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I've been struggling to harass as Terran at the Platinum level.
- Reaper rushes (that don't cut economy struggle) to do much damage.
- Vikings fill such an important niche role in the Terran army that risking them to kill a few workers is rough.
- Dropships full of infantry work pretty well, but it's very costly and and risky to commit some of your 'blob' to reach-arounds.
- Hellion drops/harassment seem effective for the price. Their speed lets them suck up more time from the opponent as they race from expo to expo clearing out workers.
But that's about it. I've seen Thor+Dropship hijinx used recently which may have some potential. Maybe Ravens throwing turrets or HSM's can be added, but the big thing in all of these harassment schemes is their price. Even when they're effective, they're very costly.
I'm looking at Nukes as a way to potentially get some harassment in that's very cheap or example.
Even if it flusters your opponent for 10-15 seconds as he tries to evacuate workers, get an observer/troops to the area etc, that may be significant.
Has anyone seen nukes used cost-effectively at the Platinum level?
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Nope, due everyone being able to switch to the place where the nuke happens its not that great..
so basically you waste resources on nuke (maybe cloak too) and it won't harm a single fly.
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On April 15 2010 03:54 Frenzied_Tank wrote:
Nope, due everyone being able to switch to the place where the nuke happens its not that great..
so basically you waste resources on nuke (maybe cloak too) and it won't harm a single fly.
It might not kill anything, but stopping a player from harvesting for 15 seconds (ish) is worth 100 minerals / 100 gas for nuke... and if you keep raining them down you might be able to garnish a win that way... IDK i havent tried it in almost 500 games as terran lol.
EDIT:A conservative estimate for 16 scvs harvesting 8 mienral patches and 6 scvs harvesting 2 geysers for 15 seconds ( 3 trips?) = 16 x 5= 80 x 3 = 240 minerals lost and 8x5=40 x 3 = 120 gas lost. Net win for the nuker.
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I watch a LOT of plat / high gold stream / replay usage and all I can say is that when they are used and actually hit it is the most devastating thing that you can do to an opponent aside from all out victory. Especially if you coordinate multiple nuke strikes at one time. There is NOTHING worse than losing nearly 100% of miners all at once. And if attacking multiple bases you can literally shut down production cycles. using One ghost at a time is almost worthless however. For buildings only supply depots / turrets die outright. One ghost is also very easy to find and kill.3-4 ghosts is not easy, however with each building you create and nuke the larger you sink into the red econ wise until you can be effective. Heavy nuke use is amazing, they can be used defensively also.
Just my $.02
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It's a rather large investment for a rather low result. Ghosts are an expensive diversion from your main army unless you are fighting toss. But all toss have obs floating everywhere. So, pretty much, the result is:
Toss: Nukes get spotted a mile away by obs.
Terran: You get killed by a superior army.
Zerg: You get killed by a superior army.
Albeit late game you could probably use ghosts fairly well as a harassment, but early to mid they are not very efficient.
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They are very viable if you understand how to reach the point in the game where it is ok to build x3 nuclear silos.
If you go nukes, do not invest in only 1 silo, you need x3 so you can snipe expansions while using your main army elsewhere.
they really are viable mainly in tvp, but there are some specific uses tvt as well, and probably could be in tvz too but not as viable there.
also, if you play a toss that clusters pylons to power gateways, like 8-10 of em, it is worth it to nuke the pylons. Same goes for if you go x3 nukes, nuking gateway/pylon clusters can many times be better than nuking a nexus or multiple expansions. If you know your main army is stronger, go for the gates/pylon clusters.
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My friend sent me a rep yesterday of him playing TvP on LT at 3 and 12 vs incontrol where he used nuke successfully to control the map. Was a pretty fun game to watch and went into the mid-late game where both had a gold expo. inc had 5 colossus at one point and the t ended up winning using only marine, marauder, ghost, and micro. The tooltip says snipe only works on biological, but i'm pretty sure he was using snipe to kill sentries very quickly... but i could be wrong. I've tried using nukes but it only works vs bad people so far.
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They work great for taking out a corner of massed supply depots or pylons.
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Ive seen defensive nukes used to great effect a few times.
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As a zerg plat ~50 I've had 2 different terrans use them very effectively on me, both times on desert oasis. I assume, due to the distance on that map many zerg wont use the bane/bust bo, which probably would own the nuke start... anyway...
What these 2 players did, normal'ish supply wall with bunker, 1rax -->ghost bldg start producing nuke/ghost. They walk their ghost out (both avoided the los from towers that my lings were on) walk to obscure places below/across from my min line/extractors. Scan my base, drop nuke. never killed a single worker but forcing me off min line and Insta KILLING both extractors really hampered my tech. As one player followed this up with 3 more nukes in this fashion, forcing multi rebuilds of my extractors as well as heal for my lair which also takes quite a bit of damage with each nuke.
Other than that I havent had nukes used with much success against me as a Zerg.
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When DO you use nukes? Like, is there a situation where you would say OH, a nuke would be PERFECT right now!!
They only time I've used one sucessfully was on Twilight Fortress when a Huge army walk up the entrace of my base. I nuked the entrance and I must say it was pretty funny.
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in terran vs terran where both of you went tank/thor and can't break each other's lines
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nukes, good for killing depos and pylons, you can pretty easily put a tough supply cap on a player
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Building multiple Ghost Academies seems to get away from the point I'm trying to hit. I'm looking for very cheap cost-effective harassment. Terran has plenty of options for expensive harassment - I want something that doesn't autolose me the macro fight in the process.
In terms of matchups, I guess it makes sense to build a few ghosts against Toss for EMP, and they're alright against Zerg as well to hamper infestors/corruptors and snipe is useful in situations.
In those cases, building an additional nuke isn't prohibitively expensive if you can make it payoff. Again, paying 100/100 now for a potential payoff 60-90 seconds from now is rough. Hmm.
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That is such an awesome match, as in, amazing match, hmm, i might watch it again :D
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On April 15 2010 03:54 Frenzied_Tank wrote:
Nope, due everyone being able to switch to the place where the nuke happens its not that great..
so basically you waste resources on nuke (maybe cloak too) and it won't harm a single fly.
Didn't this end up being a false rumor?
In this thread about half way down page 2 a few people tested it and found it not to be true. You could center on places where nukes hit by hitting the spacebar to go through old notifications, but not center on it while a nuke was enroute. Honestly I haven't tested this myself, no one has tried to nuke me yet (I probably will test itwhen i get home).
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I've found defensive nukes very useful in TvP when he's pushing your choke. I've found if you're able to hold him at your choke for a short time or can lure him into it is best.
1) Hold him at your choke - When he runs in, place a nuke under his feet. Try to keep your troops at a place where you can try to fend him off while he stays where he is for the nuke. Doing this I'll cloak the Ghost and place him within the army. Normally if you got a few ghosts he won't be able to pick it off in time.
2) Lure him - When he's moving in, nuke your feet. After he moves in, run back. Hopefully he moves in early enough/you move out fast enough that he doesn't notice and you don't lose many (if any) units to the nuke. Offcentering the ghost seems best in this spot, or holding him where you move your units back to.
Other than defensive purposes, I don't see too much other uses of Nukes at current time. I have one replay with a 1-type defensive nuke if you'd like to see it and I definitely think it saved me the game after I screwed up terrible earlier and should have lost.
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I try to use nukes in my terran play, but they're often only effective on maps where I'm slow-pushing anyway. Sure a tank firing on your expo is annoying, but a nuke on your expo basically *forces* them to hit my contain.
I've also tried sending one little cloaked ghost off by himself to nuke a random expo during a bit fight. Have had mixed success.
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Nukes are actually very effective, and it is not that easy to stop them. Detection is not always present, scans can miss if you dont see the ghost etc. Ofc, they are not really viable as an early game strat but 2 bases can support them, especially against protoss as you will have ghosts anyway. The biggest problem I found with them is the amount of APM required.
Another possible way to use them is in battle (especially if you already used them elsewhere during a battle) the opponent may not notice and this is obviously a huge advantage, but more realistically he may panic and start to fall back while your marauders chase him or he is shot by tanks.
If you think about it the nuke really screws up macro. You will spend 10-20 seconds looking for the nuke, then you will have to start returning you workers, repairing damage etc. If you can keep someone constantly under the pressure of nukes (like one per two minutes) I imagine that they will feel much less comfortable and probably start making a lot of mistakes.
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On April 15 2010 03:54 Frenzied_Tank wrote:
Nope, due everyone being able to switch to the place where the nuke happens its not that great..
so basically you waste resources on nuke (maybe cloak too) and it won't harm a single fly.
noob question: how does one switch to the place where the nuke is going to happen? space bar?
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The spacebar thing does not work, I tested it specifically and also tried in games where I was nuked.
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Hyrule19034 Posts
Nukes will work great against someone running on Low graphics settings, since the dot DOESN'T SHOW UP
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Most people tend to get detection and defense for their mineral line and overlook their macro area or tech buildings. I often times dual nuke two expo's at the same time as I push against my opponents army. Forcing him to either let his workers die, or take some attention from the army clash to locate nukes and move stuff away. In both cases I get an advantage out of it. Then the next time I get two nukes I place them dead on his tech or macro area where there is generally less defense.
One nuke to unpower 8 warpgates seems like pretty well spent money to me. Two nukes to annihilate every single tech building, again completely shutting down production for a bit also seems quite worth it. The upside to nuking all the pylons around the production area to hell is that not only will the toss have to rebuild those pylons but in general he will build way more pylons than he wants to just to have backups for the next time and ofcourse the next time the nuke is going to be landing somewhere completely different.
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On April 15 2010 06:38 Zafrumi wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2010 03:54 Frenzied_Tank wrote:
Nope, due everyone being able to switch to the place where the nuke happens its not that great..
so basically you waste resources on nuke (maybe cloak too) and it won't harm a single fly. noob question: how does one switch to the place where the nuke is going to happen? space bar?
Please stop spreading that false rumor!
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yeah i've seen plat replays where the terran goes nukes.
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I personally tap spacebar immediately every time I hear the warning, after seeing that thread, and it never seems to move to the nuke area. I dunno if I'm doing it wrong or something.
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If that space bar thing would work, Blizzard might just as well put a big X on the minimap where the nuke will go down. It's not going to be very effective that way.
I personally am not nuked often and I am thankful for that. It's not really viable to have Overseers everywhere and they aren't THAT fast. So the only real solution is to run away whatever the nuke is targeting. 1 or 2 kills (buildings, drones on gas that were in the extractor when you box select) and the lost mining time + time lost while searching the map for the nuke should be plenty to make the nuke pay for itself.
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Nukes definitely have a shot at being effective, especially as they can be used as a normal part of your army now.
They are definately worth it to keep your enemy off of mining from at least one base each time a nuke is launched. I'm also going to be giving it a try.
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I wouldn't go out of my way to build a Ghost Academy and then nuke for harass, but if you're on that side of the tech tree anyway it is pretty cost effective... the players you play against aren't pros, and many times will react late, getting you some extra drone kills too.
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Spacebar DOES NOT reveal the Nuke location, well at least not due to the launch of the nuke. What happens is the ghost will sometimes shoot a worker or building before launching the nuke because Hold Fire is currently garbage. When your opponent hits spacebar it centers the screen on the ghost because he attacked, not because he launched the nuke.
Once Blizzard changes Hold Fire to be a toggle this issue will resolve itself. Right now if you do anything with your ghost it removes Hold Fire and thats how these rumors got started.
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they're pretty awesome to use. but getting a ghost + cloak + nuke is a large investment for terran, esp early/mid game.
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On April 15 2010 13:06 Kinmaul wrote:
Spacebar DOES NOT reveal the Nuke location, well at least not due to the launch of the nuke. What happens is the ghost will sometimes shoot a worker or building before launching the nuke because Hold Fire is currently garbage. When your opponent hits spacebar it centers the screen on the ghost because he attacked, not because he launched the nuke.
yea right, have just tried it and didn't work, sorry.
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im ~30 plati random and play arround 200 games and never see a nuke in my games, but i will try this tech for sure
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its pretty good in TvT aswell, to attack sieged positions, your oppoenents gets two choices, to stay and die or pack up and move, and by doing that, leaving your tank free to roll in and siege up
Lately when ive used nukes, my ghosts just die  so you pretty much have to get the stealth upgrade
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In my opinion nukes are best used either on an opponent's high yield (especially on metropolis where its so easy), or to force an opponent's army to go where you want it. 2-3 nukes could be devastating to an army in the right place, or could easily keep an opponent from trying to break you at your choke. 1-2 nukes behind first, to prevent escape, 1-2 nukes on top of their army while you fly a medivac around in their main to get them searching elsewhere. Especially in tvp where ghosts are great w/o nuke, I think we'll see nukes more and more in SC2
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you really need to try to nuke multiple places at once. That really reduces the chance of it being just a crap shoot.
Oh, and go directly to nuke, try to unload somewhere where you will be out of firing range of any enemy units/structures whenever possible. This allows the spacebar to center on the ghost if you end up pecking at some enemy unit/structure.
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On April 15 2010 05:47 Alexc26 wrote:That is such an awesome match, as in, amazing match, hmm, i might watch it again :D
Epic amazing match. Wow. This is probably the best I have seen so far, just a really great exciting game with so much macro and micro, multiple attacks and defenses going on the entire game, so much expo harassment etc. Just wow, loved watching this, thanks for the post.
And that ghost on the xel naga nuking the gold expo OMG ! I know that Liquid was going WHERE THE HELL IS THIS DAMN GHOST just like i was when it happened, brilliant move.
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I use the following game as reference.
http://sc2.nibbits.com/replays/view/1445/inka-vs-qxc
Nukes are really one of two things
1) Harassment tool. It's an extremely cost efficient way to kill a lot of defense structures and/or workers
2) Siege weapon. Seeing as how siege tanks are virtually useless nukes serve as a good way to break defenses.
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nazgul v. littleone on metalopolis is a good one to see how nukes can be used well
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Probably not what you were aiming at, but I thought I'd note that nukes in a T/P team in 2s are awesome if your partner can position sentries to pin the opposing army down. Takes great positioning though... partner and I have only managed it a couple of times.
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Your math is wrong! Its not 15 secs but rather 10 or even around 7 secs, because a skilled Toss draws back not in an instant but a little later to reduce the dmg done!
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On April 15 2010 03:50 RPGabe wrote:
Has anyone seen nukes used cost-effectively at the Platinum level?
Yes Team Liquid Invitational, TheLittleOne vs Nazgul. He attack an expo and when Nazgul was bringing up his troops he placed a nuke right behind his men so Nazgul couldn't chance an attack.
He used nuke several other times during the match, kiled some worksers every now and then but yes it is very difficult to get much use out of it.
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I'm working on Nuke Rush build... Might take few days but it seems really promising. 
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On April 15 2010 15:47 The Terminator wrote:
they're pretty awesome to use. but getting a ghost + cloak + nuke is a large investment for terran, esp early/mid game.
Well you could already make use of the cloaking early in the midgame ... (works vs Terran and Zerg only!):
- get a Ghost ... or better two and run his energy high
- get a Medivac
- take the Medivac to your enemies base (works best on maps with large main bases)
- sneak the Ghost to the worker line and use SNIPE to kill workers
Due to the workers being one-shotted the enemy does not get a warning that he is under attack. It is best when you only kill a few workers (maybe concentrate on Gas?) and then get out again before he notices the missing workers and figures out the tactic (scan from Terran).
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Nuke is good if you are able to micro/macro very well. If you are engaged in some sort of field control battle back and forth, then what you can do is macro a ghost around to fire a nuke at his economy while you are stalemated with his blob.
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So you'd spend 800+ gas to kill 6 workers?
If you attack at the same time as you nuke a mineral line or expo he wont know where its coming down, spacebar will point to the last action.
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i reckon Desert Oasis to be an excellent map to harass geysers with nukes....
...stupid map... 8[
but this will probably bring us to "extractor 500hp, refinery 500hp, assimilator 450+450hp" 
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I remember seeing, I think it was, TheLittleOne use nukes to force his opponent's army away from areas. I recall him attacking an expo, and dropping a nuke near where the Protoss army would have to move through to defend. This forced the Protoss to stay back as his expansion died, and allowed the Terran to run out without losing any units.
You don't necessarily have to hit anything for it to be cost effective in all situations.
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Has anyone tried using nuke with air harassment?
Like, call a nuke down, run a raven in, and shoot an HSM in from the direction the probes would normally run?
Or follow up a nuke with a thor drop or banshee raid, after the defense buildings are dead and defending units have run away?
I haven't seen these kinds of tactics, only nukes used in isolation as feeble harassment.
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On April 15 2010 03:56 Zoltan wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2010 03:54 Frenzied_Tank wrote:
Nope, due everyone being able to switch to the place where the nuke happens its not that great..
so basically you waste resources on nuke (maybe cloak too) and it won't harm a single fly. It might not kill anything, but stopping a player from harvesting for 15 seconds (ish) is worth 100 minerals / 100 gas for nuke... and if you keep raining them down you might be able to garnish a win that way... IDK i havent tried it in almost 500 games as terran lol. EDIT:A conservative estimate for 16 scvs harvesting 8 mienral patches and 6 scvs harvesting 2 geysers for 15 seconds ( 3 trips?) = 16 x 5= 80 x 3 = 240 minerals lost and 8x5=40 x 3 = 120 gas lost. Net win for the nuker.
But they can still mine for 8 of those 15 seconds if they know when it's going to happen (since you're saying they use multiple nukes) so in the end, the nuke cost is going to be higher than the resource damage to opponent..
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I use them when i'm bored or accidentally get a ghost academy.
AKA i use them a lot. :D
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EPT
