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Ok I've got two replays against a low masters zerg.
They're not pro or anything of course, but I think should be helpful to people to see what it might look like. I looked through a few replays given in the OP already and most of them were very unhelpful, barely using any marines at all or the zerg dying before the ravens could be built up in significant enough numbers. Plus they're pretty old 
In these 2 replays I skip the 2 medivacs I usually get before Corvid Reactor finishes, and go pure MR.
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-233818.jpg)
vs Ling/Bling/Muta into Infestor/Ultra
Here he gets the normal ling bling muta. I lose a good number of SCVs, but am able to bounce back into the game, barely losing Ravens (if at all). The speed of Seeker Missile is insane now. Look at how fast his mutas and blings die in close range, he has pretty much no time to react. He gets a few good fungals off but thanks to the fungal nerf and to me being more careful with them (sitting them behind turrets and split up), I keep a lot of them at red health and have about 20 at the end. 20 Ravens is about a new autoturret every 4 seconds. He gets a few ultras at the end, but my turret field and mass marines spread is too much for him.
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-233819.jpg)
vs Roach/Corruptor
I open up with a greedy 14 CC and he goes for roaches and corruptors. I poke around and keep control of the center tower, seeing that he has mainly just slow roaches. I rally units at the tower and move forward, creating my turret field close to the front of his natural's ramp. He nydus's and counterattacks my 3rd and new 4th, but my reinforcements are able to hold them off. Eventually he loses too much, and I, with most of my Ravens alive, slowly turret push into his base.
It looks like as long as you keep good spread vs Infestors, you can deal with both Roaches and Ultras easily. A well made turret field (spread out) will stop ultralisks from killing too fast, due to marines sitting in it safely. Seeker missile does well almost anything and Roaches aren't an exception. Turret + Marine is pretty good against Roach too even due to Roaches' slow DPS, high supply (lesser lategame strength), and smaller range. And they won't be on creep usually.
It seems like the composition to "counter" or deal with Marine/Raven would be Infestor Broodlord, perhaps starting at Infestor Roach or infestor ling bling earlier on.
PDD also lasts forever, it's so awesome.
Thoughts:
Ghosts would be epic with this. If MR isn't enough lategame to deal with Infestor Broodlord ( I think it can, but it will probably be too micro intensive ) then I could see Snipe/Nuke/EMP dealing with Infestor Broodlord quite well. Snipe/EMP Infestors so Ravens can be a little safer when moving in to seeker missile the broodlords. Air units stack super easy and 2 range radius for Seeker missile is quite big. Probably not more than just a couple ghosts though, just for a couple EMPs, but maybe if you have a large enough Raven force you can start cranking Ghosts to make an extremely strong lategame spellcaster force of Ghost Raven, while throwing Marines at your opponent.
Marine Ghost itself is really good, the problem is mass mass ling bling. But with Turret/Seeker Missile support, ling bling is not a big threat. And the turrets create safety for Snipe vs Ultra/Broodlord and safety against Infestors
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Been trying this out recently due to seeker missile buff. Now it completely wrecks everything that zerg can make, aside from corruptors. I'm masters and have won at least 5 games using this strat. Pretty amazing. Ravens are extremely good at shutting down both infestors and mutas, which are pretty much the only units zerg can use against terran. I recommend this strategy to terrans of any level
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On September 28 2011 14:06 scarper65 wrote:
Been trying this out recently due to seeker missile buff. Now it completely wrecks everything that zerg can make, aside from corruptors. I'm masters and have won at least 5 games using this strat. Pretty amazing. Ravens are extremely good at shutting down both infestors and mutas, which are pretty much the only units zerg can use against terran. I recommend this strategy to terrans of any level
Then again, corruptors are slow so you can just retreat your Ravens to your marines or retreat back to turret field :D or even just seeker missile them lol
Just wondering how high masters (skill wise, idc about points lol) are you? And what server? Could you share some replays if you have any good ones?
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I am thinking that infestors using ITs combined with roaches would break the turret field rather easy. As long as the zerg is trading energy spawns for energy spawns then I would feel the zerg should come out ahead since a fungal could wreck a batch of marines but a HSM would not be that big a blow to some roaches.
I think in those replays, the zerg was wasting money sending units to take and take out the turrets when perhaps using a shitton of ITs would have been a better trade. I believe 2 ITs would kill a single turret so it would about even out energy wise.
The problem still poses for zerg on how to kill the ravens, but the best you can do is corruptors or hydras, and/or mutas if you have really good micro.
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On September 28 2011 14:51 Tiamat wrote:
I am thinking that infestors using ITs combined with roaches would break the turret field rather easy. As long as the zerg is trading energy spawns for energy spawns then I would feel the zerg should come out ahead since a fungal could wreck a batch of marines but a HSM would not be that big a blow to some roaches.
I think in those replays, the zerg was wasting money sending units to take and take out the turrets when perhaps using a shitton of ITs would have been a better trade. I believe 2 ITs would kill a single turret so it would about even out energy wise.
The problem still poses for zerg on how to kill the ravens, but the best you can do is corruptors or hydras, and/or mutas if you have really good micro.
True, but then again the advantage of the ravens over the infestor/roach, which I think can make raven/marine work, is that ravens fly (duh) and can go around the map and harass, while neither infestors nor roaches are very fast (at least not as fast as lings as if you were playing marine tank and did some marine drops). Also infestor roach is gas heavy, and his relative immobility will make it hard for him to defend his bases, which inhibits his gas income.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but in big numbers even if you don't have medivacs, marines trade pretty well with roaches (if we say 2 marines = 1 roach), so if infestors use IT to kill turrets (probably the best choice for zerg) then they'll have less energy for fungal too. Perhaps if you're good enough, you can easily capitalize on that by saving up energy for Ravens instead of continuously making Turrets, so that you can push in and use some seeker missile possibly or just seeker missile any infestors that may have enough fungal energy then push in.
Also another I idea I got is to mix in even just 1 banshee. Just like in TvT, where you mix 1 banshee in with your vikings, so you can pick off tanks and force him to have enough aa (air superiority in TvT case). 1 Banshee would force multiple muta/corruptor; using fungals on 1 unit really isn't worth it. And you have marines/turret/pdd for the mutas, while you can outrun the corruptors. Either way the zerg uses more gas than you do.
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Anyone got this strategy to work consistently with the new patch? These are my conclusions so far from trying the strategy.
1. It is very powerful when the Zerg player does not know how to respond correctly.
2. Turrets are better than HSM in most cases since you need to pressure Zerg all the time, you cannot wait until you have 125 energy before attacking with your Ravens.
3. Corruptors really hard counter Ravens; you lose for cost even with Viking support and several point defense drones. Only if you have managed to save up 4+ HSM will Raven/Viking defeat Corruptors for cost.
4. Ultras just laugh at Ravens, Auto turrets only do 2 damage to max upgraded Ultras, HSM are almost as useless given the high energy cost just to do 100 damage.
5. It is really fun play-style, but I am not sure it works if the opponent really knows what he is doing.
6. Taking out expansions with auto turrets seems to be the strongest part of using mass Raven. The real problem is escaping back to your home base before mutas/corruptors wipe our your Ravens.
I will do more testing but please write down your experiences with using Marine/Raven against Zerg.
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I have been playing a VERY heavy marine style lately quite successfully around 1000 masters. I don't put my gas into ravens though because I put all of it into getting basically the fastest possible 3/3, medivacs and ghosts.
I can't see replacing ghosts with ravens, the problem is the ravens largely fulfil the same roll as marines, they are good against mutas and for harassment but they arent really that good against infestors or brood/corruptor (except once you have a ton) and even then they are really vulnerable to some fungals.
Meanwhile a few ghosts can completely shut down infestors and a few more ghosts can totally shut down broods and you can just ignore the corruptors.
So really I think the strategy should be modified to Marine/ghost with a touch of tanks.
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That's a different build, man. :p Marines with ravens and ghosts would probably be quite sick though much tougher to pull off than tanks into ghosts. Jinro used to be a micro god of 1 base Marines + Ghosts only where you snipe banelings and mutarlisku so you can even go tankless marine/ghost if you are good enough.
@Yoshi - You really should consider a fast Hi-Sec auto tracking. +1 range doesn't seem like a lot but you get a rather good bonus to space control especially for air. Treat it like +1 building weapons. If a unit spends 5 seconds attacking a turret, then its taking damage from that one turret but if that turret is covered by another turret then it takes 2x as much damage, 3x for covered by 2 etc.
Given that you put turrets 3/4 tiles apart, the +1 range can easily make it so 2-3 more turrets are firing while the front turrets are being attacked. If you put this on a grid pattern then you can see this is roughly 50% increase in damage.
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I know that its not exactly the same build but I feel that the thread has changed into more of a discussion about mass marine play rather then the original build.
My ZvT is definitely mass marine centred as MM is basically all I get for the first 10-15minutes of the game. I do get a few tanks here and there but mostly I just depend on splitting and high upgrades to trade with banelings and easily deal with mutas. Mutas are basically garbage once your marines are 2/2 nevermind 3/3 so its really awesome since most zergs open mutas.
I find that ghosts are much better complement to marines for dealing with infestors then tanks and obviously they are also really helpful for destroying BL play.
Basically infesters are the only thing I fear.
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If that's the case, I'm curious, has anyone started to run into ultralisk re-maxes due to the build time decrease?
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Hey,
I got inspired by this and tried it out vs a fellow mid-to-low EU diamond zerg. I've attached the replay.
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-235704.jpg)
For those of you with little time:
This was surprisingly effective, my inspiration was to drop 16 upgraded marines while massing ravens. Granted, neither my opponent, nor myself are top notch players, but I made it work for me. Its really fun to play and it probably improves your multitasking. The guy complained afterwards how he didnt know how to react, and its true; as I see it, anything but infestors gets eaten alive by this.
I researched all upgrades for the turrets and upgraded the marines heavily as well. The zerg seemed to be ahead all the time, even after a failed bling bust.
Oh, I dont play that well, so dont mind my timings, macro and such... We didnt get to the hive stage, he tried using corruptors, but failed miserably (some miscontrol on his part as well...considering that my apm is quite low and i cant spread marines i'd say we were even...)
All in all, a very fun way to play tvz (i usually mech, btw)
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On October 05 2011 02:16 Antisocialmunky wrote:
If that's the case, I'm curious, has anyone started to run into ultralisk re-maxes due to the build time decrease?
I think in that case, the idea would be that you should have enough Ravens to go just kill some of his bases, forcing him to be in a low econ state. If he counter attacks then you could base trade and/or force a weird stalemate (you with the advantage due to floating buildings + raven). Plus, I really do think that 10 marines is good enough for 1 ultralisk. 10 marines is 4 more supply than 1 ultralisk, but it's unlikely you'll be engaging in maxed food since you want to keep pressure while massing up more ravens and marines do worse in bigger numbers.
Also one big benefit of Ravens over ghosts is that unlike ghosts, obviously, Ravens can fly. Meaning they are safe from banelings. With ghosts you might get caught off guard or surrounded and suddenly all your ghosts die. Also, obviously, you can harass with Ravens without medivacs but you would need them for marine/ghost.
Also, in large numbers (late game), it is much easier to use Ravens to put down PDD or mass seeker missile or even turret than to try to mass snipe with ghosts.
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I can't believe it's almost been a year since you posted this thread ASM! That raven buff excited me but i haven't tried this build for quite a while. I'll watch those replays Yoshi posted and see if I can come up with any success. Adding ghosts sounds like a good plan, we've seen how insane they are in TvZ with good micro.
Mass marine is still my favorite thing in the world 
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you can transition to other builds. if you scout ultras, get a few tech labs on the rax and start pumping out marauders
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On September 24 2011 05:53 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:Ok I've got two replays against a low masters zerg. They're not pro or anything of course, but I think should be helpful to people to see what it might look like. I looked through a few replays given in the OP already and most of them were very unhelpful, barely using any marines at all or the zerg dying before the ravens could be built up in significant enough numbers. Plus they're pretty old In these 2 replays I skip the 2 medivacs I usually get before Corvid Reactor finishes, and go pure MR. vs Ling/Bling/Muta into Infestor/Ultra Here he gets the normal ling bling muta. I lose a good number of SCVs, but am able to bounce back into the game, barely losing Ravens (if at all). The speed of Seeker Missile is insane now. Look at how fast his mutas and blings die in close range, he has pretty much no time to react. He gets a few good fungals off but thanks to the fungal nerf and to me being more careful with them (sitting them behind turrets and split up), I keep a lot of them at red health and have about 20 at the end. 20 Ravens is about a new autoturret every 4 seconds. He gets a few ultras at the end, but my turret field and mass marines spread is too much for him. vs Roach/Corruptor I open up with a greedy 14 CC and he goes for roaches and corruptors. I poke around and keep control of the center tower, seeing that he has mainly just slow roaches. I rally units at the tower and move forward, creating my turret field close to the front of his natural's ramp. He nydus's and counterattacks my 3rd and new 4th, but my reinforcements are able to hold them off. Eventually he loses too much, and I, with most of my Ravens alive, slowly turret push into his base. It looks like as long as you keep good spread vs Infestors, you can deal with both Roaches and Ultras easily. A well made turret field (spread out) will stop ultralisks from killing too fast, due to marines sitting in it safely. Seeker missile does well almost anything and Roaches aren't an exception. Turret + Marine is pretty good against Roach too even due to Roaches' slow DPS, high supply (lesser lategame strength), and smaller range. And they won't be on creep usually. It seems like the composition to "counter" or deal with Marine/Raven would be Infestor Broodlord, perhaps starting at Infestor Roach or infestor ling bling earlier on. PDD also lasts forever, it's so awesome. Thoughts: Ghosts would be epic with this. If MR isn't enough lategame to deal with Infestor Broodlord ( I think it can, but it will probably be too micro intensive ) then I could see Snipe/Nuke/EMP dealing with Infestor Broodlord quite well. Snipe/EMP Infestors so Ravens can be a little safer when moving in to seeker missile the broodlords. Air units stack super easy and 2 range radius for Seeker missile is quite big. Probably not more than just a couple ghosts though, just for a couple EMPs, but maybe if you have a large enough Raven force you can start cranking Ghosts to make an extremely strong lategame spellcaster force of Ghost Raven, while throwing Marines at your opponent. Marine Ghost itself is really good, the problem is mass mass ling bling. But with Turret/Seeker Missile support, ling bling is not a big threat. And the turrets create safety for Snipe vs Ultra/Broodlord and safety against Infestors
2nd game I'm not convinced at all.
At one point you put 2 raven harassing his 3rd base, he has a group of 24 lings, 6 banelings outside your nat.
He tried to attack your nat with lings, it was walled off, and he retreated his army.
At that point he had 1.5k / 1.5k. He could have easily morphed all the zerglings into baneling and obliterate your natural's infrastructure, yet he did not.
At other point, he attack with roach, forcing a lift-off on your 3rd.. He has roach inside your natural, and you had ZERO army aside from raven and producing marines. Again, he is at 1.5k / 1.5k. Can you imagine 30 baneling shows up instead?
All in all I think raven is good, but the transition in that game is not smooth at all, there are so many points he could've crushed you. He made the mistake that a lot of macro zerg make, too passive. He knows you are going for a unit that has long lasting power late game, and one that is expensive, and once the number gets high enough it will become unbearable. Compare Raven to a collosus, if you see protoss massing collosus with little defense, the best action is to rush and kill him rather than staying passive.
I do think Raven has great potential though, please PM me and we'll do some games and try to figure out a good transition. I play zerg. I could use some ZvT practice as well and I do think raven is going to be popular soon. Let me know 
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Well, the main transition that KME banged out was fast siege tanks which will hold a baneling ling bust with a good wall off.
As for thirds on big non-blizzard maps with BW style expo patterns, you might want to consider building a PFort and then cutting SCVs for mass OC to keep up with a zerg with more bases. Also a potential idea is getting a reactor port for medivacs.
Also once you do establish your forward position to siege zerg using auto turrets from, you can do the 'cut in cut out' thing where you send detachments to polish off the zerg's Expo. You still want to keep the main body of your force camping outside his natural though and try to bulldoze zerg down with it.
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I thought this is was actually a truly viable strat, until i see you keep doing it to Low-master/high diamond players who never played against this style before.
-> You out play them anyways, and they don't know how to react.
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Hey,
Just played another game with this style, this time a custom against a low master zerg. I still suck quite badly and am mid diamond tho
Anyway, this time I used the 16 marine drop again, which did some good dmg, then continued producing upgraded marines, ravens and medivacs. What I like, that this way I'm extremely mobile, can easily limit creep spread, and I still think that nothing but infestors can stop this.
Dropped marines with raven and medivac support are amazing. I've attached the rep, because I'm unsure whether I won because of good marine drops...What do you guys think? Do the ravens provide good support for the money they cost?
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-235772.jpg)
I believe the autoturret's ability to create chokes for the marines provides excellent added value, and with upgrades the turrets stay forever. Mutas are not really an issue because of HSM. I believe at my level this is a viable way to play vs zerg, and many are surprised as they expect marine tank.
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This build need a more solid way to transition into additional bases, siege tanks (pure baneling/ling will beat this if they split up banelings at all).
I think its really cool because of the tendency for zergs to get these super big muta balls up but lack of army diversity is concerning.
I also don't see you being safe after an army trade. The OP says that trading armies, while not losing ravens, is the key to winning with this build. Unfortunately zerg is gonna reinforce way faster than you can recharge energy. At that point it will be you defending 2 bases with mostly marines and maybe a handful of Auto Turrets.
This feels like a 2 base semi-allin timing attack that unless you deal some good economic damage with the ravens or completely stomp their army will fall flat on its face going into the mid/late game.
I would be interested to see if accumulating a nice ball of ravens to use as map control/anti muta would be effective, while expanding and taking over the map and transistioning into standard marine tank. HSM simply is not enough to deal with banelings even with the denying of creep.
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@OIDan will check out the replays when I have time >.<
One thing that I didn't incorporate into my play (replays) is making walls with Turrets to make chokes. I just sort of slapped them all over the field as if they were tanks. Then again, making walls would mean they take more splash... but that wouldn't matter because if he sends in his blings first, I can just seeker missile right?
I think the potential for this is really good, although it might map specific. Imagine blocking off counter attack routes with turrets. With so much armor they can kill a lot of lings and are even good against the slow DPS Mutas. Maybe you could even leave a PDD at each wall.
I've been using this occasionally still but have trouble transitioning into Raven + upgrades. Then again, I never play bio so may be that is why I'm sucking. I can't get my marines to do enough damage or keep pressure, maybe I just need to split better. I could get to like level 18 or something on the marine split baneling challenge map made by Griffith, but when I'm in game it's hard to remind myself to get my left hand over to the P button, so I just box and move the marines apart... which seems to be much less efficient xD
Another opening I was thinking of was the one Gumiho showed vs Nestea (and vs Curious). He opens reactor hellion expand and banshee ASAP. With 1-2 banshees and several hellions, he slows the zerg from getting his third while staying safe (the banshees will stop any roach attack from killing you). This allows you to get your own quick third up, and he gets thors out in time for Mutas. Now, this is for mech, but we can easily transition from the reactor factory + tech lab starport into mass marine / raven. Just add a bunch of barracks. By the time mutas come out, your third will already be up and running and you may have 6 gas. Perhaps the shit ton of gas will allow you to get all your Raven upgrades really quick and thus shorten the transition, or maybe it would be even better to just make 1 extra starport (total 4 instead of 3 even though you can only support 3 on 3 base), so that you can get a couple ravens out quicker (after stockpiling gas), then get the upgrades for ravens. This way from the extra 2 ravens you get shit ton of energy. Maybe it would be best to do some calculations vs Corvid Reactor.
You get your third set up before the zerg's third will finish, so there should be a strong timing where you can hit with Marines 1/1 + Combat Shield + Stim + Ravens before he can set up his fourth. I'm thinking it would be most efficient to get Ravens (no corvid) then Durable Materials + Building Armor + Hi-Sec Autotrack + Seeker Missile.
Ahh so much to think about xD
Maybe we could test this out evan? If we both work at it we can get/make some good replays efficiently, trying out different things from both the zerg and terran side.
Also, the fact that you said you weren't convinced only for one of the games is cool. I haven't seen the replays yet but I'm pretty sure he made some big mistakes, it felt like he should have had a lot more. But if you didn't mention anything the first game then do you think the replay is decent or did you just not comment xD
Edit: Holy fuck 10 more posts until I hit 4000. I wonder what I should do with it.
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EPT
