Front page has been updated with a more thorough and complete guide. . .
*FAQ section Added *Tips N Tricks section Added *Entire Sections re-written to reflect forum feedback *Videos are now only links instead of hotlinks to help offset the larger size of the post
Also thanks for everyone who's supported or tested the build so far!
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RoL:
I've added your question to the FAQ and will review your replay a little later this morning when I get time.
With regards to PvZ queens are quite crap as they have a low damage high attack speed attack. This makes them very weak against guardian shield which any good toss will be using against you, their relatively short range and slow speed also makes them iffy against forcefield spam. I can see use for 1 or 2 extra queens as extra non-larvae costing defense against toss (especially against air) but that's it really. If you just make a 3rd or 4th queen they will have uses later at extra expansions, making too much though is a bit of a waste because of guardian shield and their slow speed. Healing is decent, so a few extra can help with that but thats about it really.
ZvZ the whole queen massing might be a lot more interesting since the roach nerf though, they basically gotten a 50% damage boost against them (4-2 vs 4-1) so that definately matters. I guess if you have the micro to heal with them a few could find their way in your army, but again mostly when playing defensive.
Funny enough I have the best success with this strat against Protoss.
Sure the Queens aren't doing a ton to guardian shielded, but the queens are your support. The 8-12 roaches are the real workers here. If they wall their choke with bubbles I just wait them out and start teching/sending more roaches. Eventually I'll get through and they *never* have enough defense. Any money they spent on Zealots is practically wasted, only a high amount of stalkers/sentries and good micro sniping high energy queens is effective.
Then again I'm certain your theorycrafting is correct. You've obviously played this or against this before and can relate from experience.
You would of been at his door with a force almost double his size. . . basically no chance he would have held you off.
Pushing with 5 Queens is fine, but is harder to manage a battle at a choke. After seeing that your opponent did not expand at 9m I would have tried breaking threw the destructible rocks on that map instead of the front door.
The last thing, and this is very important, is to make sure no unit dies until your Queens have run out of energy. I noticed that you had literally 8 unused heals in that fight and almost a 9th before all your forces fell.
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Markwerf:
Guardian shield only reduced incoming ranged attacks by 2. . . I know the queens melee attack has a range of 3, but I was unaware it was actually considered a missile attack.
Can anyone confirm this?
I usually have the +1 Missile Upgrade by then anyway to cancel it out for my Roaches, but it would be interesting to know.
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Mirhi:
Might just be a timing issue. . .
Toss are the easiest to catch off guard with the 4 Queen push since they are usually just getting done teching to robotics bay when you start moving out.
I've never seen more than 2 immortals by the time I'm at their ramp I posted some earlier snapshots of what an 8m Toss looks like in my second reply on page 1. . .
The screenshot of RoL's game is almost exactly what I would expect to see
been using this queen-roach build for a few games now and have been pretty successful but i am only in the gold league rank 1. posting a replay of a game i just played. ZvZ matchup. my opponent went speedling and transitioned into roach/hydra. i lost a overlord and my roach warren at the start to the speedlings and had 4 queens and a few roachs at about the 7min mark.
By the time you would get 4 queens off a single base against toss, they tend to either have 3+ immortals (which insta kill 1 roach, hard to heal then) or started out with some mass sentry stuff. I can't say how this fares against the mass sentries yet, might be decent as heal could counteract force field I guess, but toss can delay a huge bit. As for guardian shield reducing queen attack im 99% sure they do. Queens also benefit from ranged attack upgrades and it sais it's a missile attack as well. Given that alot of protoss units have 1 base armor , guardian shield can make it go from 4-1 to 4-3, which is virtually nullifying their damage. I understand their role is partially as a healer but I'm sure more roaches is much more dangerous then queens + roaches.
Against T or Z queens are sweet though, just dont use em aggresively against P
ya i agree. using this against protoss is hard. i think ive lost mostly against protoss. i still like the build though. its fun. =) so ill continue to use it and hope to find a way to beat protoss with it. i remember one game where i had the same unit composition against protoss. i lost that match but i think i couldve had it if i transitioned into speedlings after breaking his wall. what i shouldve done was start upgrading zergling speed as i make my way to the protoss base. i was able to break his defense and make it into his base. queen healing at his choke allowed me to do so but like you said he continued to produce immortals and some stalkers. i chose to keep making roaches but they were too slow to reinforce. if i had switched to speedlings i couldve had a dozen or more to help with the 1-2 immortals he had. although i lost, i thought it was a fun game.
http://sc2calc.net/ got updated to the most current patch recently and they list a Queen taking 30 attacks to kill a Guardian Shielded Sentry which I also confirmed in game. ( +1 Upgrade helps a lot in this case since you basically double your DPS while the shield is up )
Now I'm used to getting early harassed by Zealots with the Robotics Facility coming later, but if a Protoss player stays in their base they can have it out as early as 5m ( All-be-it a Risky Move )
If that is the case and you scout it when no rush happens you probably would want to run the 5m30s push with the 3 Queens going in first to absorb hits. I do agree with you though that once your opponent gets 3 Immortals it becomes very hard to heal and 4 is almost impossible if they are targeting Roaches
Maybe this worked because the protoss and zerg were both bad?
Especially the ZvZ video. The zerg was on one base, had a spire, hydra den, and a roach warren, yet was only making roaches. Maybe this is because he's too dumb to realize you need 4gas to support hydra/roach? And wtf is with the spire????
Is this copper league or what?
Also i noticed that in the second video there was no macro going on at all, so your opponent must have been complete garbage
I don't mean to double post but I think I deserve it since this awful thread got REMADE.
This is a garbage all-in strat. Queens first off, are not very good at attacking or defending, they just can do it. They're good at fending off maybe a single air unit or helping defend a ling rush, but attacking? please.
You're making 5 queens??????? 150 minerals and just about the longest build time of any zerg unit and you think this is a viable strategy? that's a 750 mineral investment to an attack, not to mention while you're attacking, guess what? YOU HAVE NO QUEENS IN YOUR BASE. Therefore you're completely giving up your macro ability while you're dedicating yourself to this attack.
Think about this: instead of making 5 queens for 750 minerals, make 10 roaches. Then, like an intelligent person, use the correct(read 1 per base) amount of queens to spawn larvae so you can make MORE roaches or actually macro and get up to 2base 4gas so you can add on hydralisks.
I really cannot stress how absolutely awful this idea sounds, and how awful those replays are.
By the way, the protoss in your replay could've easily had 3 sentries at that time if he wasn't a terrible player and he could've walled you out until he had immortals
On April 12 2010 03:35 squ1d wrote: The first ZvP was retarded. The guy had massed Stalkers vs a Zerg with Roaches - he obviously doesn't know how to play. This strategy would fall to any half-decent player in my opinion.
here's idra getting owned by mass stalkers when he has roaches. oh wait, you're better than idra i guess.:
LOL if that was true then no one would fast expand. the point of an expansion is to barely hold out with positioning and travel time on your side in order to gain the benefits of the expansions.
its not "mathematically impossible" by ANY stretch of the imagination.
Think before you type. One-Base play is made to break peoples expos. If you one-base and can not dent the opponent, you are far behind.
As for the build a Queen is always in the production queue when attacking so depending on when you last sprayed for larvae you may not lose any macro.
Also to my knowledge this strategy already utilizes all available larvae so 5 Queens will not translate simply into another 10 Roaches. To do this you would need a second hatchery and the gas from another extractor which would set you back 575 mineral + 5 larvae (A maneuver that would be both costly and risky in the early game)
With regards to your disrespect to the people I tested against I suppose I could pass on your criticism
All I would need is your Beta Account Name so they could follow you up with any additional questions they might have. . .
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bountyface:
Good video showing a very under-used strat. . .
One of the things that I've discussed about this build with people elsewhere is that because of the Stalkers superior speed and range to Roaches off of Creep it is possible to get ambushed in transition to the enemy base leaving a window of about 40 - 50 seconds where the Toss player has free rein to harass until Zerglings arrive to force the battle.
LOL if that was true then no one would fast expand. the point of an expansion is to barely hold out with positioning and travel time on your side in order to gain the benefits of the expansions.
its not "mathematically impossible" by ANY stretch of the imagination.
Think before you type. One-Base play is made to break peoples expos. If you one-base and can not dent the opponent, you are far behind.
ya. thats the point. how bout you think before YOU type kk? i get your new so try being a little nicer around here, and you'll get farther.
I understand one base play is made to break fast expo. but OP said it would always win. which it wouldnt. dont be a jerk when my point is true.
On April 12 2010 03:35 squ1d wrote: The first ZvP was retarded. The guy had massed Stalkers vs a Zerg with Roaches - he obviously doesn't know how to play. This strategy would fall to any half-decent player in my opinion.
Stopped to watch after idra fast expanded. Seriously nex time try to follow the build closely before arguing. We're talking about a queen/roach non fast expand build ffs.
On April 15 2010 22:58 Stropheum wrote: I don't mean to double post but I think I deserve it since this awful thread got REMADE.
This is a garbage all-in strat. Queens first off, are not very good at attacking or defending, they just can do it. They're good at fending off maybe a single air unit or helping defend a ling rush, but attacking? please.
You're making 5 queens??????? 150 minerals and just about the longest build time of any zerg unit and you think this is a viable strategy? that's a 750 mineral investment to an attack, not to mention while you're attacking, guess what? YOU HAVE NO QUEENS IN YOUR BASE. Therefore you're completely giving up your macro ability while you're dedicating yourself to this attack.
Think about this: instead of making 5 queens for 750 minerals, make 10 roaches. Then, like an intelligent person, use the correct(read 1 per base) amount of queens to spawn larvae so you can make MORE roaches or actually macro and get up to 2base 4gas so you can add on hydralisks.
I really cannot stress how absolutely awful this idea sounds, and how awful those replays are.
By the way, the protoss in your replay could've easily had 3 sentries at that time if he wasn't a terrible player and he could've walled you out until he had immortals
First of all the queens aren't here to attack or defend. They're here to HEAL ! big fucking deal. They can also tank, which is really good if they're focused by a few roaches (not too much though, just enough to heal the queen without letting it die to quickly) Having no queens in our base is perfectly understandable as long as we have the spawn larvae already on the hatch and we're waiting the next queen to do an another one.
God that's why i hate posting reps, there'a always someone that know everything and need to criticize our build just because it's far from perfect... We're not here to talk about the leaks but to see how viable it is.
It looks strong on ZvZ period. I keep winning with this strat. If you aren't convinced, then just try it before saying anything because i'm 99% sure you haven't played this build order at least 10 times. Yeah you read it right, 10 fucking time in order to fully grasp it.
I didn't say always. . . my reply still implied doubt, but regardless I'm glad you brought it up again. . .
Enough testing has been done that hard counters have been found for each race that can be used against this build and are effective enough to allow you to hold off the push and eventually get an expansion out.
This is good news since I'll be able to experiment with some of the strategy's natural transitions when before they felt too artificial.
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I'll be posting the Counters and Transitions in the next major update that I make to page one, and hopefully also with some replays or videos that are less blurry.
On April 16 2010 04:40 MaximumSquid wrote: mOnion:
I didn't say always. . . my reply still implied doubt, but regardless I'm glad you brought it up again. . .
Enough testing has been done that hard counters have been found for each race that can be used against this build and are effective enough to allow you to hold off the push and eventually get an expansion out.
This is good news since I'll be able to experiment with some of the strategy's natural transitions when before they felt too artificial.
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I'll be posting the Counters and Transitions in the next major update that I make to page one, and hopefully also with some replays or videos that are less blurry.
as you can tell from my last post using the [quote][quote] function which you havent figured out how to use yet, i wasnt talking to you. i was talking to the person who insulted me for being right ^_^
and you're right that you didnt say always, but you did say mathematically impossible. which is close right?
I've been doing this in gold / plat but I make a quicker attack so the toss doesnt have too many ranged units. Best timing IMO is 2 queens 8 roaches... they'll have like 3-4 zealots and 2 stalker or sentries. If the toss opens 2 gate this is almost an instant win.
A protoss player handled me by massing stalkers and focus firing queens/roaches while blinking his weakened stalkers to the back of his bunch. Was pretty nice.
I actually played against a player who went for the queen/roach rush, countered with a 16 zergling attack when he hit midfield and was able to get 2 spine crawlers up. He may have had me if he had pushed but i was able to keep pressure up and get to mutas shortly after.
It's still a viable strat against some openings, just like everything, requires you to scout well.