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On May 04 2010 04:44 link0 wrote:
While Viking/Tank/Marine is fairly balanced unit composition, it will usually fail if your opponent goes either mass air or mass ground.
Mass ground is definitely what gives this build the most trouble, but I can usually handle it if I play defensively, or if I can put early pressure on them before they have too many units. It only takes a couple of early tanks with a single viking to cause a lot of damage to the opponent's wall, and the ground units take a lot of splash damage when they funnel down the ramp to defend.
As far as mass air goes, I actually have a really easy time against it. If my opponent masses vikings, while he will generally outnumber my own vikings, my marines are what win the fight. If he lands his vikings to attack the marines, they just get torn apart by tanks. In the case of banshees, the vikings are a hard counter to them.
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I hear a lot of people talking about mass xyz and not a lot of talking about building a balanced army and continually scouting and reacting to that scouting... Generally I play every match with some mix of rines/marauders/tanks/medivacs/vikings/banshees. The %s change based on what you scout...! If they have heavy ground and their tanks are giving you trouble, mix in some banshees, if they have banshees that are troubling your tanks, mix in some vikings or marines ect. Try not to be too predictable. Generally all in strats are going to be epic or epic fail. If you are happy throwing away a potential win because your betting he wont scout your army then go for it but if you can beat them in a legit match why not take a sure thing?
Something i notice in TVT games is that the 1st expansion comes a little later than normal. I typically play fairly defensively and wait until they make a move that i counter before i expand. I also always keep like 1 marine behind their nat minerals so i can make sure that they aren't expanding w/o my knowledge.
Most matches i will throw out a 10 rax 10 gas 11 sup reaper harass but really its just to mess with them and pull their SCVs off of their minerals. I never make more than 2 reapers and after that its factory with 2nd rax w/reactor for marauders/rines/tanks depending on what i see. You should be scanning every other 50 energy from your OC to make sure you dont get cheesed. Also, send a few rines around the map to make sure he isnt proxying some cheese or taking a random expo before his natural or something like that.
Generally in TVT you dont want to wall your entrance as it leaves you open to reaper harass and with medivacs being so plentiful its not like they cant just pop in wherever they want anyways so dont plan on your main entrance being your source of defense. other than that, just play well :D
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On May 03 2010 11:30 HCastorp wrote:
Thors don't beat all terran air, BCs slaughter them, even though it seems like they wouldn't. I think this is true even if you don't use/have yamato yet.
Going BCs is suicide in TvT unless its unscouted. Reactor-port pumping vikings just dominates BCs.
This matchup I generally have no clue what I'm doing. Tank-viking seems strong if you see they aren't going any sort of heavy bio push. If they go heavy bio you need to make a ton of bio to complement and shield your tanks and defend well though.
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On May 04 2010 04:44 link0 wrote:
While Viking/Tank/Marine is fairly balanced unit composition, it will usually fail if your opponent goes either mass air or mass ground.
One example of the huge dice game: You scan a starport with tech lab. It can either be banshees with cloak, banshees without cloak, or a Raven. Now what do you do? If you don't have turrets or a Raven, you are screwed if he goes banshees with cloak. If you do make turrets, you are way behind if he only made a raven or doesn't get cloak on his banshees. In high level TvT, being just a few hundred minerals behind at such an early stage in the game is huge.
Guess thats why they call it strategy? The mental or mindgame aspect is kind of important
No different than tech switching as Zerg or cancelling a warping building after your opponent scouts and leaves
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Heavy bio pushes I dont have that much of a problem with. I mean, tanks destroy bio. if you have 2 tanks you can hold off a non-medivac push. And medivacs get countered by vikings...and then the vikings canland and make a wall...right?
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On May 04 2010 07:14 Prisom wrote:
Generally in TVT you dont want to wall your entrance as it leaves you open to reaper harass and with medivacs being so plentiful its not like they cant just pop in wherever they want anyways so dont plan on your main entrance being your source of defense. other than that, just play well :D
Ha, I wish the wall-off wasn't so much of a given for Terran players, otherwise my preferred harass strategy of blowing straight by their main force with Hellions, burninating all of their workers before they can react, and riding back out just as fast would work better. Hellions are quite a bit tougher than Reapers and stand up well against the fire of a few token Marauders near the mineral line, but if you wall off, they just can't get in with the surprise they need, even if you don't have any defenders on the wall.
Medivac drops with Hellions work quite well, though...two Medivacs and eight Hellions can show up, do damage, and get back out very quickly. I play mostly random 2v2 and hitting the mineral lines of both opposing players early on, one after another, will put them so far behind that I can win even if my partner is terrible. Some players will try to expo immediately after getting hit with a good harass as kind of a Hail Mary to get back on even footing in macro...it's pretty amusing to trash three or four bases with the same bunch of Hellions.
It does really well against Zerg at least, seeing as a good Hellion rush can often take out a Queen as well.
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Raven/thor/tank is unstoppable unless you have raven/thor/tank
Raven's pt defense drone 100% negates banshees, vikings, and marauders. Once you get 6-7 ravens, its ridiculously strong. Terran has no anti-air other than marines that can go through pt defense drone so your raven cloud can just fly around with impunity.
Thors with upgrades decimates air. Even if you can micro the banshees, ravens will, again, completely negate the damage and Thors with upgrades cut through banshees like no other.
If you have extra energy left, auto turrets decimate tank fortifications. Each auto turret can take 3 seige mode hits, and costs 50 energy. It also does 8 dmg which is somewhat negligible. So for 50 energy, you are basically getting a zealot bomb a la BW. Except thanks to pt defense drone, the enemy can't do anything about it.
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On May 04 2010 08:11 Xenocide_Knight wrote:
Raven/thor/tank is unstoppable unless you have raven/thor/tank
Raven's pt defense drone 100% negates banshees, vikings, and marauders. Once you get 6-7 ravens, its ridiculously strong. Terran has no anti-air other than marines that can go through pt defense drone so your raven cloud can just fly around with impunity.
Xenocide_Knight, while this unit comp certainly sounds powerful, the problem I see with it is that it really requires a lot of investment into teching (not to mention all of the gas that it costs), and I feel as though there would be a huge window of opportunity before you have the 6-7 ravens where you'd be very vulnerable. Unless this is your late game strategy, how do you successfully defend yourself while you get to this powerful combination of units? Unless you can do a sufficient job getting defenses set up, it seems like most builds would actually be very effective against this one (again assuming that this isn't some sort of late game strategy).
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On May 04 2010 08:11 Xenocide_Knight wrote:
Raven/thor/tank is unstoppable unless you have raven/thor/tank
Raven's pt defense drone 100% negates banshees, vikings, and marauders. Once you get 6-7 ravens, its ridiculously strong. Terran has no anti-air other than marines that can go through pt defense drone so your raven cloud can just fly around with impunity.
Thors with upgrades decimates air. Even if you can micro the banshees, ravens will, again, completely negate the damage and Thors with upgrades cut through banshees like no other.
If you have extra energy left, auto turrets decimate tank fortifications. Each auto turret can take 3 seige mode hits, and costs 50 energy. It also does 8 dmg which is somewhat negligible. So for 50 energy, you are basically getting a zealot bomb a la BW. Except thanks to pt defense drone, the enemy can't do anything about it.
I don't think that this unit composition would deal well with battlecruisers. Thors and autoturrets are not very good against battlecruisers, and i haven't seen point defense drones used against BCs but I don't think they would be very good since BCs have a high rate of fire and would drain the drones' energy quickly.
Also, tank/thor/raven is very slow and immobile which leaves yourself open for harrassment. It can work in some situations but I think you're lacking in map control. What will you do if they drop your base with a group of vikings and you're out trying to kill an expansion? bring your ravens back and setup autoturrets? I don't think that would work very well -__-
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On May 04 2010 11:10 caldo149 wrote:Show nested quote +On May 04 2010 08:11 Xenocide_Knight wrote:
Raven/thor/tank is unstoppable unless you have raven/thor/tank
Raven's pt defense drone 100% negates banshees, vikings, and marauders. Once you get 6-7 ravens, its ridiculously strong. Terran has no anti-air other than marines that can go through pt defense drone so your raven cloud can just fly around with impunity.
Thors with upgrades decimates air. Even if you can micro the banshees, ravens will, again, completely negate the damage and Thors with upgrades cut through banshees like no other.
If you have extra energy left, auto turrets decimate tank fortifications. Each auto turret can take 3 seige mode hits, and costs 50 energy. It also does 8 dmg which is somewhat negligible. So for 50 energy, you are basically getting a zealot bomb a la BW. Except thanks to pt defense drone, the enemy can't do anything about it.
I don't think that this unit composition would deal well with battlecruisers. Thors and autoturrets are not very good against battlecruisers, and i haven't seen point defense drones used against BCs but I don't think they would be very good since BCs have a high rate of fire and would drain the drones' energy quickly. Also, tank/thor/raven is very slow and immobile which leaves yourself open for harrassment. It can work in some situations but I think you're lacking in map control. What will you do if they drop your base with a group of vikings and you're out trying to kill an expansion? bring your ravens back and setup autoturrets? I don't think that would work very well -__-
Which is why you would scout the fusion core, and mix in vikings from reactored starports. It's a given that mass BCs with yamato demolishes everything, including vikings unless you outnumber them 3-4 to 1.
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Thors actually aren't too bad against bcs if you push with some scvs building turrets. I once had a game where I got battle cruisers to (apparently) counter thors, but he kept pushing up slowly with turrets and I couldn't get near them except with yamato gun.
I also find that PDD isn't too bad vs bcs. Not as good versus something like a hydralisk but it still blocks roughly 200 damage (or more if the bc has upgrades). Even though that damage is coming out faster it's still blocking just as much.
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Upgrades are huge in BC vs Thor, generally in the Thor's favor. A 0/0 BC can take two 0/0 Thors, one after another, whereas a 3/3 Thor can take (just barely) a 3/3 BC.
Source: http://sc2calc.net/
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I make double starport opening. One with reactor, another with tech lab. Then I go immediately for harass with banshees + vikings, while building expansion and starting pumping mass marauders. Under the pressure opponent build expand later and usually switches to mass vikings/thors and my marauders work really well.
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Thats why I 3rax, Factory, 2sp
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On May 03 2010 10:23 Energizer wrote:
So I've been playing a lot recently, and lord and behold.....
It is lo and behold
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Win air with Vikings and then you can do whatever you want
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On May 05 2010 00:57 Snowfield wrote:
Win air with Vikings and then you can do whatever you want
lol
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On May 04 2010 23:40 Shaithis wrote:Upgrades are huge in BC vs Thor, generally in the Thor's favor. A 0/0 BC can take two 0/0 Thors, one after another, whereas a 3/3 Thor can take (just barely) a 3/3 BC. Source: http://sc2calc.net/
That's because SC 2 calc has the wrong numbers for the Thor air attack upgrade. It's +1 per upgrade, not +5.
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On May 05 2010 05:10 Azarkon wrote:Show nested quote +On May 04 2010 23:40 Shaithis wrote:Upgrades are huge in BC vs Thor, generally in the Thor's favor. A 0/0 BC can take two 0/0 Thors, one after another, whereas a 3/3 Thor can take (just barely) a 3/3 BC. Source: http://sc2calc.net/ That's because SC 2 calc has the wrong numbers for the Thor air attack upgrade. It's +1 per upgrade, not +5.
Holy crap, I had a feeling something was off...
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Hey Chease!
On May 04 2010 02:26 CheAse wrote:
I used to hate tvt but I am starting to have some success with it. I am currently 19-2 or something in plat, and beat a couple people in the triple strike cup in tvt, so I think my tvt is decent. Here is my build with notable mentions
12 rax
12 scout for tech lab
--->if tech lab, place marines at likely ledges, watch for reapers
--->if 2 rax, bunker at your ramp sweet spot
--->if he is going marauders you will not be able to move out fast and FE with tanks
13 gas
15 OC
always constant marine production
factory when you have the gas
make another gas when you have enough mins
1 or 2 tanks,use 2nd or 3rd scan to see if they have a port with tech lab
--->if port has a tech lab drop a reactor on your rax, and swap it with your port when its done
--->if they have port, make your port after 1 tank is qued,
--->if no port, make your port after 2nd or 3rd tank.
Start to contain and push your opponents natural with tanks and vikings with a marine buffer for marauders
Expand after contain
This is good, everyone's gotta note the if statements here. You can't have a set build in your TvT past 15 OC. It just can't be done. You build one too many tanks and you lose to mass air. You build one too few tanks and you lose to mass infantry.
A good safe place to start is 1 barracks -> 1 factory -> 1 starport. Before your starport is complete, you need to know what the opponent is doing.
The key is that 3rd scan (or even better, if you somehow manage to scout them without a scan).
--> If they have the starport WITH TECH LAB (and possibly another starport), you either go mass viking OR thor (your choice) because they are going mass air.
--> If they have the starport WITH NO TECH LAB (and possibly with a reactor) that means they're "expecting" you to have banshee and they just want to have some air presence w/vikings (or they eventually want to go banshee themselves if you go no air). Your choices here are to also mass viking and "tie" them OR thor (best) OR ignore air completely and just push them (if they only have a starport w/reactor) because vikings are terrible if you have no air
--> If they don't have a starport but they do have a factory with a tech lab, then they're going siege tank. You can either go mass marauder OR big air. If you go big air, you have to bunker up otherwise you'll get rolled over before you can get a banshee out. Especially true if they also have a barracks with a reactor on it.
--> If they don't have a starport, and don't even have a factory (they have 3/4 barracks) then you need to BUNKER THE HELL UP and you have your choice of either M&M&M&Siege Tank OR Big Air (skip vikings, double starport w/banshee...or single starport w/banshee with cloak)
so the key is the 3rd scan. There's all sorts of things in between too. But mainly it comes down to being one step ahead of them in building the right units.
p.s. if your 12 scout sees a already complete barracks already and few scvs, or a complete barracks already with a refinery and a tech lab, or no barracks(!), you need to bunker the hell up your mineral line with probably 2 bunkers (one on both sides of your minerals)
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EPT
