[A] Starbow - Page 319

At the moment though, pure bio isn't viable in themidgame for two reasons; 1) Map control can easily be denied by stalkers kiting your army and 2) Reaver tech comes relatively early.

If you want to force your opponent to stop sitting outside your base, you need to force him to go home by sending out dropships to his base while having tanks to defend against counterattacks. Unlike in sc2, you don't have "natural map control" as bio, but you need to manipulate your way into having map control by forcing his units into his own base by dropping him. In Sc2 you would just move your bio force out on the map and then start dropping, in Starbow you need to load up the dropship from your own base.

This is slightly problematic. First of all, new players aren't aware of this, and they are likely to feel frustrated the first time they try out bio in Starbow. As I don't see how it improves gameplay that terran needs to manipulate there way into gaining "map control" instead of having it of natural reasons, I don't think this is optimal design. All it seems to accomplish is to make terran harder to learn. I think Starbow should easy to learn - difficult to master.

Secondly, and perhaps more important, It is highly doubltfull whether you can actually use that map control for anything. In Sc2 you would drop some portion of your army and then still have a relatively mobile army that could be used to target another location. In Starbow, drops should in theory be shut down very quickly by mobile and strong stalkers, and since the remaining of your army is pretty immobile, as it consist heavily of tanks, you can only use that army to set up a contain.
However, if the contain is to be succesful it has to be an all-in, since the protoss will just outproduce you, if you don't commit heavily to it.

The problems with tanks in the midgame (from a design perspective) is that they are 1) Good at denying action and 2) Bad at creating action. In lategame they are awesome because they the positional battles become very exciting, however once on 2-3 bases, their mobility disadvantage isn't significiant enough for action to occur, and they do a good job of making sure the opponent can't attack you.

Despite the problems with TvP bio (+tank), it still has a bit more potential than TvP mech. I can at least see some ways TvP bio heavy can be an okay'ish mathcup in the midgame, however pure mech is an absolutely awfull matchup.

Chances are that if you happen to watch a random TvP mech game between 2 diamond/master starbow players, then this will occur;

- Protoss player has his whole army in a ring outside the terran players 3rd. In this proces he makes it dificult for the terran to take expos and also prevent any dropplays and vultures from slipping behind.

- The terran uses turrets/vikings to deny warp prism harass, since a warp prism hanging over the main can be so damaging for the terran player. In theory if you don't prevent it from ever entering your base, then an infinitive amount of protoss units can enter your main/natural. The terran player obviously can't allow this from occuring and therefore a smart player invests in infastructure/vikings to nullify the drop threat.

- Since the terran player knows he can't vulture harass efficiently, and since the blink all in threat is quite large, he is likely to be more tank heavy than vulture heavy. This makes engaging/army trading as a protoss player pre 15 minute mark quite impossible.

- Basically nothing will happen in the first 15 minutes as long as both players are somewhat smart and decent mechanics. If the terran player is better than decent (say good), then he will also make sure that he easily can secure a 4th. That implies a stalemale for at least the first 20 minutes.

So the question is, how did BW mech becomes something that was awesome while Starbow mech (at least in the midgame) kinda sucks? Was it all just nostalagy or what are the differences.

Below, I found an interesting vod between Flash and Best, which highlights the differences between Starbow and BW



Around the 10 minute mark, Best retreats with his dragoons from Flash's base and never once return. Thus we don't get the same type of "surround" scenario in BW, which actually opens up for potential harassment for the terran player. While Flash still chooses to go into turtlemetode, at least that seems to be a voluntary decision. I could imagine Starbow terrans choosing to abuse that situation in BW to drop/banshee harass or make vulture runbys.

Im definitely not an BW expert, so I can't really give a solid answer to why Best chooses to retreat with dragoons, but possible explanations could be;

- Starbow economy hurts the immobile race too a larger extent than in BW. Further, protoss has more stuff since they get chrono for free while terrans have to pay 100 mins to get a OC and they pay 50 mins for scv calldown.

- The stalker is much much easier to have out on the map than the dragoon, and with its bad AI you were probably vulnerable to vulture runbys if you tried to set up a "contain".

- Warp ins used for defensive reasons reduces the threat of vulture runbys.

- The threat of a warp prism warp ins increases the neccesity of terrans to invest in a lot of static defense/vikings in the midgame, which means their army value is less.

- The blink threat punishes heavy vulture play (you need spread out tanks).

Overall, it seems that the tools of protoss are so strong that they can outright just end the game. And the tools of the terran to prevent harass from occuring are also really strong (vikings + turrets), so since a solid terran player doesn't wanna lose the game, he needs to take a "prevent-strategy". Since the protoss player can't really do anything against the terran mech player, he uses his stalker in a "prevent-role" as well.