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pvt is pretty imbalanced right now in my opinion. vikings absolutely destroy colossi and void rays. largely because they are untouchable because of their range and speed. I find that lately the only chance I have is to go fast blink stalkers and catch him with his pants down. You can get about 7 stalkers and storm his base when he only has a few marines and a tank or 2. This build order also protects against banshees and reapers. if he goes strong marauder you might have trouble unless your mico is good. before he gets too many marauder u can blink the damaged ones to the back. This is very effective. Also you can go to void rays real fast if he is very marauder heavy.
Scouting is very good. You can do a lot of harass with your drone to prevent them from getting a tech lab. Place your drone where the tech lab goes, or build a pylon. when he lifts off, u keep ur drone under his barracks and it will mess him up pretty badly.
If you let the game go on too long, you are bound to lose. no one can fend off even 5 tanks, a medium size bioball, and vikings, and its pretty easy to get that.
I personally dont like HT, but a lot of people do. Ghosts take them out pretty easily and i find that storm doesnt do enough damage. even with your storms he will still have all his tanks and have his bioball.
DT can be very annoying for terran if you catch him without an engineering bay or raven and if he is using his energy on mules, but this is risky because of the gas and time involved in the tech. send them 1 or 2 at a time to avoid losing 6 to scans. they can be very good at keeping him in his base. (until he builds a raven).
If terran goes fast raven you are in trouble. PDD shuts down stalkers like nobodies business.
To sum up. I find that a fast stalker rush is pretty much the only viable option. let the game go on and tanks shut down all ground and vikings shut down all air. and u lose. Your other option is to mass expand and play a huge macro game. get like 10 gateways and keep summoning mass zealots and HT. This requires you to outplay, and macro, and out micro your opponent, who can 1a 2a. hence the imbalance.
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tanks can be pretty challenging but if you look back to brood war and when vultures had spider mines imo it was a lot harder. i usually dont try to go into late game (when terran can get the "death ball" with 5+ tanks but if i do i take advantage of my mobility to win.
a good example is lost temple where the terran can defend there natural very easily cuz of the high ground and the narrow choke. i would never attack into that natural cuz ur army will get lit up in such a situation take map control and safely expand (like don't double expand just cuz hes contained) and get a macro advantage if u kept him contained which you can do because he cant unsiege (and if he does attack because he wont get any volleys off until your armys have collided) he will be starting on his third while you are at 4+ bases at which point you can afford to enter skirmishes that are unfavorable because you can still rebuild your army faster than he will. i think a lot of people has this mentaility that if im not attacking im not winning , but in this case if you just macro harder you will gain a healthy lead
im not saying dont pressure the terran though look to exploit any weaknesses, like if he has no aa get phoenixes or vr's etc. when scouting with your observers and u see his units are defending his natural go harass his main with blinking stalkers or drops. these are all things that can disrupt the terran and possibly throw him off his game and make a mistake.
day9 puts it the best "u dont have to win by a lot u just have to do enough to win" take your macro advantage let that extend out through the game because it will get bigger and bigger. also terran are not op they would be if you could only 1a but fortunately this is not C&C, its starcraft 2 and you can utilize tactics and macro to win.
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On June 02 2010 21:25 johngalt90 wrote:
tanks can be pretty challenging but if you look back to brood war and when vultures had spider mines imo it was a lot harder. i usually dont try to go into late game (when terran can get the "death ball" with 5+ tanks but if i do i take advantage of my mobility to win.
a good example is lost temple where the terran can defend there natural very easily cuz of the high ground and the narrow choke. i would never attack into that natural cuz ur army will get lit up in such a situation take map control and safely expand (like don't double expand just cuz hes contained) and get a macro advantage if u kept him contained which you can do because he cant unsiege (and if he does attack because he wont get any volleys off until your armys have collided) he will be starting on his third while you are at 4+ bases at which point you can afford to enter skirmishes that are unfavorable because you can still rebuild your army faster than he will. i think a lot of people has this mentaility that if im not attacking im not winning , but in this case if you just macro harder you will gain a healthy lead
im not saying dont pressure the terran though look to exploit any weaknesses, like if he has no aa get phoenixes or vr's etc. when scouting with your observers and u see his units are defending his natural go harass his main with blinking stalkers or drops. these are all things that can disrupt the terran and possibly throw him off his game and make a mistake.
day9 puts it the best "u dont have to win by a lot u just have to do enough to win" take your macro advantage let that extend out through the game because it will get bigger and bigger. also terran are not op they would be if you could only 1a but fortunately this is not C&C, its starcraft 2 and you can utilize tactics and macro to win.
People are aware that you can take advantage of the immobility of a siege tank type of play, the problem is that you eventually have to deal with their army, and you can't. In BW, stasis, mine drags, zealot bombs, etc. all helped you whittle down their army. This isn't even half as effective in SC2. Try any combination of army against a maxed or near maxed Terran army. Not only will you lose, but you won't do any damage whatsoever, you will kill a few tanks if that. You would have to sacrifice a full army multiple, multiple times to finally weaken the Terran army to the point where you can kill it with a final assault. Even then, that would only work if you were able to fully take out their entire reinforcement process.
I even stated in my above post, mid-game I can easily see a scenario where I blink in to their bases, drop immortals, and things such as that to try and give myself the lead. The problem is that it doesn't matter the amount of lead I have when I go to mid-game, you cannot stop their army, or come close to weakening it a significant amount with any unit composition. That's the problem.
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Man, I remember not too long ago, all the Terrans were complaining of Immortal imba...
Echoing what everyone is saying, don't engage, abuse immobility and mass expand, and you might have a chance.
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On June 03 2010 01:37 captainwaffles wrote:
Man, I remember not too long ago, all the Terrans were complaining of Immortal imba...
Echoing what everyone is saying, don't engage, abuse immobility and mass expand, and you might have a chance.
How? The point is that they will eventually hit that composition that is impossible to break.
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Abusing the terran's lack of mobility isn't even possible on some maps, such as Steppes of War, where the distances between bases and expansions is so short. Generally, I've found that if I'm unable to prevent the terran from getting his third up, I'm probably screwed.
I'm not sure that the problem is the siege tank as much as it is the viking. That thing is just too good for how cheap it is. Either the range or the damage needs to be decreased. The viking shuts down pretty much everything that the protoss has that can counter tanks and large terran ground armies other than high templar.
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You only have to win, not decisively. I'm not going to get down into the details, but you snipe his expos or get into his main (warp prism, mother ship, void rays) and snipe unit producing buildings. Just be every where he isn't, and for god sakes don't forget to make cannons at your expansions. One of my favorite things to do EVER: win a battle or make him retreat, IMMEDIATELY load a medivac or two and drop expos, works like a charm.
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On June 03 2010 01:54 captainwaffles wrote:
You only have to win, not decisively. I'm not going to get down into the details, but you snipe his expos or get into his main (warp prism, mother ship, void rays) and snipe unit producing buildings. Just be every where he isn't, and for god sakes don't forget to make cannons at your expansions. One of my favorite things to do EVER: win a battle or make him retreat, IMMEDIATELY load a medivac or two and drop expos, works like a charm.
At this point in PvT mech, I would be satisfied to win by the skin of my teeth. Like I said, let's assume you deal reasonable economic damage, delay expansions, kill some SCVs. You still have to deal with his army, you cannot avoid his army all game and then he'll type out, as long as you haven't touched his army he will stay in the game. There simply isn't a composition that deals with siege tank/hellion/viking, as far as my own testing goes, it doesn't exist. If you cannot reasonably weaken a Terran's army, you stand no chance of winning. Even in Brood War you could use stasis, mine drags, zealot drops to slowly whittle down their army, and then use your expansion advantage to replenish, I know how that works, I played a lot of BW PvT. That same strategy doesn't work, SC II Protoss don't have a way to whittle down the army, that's the problem.
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yay, after a long time of lurking, finally a post by me 
During the last couple of days, I have thaught very much about the current PvT. I was pretty despaired about the actual mech play and on my way to figure out how to deal with it, I often ended up in sleepless nights and drowning in my own tears while biting in my keyboard.
Probably the biggest mistake is to try to beat a Terran in a similar style like I deal with PvP or PvZ, which means, get an army which is superior to his and beat him in one big battle to gain the winning advantage.
So i have tried the classic immortal push or nonys phenix style in order to get raped by the more and more common mass marine tank support.
Long Story Short, even my maxed out Protoss Force, inclusive illusions to eat the first tank shots, got raped by a bunkering terran (and his f***ing tanks!)
After several very frustrating experiences i have taken a friend of mine who plays this defensive Mech play very well and started many practice matches to figure out how to beat it.
My Solution:
In my experience, a Stalker opening works quite well against nearly every Terran Opener... exspecially it provides a fairly good position against the actual rare M&M&M Terrans.
If the Terran is going for Mech, ill go for a 3 Gate Blinkstalker opening.
Usually i keep my Stalkers near by the Terrans base to punish early Attacks with fast Blink in - Tank Snipe - Blink out. Mostly i force the Terran to retreat back into the safety of his Base without losing many Stalkers.
I use a Probe or, if the Map allows it, the Watchtowers to check for Terran Attacks.
I set up my expansion soon after my 3thd gate and add a Robo/Starport for High Ground Vision and efficient scouting.
While saturating my Natural, i increase my Stalker count and start Templar Tech (DT and HT).
The DTs help me to keep the Terran inside his Base, if he wont placed Turrets all over his Base, i usually poke him with some warp prism Harass.
After the full saturation of my natural im going for my third and add some robos and tons of warpgates in order to add immortals and more warpgate stuff (inclusive HTs) to my Army.
This is usually the time when the Terran gets strong enough to break my light contain and pushes out to save his fairly late third.
Now, with my superior production capability, i attack the Terran Army.
I try to attack from 2 or 3 different directions to guaranty an optimal split up of my army. The Immortals who lead the charge, soak the first tankshots and allow my Warpgate Stuff (exspecially my HTs) to get into combat range. Now Storm Spam before the EMPs get my Templars (sometimes they waste it for the incoming immortals... but its rare) to maximise the dmg against the non tank Terran groundforce.
While my offensive is running, i secure my 4th, reproduce like hell (the same stuff) and continue to add robos and warpgates to support my increasing income.
Usually i loose the first big battle, unless the Terran isnt that good, but the target was just to harm the Terran Force enough to turn a possible counter attack harmless and force him to restock his Army
With superior Production capabilitys, my own army reaches its old strenght much faster and ill start another suicidal attack. And on and on and on.
If im able to stay ahead in expos and dont become a sloppy victim of drop play, (spread observer and control pylons to scout for incoming drops) the Terran will slowly die.
Sometimes im able to add a bunch of Stargates in the Lategame (6-8) and surprise him with a tech switch into mass Voidrays... often a great way to seal the deal because after 2-3 battles against your mostly ground force, the Terran overcommit to anti ground which leaves him more vulnerable to the anyway ridicoulus strong mass voidray attack.
Anyway, there is nearly no way to end a PvT against a mech Terran early if the Terran knows what he`s doing and stay fokussed. Just prepare yourself for a very long Makro game, dont expect to clearly win every battle and on the long term Protoss regains domination.
My best and most entertaining games were against Terran... No other Protoss MU allows such intense Makro games far beyond a third base.
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what about a mothership in late game once you have map control lol
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On June 03 2010 02:22 FreeZEternal wrote:
what about a mothership in late game once you have map control lol
I've personally tried this. It's completely plausible to get out a mothership, because you will be able to keep a Terran in his base long enough to build one; immortals and blink stalkers are very good versus smaller numbers of tanks, so you can deter them from moving out until they have the appropriate numbers. You will almost certainly get a mothership's vortex off before it dies, they are pretty durable at 350 HP/ 350 shields, but in my experience it isn't enough to turn the tide of battle in your favour.
I will say however that I have only tried this twice, so more testing could be done to see if this is a viable option.
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jep, probably a viable alternative... a good vortex could end the match much earlyer
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On June 03 2010 02:22 FreeZEternal wrote:
what about a mothership in late game once you have map control lol
If the terran has a large viking mass (which terrans always do by late game), your mothership won't get close enough to do anything useful before it gets burned down and destroyed.
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No Terran will go for mass Vikings if you dont deliver a reason for it. If you dont add colossi or any kind of air units, Terrans usually favor Ravens and Medvacs.
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On June 03 2010 02:45 Voodo0 wrote:
No Terran will go for mass Vikings if you dont deliver a reason for it. If you dont add colossi or any kind of air units, Terrans usually favor Ravens and Medvacs.
The problem is that if the terran has tanks, the protoss needs some type of air support, particularly as the terran tank mass grows.
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I play T and use this strategy against most players (even against other T and sometimes Z)
I usually do a factory/starport tech lab swap at the start to get an early raven, then pump banshees if the P isn't making voids, or swap the starport+barracks (which has a reactor) and start pumping vikings to counter the voids.
It's a very powerful build and I win a lot v. P in upper gold (pre 13 - haven't played as much since 13-14 released)
The things I lose to are:
- early phoenix. if I only have 3-4 tanks, a couple of early phoenixes and some zealots will decimate me. Just lift up a couple of tanks, and let the zealots charge in to kill any other tanks (kill the tanks first of course, then marines)
- heavy zealots + charge. These eat up early tanks if you play them well. Keep the tank count low and you'll keep the T on the defensive. T needs to play this build aggressively or you can out-macro fairly easily. Usually the very first timing push decides the game ( for me it's usually when the first banshee is out, so I have a bunch of rines, 2 tanks, raven, banshee. I you can rush in w/ a few zealots and kill the tanks quick, it's tough for the T to stay on the offensive
- attacks when I'm moving. If I unseige and move out, and P hits just then (either w/ chargealots to hit the tanks quick, or stalker+blink to the tanks) it can be pretty bad. Not always a game loser if I have tanks building in my main, but can definitely swing the map control to P if that first army is wounded / taken out.
- cheese. someone mentioned a warp prism in the back of a base - while I don't recall this ever happening, it sounds like it would be pretty bad. Sometimes I'll lose to a T who does a good drop in my main to take out SCVs
Stuff that doesn't work:
- DT's - since I do early raven, I very rarely lose to any DT play, and usually it's a complete slaughter if they do this
- void rays. this build is really easy to switch to mass viking, and since it's marine heavy already, VRs usually fall pretty quick. even more so since the VR range reduction. It's just important for the T to scout, so maybe if you manage to hide your starports it could work very early
- immortals/collossus are usually not that great - I'll focus the immortals w/ the marines and they drop pretty quick. Collossus do ok, but they seem so expensive/slow it's tough to get a lot out w/ the terran camping at your front door.
- stalkers. PDD eats the stalker blasts, so even a mass stalker army is useless for the first few seconds of a fight if I drop a PDD, giving me a large advantage
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So ironic how siege tank counters immortals, the unit it's supposed to hard counter.
In PvT, if you go immortals, you lose.
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On June 03 2010 03:29 jstar wrote:
So ironic how siege tank counters immortals, the unit it's supposed to hard counter.
In PvT, if you go immortals, you lose.
Tanks don't really counter immortals until there are very large numbers of tanks. The real problem is the ghost. I kinda think that immortals should be tweaked such that they have 50 more shields and 50 less hp, just so that 1 EMP doesn't make them useless.
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Posted this in another thread about mech play versus Protoss. Special thanks to FreezEternal.
On June 03 2010 03:39 Salv wrote:After some extensive testing, the mothership is by far to most critical unit in breaking a terran tank ball. Someone posted about the mothership, and I had tested it before, but I wasn't impressed by the small vortex radius. This time i tried mass recall, and it works in a weird way. Remember back to SC:BW PvT, if you hit a recall, the blue wormhole animation would appear, and about two seconds later, the units near that wormhole would be teleported to the arbiter. If the arbiter died before the wormhole sucked the units through, nothing would happen. That's not how mass recall works. The second you hit mass recall, all your units targeted disappear, but it's not for two seconds later that they appear under the mothership. So it's possible for your units to be in limbo, where they are being recalled to the mothership, and they are no where on the map. What happens if the mothership dies while your units are still in that teleporting limbo? They will still appear where the mothership was, meaning that you can cast a mass recall just as your mothership is about to die and the units will warp in. I tried recalling immortals, stalkers, and zealots, as well as immortals, colossi, stalkers, and zealots. The first composition did a lot of damage, killing most of my opponents army, the second composition beat the entirety of the Terran army and a few immortals were left over. The actual testing was done with either: - 5 immortal, 18 stalkers, 7 zealot, 3 colossi, 1 mothership -VS- 16 siege tanks, 7 vikings, 19 hellions, 1 raven. The cost of these two armies are very, very similar, and if anything, the Protoss would have the economic advantage. The second composition was the same, except three more immortals instead of the 3 colossi.
There are a couple flaws from what I could see. Firstly, a ghost EMP would render this useless. Secondly, later on when the Terran has more vikings, the mothership wouldn't be able to survive as long before it has to use it's recall. In tested situations where I had to recall earlier than ideally expected, there was still significant damage done to the Terran, where they had about 20% of their army leftover. The ghost EMP and mass vikings at first would make me think this strategy couldn't work, but I don't know how many Terrans would have a ghost, or would be able to use their ghost quickly enough, but the mothership moves at a decent speed for a mass recall when you allow it to accelerate to it's maximum movement. Secondly, as long as you wait until the Terran isn't near a Xel'Naga watch tower, they would have to react near instantly to your mothership to catch it in an EMP. Actual in game testing will reveal whether or not that's going to happen often, but at that stage in the game, although losing a mothership sucks, it wouldn't be game-ending as you can simply chronoboost out another, and because the Terran turtled, you should have the economic advantage.
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On June 03 2010 03:29 jstar wrote:
So ironic how siege tank counters immortals, the unit it's supposed to hard counter.
In PvT, if you go immortals, you lose.
In my games, the marines+banshees are what counter the immortals -
lots of marines > a couple of immortals
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EPT
