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On December 14 2010 06:26 SethDrone wrote:
Anyone testing this on PTR and have some input on how it holds up?
My main issue is the midgame, I feel very weak during a point where they have mutas + hydras while I have a few phoniex / voids and either 1 coll or 1 building. Basically they give up the fight for air control and while you get in some harass they pump units for a counter attack to overrun you. What are y'all doing to hold during the mid game?
IMO going double stargate off a FE is more about getting safely getting into the midgame on an equal economy to the zerg while at the same time denying zerg his 3rd base. The phoenix build time buff will only help that. The loss of VR speed hurts the late game harassment ability of your VRs but the build is flexible to transition into anything late game IMO. The vast majority of my games end before I even think about getting void ray speed.
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I have yet to lose a game with this.
I just dump all my minerals into cannons/probes/pylon/void and no zerg is going to break mass cannons with proper void ray support.
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On December 14 2010 08:12 Abstinence wrote:
I have yet to lose a game with this.
I just dump all my minerals into cannons/probes/pylon/void and no zerg is going to break mass cannons with proper void ray support.
Glad it's working for you!
For those of you who are having trouble, post replays so I can see if you're doing anything wrong.
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On December 14 2010 08:12 Abstinence wrote:
I have yet to lose a game with this.
I just dump all my minerals into cannons/probes/pylon/void and no zerg is going to break mass cannons with proper void ray support.
It sounds as you're not making any collosus???
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Haha hilarious thread, well made, well made!
Such a good point that you can afford to spam cannons (ok who wouldn't want to be able to?!) for such gas heavy builds (which happen to be fun!)
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If you add some carriers? Is it worth it? Or just VRs are good enough?
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I watched your game on the PTR where you did this and forgot to rebuild your only warpgate (lol). It was on Shakuras as I recall.
There were times when you have 2500 minerals. You could have just sunk them all into zealots or or something. You only won because your zerg opponent was terrible... just saying...
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Why would I rebuild my gateway (not warpgate, no point wasting 50/50 on the research) if my strategy doesn't involve making any units from it? Speaking of PTR, muta/corruptor may be too difficult to deal with without flux vanes. But then it becomes a question of whether they can build enough mutas to overcome my cannons if they get corruptors.
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iamke55, what do you think about transitioning into carriers after 3d base is secured in the next patch without flux vaines?
And when I tried this build, even though i got the tech for colossi, i just ended up massing void rays. I felt only void rays would benefit my death ball more since its more mobile and because i found my opponents to always go hydra/ corrupter vs mass void and not only hydra, is that something you have experienced aswell?
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Here's a game I just played vs muta/infestor/corruptor
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-174271.jpg)
Note that I forgot to send probes to my 3rd gas, which cut into my air unit count greatly, but also gave me the minerals to fail repeatedly to expand, and then still have enough left over to spam cannons once I finally got the expo up.
His reaction to the game:
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/3uxUZ.jpg)
Going carriers after a 3rd base is a bad idea because it makes you so vulnerable to corruptors. Void rays and corruptors already break even in same cost or same supply battles, you just dominate them in real games because you're way ahead in upgrades and nobody goes corruptor when they see how many cannons you have. If you make carriers, corruptors start to become cost/supply effective vs your army. You generally don't want to do a real attack until you hit 200/200, at which point you have 2 void rays per 1 carrier you'd have otherwise, and 2 void rays are better than a carrier.
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I watched one game and I kept thinking "corrupters"
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late game speed voidrays are total hell for zerg
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On December 16 2010 16:51 JeanLuc wrote:
I watched one game and I kept thinking "corrupters"
Watch another game and you will think "nvm, corruptors suck"
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two things:
1) Seems like this loses to a good 7RR. The "early roach pressure" you mentioned shows roaches attacking you at 8 minutes, not the 5:20-30 of a good 7RR build.
2) It blows my mind that in four pages no one mentioned neural parasite.
Does everyone suck with infestors?
Infestor/hydra would rip the shit out of this build.
Easiest way to turn a 200 food army into an actual 300 food army is neural parasite. Make a ball of hydras, FG then NP half his voids, and your army will melt pretty quick.
Sorry I don't have a replay, as this has never happened to me... but whenever I play against someone who masses an expensive unit, my instinctual reaction is simply tech infestors with NP. There isn't anything you can do about it when I control your units, except hope that my range 9 infestors spamming NP on your ball will die before I reach critical NP mass.
You seem like you've been doing this a while though.... do you have a replay off infestor/hydra (with NP) failing? I'm not talking about 4 infestors, which doesn't count as infestor/anything in a 200 game imo. But if you have 25 void rays and 6 colossi, a reasonable counter army would have at least 15 infestors and maybe 20 hydras ABOVE 0/0.
If that guy with 7 bases had made some infestors and done something other than FG your death ball then right click his units into it, seems to me you'd have lost pretty handily.
p.s. - it's cool that you have this build and to see that it is indeed viable in high levels of play, as it exploits current gaps in good players' skills right now. Hopefully even without flux vanes you'll be able to continue doing it.
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Rage-deleted the rep, but I just wanna say that I can NOT recommend doing this build on scrap station.....the problem I encountered there is, that, once zerg establishes a somewhat "safe" position against harassment, it's literally impossible to deny them the gold without dying when they bust down the shortcut-rocks. Meanwhile you can't really take a 3rd either. The zerg can just camp with hydras outside your cannons, have spotters outside your natural and everytime he sees you flying out he will poke in. Then he gets a quick 4th, trades armies once, replenishes everything with the saved up larvae and stomps you. 15 Nexus is very possible on scrap, but I'd advise against a non-gateway army.
I strongly recommend sticking with the maps mentioned by the OP: shakuras is awsome, on jungle basin it's imo even OP since you can deny 3rds so easy while having such a safe natural, lost temple also good, although I have to admit that 90% of my zerg-opponents try to bust me down, so better be prepared for this. On shakuras I would go for a very quick third if you don't scout any signs of immediate aggression, thirds are so easy to secure on this map if you have air control. If you are cross-pos I think it's best to bust down the backdoor-rocks and put the 3rd onto the happy-face expo, if you put a spotter-pylon on the other side you are practicly untouchable for quite some time.
PTR-question since I'm a poor 2nd class european: What do you think of:
a) generally staying on 2 stargate way longer if they play mutas, since phoenixes build so fast now?
b) opening with 4 heavily chrono-boosted phoenixes before void rays to quickly kill unprotected queens?
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On December 08 2010 17:09 Heaven. wrote:
As a Zerg player I swear this happened to me and I barely knew what to do
Best advice is just mass corruptors =[
Nah.
Hydra+ Corruptor+ Infestor is the magical trio.
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On December 16 2010 19:13 7mk wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2010 17:09 Heaven. wrote:
As a Zerg player I swear this happened to me and I barely knew what to do
Best advice is just mass corruptors =[ Nah. Hydra+ Corruptor+ Infestor is the magical trio.
Yes, If you can actually hold the speedrays down, it is quite beatable. You'll need infestors, hydras, corruptors and good creep spread to get them there in time. All of these are incredibly gas heavy. Just taking your few void rays and snipe the extractors. This easily holds them off on getting enough units fast enough. Not to mention, if you have good map awareness, and you should have map control, you can easily position your army near cliffs and empty spots such that only a few units can attack at a time. The stacking on your void rays makes any engagement near a ledge absolutely winnable.
Speedrays are probably the most overpowered unit in the game. They have no air counter and run away from everything on the ground. The best part is as day 9 says, the transition. With void rays being so gas heavy you can cannon as much as you like to get to them.
Think this strategy will still have lots of potential after the flux vanes nerf, but it won't be nearly as OP.
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Hah, I just saw this post, but i've been using a very similar strategy in my PvZ games lately, on shakuras, LT, and jungle basin... I normally pylon block the zerg's expo, go for like a 16 nexus, then get a forge and cannon myself in. Unless he went for a fast pool, I get my wall-in up in time to stop the lings from getting to me... and the fast voids shut down any roach busts, and often kill his third.
I don't actually use flux vanes when I do this, however. I generally just make 6-7 voids, and then switch to colossus + stalker tech, and just take a third at around 14 minutes when I have 6-7 voids, 4-5 colossus, and 15 or so stalkers, while denying zerg thirds with my large colossus / void / stalker ball.
The zerg almost always goes hydra in response to void ray harass and denial of his third, so the blind switch to colossus works very well. if I see him going mutas, like you said in the guide, throw down a third stargate and pump phoenix while making zealots out of my gates to deal with lings. Works like a charm.
The coolest thing about non-speed rays is that they have the same movement speed as colossus... making your colossus / stalker / void ball all stack on top of each other pretty much, and can seriously annihilate anything even close to it, so long as you don't let the zerg surround you.
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Got owned two times by this strategy. First time i was caught off guard. Second time I knew what was coming and defended pretty good with hydras but my hydra, infestor, corruptor mix got BADLY owned a few minutes later by mass voids + colossi from a two base protoss.... No chance of breaking him due to mass building wall and cannons. Im a 2500 diamond zerg
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After seeing GuineaPig's games in the GSL and reading this thread I decided to give this strategy a go in my PvZ. So far I'm 4:3 W:L with it, but every time I've made it to the mid game I've won in a commanding fashion at ~2K diamond level. This strategy really lets you go toe to toe with a zerg in a pure macro game, I've just got to work on the early defense now really.
So thanks for the thread! This is now my go to strategy for PvZ; I like it much more than the ground based pressure builds described in Plexa's PvZ guide. I no longer feel like I'm walking on razer wire trying to get the zerg player to make a mistake so I can win.
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EPT
