As I already stated I am a low diamond player myself (so worse play than you I guess).
I have found that opening speedlings is safer, 1 base 13 gas 12 pool, drone to 14, OL, and get a queen and speed as soon as pool pops. Not having an expand means no bunker rush and only 1 base to defend from harass. You get the expand around 20 at roughly the same time as the lair. By this time you can have a fair few speedlings to defend with.
One of the basic things to remember is that a bunch of ling/baneling will at least clean out the marines from an army and when you hit 20+ mutas you can kill 4 thors easily (just move over and hold position) once the marines are gone. Then the rest of the hellion/marauder/tank are free kills (which makes it well worth the loss of a few mutas).
On top of that Zerg generally faces the problem of not being able to counter attack after winning a battle. The absolute best units for a quick counter though are mutas (because they don't care about walls and siege tanks) and the ling/baneling combo (because they can bust in) which means that after a successful battle you can do serious economic damage immediately (whereas roach hydra usually has to be passive).
On August 15 2010 11:59 HeyJude wrote: I watched all of the OP's replays and tbh I wasn't too impressed with his opponents' play(although I do use the exact same strat, ling/muta). I must ask though, how do you inject larva when every queen is on same hotkey? I feel like I'm behind or something, currently I have all my queens/hatches on separate keys.
You click v, minimap, v, minimap, v, minimap.
Then 40 seconds later you do 5stttttzzzzzzvv
Heh, I actually just lost my last 4 zvt. But I thot it was due to bad play in general from me.
Wow was my reaction as well. Looks like he hotkeyed the mutas into "mini groups" then attacked the thor group from 10, 12, and 2 o clock all at once then held position continually spreading his mutas out. Im not sure, but it almost doesn't look like he was actually focus firing. I think if one selects the entire mass of mutas they will clump, but if you either hold position or select small groups at a time and target attack, they may not clump as bad. go ahead and correct me if im wrong on this, as this is just speculation. Definately gonna try this.
Also, here is the 2nd half to the video, im not sure if it was also posted. At about 7:30 in the below video he takes on 4 thors with nothing but about 15 mutas and comes out ahead. I am very impressed with this!
On August 15 2010 10:10 D-Rose wrote: I'm adding another replay that I just played 2 mins ago.
This is against a rating 945 terran (probably 950+ before this game), so hopefully no more of the "your terrans suck" statements.
It was a very awesome game. The terran was very very micro and harass heavy. Myself I actually thought I played a relatively poor game in terms of harassment denial and ended up losing way too much to harassment. Could have done a lot better. But you can kind of see how I deal with it. I actually kind of thought during this game that against this kind of heavy harassment terran, it's very hard to deal with if you have the immobile hydra/roach army, even if you have creep everywhere. Muta lends itself better.
Edit: oh btw, obviously I myself have much room for improvement as well. so anyone who's watched my reps for my build but are also willing to give me some pointers I would love to hear them too. thanks.
At 10 minutes when his vikings moved in you had 3 queens (which i thought was nice) but you didn't engage with your queens, only your mutas. Your queens had energy for heal, which is pretty amazing early game for mutas if you're against vikings. At 14 minutes you got flustered by the attack and sat on larva for awhile even though you desperately needed to morph them.
I liked how easy you made it look to shut down hellion harass. Put a sunken on the outside and have a queen ling ambush at the ramp. I would have liked a queen block though.
The terran was good but his strat to get more vikings against your mutas was obviously failing and he didn't adapt. I think if he went heavier on the marines with a touch of vikings and medivacs he would have been much better off. But then again, you would just baneling the hell out of him. I think I'll be stealing your strat.
It seems that going mass muta (or, to be fair, sling / bling / mutas, with a strong component on muta, not just 5 ou 6 to harass) is the standard way Check play against Terran - with a lot of success (it is visible on his games against Cargo & JustFake, viewable in VOD on HDStarcraft Youtube channel).
He tends to not fast expand (or at least, not as fast as you), prefering to stay in one base to manage the first helions or reaper harass. But the concept is the same. That should end the "this wouldn't work at top level" remarks :p
I'm currenlty DLing a lot more game from Check vs Terran, to check (eh !) if he do the same strat.
Perhaps against 1base Terran mass muta is more effective, but 2base Terran (Delta Quadrant) can have far too many marines and Thors for any amount of mutas to handle if he scouts the transition into heavy mutas. Microing mutalisks can really only help so much. The way that air units bunch together, your entire group of mutas is going to be taking terrible terrible damage from the first volley off the Thors, even if you micro well after that.
Not only that, but Thors and Marines are very, very capable of pushing back at you. With the support of a couple seiged tanks you won't be in any position to hold your base, confront his thors, and there's no way you'll win a base race.
Been doing this 2v2. Starting with roaches to hold push, then switch to mutas with my T partner funneling gas to me while he masses marines. Not applicable to 1v1, and probably not applicable to higher level play, but it's actually been fun to play Z this way, when I was having no fun before. So there's that
Zerokaiser, I think the issues you bring up are easily assuaged by havig better micro. If yo've already got 20+ mutas, you take take a bit of damage to kill the seige tanks( the real damage dealers ) to allow for blings to move in. Max you won't lose more than 6 mutas BEng generous to Terran. Stimpack marines are still a problem, but without seige tanks, Zerg is easily capable of fighting Terran head on in a ground war vs rines and thors. The fact that you'll still have mutas alive after killing the tanks is a huge plus in redirecting marine and Thor attacking AI away from ground units (hopefully sling bling roach) and let your forces clean up.
Seige tanks are the main issue when fighting Terran ground, and mutas are easily able to keep their numbers down by sniping, picking off reinforcement tanks, and, f need be, suiciding to kill all tanks before retreating the wounded mutas.
On the other hand, on my last game against a Terran, he responded to the mutas with Ghosts. They really melted my mutalisks... I was still able to win, but some defending cloacked ghosts can shut down muta harass quite quickly (and bringing an OL to harass is not exactly the easiest thing to do ^^).
On August 15 2010 19:56 Nuage wrote: On the other hand, on my last game against a Terran, he responded to the mutas with Ghosts. They really melted my mutalisks... I was still able to win, but some defending cloacked ghosts can shut down muta harass quite quickly (and bringing an OL to harass is not exactly the easiest thing to do ^^).
Nuage.
and how is it then mech? Ghosts have quite the gas cost.
I also watched Check's replays and that's pretty much the strategy I use against every terran as well. The basic concept is abusing Zerg's mobility. The ones stating that this strategy doesn't work against mass marines and mass Thors are right, but the problem is that the terran won't be able to have mass marines and mass thors. Against small numbers of marines and Thors, Mutas do pretty well. Add Speedlings to the mix and the Thors don't know what do shoot at and are taken out in seconds. If you watch Check's replay one can see that he uses his Mutas all the time while macroing his base to keep the Terran extremely busy. So this strategy is very stressful, because you can never lean back, wall yourself in and build an unstoppable mech ball. Some of the most difficult terrans to deal with are those who secure their three bases (turrets, tanks, marines, bunkers, planetary fortress, engineering bays), max their mech army and slowly push out taking out one important expo after another while harrassing your expos with hellions. Even if Zerg controls the whole map, the terran is often able to hold long enough to build this fearsome mech army. So early pressure (often mutas are the only solution to get into their main) and abusing Terran's immobility with everything Zerg has to offer (creep, drops, Nydus worm, Speedlings, Mutas) are key in this matchup. Against MMM I like the use of creep even more (with muta micro I usually forget about the creep) as your Zerglings are ultra fast on creep and able to defend your expos pretty well. With infestors and banelings every MMM ball will have its difficulties.
For "muta micro" you can just let them split up nicely, do a normal move past the thors and hold position over them. With the natural spacing the thors will hit 1, maybe 2 mutas with a volley. It does mean the mutas don't focus fire but that is much less important than them not clumping.
If there are marines around bring in the zerglings just a little before the mutas.
Right so, I'm terrible (Gold) and have been doing this for awhile. I beat a diamond toss (not sure of his points..sorry) with this the other day using this strat and he was flabbergasted. I'm at work currently, I'll up the replay when I get home if anyone is interested...if I still have it.
This being said thors were shutting my shit down HARD primarily because of splash damage I think. It looks like the key is to issue move command (right click) past the thors and then hit H to issue the Hold command while they're directly overhead? At this point then I shouldn't concern myself with focus fire just let it happen as it happens?
I doubt my micro is good enough for this, but would best case scenario be to split your groups up even more and do this with like 3 different groups all at once?
On August 15 2010 22:35 ConsummateK wrote: This being said thors were shutting my shit down HARD primarily because of splash damage I think. It looks like the key is to issue move command (right click) past the thors and then hit H to issue the Hold command while they're directly overhead? At this point then I shouldn't concern myself with focus fire just let it happen as it happens?
You need to spread out the Muta beforehand (By selecting all your Muta and spamming stop, followed by manually spreading them out even further) THEN you need to order the move command past the Thor, making sure you don't accidentally give them an attack command, which causes them to bunch up.
It's pretty easy, actually. The only problem is that if he gets too many Thors, your muta will end up attacking different Thors, and if they're all being repaired by SCVs, it gets really hard to kill them all without losing everything.
That's why you need to grab more expos and switch tech to Roaches ASAP, and possibly bring along Banelings to kill SCV and Marine escorts. (Infestors to NP the Thors could also be cute, haven't tried it yet though).
On August 15 2010 22:35 ConsummateK wrote: This being said thors were shutting my shit down HARD primarily because of splash damage I think. It looks like the key is to issue move command (right click) past the thors and then hit H to issue the Hold command while they're directly overhead? At this point then I shouldn't concern myself with focus fire just let it happen as it happens?
You need to spread out the Muta beforehand (By selecting all your Muta and spamming stop, followed by manually spreading them out even further) THEN you need to order the move command past the Thor, making sure you don't accidentally give them an attack command, which causes them to bunch up.
It's pretty easy, actually. The only problem is that if he gets too many Thors, your muta will end up attacking different Thors, and if they're all being repaired by SCVs, it gets really hard to kill them all without losing everything.
That's why you need to grab more expos and switch tech to Roaches ASAP, and possibly bring along Banelings to kill SCV and Marine escorts. (Infestors to NP the Thors could also be cute, haven't tried it yet though).
This.
The baneling/speedling attack is very important if the thors have any marine or scv support (and when they don't I'm like a kid at a candy shop lol). The banelings, especially if you have 20+ of them, should be mixed into the speedlings (this avoids splash to the banelings to some extent) and just A moved really. The radius of their explosion combined with the Terran formation in a ball is enough for them to do fair damage to everything but especially destroy scvs, marines and hellions (never forget that hellions get really hurt by banelings, this allows your speedlings to live a lot longer).
The thors tanks and marauders that are left are all vulnerable to lings (if any are still alive) and the mutas take out the thors pretty fast once the support is gone (not to mention the thors usually take over 100 damage from various banelings due to their size). That leaves the mutas to clean up marauders and tanks.
As a side note it is well worth having extra queens both for extra in base hatches, creep spreading but especially transfusions. A 150 mineral investment gives you a free muta every minute game time or 40 seconds real time I believe (I always have one in the red to transfuse). That's a pretty good investment and allows you to come back really fast (rather than risk losing a full pack of mutas in the red to a lucky thor shot.
watched the replays, I think the most important thing that you do that hardly anyone else does is get air upgrades.
2-2 mutas are so much better than 0-0 mutas against thors.
Thors do 4 attacks per volley, that means each level of air carapace decreases Thor's attack by 4.
With just level 1 air carapace, thor do 8 damage per attack to mutas, instead of 12; this is huge. If you can stay ahead on air carapace, mutas become much better vs thors.
EPT
