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I just got done playing a ladder match (1600 diamond) on steppes of war in which my Terran opponent used a planetary fortress AT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS EXPANSIONS.
Now I know that storm is very useful in taking down the repairing scvs but seriously what can be done before that?
I definitely should have made a tech switch but I felt that what I was doing was working so why change it? But after repeatedly killing 75% of his army when it would usually be gg, the Terran was able to just retreat and macro up an army again behind his PF. After killing about 5 armies i decided hey lets just go destroy his production facilities because I thought I was ready to finish the game and that was definitely why I lost but I feel like there were SO MANY times where I should have been able to win and was just repelled by the power of the mass repair splash attack planetary fortress.
What should I have done besides not over committing?
Honestly at this point I no longer want to apply any pressure to my terran opponents so they think they're safe enough to build orbital commands everywhere because there have been a number of games were I have lost to this one goddamn unit.
Please watch the replay:
Slam vs Polaris on Steppes of War
Sorry for the somewhat poor quality of my post, I am still undergoing a lot of rage lol.
I really fucking wish that Blizzard left this crap out.
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If you don't have an effective way of clearing out his scvs or ridiculous amounts of anti-armor damage you're better off not engaging the PF.
The tradeoff is that you can expand yourself and crush T's army easier because he won't have the extra mules - and if you've wiped out T's army, you're in good shape to get a lot of colossi or storm tech which can ensure a kill at the next opportunity.
Watching the rep:
You were never actually all that ahead. While you killed his army you often lost a ton of yours and your probecount was extremely low (2nd base at 16 minutes, third at 22, 40 probes at 20+ minutes). What you should have been doing after winning battles is pulling back to macro up and take the map rather than suiciding 40-supply armies into PFs and ralled production.
Engaging a PF shouldn't be done unless you have a lot of power to bring against it, but more importantly you shouldn't be trying to force the win on such weak econ in any case.
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From the replay I don't think you had a single observe to scout, spot for drops, you should have either pylons or obs to spot the drops and make more stalkers next time. You had a lot of zealots but didn't bother to get charge which would have worked well. You could have gotten your expo way before him and macro'd up but you played too agressive and were throwing your advantage away. immortals are good for tanking planetary and taking them down. Also you can use your collosus to abuse the cliff and snipe the scv's since they will outrange the PF. I felt you would have been much better if you teched and upgraded. By getting the forge your units will be much stronger with upgrades and then you can use cannons to block your expos from being sniped by his drops.
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Deal is. Without storm, or like 10 immo's (which i seriously don't recommend.) You can't. Get storm man. Even if you're going colo build, get freakin storm. We as toss players know through trail and error, that you infact CANNOT bust a PF with a T army enforcing without Storm.
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While its true storming the mineral line/army support can be key in bringing down a PF....
Its worth noting that repairing a PF taking heavy damage is very expensive for a T player, and any SCVs repairing aren't mining.
Which means that a Colossi with Thermal Lance can force the Terran to use up a huge number of resources just by parking it outside of the PFs range and dealing damage continuously. Even if the PF doesn't fall, it nullifies the entire purpose of that expansion as long as you're dealing damage, just because it becomes such a resource sink.
A lot of times Toss players will hammer away at a PF for a bit and get mad when it doesn't fall, like they didn't do anything. But don't underestimate how much econ damage you can do just by forcing massive amounts of repair from the Terran.
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This is why I don't got templar much anymore because bunker/PF are irritating as hell. Colossus can just either snipe workers, snipe repairers, or even take on the PF. Getting 1-2 immortals helps a ton. Usually a PF goes down at a 3rd and its really hard to kill since it has so much armor, splash, and repair...
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You didn't tech switch because you thought you were about to win.
You ended up not winning.
You ask us how you could have won.
I think you might have been able to win by tech switching to templar.
But if you really hate templar, try attacking the scvs with colossi, they do splash.
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Didn't watch the replay, but if you can afford it, spreading out your army to take out the PF is really great, especially if you don't alive storms yet. If you can attack from different sides with Collossi, the SCVs get hit alot. But thats normally not possible :/
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On October 26 2010 10:37 slam wrote:I just got done playing a ladder match (1600 diamond) on steppes of war in which my Terran opponent used a planetary fortress AT EVERY SINGLE ONE OF HIS EXPANSIONS. Now I know that storm is very useful in taking down the repairing scvs but seriously what can be done before that? I definitely should have made a tech switch but I felt that what I was doing was working so why change it? But after repeatedly killing 75% of his army when it would usually be gg, the Terran was able to just retreat and macro up an army again behind his PF. After killing about 5 armies i decided hey lets just go destroy his production facilities because I thought I was ready to finish the game and that was definitely why I lost but I feel like there were SO MANY times where I should have been able to win and was just repelled by the power of the mass repair splash attack planetary fortress. What should I have done besides not over committing? Honestly at this point I no longer want to apply any pressure to my terran opponents so they think they're safe enough to build orbital commands everywhere because there have been a number of games were I have lost to this one goddamn unit. Please watch the replay: Slam vs Polaris on Steppes of WarSorry for the somewhat poor quality of my post, I am still undergoing a lot of rage lol. I really fucking wish that Blizzard left this crap out.
I'm not entirely sure what you want us to tell you. You list off all the things you know are effective and then state the things wrong and then go "hey I did this wrong and I know it contributed to my loss, but other then that what should I do?"
Honestly, it sounds like you know how to handle the situation perfectly well and just refused to do it, which is simply poor decision making. If you think what you are doing will work but you know something else you can do will work why would you not do the thing you know will work?
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On October 26 2010 11:27 awesomoecalypse wrote:
Its worth noting that repairing a PF taking heavy damage is very expensive for a T player, and any SCVs repairing aren't mining.
I don't find this persuasive considering that a PF taking damage and being repaired is strictly better than any other defending unit in SCII taking damage from a cost perspective. It costs 175 resources to bring a PF back to full from 1 HP, mostly mineral. That's the cost of *a single* stalker. That may add up, but it is by far the most efficient tank in the game in terms of cost. By comparison, a Thor is 175 resources for 400 HPs of tanking, or .44 resource per HP. PF on the other hand is ~.12, almost 4x better!
When the PF takes out a ground force and keeps on ticking, that's lost mining time plus ONE stalker [per 1500 damage sunk] to hold off or even destroy 1000s worth of resources.
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Hey, as Terran I've recently encountered this TvP: They just skip right by my PF, and go and kill me. Granted, I tried running my army back, etc, but put simply: Do not engage a PF.
Or, if there's a PF all by its lonesome, a void ray or two will either A) take it down, B) force a huge mineral dump, and possibly C) get his army out of position if the fortress is far away enough.
I'm aware that this isn't always possible, just keep in mind that they can't shoot up- I see some toss get so in the mindset of the army they're building that they don't even think about getting air.
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Just watched the replay.
When you saw that his army was mostly dead, you should have go straight for his production building instead of trying to kill it. Losing the 2 colossus at this point was very bad.
When you finally went into his base you already have less of an upper hand, but you could have stalled him better by sniping quickly all his tech lab on the raxs.
Colossus are fragile when you fight inside a base with marauder popping out everywhere, so forcing him to make marine helps alot.
Also, dont get trapped into his base. Stay on the edge and use blink and cliffwalk to run if you need to. Sacrifice the zealot so the more expansive units can run after doing damage.
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u complain about PF we complain about mass colossus --isnt this ironic haha.
PF are imo the only way the terran can defend against both of the other mobile races. protoss have a walking hell army with aoe, and a lot of dmg....while zerg; well zerg is just a swarm of bad news.
regardless -- there's no need to go after resources unless both of u are at the same macro. focus on supply blocking him and taking out scvs. extended lance colossus outranges a pf -- just hold position and if need be tell it to attack the scvs that are repairing it. while ur doing that macro up a huge army.
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you can park stalkers or colossus out of the range of the PF and have them hold position, shooting anything that comes into range (scv's)
or just run zealots into the scv blob and hit hold position.
PF Is ok it's just the targeting priority that bothers me at this point.
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use forcefield,and force field away as much repair surface area as possible. Just place them at the edges of the PF
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dont engage with low army count.. colossus are great untill terran gets vikings out (which is unfortunatly too early)
immortals are also great damage dealers and tanks against pf.
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A single immortal can tank a PF like forever, walk him very close to the PF so he doesn't splash the rest of your army, then engage. Obv the T player can manualy target something else, but from my experience that never happens.
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1 Void Ray > Planetary Fortress.
2 Void Rays > Planetary Fortress and repairing SCVs.
If you're having THAT hard of a time busting a PF with Robo tech, the extra 650 mins and 450 gas is a small price to pay to kill the PF; you seem to have a tendency to throw your army at the problem, so 2 voidarys seem like a pretty worthy investment, not to mention you've forced the Terran to hard counter your V-rays or get rolled. (though he may have vikings already to counter your colossus)
I have found lots of success going Robo tech into a void ray or two. As the Terran techs to counter the Void Rays I tend to counter with an immortal/zealot/stalker push.
FYI, the Planetary Fortress was designed by Blizzard to be owned by the Immortal.
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Turtle more. When you have an advantage make sure you don't waste it. If you kill off his army you can expand more and get better eco. At a certain point you can just trade armies with him till he runs out of minerals and you'll win everytime. If you're going for the quick kill you better be damn sure you can take him out, cause otherwise you may have lost a sure win.
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Push past the PF with your army to cut off reinforcements while leaving a couple void rays on the PF. I almost always get a few void rays when facing a T who likes PFs and I've never regretted it.
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The PF is where the Terran army wants to fight, if you attack it with a void ray he HAS to bring his vikings and marines to the defense... Why not catch him in the open ground on his way to the PF?
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You could have done a lot of things better. force fields werent that great, you need to shooting down those vikings + medivacs is ideal (his count on them was high), I believe after winning some of those decisive battles you had safe points to expand. another good point I saw was scouting. you should have established good scouting and macro. tech switching to high templar and/or even getting some phoenixes would have been viable as they can scout for you AND kill medivacs/vikings researching charge is an ok idea too.
bottom line; tech, scouting, macroing up after winning some battles instead of amassing a bigger army and attacking again. if hes going to turtle up with PF macro up
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if he's got a bunch of pfs, you should be happy. that's one less orbital command for him. take advantage of his turtling and further extend your lead by expanding everywhere. when it comes time to engage him, storm the repairing scvs and have a decent amount of immortals to dps it down.
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Once you have the amulet upgrade, it's pretty important to hide pylons around expansions to warp in High Templar to storm SCVs mining. You don't even necessarily have to kill the fortresses. Another tech switch you can do after taking your third is a two stargate+fleet beacon transition where you use speed voidrays (still effective after patch) to deny expansions, force missile turrets, take map control. I've found it to be extremely effective.
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Who gets a PF without at least 1-2 turrets to take out observers? 1-2 turrets kills 2 voidrays easily now, so the answer is, go with storm. Otherwise just walk around it, you won't lose anything in the time it takes to run by.
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At 9 minute mark you engage the terran ramp head on with no prior scouting, if you didnt do this you would have had a much greater lead, watch the replay again.
From 20:00 to 22:00 you dont build a single thing, banking from 200 to 1300 minerals.
On topic, planetary fortresses do not produce mules which are essential to the terrans ability to sustain a healthy flow of units.
When a player sacrifices economy to get a unit-lead early on (spinecrawlers, sc1 bunkers, photon cannons) he will be able to defend, the smart decision to make is not to engage, but techswitching using the same range of money that your oponnent spent on making his defences.
Day9 would have said "its a free techswitch" because your oponnent uses 150gas 150mins on a planetary fortress, you can make a 150/150 stargate
and make void-rays with the equivivalent money he would have earned if he had mules. Frankly though, most of the time protoss can just attack move and kill diamond league terrans when they make planetary fortresses, you see they cant afford not to have the mules, you just get so far ahead you can make a huge stalker/sentry/collossus army and kill him. And you could also micromanage with blink or warp-prisms to get dying terrans when they camp in their base.
(Warp-prisms can turn into a flying pylon that ground-units cannot attack, then you can magicly make units in his base)
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EPT
