sentences. | ||
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Daniel C
Hong Kong1606 Posts
Ask yourself this question: Do SC2 pros use stalkers as a key unit in their armies? Yes --> Go to 1. No --> Go to 2. 1. Stalkers are useful. 2. Stalkers are not useful. It's not hard really, it really isn't. Way too much theorycrafting in this thread. If you want to know HOW to use stalkers, then go watch some replays of high-level PvX. On November 18 2010 18:05 Liquid`Nazgul wrote: You simply cannot compare one unit in SC to the other and use it for balance discussion. You can't compare stalkers to roaches or hydras because of infestors, sentries, upgrades, immortals colossus etc etc. Whenever you find yourself comparing one unit to another and using this for balance discussion just give up immediately and admit you do not understand the game. As a result, do not press the post button in the Strategy forum. . Exactly. Whether or not a unit "sucks" or is cost-inefficient against any other unit is NOT the most important factor to determine its usefulness. How well the unit complements your army, and the tactics that you can employ with it(e.g. with blink) are the most important criteria, IMHO. | ||
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Panoptic
United Kingdom515 Posts
On the other hand, if you do want to only make pure stalker (just like if you want to make pure marines or roaches for example) I think you have to be extremely knowledgeable of that unit's strengths and weaknesses. Abuse the hell out of their strengths and absolutely avoid letting their weaknesses be abused. For stalkers this would basically be mobility, and coincidentally enough, movement speed is a stat rarely brought up in these conversations, whereas as attack power constantly is. | ||
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Severedevil
United States4839 Posts
But they're terrible at anything else - too expensive to serve as meat, too low DPS to be fire support. Stalkers are an awful addition to an army - they're not remotely cost effective unless you can keep inflicting damage via their range/regen/speed, which cannot be done passively. | ||
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X-Codes
135 Posts
Seriously, stalkers are actually a pretty good AA unit. Obviously they have nothing to fear from Vikings or Corruptors and deal substantial damage to either if they're flying overhead, and being Armored and relatively quick means they're also good at fending off any kind of Phoenix shenanigans. As for Mutas, anything that can shoot up and has an Armor upgrade is good against Mutas, and Stalkers actually get said armor for free. Hard ground attackers like Banshees, Broodlords, and Void Rays will give them a hard time even numbers, but they will never fight in even numbers because there will always be more opportunities for Stalkers to be made than either Banshees or Void Rays. They're also the most economical counter to Battlecruisers because the more damaging counter, Void Rays, can be yamatoed down easily. I think that leaves Carriers and Motherships, but such things really ought to be the least of your worries. That's about it. There's no ground unit they're particularly good against, but that's what Zealots are for, and you'll want to bring some Stalkers along for air cover, anyway. The whole kiting zealots thing is ridiculous because you'll use Forcefield properly to cut off the "kiting" unit's escape route and slice them in half with your chargelots. If you're fighting on creep then you're definitely doing something wrong vs. Zerg. No zerg should ever be able to spread creep with Observers being so easy to grab as Protoss. | ||
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Panoptic
United Kingdom515 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + OMG they had forcefield! | ||
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GoldenH
1115 Posts
In particular the question of whether a roach or a stalker wins in a stand up fight is important because it tells us in what circumstances we can use the Stalker to put pressure on the zerg opponent or take advantage of a weakness. In addition I feel that the microability of the Stalker is highly overrated, especially when using it as part of your general unit mix and not getting Blink first thing because you are doing something else instead (alternate tech, expanding, focusing on economy). While the Zerg does indeed have to consider Larvae that limits unit production, so too does Protoss have temporal limits on how many units he can produce. Do you realize that in order to maximize the efficency of the Stalker against the roach you have to actually stand there and take a volley of damage? That's because even after you move out of roach range, the time it takes the stalker to turn and fire on the roach (even if you cancel the animation!) is so long the Roach can easily cross a 2 range distance. Practically, the best you can hope to do is to make 2 volleys for each one of the roach's. But even that is only possible if the Zerg player does not micro by advancing towards your stalkers in between his roach volleys. You have to go back and forth on Lost Temple *three times* before you managed to trade stalkers for roaches equal resources. To do better than equal resources, that is, for the stalkers to not get hit at all, the timing is so precise that I can only manage it 50% of the time even with no lag, playing against the CPU on normal speed. With greater than 3 stalkers, they get so bunched together that it is impossible. This is off creep, no roach speed or blink. So what happens when you make a bunch of stalkers and the Zerg player just marches some roaches into your base? Even if you kited them allll the way there, the Roaches would arrive in your base with you both having traded 1/3 of the resource values down. If you have a wall, I guess you'll have to stand and fight. Sure, the Zerg player will have to trade his army for any damage to economy or buildings he does, but he'll get at least his resources back on buildings of his choice and there's nothing you can do to stop this trade. Now lets look at other use of the Stalker. How about putting on pressure early game. Well the whole point of pressure is to make the economy minded Zerg produce more units than he wants to, right? And thus eat into his money to prevent him from teching or expanding again soon. Well, fortunately, any units the Zerg makes is more than he wants, so, any roaches at all are a victory. But this doesn't cost him enough to make him slow his tech. Anyway, at best, we could force the Zerg player to build a third in base hatch so he has the Larvae he needs to hold off an all-in attack (which is what 4 gate blink stalker is, and for a zerg, it's when the Zerg player spends every Larvae on units and none on drones). But if he does not even need to do that, your attack has already failed before you launched it and you'd have been better off building cannons at an expansion, which can at least take out equal resource of roaches (and they'd better, cuz you can't micro them at all). If you are fighting in his base and he has roaches, you're at a severe disadvantage. He's on Creep, and that means you cannot even trade resource for resource, larvae for production cycle, APM for APM. But hey, maybe you could expand, if you hadn't spent all your money on stalkers instead of a Nexus. Too bad the Zerg player still can. The only advantage here is that you can punish a Zerg who fast expands by drastically slowing down his growth and forcing him to micro, in exchange for completely halting your own, but eventually, assuming you both play well, the Zerg will come out ahead or you will have to judge when you are even and retreat. If it had a chance to do damage if you out microed your opponent, it would make sense to perform such a risky move beyond just a desire for variety. Unless you know your opponent sucks at micro, why even commit to such a strategy? And if he really sucks, why even care about Stalkers, you could kill him with any unit, certainly, it has nothing to do with wether the Stalker is a good choice in this situation. Then what unit is? Well, this thread is about the stalker, but I've discussed how the Stalker can and cannot participate in the larger game extensively in this thread already, and it had pretty much nothing to do with what the unit costs, except at the end you can add it up and decide if its feasible or not. I really feel that army value is a good way to compare armies, better than food even, because despite everything, the Resource Income charts and worker counts in every game I've played are pretty damn even. This isn't theorycraft. This is all from actual game experience and training to specifically see what is possible from the unit in a perfect environment. There are some numbers to hammer home the point, but not replays because really, who wants me to post an hour long replay of me trying to kite and flank roaches from one end to the other of an enormous empty map. Just try it yourself. Edit: If people want to go then say "duh, stalkers aren't for roaches", great, thanks for agreeing with me, but that's not what I'm hearing in this thread. | ||
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Deleted User 124618
1142 Posts
-Zealots are slow -Sentries are slow -Immortals are slow -High Templars are slow -Dark templars are average at best -Colossus aren't exacly sprinters Stalkers are pretty much only mobile ground attack and/or defence protoss has. The instant zerg realizes protoss has 0 stalkers, mutalisks are on the way to wipe out the protoss completely. Colossus are needed vs terran, to defend colossus and to defend vs drops you need stalkers. I don't know how to compare stalkers to what other races have, but stalkers are absolutely vital to almost any protoss. | ||
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FallenWraith
United States26 Posts
Basically looking at the following items: Marauders build times 30s - 100m 25g - upgrade 50m 50g 60s Stalkers build time 42s - 125m 50g - upgrade (building 150m 100g 50s) then 150m 150g 110s Granted eventually Protoss get warp gates which can allow for rapid warp ins of units, and they gain force fields. Honestly I think the core issue is Terran bio is currently way to strong early and mid game vs Protoss. | ||
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