EPT[G]TvZ Marine/Raven - Page 8
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Ferrose
United States11378 Posts
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MrCon
France29748 Posts
But the bratok games are a good exemple of the other viable new TvZ strat (mass rine/tank) And those games were amazing played by him. | ||
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Senorcuidado
United States700 Posts
 You can't overestimate the value of forcing larvae. Constant marines may have died horrible acidic deaths but they almost always killed enough units (read:larvae) to make them worth it, not to mention trading minerals for gas. By constantly trading, kme ends up ahead in workers while stockpiling ravens and building up energy. Marines are expendable, and with so many rax there is always another ball ready to go as long as your macro is okay. By the end of the game, 3/3 marines are pretty nasty, but really that huge cloud of ravens is biggest danger. Problem is, as we saw in the replays, the zergs spent all their time and effort trying to hold off the constant marines. I have no doubt that weaker players can screw this up royally, with either poor micro against banelings, poor macro from the rax, or bad decisions with the ravens' spells, and come to the conclusion that the build is terrible but I'm excited to give it a try. edit: I wanted to add, at least how I interpret the strategy, it is the job of the marines, early on, to die. They aren't meant to necessarily do tangible damage, but to kill as many lings and banelings (larvae) as possible. If you see the marines in this way it makes a lot more sense. Killing two lings is just like killing a drone. Banelings WILL kill your marines, so don't try to survive, just make sure it takes more banelings than he wants it to, and kill as many lings as you can. kme came out even on cost in those trades, even against banelings, as well as killing a lot of larvae that could have been drones. | ||
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sodoff
Niger14 Posts
My last game of the night last night, i played a rank 2 diamond zerg and beat him, and he went basically all roaches. ![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-160832.jpg) This strategy is brilliant. it does force the units of Z to be either heavy roach or heavy baneling, neither is great against the ravens. also it allows you to pressure the zergs third and fourth which is so so important against zerg and something that i used to find to be almost impossible to do. loving this build and im gonna use it some more today ALso, on two replays that i didnt post, the initial attack of 16-20 marines has just killed my zerg opponent twice. the initial attack is strong lol, and if zerg is massing up drones on two base, its going to do alot of damage. | ||
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Tenks
United States3104 Posts
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metaldragon
United States251 Posts
The biggest threat is actually Getting turret bombed by fully upgraded auto turrets! Those things can EASY take out a base. S Z is forced to spend food fichting auto turrets While T Continues to make the never ending marine army! | ||
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Smackzilla
United States539 Posts
Is burning Z's gas/larvae so important that you rarely/never retreat? It seems the answer is yes. | ||
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mati
Argentina114 Posts
. I would love to have a partner to practice this (not the best players on latin american server T-T), so i have to ask... The early game marines trade for bling/lings, its smart, and i belive very needed for it to work... but (and this is a question, not a statement, i want to know from your experience) if he just get some roaches + crawlers (fighting only on creep), and borrow tech for fast healing... then he could recycle the same 7-8 roaches to fight all your early marine harras, and save up a lot of larva for big macro, and lot of gas for what ever tech he was aiming to...Does this works like this? or i am wrong about it? thanks | ||
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Kinmaul
United States104 Posts
On October 27 2010 06:35 Smackzilla wrote: How important is it to force trades? Specifically, in the replays, it almost looks as if the player is intentionally continuing a losing battle instead of retreating just to force more larvae/gas to be spent on zerglings/banelings. Is burning Z's gas/larvae so important that you rarely/never retreat? It seems the answer is yes. Muta/ling are both very fast units which often make retreating impossible unless you are very close to your base. You are better off having your units fight to the death instead of trying to run and giving the zerg free kills. | ||
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micjmac
42 Posts
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Fruscainte
4596 Posts
On October 27 2010 07:04 micjmac wrote: How do you handle spine crawlers? Is it effective to suicide marines into spine crawlers, or should you try to bypass them? Just kill them. People give too much credit to Static Defense. If they got something like 15 spine crawlers at their natural, simply back off and just take your third and even your fourth. | ||
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metaldragon
United States251 Posts
On October 27 2010 07:04 micjmac wrote: How do you handle spine crawlers? Is it effective to suicide marines into spine crawlers, or should you try to bypass them? Mass rines deal with them pretty well with a medivac or 2 another plus of this build is the very fast ground upgrades your bio gets which tend to help a ton vs spines | ||
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Fruscainte
4596 Posts
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Unstable
Sweden64 Posts
What are your thoughts regarding a zerg that continues to make mutalisks and provokes HSM to waste raven mana whilst using his ling/bling/roach in addition to his ~20 mutas to secure additional expoes? My opponent kept on making the same unit combination ( muta ling bling, though eventually adding in roaches to a higher degree ). It seems very hard to actually kill off a large group of mutas, HSM just doesn't seem to cut it against a player who is overly careful with his mutas. When our armies clashed his blings mowed down my marines to quickly for there to be enough left to be a real threat against his large stack of mutas. Only when I could force him to defend his last operational base could I land a killing blow with the HSM. edit: grammatical error | ||
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nalgene
Canada2153 Posts
On October 27 2010 04:26 sodoff wrote: awesome thanks for the feedback OP. Im really liking this strategy. My last game of the night last night, i played a rank 2 diamond zerg and beat him, and he went basically all roaches. This strategy is brilliant. it does force the units of Z to be either heavy roach or heavy baneling, neither is great against the ravens. also it allows you to pressure the zergs third and fourth which is so so important against zerg and something that i used to find to be almost impossible to do. loving this build and im gonna use it some more today ALso, on two replays that i didnt post, the initial attack of 16-20 marines has just killed my zerg opponent twice. the initial attack is strong lol, and if zerg is massing up drones on two base, its going to do alot of damage. You should have 2/2 or 3/3 2/3s of the way into your game Both orbitals have 200 mana all game Get building armor ( they add +2 to the turrets ) Get a second engineering bay and add medivacs/additional starports at some point you could also add more bunkers if needed | ||
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Yotta
United States270 Posts
On October 27 2010 07:57 Unstable wrote: Have you tried PDD against Mutas? In replay 7 (i think, it was on Lost Temple) of the OP's post the T uses PDD in one engagement where there were lots of mutas and lings. The PDD depleted pretty fast, but it gave the marines enough time to do significant damage. A modest amount of damage prevented at the beginning of a decent-sized battle can have a huge effect, in the same way that cutting a worker early has a large effect on later stages of the game.Kudos for the strategy. What are your thoughts regarding a zerg that continues to make mutalisks and provokes HSM to waste raven mana whilst using his ling/bling/roach in addition to his ~20 mutas to secure additional expoes? My opponent kept on making the same unit combination ( muta ling bling, though eventually adding in roaches to a higher degree ). It seems very hard to actually kill off a large group of mutas, HSM just doesn't seem to cut it against a player whom is overly careful with his mutas. When our armies clashed his blings mowed down my marines to quickly for there to be enough left to be a real threat against his large stack of mutas. Only when I could force him to defend his last operational base could I land a killing blow with the HSM. Also, don't underestimate turrets. They're relatively cheap and pretty effective with the building armor upgrade. Off topic, the "whom" I italicized within the bolded section of your post should be "who". The player who is overly careful with his mutas is the subject of the verb "is", so the pronoun is who, not whom. I wouldn't normally point out a who/whom mistake but I find people generally go out of their way to use "whom" when they think it is grammatically correct, as opposed to those who simply don't care and use "who" in place of "whom", so it seemed appropriate to correct you. | ||
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Unstable
Sweden64 Posts
My main concern with ravens against mutas lie with the fact that it seems necessary to conserve energy to make the Zerg think twice before engaging with his mutas. Unless the ravens come with an escort of marines being short on energy means that they're usually going to die if I try to use them to harass expansions. There's little to stop an opponent from sniping multiple ravens with the splash damage from the mutas as even a couple of hits from a group of auto-turrets is well within the limits of what's acceptable damage if the reward is great enough. But being conservative with the ravens energy means less room for aggressive harassment and if the zerg is good at provoking HSM and dodging it, he's effectively limiting my chances to put the ravens to any real usage. marine raven vs. muta ling roach - I'm well aware that my mechanics are lacking, and that I only won that game due to equal shortcomings from my opponent whom(?) failed to capitalize on my mistakes. When I played that game I figured that wasting marines and even ravens wasn't as costly for myself as it would become for my opponent in the long run. But it might hint at my concern regarding HSM. I probably wasted hundreds of energy trying to land just one. | ||
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Ferrose
United States11378 Posts
On October 27 2010 02:33 MrCon wrote: The idra vs qxc and bratok vs ret are absolutly not exemple of this strategy, unless they played games that I didn't saw. They just use one raven for creep tumor snipe and to avoid bane traps. Qxc used 2 ravens but with 4 thors and 4 helions + marines and marauders, not the same strat, but a nice timing push. But the bratok games are a good exemple of the other viable new TvZ strat (mass rine/tank) And those games were amazing played by him. I just figured that it'd be helpful since it shows an example of Raven play against Zerg. | ||
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ninjamyst
United States1903 Posts
On October 27 2010 04:26 sodoff wrote: awesome thanks for the feedback OP. Im really liking this strategy. My last game of the night last night, i played a rank 2 diamond zerg and beat him, and he went basically all roaches. I can't believe that was rank 2 diamond zerg. He played pretty crappy. Where were the creep tumors? Where were the infestors and banelings? He knew exactly what you were massing but he didn't build any units to counter till very very late into the game. Going back to this build, it could definitely work. Did you guys see the first game of MvP against oGsZenio? He massed marines with medivacs and some tanks. Totally pwnt the zerg but lost the next two game. So this definitely has promise if you can spread and micro your marines like MvP | ||
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Yotta
United States270 Posts
On October 27 2010 08:30 Unstable wrote: Hmm, I haven't watched your replay yet but it sounds like you try to harass expos with just ravens? From my experience, and from what i've gathered watching replays, it's best to keep them with a group of marines. When a battle starts you should cast any useful abilities and then run them back to your base to recharge and preserve them. Marines provide plenty of pressure, it's their job to die harassing expos or trading armies. Your goal is to mass a fleet of ravens, not use them to harass mineral lines.Thanks, I haven't watched all of the replays yet, but I'll definitively watch #7 when I can free up some time. My main concern with ravens against mutas lie with the fact that it seems necessary to conserve energy to make the Zerg think twice before engaging with his mutas. Unless the ravens come with an escort of marines being short on energy means that they're usually going to die if I try to use them to harass expansions. There's little to stop an opponent from sniping multiple ravens with the splash damage from the mutas as even a couple of hits from a group of auto-turrets is well within the limits of what's acceptable damage if the reward is great enough. But being conservative with the ravens energy means less room for aggressive harassment and if the zerg is good at provoking HSM and dodging it, he's effectively limiting my chances to put the ravens to any real usage. marine raven vs. muta ling roach - I'm well aware that my mechanics are lacking, and that I only won that game due to equal shortcomings from my opponent whom(?) failed to capitalize on my mistakes. When I played that game I figured that wasting marines and even ravens wasn't as costly for myself as it would become for my opponent in the long run. But it might hint at my concern regarding HSM. I probably wasted hundreds of energy trying to land just one. | ||
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