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Like the title says. If you're fighting against an MMM ball (let's just say around midgame, so maybe 60 foodish ball), and you see ~6 medivacs, what do you focus first? Assume you are Z or P (no colossi/psi storm yet, which means you can't mow down the ball without medivacs adding to their effective hp).
Option 1) Focus down all the medivacs first, but the MM ball will pound you to smithereens while you do this.
Option 2) Ignore them, fight the MM ball. Their effective HP is greatly increased.
Option 3) Don't give a crap and 1a into the ball.
As a ~400 diamond z, I usually just ignore the medivacs. I'm usually going with roach/hydra/ling at this point, and the hydras' have too much valuable DPS to waste on medivacs.
If I played as protoss, I might take a bit of effort to take ~3 stalkers and focus down the highest mana medivac, but I'm not sure if this would be worth it.
Your thoughts?
Obviously the situation matters (positioning, mana on medivacs, etc.) Note that what IS a big deal is if you lose your entire army, but didn't bother killing any medivacs. By the time the rest of the terran ball gets to your base it will be full HP again and ready to stim and own. Plus something excessive like 8 medivacs makes it impossible to focus them all down, and good terran micro can make it hard.
On the flip side, as a terran, you might want your medivacs to tank some of the damage. I never played brood war much, but I've heard that medics soaked damage for M&Ms. Is this the same in SC2?
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I use stalkers to focus down the Medivac, and then try to get in a few forcefields to hold them in position while my zealots charge into their faces. I guess if they had like 15 medivacs and 10 marauders I would just focus down the marauders, but yeah that's generally how I approach this, not sure if it's the best way.
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As Z, Muta/Ling/Bling gives you a much better shot vs. big MMM balls. Roach/Hydra just gets melted unless the numbers are way bigger, since Stim+Heal makes for ridiciulous fighting power head-to-head. When you're playing Muta/Bling everything you need to do is to take out the marines, which melt to banelings which makes their medivacs entirely useless and let your Mutas clean-up the rest like np. I don't see how you can take on mmm-deathballs without Infestors or BLings, Hydra/Roach is really not going to help there that much (and once he adds like 2-3 tanks not much you can do there).
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I imagine it depends on where the medivacs *are*. When I have a bioball and I'm charging into a fight I stim before I attack -- this lets the medivacs get a headstart on healing before I start taking fire, but it also means the medivacs are behind the firing line, and trying to run stalkers in there to pick them off means that they're taking unanswered fire to get there.
Also, some math: medivacs have 150 hp and heal 13.5 hp/sec. If you blast the medivacs first, you're wasting 150 damage to kill each one. In order for this to be worth it, they'd have to heal for 11 seconds if you didn't kill them, plus however long it takes you to focus them all down. Plus, while you're shooting at medivacs you're not decreasing the dps you're receiving,
If you kill the guys first, the medivacs stop being relevant, and if you have blink stalkers you can probably kill a couple after the battle anyway as they fly away.
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When you're feeling down, I'll be there to feel you up!
lol'd. HARD.
For MMM I tend to attack AS SOON as possible to avoid it growing in numbers, a 45 man MMM ball is tough to deal with so I just attack before they can get on their feet.
Also focus down the Medivacs with ranged units and tank the troops with melee. This tends to work especially well for Protoss (Zealots are tough to kill and Guardian Shield is a godsend against Terran)
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Good question, nowadays i still don't know as P how to win a battle (equal resource armys or even P favored) with gateway units against MMM, that first push with medivacs is so hard to stop if you are at open field, and you don't have too much tier 2 effectively costly options against it..
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I suspect the best way to go about this would be to focus fire. If you have your army in multiple control groups, and are focus firing the actual units, and not the medivacs, then the medivacs wont be healing much at all, just the stim really. And then spending 600/600 on medivacs starts to look a bit silly if its just for healing up the stim damage.
But ofc, that would require quite a lot more micro than just a-moving your single control group army blob.
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Well damn! OP already has it figured out with his 123 examples. Looks like he don't need us here since those scenarios are obviously the right way about things!
OP what you and alot of people need to understand is just because the unit is built out of a barracks doesn't mean it comes cheap. You said it yourself 6+ medivacs? That's ALOT of money just to make barracks units work. 600/600, Plus the factory, starport, stim, shields, and shell?
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By the time dropships come out I often am teching to templar or robo.
Going robo I'll have some stalkers to shoot medivacs, but probably wont.
Templar/zealots own m/m/m better i think. Especially with feedback killing medivacs, which can end all kinds of shenanigans.
Which reminds me. Feedbacking a thorship is the greatest feeling.
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feedback medivacs, best solution
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@snowfield
Would be better to Psi-storm and if they load up to feedback.
That's kind of off-topic though, cause he's a zerg.
i'd say lure them into a baneling trap, but i guess that depends on the exact situation/map/resources etc, but generally i think that's a good idea
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I usually prefer to target ground units when I have the choice, but my army is almost always very Chargelot and Immortal heavy by Medivac time, so I don't really have to make that decision frequently.
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Once T has medivacs up, P and Z need tech of their own to even the odds. Better to focus on microing sentries/banelings/templar/infestors than worry about whether your troops are shooting at medivacs or not imo.
Also, optimally you'd kill marines first, but it's very impractical to actually focus fire them in a large battle.
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if your playing protoss and you descided to get colossi, your better off just having your whole army kill off the ball as your colossi will hit nearly the whole ball at once. If you decided to get templar, always storm before you feedback. As medivac's can only heal one unit at a time, each medivac will only ensure that one unit out of the whole ball will live through the storm, especially if the ball is surrounded by chargelots.
As zerg, infestor/ling/baneling will make short work of the whole ball, no need to worry about medivacs. In fact, if your playing agianst a bio terran, its probably better to skip hydras for infestors until you see them chain pumping vikings or dropping a tech lab at their starport.
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I generally target the marines first, they just melt away after a stim and they do so much damage. After the marines are gone you bring up air units to help finish off the medivacs.
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On August 15 2010 19:33 entropius wrote:
I imagine it depends on where the medivacs *are*. When I have a bioball and I'm charging into a fight I stim before I attack -- this lets the medivacs get a headstart on healing before I start taking fire, but it also means the medivacs are behind the firing line, and trying to run stalkers in there to pick them off means that they're taking unanswered fire to get there.
Also, some math: medivacs have 150 hp and heal 13.5 hp/sec. If you blast the medivacs first, you're wasting 150 damage to kill each one. In order for this to be worth it, they'd have to heal for 11 seconds if you didn't kill them, plus however long it takes you to focus them all down. Plus, while you're shooting at medivacs you're not decreasing the dps you're receiving,
If you kill the guys first, the medivacs stop being relevant, and if you have blink stalkers you can probably kill a couple after the battle anyway as they fly away.
But keep in mind when you are attacking unless your dps is greatly reduced because of the medivac.(unless you focus fire individual marauders but then you get overkill)
Let's say in this situation each of your stalkers attack one marauder. Stalker attacks at 1.5 and does 14 damage, while medivac heals 13.5hp per second. So you'd be doing no damage. Say two stalkers were attacking. For every 3 seconds; that heals 40.5 and you're doing 56 damage. That's 16 damage per 3 seconds. While he's doing 40 to your stalkers with that one marauder. And this is in situations where you have more stalkers than marauders.
You need about ten stalkers to one-shot marauders, which would be the way you would have to do to negate the healing effect.
But yeah it would be foolhardy to walk past the marauders to attack the medivacs I agree.
This is why you should have collossi or ht out by the time they have medivacs
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EPT
