*****UPDATE 5/2/10********** Mass Reaper, won in 15 minutes.
This was verse my friend, he just got sc2 2 days ago from me, but has played starcraft since the release. He isnt a noob to the game, just more to the new mechanics and builds to sc2. Still he doesnt know terran well, so i mean this match isnt meant to show skill as we both were trying new things.
"OH MAN I RAPED HIM WITH REAPERS" Because honestly, i can tell it isnt a viable winning strat pass copper. Still had the exact results i planned against buildings. If he had just a few marine/maradors(which is easy by then) i would have failed.
If any veterans would like to try this out, maybe find a way to work this in, as you can basically 1 shot buildings, very cheaply, effeiecntly, and quickly move from place to place.
As of now.
Mass Reaper=Not plausible
So far in the beta, a lot of the things are the same BO and unit composition game, after game. With a select few which are very interesting.
I am gonna break away from all that and try and use the underused units and ability's to find their true potential.
Im gonna start posting all the replays i find that can be useful and show the ups of some underused things.
If anyone has some serious ideas on what to try, id be glad.
Also im not gonna do this during placement matches. Ill most likely get gold, if not silver.
I think the most underused thing is the ghost snipe ability. Other than that i dont think there are underused units, units like carriers and battlecruisers obviously not so much because its extremely expensive and its late game.
atm i'm just practicing using tanks + nukes vs toss to harass. i'm not that interested in winning games anymore, i just want to learn the mechanics more.
Mothership rush. Archon massing. Any strat that involves: ultras, reapers (past early game), archons, carriers, mothership, and... can't really think of any other completely under-used unit. Maybe the battlecruiser.
snipe basically makes them anti light/armored/air since it cost like nothing to cast you can easily get off like 8 snipes with 2 ghosts. Snipe those blings and mutas, cripple those hydras and roaches.
tactical nuke, launch a nuke against an army in advance anticipating a forward push or retreat. or in 2v2 mothership black hole or force field surround into a nuke.
id like to see some people actually use burrowed speedlings fairly early too. imagine a terran bio ball walking over a minefield of speedlings!
id like to see some people actually use burrowed speedlings fairly early too. imagine a terran bio ball walking over a minefield of speedlings!
burrow has remained solidly underused since the research time/cost nerf for any unit.
If you're going to burrow lings why not just burrow banelings instead? You obviously have the money if you made it to t2 and have been on it long enough to get burrow. Speedlings suck hardcore anyways, roach/banelings are much better.
speedlings are awesome, don't know what you're talking about. Just have enough hatches and good enough macro to support their heavy larva cost!
Nothing takes down a base faster than attack upgraded speedlings, and they make great reinforcements once you crack open a base with roach/hydra/muta/whatever
Ghosts are the most underused and underrated units in the game right now. 100/100 for a nuke that takes 20 in game seconds, so about 13-15 in real time. Snipe destroys mutas before they even can attack, and most people just back out with them after getting 1 sniped.
I think it will be really cool to make templar drops in pvz, but instead of killing drones with storm, use feedback on the queen. If you time it right he won't be able to inject larvae. Sadly it doesn't seem very practical.
On May 01 2010 02:34 WorkersOfTheWorld wrote: Mothership rush. Archon massing. Any strat that involves: ultras, reapers (past early game), archons, carriers, mothership, and... can't really think of any other completely under-used unit. Maybe the battlecruiser.
I saw a pretty good use for late-game reapers. Pretty even army advantage and I teched to HT as P. We were on Kulas and he actually hit about 4 to 5 reapers south of my natural. He then pushed my main and of course my HT were in the backline.
Before I knew it the reapers were demolishing my HT and forced me to ignore his main force for a moment which put him at a huge advantage. He didn't win the game, but I thought it was original at least.
On May 01 2010 04:19 CanT.ThinK.oF wrote: I think it will be really cool to make templar drops in pvz, but instead of killing drones with storm, use feedback on the queen. If you time it right he won't be able to inject larvae. Sadly it doesn't seem very practical.
While good idea, only will work on extra queens or people who don't inject macro well. 1queen1hatch setup, the queen never has more then 25-30 energy which would be a pretty pathetic feedback
Best of luck! I highly recommend trying to incorporate ghosts into your amies if you play terran. With only three cloaked ghosts, I was able to whittle down my opponents army using snipe and then I just overpowered him. Also, if you are lucky enough to get a ghost academy early without it being scouted, I highly recommend early nuking of your opponents min line and/or pylons/sd's. Putting them far behind in resources through either probe count or unit cap helps so much. You have to be smart with your next transition, however, either macro'ing a ton if you down his resource line or spamming units to overpower him while he's supply blocked.
I'm not a good player but one thing I have luck with is a DT/stalker combo with blink and +dmg research. I would like to see what a good player could do with it.
I try to get a very solid number of DTs with my stalkers and try to catch my opponent on the move. stalkers help me pick off any detection he has with his army with blink. I can also engage him and them blink back behind my DTs. The DT's can get a good surround or wall with my stalker out ranging many units.
If I get +3/0/0 DT's do 60 damage a hit. They melt mass Thors so fast even if a scan goes off. The idea is to catch them out of the base. Once you clean out his army, you have free access to his base even if he has built detection.
This needs lots of gas so early gas and early expand is important.
does the motherships vortex take the same amount of time as a nuke calldown? I think someone mentioned this before but suck someone's army into a vortex then time the nuke so that it drops on them the second they pop out
On May 01 2010 05:01 Tanatos wrote: I really want to see how you can use Archon
Archons seem really awesome against the current popular Terran builds in particular...and I've NEVER seen them used against my MMM. They're terribly vulnerable to Ghosts but chop up Marauders easily, and oneshot stimmed marines without the riot shield upgrade.
I'd like to see someone use Archons, HTs and Seekers (yeah, that's a lot of gas...better use the mineral savings to expand quickly and throw in massed zealots as well to balance things out, and use DTs to make the archons) against MMM and possibly Viking/Banshee with a few Phoenixes thrown in. Against MMM, send in some hallucinated archons first to try to get any Ghosts that might be around to use up their EMP, send in real archons and zealots and cut off retreating Terrans with force fields, storm them without mercy, focus fire on marauders with archons and let the marines die to the storm. Against Vikings/Banshees, hallucinate as many Phoenixes as possible to soak up Viking fire while the real Phoenixes and Archons concentrate on taking out Banshees, and HTs use feedback on Banshees as much as possible. Even if you eventually lose all your Phoenixes, if you take out all their Banshees their Vikings will have to retreat against GtA from Archons and Seekers, or transform and get killed by zealots.
The easy counter to this would be massed Hellions with infernal preigniters and more than one or two Ghosts with them to take down the archons, and how often do you see that? Also, the main army would have a tough time shutting down reaper harass compared to stalkers, so you'd need to build cannons near your probes if you were worried about that.
Ok, still waiting on my new FIOS internet. Been snagging it off my neighbor this week, can only go online, no online games though.
Once i get it back ill do these strats in order. These are just a general idea, ill be obviously adding more into them and not just doing straight up mass archon and such, but you get what i mean.
1. Mass Archons 2.Tactical Nuking 3.Mass Ultras 4. Ghosts ghosts and ghosts. 5. Heavy reaper army(i get a feeling, it will be quite good or funny)
i will also do a lot of the ones you guys posted here. Some of them i cannot wait to try.
As for how ill be doing replays.
I wont just upload golden moments if these work, ill also put up ones where you can see the fault or my fault lol in the match. To see if using more of these units is actually viable and worthwhile. Which i hope it is, as they are my favorite units.
On May 01 2010 06:28 Kin~Slayer wrote: does the motherships vortex take the same amount of time as a nuke calldown? I think someone mentioned this before but suck someone's army into a vortex then time the nuke so that it drops on them the second they pop out
I REALLY would like to see this. Trying it tonight myself. Just those two units could wipe a whole army in a completely unavoidable way.
The vortex -> nuke thing is old, and i believe the timing was changed on one of those two abilities to screw with using them in tandem (not saying it isn't possible still, it could be). There were some videos floating around a month or more ago where some players were making mince meat of 200/200 armies x2 with nukes and vortex, quite amusing.
Massing Ravens. Actually, it pretty much only works on Zerg as both Terran and Protoss have good ability to snipe their auto turrets. Zerg however does not in most common builds that contain hydra tech before you can reach his base with 2 Ravens. BO is: Standard BO with fast Factory and one Starport plus Ebay. Then go for 1 raven, raven energy tech and building armor tech as fast as possible. As soon as possible build a second raven and continue raven production from that point on. With spare minerals it should be possible to set up an island or normal expansion and add more rax to pump lots of marines. When 2nd raven is done, both should have 100 energy soon (2nd already profited from +25 starting energy) and building armor tech finished. Then go for Zerg's base and drop 4 turrets. Ideally he only has lings and max 2 or 3 hydras so far which won't kill those turrets easily which have 3 armor and 150 hitpoints each. Continue dropping turrets whenever enough energy is there to have some turrets (if there is enough energy, it is possible to surround all workers between minerals, extractors and hatch by placing turrets!). Best case scenario is that each wave of turrets keeps Zerg's army small (he always has to engage those turrets or give up his main ) so the increasing amount of ravens and therefor turrets (with expansion you can start building 2 starport ravens!) will kill him over time because you do not loose any ressources in this. It's important to get +1 static defense range as well so those turrets can kill as many hydras as possible. If Zerg doesnt get killed by harassing, there should be a massive marine force ready pretty early as ravens only cost 100 minerals. They can finish the game when Zerg is weakened.
Variations: If he goes for many roaches early on, it's easily possible to switch for banshees If Zerg holds hydra production for roaches to deal with turrets, banshees can also be a valuable addition One Banshee first will delay ravens by one minute, but possibly kill some drones or the queen and encourage zerg to go for hydralisks Instead of banshee, it's also possible to get a Viking first and hunt for overlords. Some Zerg might be discouraged to tech for Mutalisks when they already see a Viking. Early Hellions from the factory, possibly with a reactor, might force him to spend Gas on Speedling upgrades and get more Zerglings. On the flipside it might cause him to build spine crawlers which can be a little resistance for turrets. However, autoturret's don't deal too bad with them.
Cool stuff: If the game lasts long, lots of hunter-seeker-missiles are easy to get (result from playing ravens in 2v2, though it sucked because one was terran :D ) Some ravens might have like 30 or 40 kills. They drop a turret, disappear and gather frags on cheap units like zerglings, broodlings or drones.
I haven't tried it yet, but I think a midgame reaper harass with a sufficient number of reapers would be good. With base damage to buildings of 30, if you can bring down a hatchery or hive pretty darn quick.
Maybe engage their army at the expo with your main army, and sneak in the reapers around the back, or maybe drop them in via medivac. If you can get them in safely, you can probably bring down the CC in quick order.
You could try turtling with mass planetary fortresses and missile turrets, moving out with 200 scvs, building 40 barracks and 20 orbital commands, drop about 40 mules on the gold minerals, and build 80 marines at a time until he runs out of resources (http://screplays.com/system/files/replays/1230/%5Bscr1230%5D(P)IamBrown_(P)Owain_vs_(P)cheng_(T)fatduck.SC2Replay)
A really fun 2v2 strat is mass infestors + mass high templars - fungal growth + psi storm is ridiculous.
On May 01 2010 14:20 cartoon]x wrote: You can actually get nukes out really fast .. I saw a game once where the player used nukes to kill a spire which was building.
Pretty slow spire, but I do agree that fast ghost play is very under-rated.
I had a game where at a certain point, 5-6 reapers were able to snipe a few tech buildings really setting me back. It's technically possible if done at the right time.
Im also going to work on using ultraisks, mass ghost, hallucinate, infested terran mineral harass (like steppes of war natural), and i want to experiment a lot with mass reapers. I play protoss and I have used everything even archons vs zerg who go roach hydra.
Actually archons do alright vs roaches, i dont think they splash anything but they do 4 shot roaches at a decent speed and tank a lot of damage. Basically lots of cannons protecting against muta harass (tight sim city) and army of HT, zeaots with charge, archons. I make archons right after HT run out of energy.
I actually barely ever go stargate anymore now that phoenix is popular and countered -_- so i havnt had any use of carriers or mothership except a game or two where i had a huge lead anyways. But its very obvious that battlecruisers > carriers in just about every way.
EPT
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