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Recently I find myself going mass roach against Terran. This work's well but I find siege tanks cause me a great deal of trouble. They just seem to melt my roaches, and make aggression very difficult. Anyways I've found a technique, though I doubt I'm the first to use it, to minimize splash damage from tanks with a minimum amount of micro.
The technique is simple, send a couple of separated roaches ahead of your army to tank the first shots. You have to send more roaches as a buffer when there are more siege tanks but until they have a very large number of siege tanks it doesn't take much micro. What it important about this though is not to just send 1 unit or a small clump of units forward. You have to send an a buffer proportional to the amount of tanks your facing and each roach in that buffer must be separated. I will also often command the buffer roaches to move not attack move somewhere past the tanks, so the surviving ones don't re-clump with rest of roaches to draw fire for as long as possible.
Edit: I just want to add this to clarify something, this is slightly different than spreading out your units to avoid clumping. When you spread units you have to spread out your entire army and it gets less effective quickly with larger armies because they will reground will moving. With this you only spread out a couple units in the front making it unnecessary to spread out the rest of the units. The difference is this considerably easier and works better with larger army sizes.
The 2 roaches in front are the buffer.
![[image loading]](http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/1246/asdfasdfnt.png)
The amount of roaches you should send as a buffer is about 2 for 5 tanks + 2/3 per tank after, round up. An important thing to note is that this becomes less effective when there are more siege and tighter chokes.
As it turns out roaches are one of the best units in the game for tanking tank shots. It takes 3 tank shots to kill a 100 resource roach, if there is no splash. Even though some smaller units like lings technically adsorb more per cost, if would take far more micro to separate 12 lings than 4 roaches, as well lings high movement speed would make it hard to synchronize them with rest of army.
The reason I believe this works is that when running into siege tanks you are guaranteed to lose units. So the couple of units you lose sending up in front, is less than the units you lose if you let tanks deal full splash. This means in theory this should work even against mixed armies, like tanks with mm since your still reducing splash. This allows you to do your micro before the battle, since you can set up your roaches before the fight starts. Also when fighting only 1 type of unit the tank will target the closest one.
To test this I used pure speed roaches vs pure siege tanks with siege. I did not take advantage of tank minimum range. I tested each fight twice, once without micro, once with, sometimes more if I messed up micro. I also tried to split off individual roaches after battle started though I don't believe it made much difference. For every siege tank I used 3 roaches. I tested between 5 and 9 tanks.
Except for first fight where roaches split due to pathing, siege tanks always beat the a-move roaches. With this technique roaches were able to beat 5, 6 and 7 siege tanks, but lost barely to 8 and 9.
This is replay of me doing this.
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-150128.jpg)
7 tanks vs 21 roaches
Non-Micro'd Roaches
![[image loading]](http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/237/screenshot20100919at322.png)
Outcome
![[image loading]](http://img543.imageshack.us/img543/7448/screenshot20100919at319.png)
Microd roaches, If you look you'll see that all I did was separate out a few roaches to front.
![[image loading]](http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/3152/screenshot20100919at321.png)
Outcome
![[image loading]](http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/3152/screenshot20100919at321.png)
While this will not make roaches crush tanks, it will make them more effective vs them. What is significant I feel is that it does not take significant micro, and scales somewhat to higher numbers of tanks.
On a side note after patch 1.1, marines might be the best units for absorbing tank shots in this way being only 50 minerals and taking 2 hits to kill.
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Very nice. I'll try that.
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what happens if the tanks are spread out as well? 
it seems thats the thing i have the most trouble with TT
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Marginally relevant:
I'm curious. The patch notes say that tanks will be changed from 50 damage to 35 + 15 armored. How will this affect the splash? Will the splash damage do the same damage to Roaches as before, or less? I mean, does the armor type of the unit recieving splash damage affect how much it takes?
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Spreading out makes sense to avoid as many casualties in the first round of tank fire but, terrans rarely have sieged tanks on their own (as in your scenario) so it's almost guaranteed there will be other units around e.g. hellions marauders maybe a thor or two, so what do you plan to do after you enter their siege range? Do you plan to take out the tanks first? If not you'll get constantly hit by the tanks at the back...
Still a good way to minimize damage, so thanks for the nice explanation pictures
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So spreading units is good against splash dmg you say.... 
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You should also test how this works when you move the whole roach group in a staggered formation, and how microing the tanks to shoot the ball instead of focusing the screen affects this.
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On September 19 2010 18:51 Odds wrote:
Marginally relevant:
I'm curious. The patch notes say that tanks will be changed from 50 damage to 35 + 15 armored. How will this affect the splash? Will the splash damage do the same damage to Roaches as before, or less? I mean, does the armor type of the unit recieving splash damage affect how much it takes?
As roaches are armored it wont affect them. It will still do full 50 damage with full splash to them. Only non-armored units benefit from that so even after the patch roaches are you best bet against tanks.
Except if you go fast +carapace then your lings can take them out more easily, that's if he won't get the +vehicle damage upgrade.
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It's hard to spread units when you have them all in 1 control group. I don't see much micro spreading from pro players much. I think they care more about macro than micro.
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This may seem like an obvious conclusion given the nature of 'splash damage', but I doubt many people remember to do this often enough for it to be useful. Granted tanks are rarely without some form of support, however it just so happens, more often than one might think, that just such a small micro will save you the extra handful of lings/roaches you need to clean up an aggressive push by terran. Definitely a worthwhile post.
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Very underrated technique. A lot of people seem to a-move not just because of smart fire. It's not THAT smart people!
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doing this, i believe, only negates the first round of shots, since once every other roach gets in range, it goes for the cluster with smart firing, but i would agree its vastly underused since it still stops the initial blow
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Thats great but will be useless in big Fights .... there be something " infront" of the tanks that will stop u from getting there !
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Asdkmoga: I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure tanks just target closest unit, when only facing 1 kind of unit.
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I've seen a lot of high-level T players where their tanks are rarely clumped up like that. If they had 6 tanks, you'd see three pairs of tanks staggered in a line.
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I do this with immortals where I spread them out and send them in first with chargelots just behind them. Ideally, all the tanks fire once, then my chargelots get to them before the second volley. Seems to work incredibly well.
Should work well with just about any unit (nothing as good as immo, of course) and roaches seem a good choice :D
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I'm not sure it should matter whether the tanks are staggered or not, the entire point of this is to reduce damage when you are running towards siege tanks. Since you will lose more units if you don't make buffer units than if you do you there is little reason not to do this
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This technique should also be used against banelings/storms any AOE abbility. For some time I have been rather annoyed with the good players lack of splitting their forces. It is just 1 big control group ftw! I think players should be able to punish this lazy kind of play more than they are atm.
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I'm not sure it should matter whether the tanks are staggered or not, the entire point of this is to reduce damage when you are running towards siege tanks
I mean yeah, as was said upthread, spreading your units out to avoid splash is always good. I'm just thinking of the scenario in his example pictures - would it have turned out the same way if the tanks had been in staggered pairs?
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On September 19 2010 20:01 Asdkmoga wrote:
doing this, i believe, only negates the first round of shots, since once every other roach gets in range, it goes for the cluster with smart firing, but i would agree its vastly underused since it still stops the initial blow
No it doesnt.
This is certainly a great display of tactics, and should be used in all direct attacks vs a siege line. It's certainly a better idea than just 1Aing in.
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EPT
