Zerg are the only race "without" healers for harass forces. Toss have shields, Terrans have everything. But this is just an illusion.
Don't they have regeneration? Just something to note. Yes, Queens are hot shit. Didn't we recently see a game where a guy did an all-in push with hydras and like 5 queens after fending off a phoenix harass?
Was really beautiful ):
What I think he means by, "healers," is something that's useful in short-term engagements (like a few seconds between pushes, or even during the fight).
Exactly. The regeneration is a nice passive utility but can't be used on short terms. It helps building harassed to rebuild life slowly as an example. But outside this, it's far from being as useful as, let's say, a Medivac, or a shield replenishing. VERY far.
It's the answer to the early hatch. Hatching first and delaying gas while droning hard, spines and queens allow you to sit on t1 longer without having to waste mineral production to rush t3 units. Droning more earlier will also allow for a faster t3 transition due to being able to throw up 3 more geysers. Then as you stated when you go into the mid or late game you can use those queens in your push or to take more bases.
they are only worth it on creep tehehe. But there is a reason why they nerfed the off creep speed. Because queen rushes where probably one class above 60 hp scv rushes. But it means at the same time she is still imba but only on creep. Never saw a reason to not go for 4-5 queens at the start as either the opponent would push and my queen heal would keep every unit alive or to heal up my damaged mutas i would get if he would turtle. (also because they save you larva and you can get more workers out) Can't play zerg though it made me to lazy and i got worse in macro and my macro was bad before hehe. Could use a more complicated base management
My stub build will be 4 queens before lair, on 1 gas. I'll work on the transitions (roaches ? mutas ? ling blings ?). My goal will be to have 2 builds : one which saves gas for fast T3, and one which uses all the 2 base ressources to have a really surprisingly powerful drop push.
But as Queens are the BEST AA in the game, with Rines, I really think it can get a Z to be much more creative with his army composition.
Question- what would be your hotkeys for this set up? As a random player, I usually just hotkey all my queens together on 6 and have all my hatches on 5, but would you put your non-injecting queens on a separate hotkey (for example 4), would they just be lying around with your army, or would they be on the hotkey with the other queens?
Queens are truly good and with perfect creep spread i would say they are a bit imbalanced.
I did some counting and if you constantly produce queens from two hatcheries it will take just 250 seconds to get 110 creep tumors if you control the creep perfectly.
I used the queen building time of 50 seconds and said that the queen gets energy for one creep tumor every 50 seconds ( in fact enough energy every 44,4 seconds when using the data from the map editor.) I then assumed that each creep tumor that can place another creep tumor place one every 25 seconds, which would allow each of the creep tumors created from queens to create 2 more creep tumors every 50 seconds.
Then when your first two queens pop you create 2 creep tumors and start your two next queens, when the next two queens spawns the starting creep tumors would now be 6 creep tumors. The queens then spawn 4 more creep tumors creating a total of 10 creep tumors and 6 of them from queens, the rest of the calculations are presented down below.(The creep tumors from queens are the ones that can create more creep tumors)
The first column is time passed in seconds, the second one is number of queens, the third one is the number of creep tumors from queens, the fourth is the amount of creep tumors created from other tumors and the last column is the total amount of creep tumors.
However you will not be able to get this many creep tumors in a real game because of several factors such as travel distance for the created queens as well as the opponent killing creep tumors.
However if you manage to just get some of these creep tumors in a real game it would gain so much vision from the tumors that it's basically full maphack. luckily no human being could have perfect creep spread and 110 tumors in 250 seconds might be a bit more than possible in a real game.
Well, thats my secret to a 80% ZvP ratio busted xD.
Queens are so retardedly strong to mix into an army, and i always make them in place of hydras. you can max extremely fast when using Roaches for your larvae and queens at the same time, your pumping 15+ supply per hatch every 30-40 seconds.
Not to mention it gives me the gas to go extremely fast infestors and double upgrades (roaches and queens get same upgrades btw). Since roaches have such high HP, it's a really efficient transfuse target too, so much synergy. You can also pump some spare gas into quick overlord drops + banelings, which to be honest at the 2k masters level, a 26 baneling drop onto a CC or nexus can end games right there.
So many opportunities with gas. Might upload some reps of these things working.
Infestors also happen to shit on any Protoss stargate play.
Also very viable in ZvT although their usage for me is less pronounced as a game winner, probably due to me not being creative enough with the extra gas.. i just tend to kind of stick to the whole muta/ling thing.
edit:
@ Dullahb
When creep spread is your #2 priority directly after injecting its very very easy to spread scross the entire map in under 10-11 mins game time.
On metal I've reached the opponents base at 11 mins numerous times. It becomes laughably fast if you use Poopoverlords to leapfrog your tumors too. Using the new hotkey changes the camera position is much easier to use, personally i think using [shift + `] to set the camera, and [`] to go back to it would really speed up creep spreading, however its fairly easy to work it in just by minimap clickin after inject.
But yeah, by 10 mins you can have 1000+ hp worth of transfuse ready to go with your queens.
Such a long post, horribly written overall. Sorry.
calling it now, in HotS the queen can morph into a matriarch with new abilities and more mobility
Haha mass roach/queen!
Anyways, yes Queens are so underused! They are a great unit, and NO GAS omg seriously NO GAS that is just amazing. And no friggin larvae. It's awesome that they synergize with such gas heavy units, like BLs and Ultralisks! And transfuse really is just friggin amazing when used on ultras/BLs and to a smaller extent Roaches (or even other Queens xD)
Been playing 10-20 queens in ZvP and ZvT for ages now, yep, it's great! ZvZ it's also good because the enemy has creep, but the games dont go long enough generally.
On January 17 2011 06:51 mr_tolkien wrote: My stub build will be 4 queens before lair, on 1 gas. I'll work on the transitions (roaches ? mutas ? ling blings ?). My goal will be to have 2 builds : one which saves gas for fast T3, and one which uses all the 2 base ressources to have a really surprisingly powerful drop push.
But as Queens are the BEST AA in the game, with Rines, I really think it can get a Z to be much more creative with his army composition.
I don't think that you should pre-plan what transition you're doing, as it reacting would do wonders here. Such as, if a T's going MMM, Blings and Upgrades will do wonders (or infestors *wink*). If it's thors/mech, speed roaches (especially with heals) do wonders. If he's turtling really hard, map control, expanding, and mutas. With this there's no real one-answer-solution.
Why is it underused ? Predicted response : «Hey smartass, no pro has ever dropped a queen during GSL, therefore it sucks, you should get banned blah blah blah». So, why hasn't it been used already ?
I like this idea but the reason why queens don't really get used too much in offensive ways is because they used to be in beta and blizzard kept nerfing them. Thats why queens are really slow off of creep and transfusion has a mini CD on it.
Queens are incredibly useful, especially when defending a 4 gate. I'm glad that you pointed out how most people try to focus down the queen, because, well, they do. Also, When you're doing a drop, also be sure to spew creep so your Queen has a little more room to dance (haven't tried, but it's pretty sound theorycraft, right?)
I don't think that this is very Zv*, as much as T or P. I feel like in ZvZ, this is too slow to handle even moderately aggressive builds. Against a 4 gate and multi-rax push, you can multiple queens out and a sizable army. But against mass Slings or Sling Bling, I feel like the mineral loss is a little too much in the early game.
It seems lame but I've always thought about queens in terms of raiding and wow, you would never succeed without your healers even if you had 8+ tanks (ultras or broods)...
I've had huge success with lots of queens at lower levels, but I always assumed that if you relied on them too much at higher levels people would stuff stuff with EMP or feedback.