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I know that we have all recently been less than satisfied with the mundane tank viking play that seems to dominate the TvT match up. I am no exception to this, so out of the goodness of my heart I have decided to share the build I have been using in TvT lately with the community. This build revolves mainly around the use of ghosts to support mass marauders, which may seem frail at first, but read on my fellow starcrafters.
There are many reasons why this build is so versatile and works so well. Marauders are not very gas heavy which leaves it open for the ghosts. Both units are made out of the same structure with the same add-on, so it lets you get a good sized army out early, and all your upgrades will affect both units. These are the obvious pluses, but here is where the huge benefits of the build come out:
The main problem in TvT with going straight mass marauder is that you obviously have no AA. The viking is not a problem, but the banshee is a huge danger. Ghosts take care of the banshee perfectly, they have bonus damage to light armored units and they have EMP to take care of cloak (so you don't have to waste scans instead of mules). They also match them at 6 range so you don't lose 50 marines to 1 well micro'd banshee. Yes ghosts do cost slightly more gas than the banshee (100 vs. 150), but they build in 40 seconds compared to 60 seconds and the structure they are produced from is far cheaper as well.
Your second main concern is fast marines early. Now aside from the point that marauders actually do deal quite well with marines, ghosts again are a perfect fit for dealing with this danger to just plain mass marauder. The reason in this case is not the bonus to light armored units (though that doesn't hurt), but instead the snipe ability. For early game the opponent will most likely not have combat shield, leaving each marine with 45 hit points, which just happens to be the exact amount of damage that the snipe ability does. With a few ghosts you can literally mow down enemy marines before they can even come close to getting a dangerous concave on your marauder force. Now late game the player will probably get the combat shield, but he will also get stim, which after being used again leaves the marine with 45 hp. Now you would think yes, but of course the player will have medivacs to heal the marines so stim and combat shield seems dangerous, but again ghosts have the emp ability which quite easily renders the enemy medivacs as simple drop-ships and makes your infantry that much stronger against his.
The last (and probably scariest) danger if you were to go straight mass marauder would be the raven with its wildly imba Point Defense Drone. But again the ghost unit handles this remarkably well. The obvious solution to the raven is to use a ghost to EMP it so that it cannot cast the PDD, but other solutions are also available. The raven is again a light armored unit, meaning that the ghosts can kill it extremely quickly, but the other thing to consider is that the Point Defense Drone itself is a light armored unit, and ghosts shots are not affected by it, leaving it particularly vulnerable to a simple ghost target fire (it dies in 2-3 shots from a ghost depending on upgrades).
Using this build correctly should effectively leave you with a large stim marauder force that can very easily (if controlled and positioned correctly) deal with tanks and any ground army the other player can throw at you. The build itself is a simple 3 rax build with the ghost academy coming after the third rax, unless you scout a fast factory in which case building it after the second rax is required to deal with very fast banshees. Obvious transitions into the later game include supporting your bio with medivacs and vikings if BCs make an appearance. I personally feel a 4 or 5 to 1 marauder to ghost ratio works well, depending on the opponent of course.
In short (for the lazy): Ghosts are a wildly versatile and underused unit that deal with pretty much everything that the marauder can't in TvT and i plan to see the TvT match up move towards this more mobile and deadly style.
- noooob
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Thanks for the interesting ideas. Just a question.
How do you deal with tanks/massed tanks. Do you just stim up and run in and focus fire, this seems risky to me. A counter to this in my mind is to launch a nuke at the ideal seige tanks, have them un-siege, cancel the nuke and run in stimed mauraders.
Which leads me to my next question. Having the tech available for nukes, do you employ them, and how in terms of this build.
Thx.
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Seems cool. I am no terran player tough
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Very innovative thinking with the marauder ghost combination, but i agree with BadStigma, what about the nukes? Also can you show some replays of your build. I would love to see it in action
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On September 15 2010 23:35 Halcyon.nico wrote:
Very innovative thinking with the marauder ghost combination, but i agree with BadStigma, what about the nukes? Also can you show some replays of your build. I would love to see it in action
Agreed, a replay would be awesome. Sounds like an interesting build though.
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This is an interesting build, it still feels weak compared to other fast push build + expanding. How would this build hold up against the current 4 marine/1 hellion/1 banshee + expansion build?
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What rating are you? So we know what bracket this build will work in.
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United Kingdom2950 Posts
Wow, very interesting. The only I see that can prove to be a problem is getting the ghost upgrades as energy will be your main issue. If you miss one emp, you're done, and you'd probably have to get out cloak as soon as they do to counter the banshee as the banshees can probably wreck your ghosts pretty badly.
Nonetheless, a very intriguing post and if supplied with replays, I can definitely see this shaking up the TvT scene.
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Wait, in what world does marauders deal quite well with marines? Stimmed marines makes marauders go away in a split second.
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i really dont know how viable this is tvt imo although i like the idea and i will test it. im a 1200+ ranked diamond terran. Looking at what it takes to get this going, this is a gas intensive build and I fear a timing push with (tanks sieged)/rauders and marines will pretty much wreck it. What do u plan to do if your opponent goes tank/rauders? and do you have a special build order? or are you playing mostly standard. But i do see how it can work with really good micro but i dont think u can go all game with this build i almost think this is an all in type of build because of how much ur putting into your ghosts and if you fail with them then its gg. But i still like this innovative way of thinking it brings another build to my arsenal and if people arnt expecting it then it might be worth doing once or twice in a tounament as a surprise.
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United Kingdom2950 Posts
http://www.sc2replayed.com/replays/81019-1v1-terran-blistering-sands
This is a quick match I just did against my Terran partner in a custom. I just asked him to play his Standard TvT and I tried to do a Ghost/Marauder build. Obviously this is a only a platinum level game so don't expect amazing things, and with no established BO, I just winged it and got supply blocked a lot. 
But you can see how a higher level player can utilize a lot of the ghost's skills.
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On September 15 2010 23:20 BadStigma wrote:
Thanks for the interesting ideas. Just a question.
How do you deal with tanks/massed tanks. Do you just stim up and run in and focus fire, this seems risky to me. A counter to this in my mind is to launch a nuke at the ideal seige tanks, have them un-siege, cancel the nuke and run in stimed mauraders.
Which leads me to my next question. Having the tech available for nukes, do you employ them, and how in terms of this build.
Thx.
yeah, exactly that. watch..i think it was TLO vs nada in the second game? drop a nuke, and as soon as the tanks unsiege, sprint forwards with stim marauders. you'll either push back the tank line or kill it outright. you do need a few tanks of your own to maintain position though, so that they can't just walk up and kill your nuking ghosts.
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sounds fun makes me want to try it.
i think we've seen TLO get ghosts against banshees, and fail a few times, but even if you miss an EMP you can still scan. I hate managing ghost cloak energy though.
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QXC was experimenting with ghost plays in TvT. He tried one thing where he made an early push with ghosts before their first tank came out, and he tried using ghosts as an efficient answer to cloaked banshees later on. These things both kinda sorta worked against good competition.
There is probably a replay pack that has this stuff, and I know there was a teamliquid strategy session on it.
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On September 15 2010 23:20 BadStigma wrote:
Thanks for the interesting ideas. Just a question.
How do you deal with tanks/massed tanks. Do you just stim up and run in and focus fire, this seems risky to me. A counter to this in my mind is to launch a nuke at the ideal seige tanks, have them un-siege, cancel the nuke and run in stimed mauraders.
Which leads me to my next question. Having the tech available for nukes, do you employ them, and how in terms of this build.
Thx.
If you spread your marauders correctly each tank hit will only hit 2-3 marauders, and considering you are mostly massing Marauaders your numbers will far exceed his, letting you stim in and focus fire them. Another plus is that the oponent's bio will also take splash damage from the tanks when you stim in towards them. Now if the opponent reaches a critical mass of tanks or has great positioning in the late game then yes nukes are an option, as well as using the medivacs for drops wherever. Nukes fit into the build just fine in the late game because you need a factory for nukes, and you need a factory to get your medivacs anyway so the tech is already there.
As to the stim marines, yes i find that marauders do handle them alright (i always get a fast +1 armor if i see a lot of marines, which does wonders). And as i said before you can decimate large amounts of marines very quickly with your ghost force, as well as disable his healing capabilities when he stims.
I also see some concern about ghost energy, but in my experience it is really not a problem. Once you have 4 or more ghosts (which normally happens before 50 food depending on your exact build) energy becomes somewhat of a non-issue. I never get either upgrade from the Ghost Academy early game as energy has never been a problem and i always have my ghosts on auto-follow to one of my marauders which leaves them in the back and tanks auto target units in the front. The Marauders will ALWAYS die before the ghosts, and with the tank nerf to light units coming this will be reinforced even further. You need to think of the ghost as more of a part of your core unit composition and less as a single infiltration / harass unit. If you have 5+ ghosts missing 1 emp is not going to cost you the game or really anything except a few seconds before you get the next one off.
As for how they deal with banshees, i suggest you try it yourself before commenting too much. 1 Banshee will beat one ghost, but unless they start going mass banshee this shouldn't be a problem as most banshee harass consists of 1-2 banshees and you will obviously have more ghosts than that because they are part of your main composition.
You can fast expand out of this build very easily and i very often do. It is not all-in at all, it is simply a very good composition that is extremely versatile, and you can use it however you see fit. As i said in my first post, it really is not super gas intensive (most certainly no more than tank viking!) considering how cheap marauders are on the gas side of things.
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I've been thinking about exactly this for a while now, but never really put it into play on a large scale with marauders because it seemed too risky (my thought pattern was, if I can think of it, so can a pro, and they should have their reasons). Against bio, I do get a few ghosts to Snipe units in key positions / harass workers in battles at expansions / EMP medivacs. I consider myself to have pretty good micro, so it's worked out pretty well (although my crap macro is restraining me from actually being a good player and following up with large-scale game enders).
When I scout the beginnings (or am just supernaturally aware) of a 3rax or early reaper(s) I always follow a "Ghost First" (more accurately a "Marine first, then Ghost" because Snipe just owns so hard when the harass consists of a small number of units I can Snipe (Marine) or Snipe+hit (Reaper). It gives me map control and lets me do some pretty good harass to let me early expand or set up a contain. A small poke of 1 Ghost, 1 Marine, and a SCV to take some shots can do some serious damage without being too much a commitment.
They don't do so great against Mech though, unless you feel like it's worth it to use nukes to force out-of-position fights / withdrawals or drop one or two in the mineral lines. Nuking would require cloaking and some luck (bad scanning / positioning / lack of detectors). The second choice seems to be a pretty cool thing to do during a battle but as it would be infinitely more successful Sniping and you need your micro focused on the battle.. I'd rather just get a Banshee or two.
tl;dr I freaking love Ghosts.
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I've dabbled with it, and it's a fun build, but it's inferior to straight up tank/viking play because:
- Staggered tank lines stop you cold. Even if you nuke to force the front line back, your marauders get demolished by the second line. And with no tanks of your own to secure position, he can retake that ground easily.
- Pure air will dominate you. If you neglect air control, a smart terran player will get a few vikings then start massing up BCs. He's also free to expand across the map because he can stop any drop play. Once he's established air dominance, it's impossible for you to regain.
Both of these strategies also use either expos or marines as mineral sinks. Both work well against you.
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I'll echo the concern about mass tanks. The marauders do great in small numbers but they still die to a lot of tanks. Maybe nukes are a good solution though. Those Vikings giving sight can suck too and I'm not sure if ghosts will help with that. I like their utility against banshees, however I wonder how they do in a fight with equal cost...
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On September 16 2010 09:41 Moja wrote:
I've dabbled with it, and it's a fun build, but it's inferior to straight up tank/viking play because:
- Staggered tank lines stop you cold. Even if you nuke to force the front line back, your marauders get demolished by the second line. And with no tanks of your own to secure position, he can retake that ground easily.
- Pure air will dominate you. If you neglect air control, a smart terran player will get a few vikings then start massing up BCs. He's also free to expand across the map because he can stop any drop play. Once he's established air dominance, it's impossible for you to regain.
Both of these strategies also use either expos or marines as mineral sinks. Both work well against you.
I don't deny that reaching a critical mass of tanks will demolish your marauder force if you engage head on, but the main idea is to not let him get that critical mass, and use nukes as a last resort if you for some reason cannot stop it. You must understand that by the mid game you will have something like 20-30 marauders against a handful of tanks, which favors you substantially if you space them out correctly.
As for pure air, i disagree quite a bit. The point of this composition is basically to allow you to mass marauders without getting punished for it. If the guy is going pure air and you see this all you need to do is push at him and keep the pressure on him (possibly leave a few ghosts or marauders at home to deal with counter aggression). There is no way he will have a ground force that can even come close to being able to deal with your ground force, and the ghosts deal with the banshees very well. This basically means if he wants to defend at all he is going to need to land those vikings which will get torn apart by the marauders. And again when you have the ghosts marines really are not a problem.
One of the main ideas of this build is to force him to build ground units to be able to contend with your meaty ground force that still has decent AA, and if he does not then punish it. If he still has a large amount of vikings and is able to get BCs out then i think you might have done something wrong. Though i do agree that BCs pose a large threat to this if you allow them to maintain air control and turtle. This might be relieved slightly with the 1.1 patch, but the main point is the opponent should not be able to maintain both air and ground control when you have such a strong ground army that is easily upgradeable.
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Does anybody have more reps on the marauder / ghosts strat?
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Anymore replays of this? I just don't see how pure marauder/ghost can beat tanklines, especially when hes going to have vikings spotting. Giving up air control (and map control), how do you pressure then when you will have to be watching your own base most of the time for landing vikings?
1100pt diamond - i'd love to see more on this strategy but it seems flimsy to me.
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i think select done that in some tourney finals. Try searching for his replays
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I've tried this a few times and the main problem is that banshees tend to destroy this. Ghosts are way more costy than Banshees and you pretty much need them in a 1.5:1 ratio to deal with the Banshees. Banshees beat a Ghost 1v1 , and you don't have the gas to get enough Ghosts out fast enough. In the end I haven't found a decent way to deal with banshees when going for this. They can just keep harrassing you in different bases and you can't split your forces up like you can when going marine-heavy, because you need every single ghost you have in order to deal with the Banshees.
EDIT: And the later tank-viking-marauder transition is really rough as well. Especially with Banshee support your pure Marauders don't really stand a chance. The ghosts don't really accomplish anything useful to be honest.
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I'd really like a see a rep cus I'm tired of tank/viking games too.
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everyones asking for a rep! can we get a rep please???
btw just curious what rank you are, noooob
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i got really excited when i saw this thread...
i dont take advice from noooobs anyway though 
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On September 15 2010 23:20 BadStigma wrote:
Thanks for the interesting ideas. Just a question.
How do you deal with tanks/massed tanks. Do you just stim up and run in and focus fire, this seems risky to me. A counter to this in my mind is to launch a nuke at the ideal seige tanks, have them un-siege, cancel the nuke and run in stimed mauraders.
Which leads me to my next question. Having the tech available for nukes, do you employ them, and how in terms of this build.
Thx.
i think you can harras your oponent before he have more than 2 sieged tanks if you go only marauder/ghost build.
I would build the ghost acadmy after the second rax, and build the 2nd gas right after the first one is finished and have 2 scv's on each gayser so you can have enough minerals to constantly produce marauder/ghost/upgrades and attack with a force of 6 marauders and 2 or 3 ghosts with stim (to kill off the bunker quickly)
and if you go for some dropships you can get cloacked ghosts, emp his command center (so he wont have energy for scans) and nuke his supply depots... that would be lolerz.
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Post replay Mr.nooob 
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saw this used today by Neans, in a KOTH tourney. It was pretty effective until the midgame when his opponent had tanks and marauders, allowing the tanks to get in the 2-4 shots necessary to change the course of the battle.
The main problem (that I see) with this build is that against standard tank/viks once the tanks are sieged and prepared with support around them, it's impossible to break without a nuke, and if those tanks push on your front door and (again) get into good position you're forced into emergency maud spam @ the tank line stomping your nat/main. This ofc assumes they've been able to fend off your intial push, but therein lies my point in that if it is survived, your tech is quite far behind, and are vulnerable to a tank creep cross map..
It's innovative, it's fun to watch, and it requires more micro, but I don't know if it's going to become a standard for tvt.. Tanks are still king IMO.
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On September 27 2010 15:47 Drakan wrote:
i think you can harras your oponent before he have more than 2 sieged tanks if you go only marauder/ghost build.
The problem is that with only barracks, your opponent sees the early attack coming and adds a bunker. I don't think there are any all barracks builds that don't involve the early attack. The bunker should let builds entering tank viking hold pretty easily.
And marines beat marauders. If it seems like your marauders hold their own against an equivalent cost of marines, it's because a player using marines as a mineral sink might not have Stim and other upgrades very quickly.
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I can see this tactic work pretty well actually. With HARDskilled mirco although. Ghost is simply the hardest mirco unit and u must keep it alive the game cuz if they get focused down it is a huge backfire. Soo if u can handle ghost + base + maruders dance at once (aprox 160+ apm, 240 + atleast in battle then i have to say. HOLY CHUCK.
too hard for me though 
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How can you fight marauder/tank with marauder/ghost? Every player goes marauder/tank with some vikings/dropships. You really think you can fight that with pure ground (low mobility) and no tanks? I don't believe it's possible, but prove me wrong plz.
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hmm. i can see it working well, especially if the opponent goes for tanks.
however, the whole reason you need tanks is to roast marines. marines left unchecked will destroy all other terran units very cheaply.
in essence, 10 rauders and 5 ghost will get rolled incredibly hard by 30 marines.
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On September 27 2010 19:13 bulge wrote:
hmm. i can see it working well, especially if the opponent goes for tanks.
however, the whole reason you need tanks is to roast marines. marines left unchecked will destroy all other terran units very cheaply.
in essence, 10 rauders and 5 ghost will get rolled incredibly hard by 30 marines.
That sounds like an interesting experiment! Time to pull out the trusty unit tester and see what happens
Been reading a lot about the snipe ability (and shift-queuing) and sounds like 5 ghosts would make quick work of those marines
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seems like an amazing strat, except vs bio mech where the enemy has 3-5 rax and 2 factorys pumping tanks.. But if you can nuke the tanks and force them to unsiege and then move in you can definately get by. Also being pure bio, you should have more map control early on letting you expo a lot more and defend them more easily as well as being able to harass very strong with drops. It definately has potential but will require alot more apm.
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This sounds really good on paper...but why can't we have replay? A replay is worth 1000 words after all.
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I'm not saying that this build is bad. All builds have their weaknesses, but once the enemy sees you have a lot of ghosts, he's definitely going to get a raven to make sure you don't go behind him and snipe off all his workers. This build is very, very weak against Battlecruisers, and it's not too much of a tech investment to go from Ravens to Battlecruisers.
Unless you add medivacs to your build (which I don't see why you would, they would get owned by vikings), you are not going to have a starport nor the infrastructure available to counter the Battlecruisers.
If only Ghosts still had Lockdown.
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This is a really an awesome idea, but from all the examples you've given OP this build seems to be centered around a more defensive stance. It feels like getting an expansion up would be hard if you only have bio ball. I'll be trying this out, but it seems like being offensive and trying to contain would just be pushed back by siege tanks.
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Ghost/marauder openings in T v T are actually fairly common now. The OP did not make up this strat. Both QXC, SeleCT, and a few other top Terrans use it.
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On September 27 2010 20:37 link0 wrote:
Ghost/marauder openings in T v T are actually fairly common now. The OP did not make up this strat. Both QXC, SeleCT, and a few other top Terrans use it.
Links please, I'd really like to see this build in action.
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I like this but no matter how well you snipe you'll get beaten by mass marines after a while (simply because you can't pump out ghosts fast enough to match his marines). This is why I'd throw in a siege tank or two. Really interesting build though!
Also the canceled nuke on sieged tanks works awsome. I do it frome time to time.
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You know you could hook this into the reactored marine FE. Start with mass marine early and then add in tons of marauders/upgrades/ghosts/nukes off 2 base.
The problem is that ghosts take so much gas that you will be really light on Medivacs so why not mass marine into 2 base off 3 barracks+1 reactor and then slam down 2 tech labs? Protects you against a mass marine player as well.
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On September 15 2010 23:20 BadStigma wrote:
Thanks for the interesting ideas. Just a question.
How do you deal with tanks/massed tanks. Do you just stim up and run in and focus fire, this seems risky to me. A counter to this in my mind is to launch a nuke at the ideal seige tanks, have them un-siege, cancel the nuke and run in stimed mauraders.
Which leads me to my next question. Having the tech available for nukes, do you employ them, and how in terms of this build.
Thx.
if the nuke forces the opponent to unseige, you have an attack window, if it kills a tank, well they cost less than the nuke did
(assuming the ghost survives)
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the EMP doesn't have to hit the raven before the pdd comes out. u can just aim the EMP at the pdd and it will lose all its energy = losing it's ability to take out missles - u still win.
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Is it possible to get a nuke called down on the tank line if that tank line is covered by a Raven scouting? Or are you nuke spotting well short of the actual tank line using the threat to unseat them? Also, doesn't this then require you to have your marauder force flank the tanks from the side or risk them getting nuked instead?
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It just seems like a trickier strategy to pull off while having this drawback:
You are less flexible in your build responses - you have gone all in with bio in this build I'm guessing, meaning it will be more difficult for you to switch off to another force if he counters this himself with heavy air.
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EPT
