This is my first time attempting a guide, so please bear with me. All games discussed from here on out will be between Master level players averaging 2500-3000 pts as of current date (Jan 24th). My goal in this is to be articulate enough to present the strategy of effectively using Ultralisks in ZvT to completely dominate terran opponents. Yes, I'm serious. You will win.
The inspiration for this guide came from three things: the first is the general Zerg QQ that literally tends to spread everywhere (I personally believe the game itself is somewhat broken, and the problems should not be singled down to zerg as a race, but that's a completely irrelevant discussion in this thread.), the second was + Show Spoiler +
I read the thread. Cocked my head a bit in thought. And then I promptly shook my head.
I want to start off by claiming that I'm fully one of the zergs that once upon a time shared that opinion: Ultras are useless. Waste of money. Never get them. Getting them just let's the terran win. Nearly ever game where I was ahead and made Ultras as a game-ender I promptly proceeded to lose. Why is this? Well quite frankly I wasn't using them properly. And I'm going to make a very bold statement here and say this: chances are that none of you are using Ultralisks properly.
I've played over a dozen ZvT's using this same Ultralisk strategy ever since the light bulb clicked on in my head. And counting games that had Ultras came out, I've lost a grand total of two times thus far (I'll get into why later).
Now this is not a "rush to Ultras guide." There will be no build order. Zerg's are a reactive race, and the terran opponent will set the pace. There is no magical way to get Ultralisks that will defend being bunkered in at your ramp, or the inevitable scv/rine all in off two rax. A zerg's job is to survive all the crap T can pull, and they do, but they still lose in the mid-late game because they persist on muta/ling/bling when there are better alternatives (Yes, this is the better alternative.). This is a guide to teach you how to use Ultralisks and why they are so good.
I want to mention Brood War a bit. Before anyone begins yelling at me about how SC2 and BW are two completely different games, allow me to maintain that this little paragraph here does in fact have relevance regarding how to properly use Ultralisks. In Brood War many unit compositions had a delicate balance and nicely complimented each other. Marines/Medics/Firebats all have the same movement speed. Tanks/Goliaths have the same movement speed, too. Duh, you might say. Marines/Marauders/Tanks have the same movement speed in SC2, too! On the zerg side in Brood War, mutas and speedlings had the same speed. Hydra/Lurk had a very similar speed. Speedlings were faster than lurkers, but not by much. The combinations had a certain synergy that allowed them to be used effectively because the units balanced each other out both in their roles and how fast they traveled on the map.
Think SC2 for a minute. The standard strategy for ZvT right now is Muta/Ling/Bling. Lings are way faster than Mutas, which are way faster than banelings. The synergy isn't quite there. It becomes even more awkward when you count in creep, which increases the speed of lings and banelings while doing nothing for the movement speed of mutalisks. This causes certain attack timings to go bad. Your lings might go in first and die when you need them for the surround so your banelings can hit the marines. Your banelings might go in first and die to tank fire. Your mutalisks might go in first and you'll lose a lot of them to stimmed marines. All around you'll find that there are complications here.
Banelings have a speed (when upgraded) of 2.95. Holy crap. Don't Ultralisks have that exact same speed? And they both benefit from creep in the same way? OMG Eurika!! Yes, baneling/ultra is a near perfect combo against pretty much any terran ground army. It completely and utterly decimates the marine/tank combo that is so popular these days. It completely and utterly decimates a maxed out mech army as well. Hell, you'll see in one of the screenshots later in this thread where the Terran went mass BC and still lost to Ultralisks. Yes, seriously.
My story of discovery starts off a few weeks ago. I was laddering, losing left and right and raging about how much zerg sucks and how I can only win ZvZ's and those are the only games keeping me so "high" ranked, when suddenly I find myself playing a ZvT on Jungle Basin. Fantastic, I cringe. But then again, what better map to experiment on than one you're guaranteed to lose on anyways? Away I go.
The terran opts to open up banshee, while I go the standard muta/ling/bling. His harrass does little, and we both take our nats and thirds. I opt for the right most expo, he naturally takes the middle and turtles up with a planetary fortress accompanied by bunkers/turrets/thors/banshees/tanks/marines/vikings/ravens as seen in the below pic. Mind you this was pre-patch so scv repair is still "imba" (this being pre-patch also the reason this is in screenshot mode instead of a replay - though rep will be included in the replay pack later anyways for those interested.)
Pictured above: a headache for any zerg player
I naturally have muta/ling/baneling... I have many... many lings and banelings. I have so many that apparently the terran decided to abandon all hopes of a ground army and own me with mass BC's instead since I spent so many resources on banelings. Really, at this point I feel lost. I started a fourth but I realize both it and my third could likely be taken out at any time. I have no idea what the T is doing in his base as I didn't invest that much into mutas and stimmed rines scare me. About all I can do is facepalm and make Ultralisks. I fully expect to lose as the terran isn't moving out and my only option is to attack headfront into a heavily defended planetary fortress. So I do just that. I close my eyes and pray.
Above: WTF just happened?
It takes me a moment to recover from the shock that yes I did just completely annihilate his army and his expo with relatively minimal losses. I proceed to my fourth, travel down, break the rocks with the ultras and proceed into the terran's natural. At this point I freak out when I see a bunch of bc's.
Lucky me his BC's do 9 dmg while my ultras have 6 armor. They all survive.
But of course, after this game I still wasn't convinced. As I'm sure none of you are either. If he had that many BC's, then his army wasn't all that big at the PF. All that supply could've been more tanks/thors/marines at his 3rd. But I couldn't shake the feeling off. The feeling that I was on to something. That this unit combination wasn't something terrans could easily deal with. It needed more testing.
The next game in my story occurred on Delta Quadrant. Are we noticing a trend here? Yup. The maps where I figure I'm bound to lose are the ones where I dare experiment. After fending off the initial marine rush, I proceed to go into muta/ling/bling. I begin to see more flaws in that unit combo this game. The terran attacked several times during the mid game, and I promptly defended. However all our skirmishes were mere army trades. His marines/tanks for my ling/bling. I'd have mutas left but he's able to easily reinforce marines to his main and on top of that has scary turrets plastered all over. I realize that I don't want to rely on my opponent making a mistake and leaving a hole in his defenses to allow muta harrass. In conclusion: turrets are scary.
Above: standard army trade. Afterwards Terran proceeds to get a third base in his front with a PF. My mutas are unable to stop it.
Despite the army trades, the terran is now macro'ing off 3 base and is turtled up in a way that I can't make any offensive. Recalling the events of Jungle Basin, I give in to temptation and make ultralisks while the terran maxes out on marine/tank/thor/medivac and moves out to make the finishing blow.
Not seen in picture: the above mentioned maxed out terran army that set up camp there a few short seconds ago
As clearly seen in the screenshot, I have ultralisks left over, just as I had in the game on Jungle Basin. Lings rebuild especially fast, as was shown in the Jungle Basin BC picture where his main was razed by ling reinforcements. As such, lings are able to reinforce very fast while your leftover Ultras lead the charge for the gg. leftover Mutas are moreoften than not unable to accomplish this, especially when there's a PF surrounded by turrets right in the front of the T's big turtle. This realization struck me very hard. I can make ultras, destroy the T army, and then reinforce the Ultras. The big advice people would give against turtle terrans is go broodlord to force vikings and then reinforce with Ultras. Umm... Ultras have a 70 second build time. I don't know about any of you zergs, but anytime I've tried going ultra after broodlord... I died. Why? Because broodlords don't tank your damage, and allow your ling/bling army to die. After the broodlords are dead to vikings, the terran still has a rine/tank army that your ling/bling failed to kill and are able to kill off your expansions one by one as you twiddle your thumbs waiting for ultralisks to spawn. And as soon as they do they die to mass marines because the terran is able to reinforce them much faster than any other of their units. Which means GG because you've just spent your gas on Ultras and Broodlords and don't have enough to make more banelings to counter the newly made marines.
Basically the conclusion I came up with here is that you don't reinforce with Ultras. You reinforce your ultras that survive the initial battle. And the reason they survive is because you still have your banelings. Ultras will tank the damage, their large size means that tank splash won't be landing on many banelings, and thus your banelings are free to target the marines while your ultras handle the tanks.
The marine/tank combo has thus been solved. As you can clearly see in replays. There are games where I charge ultras into a fully sieged tank line and come out the victor. The ultras soak up the damage, the banelings deal it. Sound familiar? It should if you played Brood War where crackling/ultra was the late-game ZvT. Unfortunately cracklings aren't as good in sc2 as they were in bw, and they are by far much faster than Ultralisks now thus their synergy is gone. Luckily banelings have been able to step into the role.
But wait!! You say. This is dumb. The T can just switch to mech. Thors rape Ultras.
Well luckily I was able to put Ultra/Bane vrs mech into practice as well.
So the game starts off rather interestingly, with fail banshee harass on his part and fail muta harass on mine. He turtles up his natural and takes his third. I take my third as well and the 6 natural + a gold. Again I'm doing the standard muta/bane/ling. But I notice something... he's not really making marines, and the ones he does have aren't being upgraded. FML, I have like 100 banelings and he has a pure mech army.
Indeed, it is.
The T maxes out a mech army and moves out. I managed to spawn 6 ultras in the meantime.
Uhh... let's try that again.
Damn.
The terrans lose their maxed armies over and over no matter the composition. And they simply don't have enough time to remax. The zerg, however, re-maxes in no time and is able to take the game immediately after the initial confrontation. This isn't army trading where both your armies die off and you're biting your nails nervous about whether you'll be able to scourge up another ling/bling army in time to defend the next push. This is you annihilating the Terran maxed out army with leftovers and proceeding to re-max and demolish everything else in your path.
Now, I'll be the first to admit this strategy isn't foolproof. The obvious weakness is the low muta count which is vulnerable to dropship play. You'll see in replays dropships used to great effect against me, oftentimes nearly winning the terran the game. Yes, I said nearly, because like every smart player one needs to adapt accordingly. If the terran is focusing more on dropships than maxing out their ground army, you will need to switch your amazingly awesome ultra bum rush strategy to a more air-oriented one and make enough mutalisks to deal with those nasty medivacs.
Similarly I believe you shouldn't invest too much into mutalisks. They are very fragile and if you're unable to harass I'm even willing to say they do you more harm than good as they are often times unable to directly engage the terran army. And the biggest advantage I believe that relying on ultralisks over mutalisks is that ultralisks share upgrades with banelings and zerglings whilst mutalisks do not. I mentioned the Nestea games at the beginning of this thread. His usual upgrades in his games against MVP were 2/1 zerglings/banelings and 2/0 mutalisks.
For the majority of his games I was wishing Nestea would abandon his ling/baneling/muta builds and just go for ultralisks. However with those upgrades his ultralisks would've likely failed as well. I've refined my build pretty carefully over the past few games. I've realized that I shouldn't rely on muta/ling/bling to win me games. However, I still need to rely on them to survive until ultralisks are out. Getting attack upgrades will not help me survive. Muta upgrades are there for harassment and engagements, because mutalisks die fast they need to do a lot of damage fast. It is the same deal for zerglings and banelings. They die exceptionally fast that Nestea wanted to get as much out of them as he could, so he got attack upgrades. I prefer the land carapace and nothing for mutalisks (as I don't rely on them to win me the game). With less mutalisks you'll be able to have more banelings, and you're relying on these banelings to keep you alive so it's best to spread creep as soon as you can and get carapace and baneling speed as soon as you can as well. Even at the expense of earlier mutalisks. After all, the terran is making marines. They do low damage at a high rate. I figure it makes a lot more sense to get those carapace upgrades out first regardless of units so you're ready for when the ultras come out. Banelings will still do a ton of damage to them even without weapon ups.
The first terran push will always come before Ultras are ready, thus a good flank on creep is a necessity. Luckily zergs shouldn't have too many problems with the first push, else they have more important things to worry about than "how do I break a turtle terran that just maxes out and a-moves?" Positioning is of course everything, catch the terran out of position and you'll survive. Allow him to set up, and you're very likely screwed.
I'll go into the games I lost using this strategy so terrans know what to do and zergs know what to be wary of. You'll see the build I've settled on in the replays. I find it works very well and is able to keep me safe from most openings. In a few of the reps you'll see me defending hellions with speedlings. I find this isn't a good idea. One game on metalopolis close positions I lost to fast blue flame hellions before my spire was even up as I simply got outmicro'ed in the early game.
Remember in Brood War that workers, and by extension zerglings, died super fast to lurkers. Hellions are just lurkers that don't need to burrow in order to shoot. It's likely more worthwhile to make a few roaches in order to defend against hellions than relying on your speedling micro being superior.
Another game to mention was on Steppes of War. There were similar blue flame hellion harass and I persisted on using speedlings as a defense. I actually held them all off, but the amount of lings lost was too great and took it's toll on me later in the game. The terran was able to push out and set up a sieged position just under the ledge of my natural with his marines secured safely way behind the tanks and a thor near the ramp leading up to my natural. My low muta count was unable to defend this and the tanks ripped apart the ling/blings before they could take out the marines. The ultras popped as my natural and third were taken out, and like I mentioned above regarding "reinforcing with Ultras" that's a big no-no and ultras are next to useless by themselves and were promptly killed by marine reinforcements. This was, however, a game where I allowed the terran to set up a strong position that was undefendable with muta/ling/bling alone.
The third game I want to mention was a ZvT on Lost Temple. This is the game that presented me with the obvious counter to my build. The terran turtled to his natural, walled off with 3 barracks, expanded to the island, and later took his gold. He persisted in dropping my expo's, had a solid marine pump from something like 15 reactored barracks and continued making tanks and thors. Despite having 5 bases of my own and constantly killing off his pushes, with his solid macro with reactored barracks' this was being an army trade. And this was not good, after all the only reason I didn't want to commit to muta/ling/bling was because those battles were merely army trades. After every clash I'd reinforce... but so would he. His marines kept coming, and after being decimated by too many drops, I was unable to keep the baneling production going and eventually one of his pushes rolled me over.
I, however, don't feel that the last game negates this strategy as it was simply my inability to defeat a clearly superior player. Other zergs with better macro and decision making in regards to dealing with drops would likely have made a much better attempt. Likewise that game was also pre-patch thus my build had not quite yet been refined and I was unable to properly adapt with a decent mutalisk switch to deal with the drops.
To conclude, of course, I will present the replays. Included in the replay pack are 10 ZvT's, all players of current 2500-3000 master rating, 4 pre-patch replays (shown in the screenshots, you can watch these offline only), 6 current patch. They are named accordingly.
I haven't read everything yet but sounds really interesting. Just some questions: 1.While your teching up to hive, wouldn't there be a timing for terran to hit? Especially considering(if I'm correct) your saving supply to use for ultras? 2.Do the replays really show a true terran, not doing any gimmicky BC stuff? Just making sure. 3.When do you tech to ultras.
On January 25 2011 11:39 Pandain wrote: I haven't read everything yet but sounds really interesting. Just some questions: 1.While your teching up to hive, wouldn't there be a timing for terran to hit? Especially considering(if I'm correct) your saving supply to use for ultras? 2.Do the replays really show a true terran, not doing any gimmicky BC stuff? Just making sure. 3.When do you tech to ultras.
Why don't you read the post. With the amount of stuff he has posted it's obvious he would have important questions like that answered.
great read :D will definetly have to try this out sometime though im only a mere random player this will help my zvt and ill look at for this when im t X)
1.While your teching up to hive, wouldn't there be a timing for terran to hit? Especially considering(if I'm correct) your saving supply to use for ultras?
Yes, there is definitely a timing for terran to hit. However, it is no different a timing than if you were not teching to ultras. Defending a terran push is all about positioning. It doesn't matter how many muta/ling/bling you have if you miss the proper positioning when you attack. I am indeed saving supply for ultras, but luckily for us zergs we have 2 banelings being equal to 1 supply.
2.Do the replays really show a true terran, not doing any gimmicky BC stuff? Just making sure.
I assure you none of the replays are gimmicky stuff, not even the BC game. The terran clearly planned on winning with those bc's as I had a strong anti-ground army and little else. He had vikings to compliment his BC therefore corruptor would've been a bad counter, and he knew there was no way I'd be able to break his front with hydralisks.
3.When do you tech to ultras.
It varies on the game. If the stars align I can have an ultra den going down by the 14 minute mark and ultras out by 17 minutes. You'll find that most of the refined games in the replay pack end at around the 20-22 minute mark. The reason games end at this point is because this is when most players max out. The terran will max out around 18-19 minutes, attack, get owned around 20 minutes, and not have the time to rebuild much of anything when your reinforcements run into his base right after the initial confrontation.
On January 25 2011 11:39 Pandain wrote: I haven't read everything yet but sounds really interesting. Just some questions: 1.While your teching up to hive, wouldn't there be a timing for terran to hit? Especially considering(if I'm correct) your saving supply to use for ultras? 2.Do the replays really show a true terran, not doing any gimmicky BC stuff? Just making sure. 3.When do you tech to ultras.
why do people always say "i havent read the post but here's some questions"
and without fail every time all of those questions were addressed more than satisfactorily in the post.
I am very excited to try this out, I've never seen much use for the ultra for a number of reasons but im going to watch the replay as soon as I get home. I am sure I'll have some questions to ask after I watch I hope you keep updating this post with answers to us noob diamond zergs who want to use ultras more as they are so badass looking but hate seeing a unit that costs a billions mins and gas die to stimmed rines.
I've seen this happen before - we fight it out when zerg has ultras, he has some leftover while my army dies and instead of spamming ultras he just goes for more lings and blings because its going to be effective due to the terran's army being much smaller and taking forever to replenish while zerg's army will be remade instantly due to a ridiculous amount of larvae.
A good example of the mistake of constant reinforcements with more ultras is that nestea vs huk game on LT that day9 also casted. iirc nestea just kept spamming ultras but huk was able to hold off because of some nice micro. If those reinforcements were just roach/hydras, it would've been game
My god, this is fantastic! What TL needs is more guides!(I would like a compilation of every [G]uide thread ever made since the release of Starcraft 2) Like every week, I maybe see like 2 out of 100 are [G]uide threads.
1 Question: There's no mention on infestors at all in this guide. Are they of any use? Where can I use them? Can i replace some of the gas used to get banelings to be allocated into infestors?
On January 25 2011 11:45 ShatterZer0 wrote: Ultralisks are the final nail in the coffin. The finishing blow. Now they might be used more often. I am happy.
No it's not and this is exactly the ignorant bile that he's trying to remove.
I've been using a similar strategy that I got from two high level master zerg players and it's a dominating strategy that doesn't have a solid counter. (As tested many times with two other high level master league players).
They weren't going to publish it because it's been working well, but now that the cat's out of the bag, it's still going to be a tough strategy to beat.
Their basic strategy is very similar....
FE with speedling into baneling, at lair tech pop a handful of mutas for harass (don't suicide them), take 3rd/4th as you get hive/evo chambers, pump 3/1 ultras and many banelings.
It's damn near impossible to stop, even when you know it's coming.
There is a weakness in that it's a bit greedy toward the mid-game where it is susceptible to some blue-flame hellion shenanigans with poor micro, but other than that, it's just a very, very solid strategy.
From the pictures it doesn't look very convincing. Weird army compositions and pure mech fighting in open areas? I use Ultras but my army still consist mainly of ling baneling. Ultras I just use to tank siege tank fire and to kill planetary fortresses because I don't want to risk running in banelings into a PF then it not dying, or leave an opening for terran to attack me when I don't got enough banelings. I feel ultras are more of a finishing unit when you're ahead by a lot.
Also by the looks of the map you're probably winning by being better, not by using ultras.
On January 25 2011 11:45 ShatterZer0 wrote: Ultralisks are the final nail in the coffin. The finishing blow. Now they might be used more often. I am happy.
Up to today, ultras are like calling down a mule in the middle of an opponents base. Just another way to dis and BM your way to an already won game.
I have always been scared of ultras more than broods. I dont know why people say ultras sucks and dies to fast. They are better than they were in brood war, status wise. Just that there are other unit such as marauder that nukes them down faster. But none the less they are still great. They can soak up enough tank shot for banelings to run in and zergling to surround for the ownage.
For people saying that he had considerable lead, i would only say that the jungle basin one he had a big lead. The other were rather close. He was up 1 base by the look of it in the metal and delta game. Fairly even game and i think Ultras are damn good and hope zerg wont use them so much aganist me x[
Well, what can I say? Wow. It seems pretty invincible if you hit that ultra timing. 5-6 Ultras and a lot of blings/lings crushes through bio and even mech with pretty considerable force. Do most of your games actually last to that 21 minute late-game mark? This really doesn't solve a lot of the mid-game marine / siege-tank timing pushes that most people die to Terran by. However, I do enjoy the way you deal with those pushes; lots of creep and lots of speed banes with +1 or +2 carapace.
After watching your replays, there is one thing that confuses me.... You make a lot of zerglings at the start of the game - you only make lings when you hit around 15 drones. Do you have any data / thoughts behind this? It sort of seems like a waste to invest in a ling army so early on. In one of the games, you were significantly behind in the drone count, not to mention your spire was delayed substantially. I'm just wondering what the thought process is behind this.
Nevertheless, I am throughly impressed with this unit composition. I will be looking into this in depth.
Seems like an interesting find. Now I won't be watching the replays but having read the whole topic, it might be the answer to ZvT.
I'm however concerned about your third lost game. You said you lost to something like 15 reactor-ed barracks, this could potential mean that your build/idea is weak to the newly popular 4OC build. Could you expand a little bit more than you did in your OP about that specific loss.
I'm a protoss player, but I've always wondered when I saw Zergs just get a ton of ultralisks. Why so many? Why can't you mix just a few with other gas units instead of going purely ultra-ling, and I feel like this post also reflects this sentiment.
Plus it makes sense, Ultras mostly suffer from not being able to get to their targets, but if they're mixed with banelings, the banelings will explode so your ultralisks will actually get to the enemy, and they both do splash damage, which also provides some synergy.
Interesting concept of the BW crackling ultra to the SC2 Ultra Bling. I think its almost mandatory that you add infestors tho. Stutter step is extremely effective vs ultra as what ends up happening is your ultras are chasing a huge ball of marines while my tanks get tons of free hits which plops your ultras.
On January 25 2011 13:36 XXXSmOke wrote: Interesting concept of the BW crackling ultra to the SC2 Ultra Bling. I think its almost mandatory that you add infestors tho. Stutter step is extremely effective vs ultra as what ends up happening is your ultras are chasing a huge ball of marines while my tanks get tons of free hits which plops your ultras.
yeah that is why I find ling/baneling/ultra to be better instead of just baneling/ultra
lings are higher speed yes , but that allows them to dart right to the back (or you can do a flank) and prevent the A move kite and also to maybe clear some siege tanks. What I do is let the ultralisks go in first though to tank some siege tank fire and then allow my lings to charge right to the back and get a good surround while ultralisks attack from the front giving the most effective area for splashing damage. That or fungal but thats a lot of gas
I definately think that ultras have a use in the zerg arsenal. The key with this build seems to really be balancing ur gas between muta, baneling and ultra count, im still a bit hesitant to use ultras as their tanking might be great, but they can barely attack as with most of the maps points of engagements are normally within small choke areas adding to their pathing problems (but this is more of a map problem rather than a problem with ultras), but as you've said ive encountered the broodlord remaxing ultra problem quite alot, so i'll definately be trying this out.
good post. i'mw atching replays right now. i think this is a game changer and an epic post. i would only question about timings though but i think that can be workedout.
Curious here. Do you not use infestors at all to bridge the gap between Lair and Hive tech and help you defend against timing attacks that come before your Ultras pop? Or are they too gas heavy to fit in?
Although I didn't watch the replay, I noticed that in the picture on JB, the terran had atleast 8 BCs. Despite doing little damage to your ultras due to their 6 armour, how effective would your ultras have been if the terran had researched weapon refit (yamato cannon), since he could have taken out a significant number of ultras very quickly, and used the BCs to melt through any less armoured units.
On January 25 2011 13:57 CortoMontez wrote: Although I didn't watch the replay, I noticed that in the picture on JB, the terran had atleast 8 BCs. Despite doing little damage to your ultras due to their 6 armour, how effective would your ultras have been if the terran had researched weapon refit (yamato cannon), since he could have taken out a significant number of ultras very quickly, and used the BCs to melt through any less armoured units.
In that game that you're specifically mentioning about with the picture, the Terran already lost anyways, he was off of one base that didn't have any more minerals or gas. What was he suppose to do with 8 BCS and no income while the zerg was on his 3 mining bases and easily pump any anti air unit and take out those BCS.
If you're referring to just BC's in general in almost any game.... then just transition into mass hydras after your ground army dies. With this composition, you have GROUND dominance. So make the most out of that, even if the terran has equal numbers of BC's to your ultralisks. Those ultras and zerglings can take out all of the terran's mining bases if that terran sacrifices ground dominance.
I don't quite understand this. Of course you're going to do well if you can get hive and ultralisks up that early. The same would be true if you got broodlords that early. Maybe ultralisks really are the better choice and that's very interesting, but the fact that hive tech that early gives you a boost really isn't anything new. Your post was very well thought-out, but as far as I can see you failed to address by far the biggest issue with this strategy.
How do you survive in those 10 minutes before you actually get to the ultras? Yes, you said that because of the fewer mutas you can get more banelings out, but the reason why those mutas are so crucial (besides harass defense, which you mentioned) is because you can buy yourself a lot of time with them. Just watch the Shakuras game between MVP and Nestea and looks at how much Nestea slowed down MVP's push with his mutas. Imagine your strategy in that situation. MVP's push would've come a lot sooner and stronger at that.
I'm not saying this isn't viable, definitely not before I watch the replays (I can't right now), but this strategy has a big weakness for quite a long time. Teching to hive isn't that expensive in itself, but saving up for the ultra den, the ultra carapace upgrade and 5-6 ultras and waiting ages for them to actually pop is going to be extremely hard when all you have to defend is ling baneling and a couple of mutas.
What I'm taking away from this thread is that ultra/baneling's a very powerful strategy and I'll try to remember that the next time I'm in a situation where I can actually make that unit mix, but to see it as your core strategy that your strategy leads to is very premature I think.
On January 25 2011 14:34 Orome wrote: I don't quite understand this. Of course you're going to do well if you can get hive and ultralisks up that early. The same would be true if you got broodlords that early. Maybe ultralisks really are the better choice and that's very interesting, but the fact that hive tech that early gives you a boost really isn't anything new. Your post was very well thought-out, but as far as I can see you failed to address by far the biggest issue with this strategy.
How do you survive in those 10 minutes before you actually get to the ultras? Yes, you said that because of the fewer mutas you can get more banelings out, but the reason why those mutas are so crucial (besides harass defense, which you mentioned) is because you can buy yourself a lot of time with them. Just watch the Shakuras game between MVP and Nestea and looks at how much Nestea slowed down MVP's push with his mutas. Imagine your strategy in that situation. MVP's push would've come a lot sooner and stronger at that.
I'm not saying this isn't viable, definitely not before I watch the replays (I can't right now), but this strategy has a big weakness for quite a long time. Teching to hive isn't that expensive in itself, but saving up for the ultra den, the ultra carapace upgrade and 5-6 ultras and waiting ages for them to actually pop is going to be extremely hard when all you have to defend is ling baneling and a couple of mutas.
What I'm taking away from this thread is that ultra/baneling's a very powerful strategy and I'll try to remember that the next time I'm in a situation where I can actually make that unit mix, but to see it as your core strategy that your strategy leads to is very premature I think.
With scouting information and muta harass.
If he spots aggression, he can pop a speedling/bling army in 24 seconds.
Saying "oh well you didn't hve anything to defend a push that didn't exist" is pretty illogical. If there was a push, he could easily have made the units to deal with it.
Speedling/bling with mutas backstabbing will shut down almost any terran mid-game aggression.
Even though bling doesn't do good damage vs 1 marauder, it does great dmg versus any ball of units, armored or not. And 15 banelings with 20-30 speedlings and spine crawlers is going to wipe out anything that comes on your creep.
This is one of those builds (similar to a well-executed 4-gate or 2-rax bunker vs FE zerg) where the APM required to stop it is a bit higher than the APM required to execute it, and that's really why it's so good.
Also, since baneling is the most cost-effective unit in the zerg army, having a baneling-centric army with a composition that maximizes baneling splash damage is very difficult to deal with, relative to the a-move/right click-move strategy necessary to execute it.
On January 25 2011 14:34 Orome wrote: I don't quite understand this. Of course you're going to do well if you can get hive and ultralisks up that early. The same would be true if you got broodlords that early. Maybe ultralisks really are the better choice and that's very interesting, but the fact that hive tech that early gives you a boost really isn't anything new. Your post was very well thought-out, but as far as I can see you failed to address by far the biggest issue with this strategy.
How do you survive in those 10 minutes before you actually get to the ultras? Yes, you said that because of the fewer mutas you can get more banelings out, but the reason why those mutas are so crucial (besides harass defense, which you mentioned) is because you can buy yourself a lot of time with them. Just watch the Shakuras game between MVP and Nestea and looks at how much Nestea slowed down MVP's push with his mutas. Imagine your strategy in that situation. MVP's push would've come a lot sooner and stronger at that.
I'm not saying this isn't viable, definitely not before I watch the replays (I can't right now), but this strategy has a big weakness for quite a long time. Teching to hive isn't that expensive in itself, but saving up for the ultra den, the ultra carapace upgrade and 5-6 ultras and waiting ages for them to actually pop is going to be extremely hard when all you have to defend is ling baneling and a couple of mutas.
What I'm taking away from this thread is that ultra/baneling's a very powerful strategy and I'll try to remember that the next time I'm in a situation where I can actually make that unit mix, but to see it as your core strategy that your strategy leads to is very premature I think.
The best way to answer this is: watch the replays.
I watched them, and then I tried this out for myself, and if you're macro is very good, you can defend very well. Mass zergling / baneling / carapace upgrades combined with a VERY good creep spread (even if the mutas are delayed) can hold you off until 3 bases, or at least from what I have seen as of yet.
Also, as a side note, I used this strategy (just to practice it) in 3v3s and ultra / bling seriously decimates everything on the ground. It is really hard to stop.
It seems like you've come up with a very clever solution, combining ultras with banelings. I'll be sure to try this out.
One more thought: it seems to me like the biggest weakness would be against marauder heavy compositions, since they deal very well with both ultras and banes.
On January 25 2011 14:34 Orome wrote: I don't quite understand this. Of course you're going to do well if you can get hive and ultralisks up that early. The same would be true if you got broodlords that early. Maybe ultralisks really are the better choice and that's very interesting, but the fact that hive tech that early gives you a boost really isn't anything new. Your post was very well thought-out, but as far as I can see you failed to address by far the biggest issue with this strategy.
How do you survive in those 10 minutes before you actually get to the ultras? Yes, you said that because of the fewer mutas you can get more banelings out, but the reason why those mutas are so crucial (besides harass defense, which you mentioned) is because you can buy yourself a lot of time with them. Just watch the Shakuras game between MVP and Nestea and looks at how much Nestea slowed down MVP's push with his mutas. Imagine your strategy in that situation. MVP's push would've come a lot sooner and stronger at that.
I'm not saying this isn't viable, definitely not before I watch the replays (I can't right now), but this strategy has a big weakness for quite a long time. Teching to hive isn't that expensive in itself, but saving up for the ultra den, the ultra carapace upgrade and 5-6 ultras and waiting ages for them to actually pop is going to be extremely hard when all you have to defend is ling baneling and a couple of mutas.
What I'm taking away from this thread is that ultra/baneling's a very powerful strategy and I'll try to remember that the next time I'm in a situation where I can actually make that unit mix, but to see it as your core strategy that your strategy leads to is very premature I think.
With scouting information and muta harass.
If he spots aggression, he can pop a speedling/bling army in 24 seconds.
Saying "oh well you didn't hve anything to defend a push that didn't exist" is pretty illogical. If there was a push, he could easily have made the units to deal with it.
Speedling/bling with mutas backstabbing will shut down almost any terran mid-game aggression.
Even though bling doesn't do good damage vs 1 marauder, it does great dmg versus any ball of units, armored or not. And 15 banelings with 20-30 speedlings and spine crawlers is going to wipe out anything that comes on your creep.
This is one of those builds (similar to a well-executed 4-gate or 2-rax bunker vs FE zerg) where the APM required to stop it is a bit higher than the APM required to execute it, and that's really why it's so good.
Also, since baneling is the most cost-effective unit in the zerg army, having a baneling-centric army with a composition that maximizes baneling splash damage is very difficult to deal with, relative to the a-move/right click-move strategy necessary to execute it.
With muta harass? That's the entire point of the build as far as I can see, you get less mutas so you can afford the hive and ultras earlier. You can't really threaten much of anything with muta harass unless you've got a good number of them out.
And you can easily make the units to deal with midgame aggression? That's what ZvT's centered around at the moment and Zergs are struggling with it even if they have the bigger muta count and don't go for that early hive.
Hmmm.. I've looked at some of the replays and on some of the games the ultras weren't even needed to finish off the terran army. most of the time the terran had horrible macro and you simply could have crushed his army with the ling/muta/bling force you had. (ie. you clearly outmacroed him). For example, on one game on X'el Naga Caverns vs oGs. He did a lot of damage with his initial 2rax opening but once he made his 2nd orbital, he didnt float it down to his nat for like 2-3 mins and had about 3-4 scvs/mineral patch in his main before he finally took it. Seems like a fairly viable composition for sure but surviving till ultras pop would be somewhat hard if your facing a fairly competent terran.
On January 25 2011 13:08 Immolate wrote: From the pictures it doesn't look very convincing. Weird army compositions and pure mech fighting in open areas?
What do you mean by weird army compositions? Even before I started going Ultra's T's were making the exact same units. They'd always either go full mech or rine/tank (or banshee).
But you're right though, Ultras are a finishing unit. You survive their mid-game push, make Ultras, annihilate their end-game push and finish the game. =P Watch the replays. There's no way I'd have had the same success if my Ultras weren't utilized as they were.
On January 25 2011 13:25 Encrypto wrote: Do most of your games actually last to that 21 minute late-game mark? This really doesn't solve a lot of the mid-game marine / siege-tank timing pushes that most people die to Terran by. However, I do enjoy the way you deal with those pushes; lots of creep and lots of speed banes with +1 or +2 carapace.
Well honestly I can't say that -most- of them last to that 21 minute mark, but some of them certainly do. There are still many games that end much earlier. Sometimes I will see that I have a clear advantage after an army trade while I'm still doing ling/bling/muta and I see an opening where I can win there and then. Other times I fail to defend one of the earlier pushes and get steamrolled before hive can even start.
Thanks for the compliments about how I deal with the earlier pushes. I firmly believe that getting carapace upgrades are better than melee ups, and couldn't believe Nestea was doing melee ups instead of armor during the GSL semi's. I hope that the benefits of carapace ups spread out to other z's trying to deal with early-mid-game T pushes.
On January 25 2011 13:25 Encrypto wrote:After watching your replays, there is one thing that confuses me.... You make a lot of zerglings at the start of the game - you only make lings when you hit around 15 drones. Do you have any data / thoughts behind this? It sort of seems like a waste to invest in a ling army so early on. In one of the games, you were significantly behind in the drone count, not to mention your spire was delayed substantially. I'm just wondering what the thought process is behind this.
Which game is it you're referring to? If I know which replay it is I can give you a better idea of my thought process. But in general if I'm cutting drones for lings it's because I'm nervous that some sort of all-in might be coming. There were games where I scouted 3-4 rax and felt I needed the lings to survive the coming attack. In general I'm confident in my late game abilities that I'm not that worried about getting drones later instead.
On January 25 2011 13:31 Deltablazy wrote: I'm however concerned about your third lost game. You said you lost to something like 15 reactor-ed barracks, this could potential mean that your build/idea is weak to the newly popular 4OC build. Could you expand a little bit more than you did in your OP about that specific loss.
The terran had a solid 4 base economy that I couldn't budge at all. He had many, and I mean many barracks and factories that even after destroying his army over and over again he kept re-popping the units almost instantly. It was clear his macro was far above mine, and on top of that he continued dropping my expansions and such had my forces running all over. Him kept me on my toes and I didn't react properly. I would think if I had switched to mutalisks to handle the drops I would've faired better. As it was, I just got outplayed. His barracks lights literally never stopped blinking.
The replay is pre-patch and the game occurred some 2-3 weeks ago. I tried to find the replay in my autosave folder, but I haven't had much luck since there are so many and they're just labeled by date (which doesn't help much. sigh). Since it was pre-patch I just shrugged it off and didn't include it in the replay pack. But I felt the loss was worth mentioning.
On January 25 2011 13:36 XXXSmOke wrote: Interesting concept of the BW crackling ultra to the SC2 Ultra Bling. I think its almost mandatory that you add infestors tho. Stutter step is extremely effective vs ultra as what ends up happening is your ultras are chasing a huge ball of marines while my tanks get tons of free hits which plops your ultras.
From my experience the Ultras step in to merely soak up the damage - aka the initial tank blasts. There are clearly LOTS of banelings that the marines tend to simply turn and flee, and if you engage on creep the banelings will eventually catch up to them. However, you might be right in that when much higher level T's get used to dealing with this, adding infestors for fungal might become a necessity. As of now, though, I find that they aren't needed at all. Worse case scenario you can chase the marines back off-creep where you can't catch up to them, let your ultra's take care of the tanks, and then run back to your creep with your banelings once the tanks have been dealt with.
On January 25 2011 13:43 Plexa wrote: This is a good post, I can't comment on the validity on it since I'm not a Terran or Zerg, but it seems solid .
Thank you very much. =)
On January 25 2011 13:55 SpaceYeti wrote: Curious here. Do you not use infestors at all to bridge the gap between Lair and Hive tech and help you defend against timing attacks that come before your Ultras pop? Or are they too gas heavy to fit in?
Truthfully, I haven't found a need for infestors. With a good creep spread, carapace and speed upgrades, it should be possible to defend against early terran pushes. The infestation pit, however, obviously needs to be made for the hive, and you find infestors necessary to stop the oncoming push, by all means you should definitely make them. Your goal is to survive, and so you should do so by any means.
On January 25 2011 13:57 CortoMontez wrote: Although I didn't watch the replay, I noticed that in the picture on JB, the terran had atleast 8 BCs. Despite doing little damage to your ultras due to their 6 armour, how effective would your ultras have been if the terran had researched weapon refit (yamato cannon), since he could have taken out a significant number of ultras very quickly, and used the BCs to melt through any less armoured units.
Yamato causes 300 dmg, which isn't really enough to kill an Ultra. You'd need 2 yamato's per ultralisk. On top of that it's also very energy taxing. In that terrans situation, I don't think it could've won him the game. His economy was razed, while I had just managed to saturate my fourth. I might've been able to keep him in his base long enough to mass up the corruptors or hydralisks needed to deal with his bc/viking force.
A nice thread you have there. I hadn't seen it before. Heh, great minds think alike.
On January 25 2011 14:46 Orome wrote: With muta harass? That's the entire point of the build as far as I can see, you get less mutas so you can afford the hive and ultras earlier. You can't really threaten much of anything with muta harass unless you've got a good number of them out.
And you can easily make the units to deal with midgame aggression? That's what ZvT's centered around at the moment and Zergs are struggling with it even if they have the bigger muta count and don't go for that early hive.
In all 10 of the replays in the pack, not once did I opt not to get a spire. I did make a few mutas, not nearly enough to properly harass, but enough that there still existed the potential to harass. If the T sees a spire, he'll have to know that at any moment you can pop 10+ mutas when he sees you've been doing nothing but making ling/bling. It is the threat of muta harass that exists here and that regardless of how many mutalisks you have, will force the terran to spend money on turrets.
As I mentioned in my starting thread, stopping the terran mid-game push is all about positioning. You need your banelings to hit his marines. Not the smartest statement there, but that's basically what it comes down to. His tanks are there to make sure your banelings don't hit his marines. You stay on your creep, you attack him when his tanks are unseiged. You get as many muta/ling/bling as necessary to make sure that happens. I've never once gone into a game thinking "I'm gonna get my hive tech started at 14 minutes this time around." Zerg is a reactionary race. There's no build order here: just a goal to head towards.
I need to survive, and if necessary I will make more mutas than I originally wanted if it will mean I survive the next terran push. The ultralisks are something you transition to once you've gained sufficient advantage after disabling the earlier pushes. Of course, if the terran decides to turtle and NOT DO anything... then by all means tech to hive with only lings in front of your natural and third. Heck, I've done that, too, because the T's practically let me. Do watch the replays. You'll find this isn't "rush to ultras, win" but more "survive to ultras, win."
I also disagree that broodlords would also work, as they don't tank for your banelings and are easily countered by vikings. Every T worth their salt will have a reactored starport in a TvZ. Ultras are not so easily countered.
On January 25 2011 15:04 lphoenixl wrote: Hmmm.. I've looked at some of the replays and on some of the games the ultras weren't even needed to finish off the terran army. most of the time the terran had horrible macro and you simply could have crushed his army with the ling/muta/bling force you had. (ie. you clearly outmacroed him). For example, on one game on X'el Naga Caverns vs oGs. He did a lot of damage with his initial 2rax opening but once he made his 2nd orbital, he didnt float it down to his nat for like 2-3 mins and had about 3-4 scvs/mineral patch in his main before he finally took it. Seems like a fairly viable composition for sure but surviving till ultras pop would be somewhat hard if your facing a fairly competent terran.
In general the Ultras are there to ensure victory. I'm not going to pretend macro was on equal footing in every replay. It never is, in any game. I'd argue against the fact that the Ultras weren't needed. You might say that if only because it was the banelings that do pretty much all of the damage. The Ultras are simply there to soak up splash and be the first in line to get hit so the 30 hp banelings won't have to. And personally I feel they do a very good job of accomplishing that feat.
stoked on this. I pumped lair tech non-stop simply because hive tech was so slooooooow/useeelesssss but I see now the error of my ways. I thinkjt eh wya the game progreses broodlord is going to be the reaper of zerg (never made anymore)
How about the addition of roaches? With the speed upgrade they have the same movement synergy with the banelings. It might help in surviving to late game before ultras come out and added dps when the armies clash.
On January 25 2011 15:14 CuteSmallHydra wrote: Which game is it you're referring to? If I know which replay it is I can give you a better idea of my thought process. But in general if I'm cutting drones for lings it's because I'm nervous that some sort of all-in might be coming. There were games where I scouted 3-4 rax and felt I needed the lings to survive the coming attack. In general I'm confident in my late game abilities that I'm not that worried about getting drones later instead.
For example, every game when you open 15 pool 14 gas you drone to 15 supply and then make 6+ zerglings. And this is every game. Why make so many zerglings at the start of the game? Those could be drones.
I couldn't find the exact replay, but from what I remember you never really "drone hard", and in some ways I like this. You seem to treat zerg as if it were toss or terran. For every round of injects you make, at least 1 or 2 are drones and the rest is army. This way, you never have a timing attack that completely slaughters you. Instead of treating zerg as a reactionary race (in this regard), you macro the same as, say, a terran would. Anyway, maybe I was wrong for the mostpart, but instead of staying significantly ahead in the drone count (like most zergs attempt to do), you generally seem to stay the same or a little on the lower side, and maybe this isn't a bad thing. Maybe your build doesn't need a stronger economy than your opponent as is usually recommended?
Well my analysis is somewhat vague and haphazard, but these are just my thoughts. I love your build from what I have seen so far (and btw it works really well in team games), and don't get me wrong - I am not trying to critique you, just better understand your motives. Thanks again.
On January 25 2011 14:46 Orome wrote: With muta harass? That's the entire point of the build as far as I can see, you get less mutas so you can afford the hive and ultras earlier. You can't really threaten much of anything with muta harass unless you've got a good number of them out.
And you can easily make the units to deal with midgame aggression? That's what ZvT's centered around at the moment and Zergs are struggling with it even if they have the bigger muta count and don't go for that early hive.
In all 10 of the replays in the pack, not once did I opt not to get a spire. I did make a few mutas, not nearly enough to properly harass, but enough that there still existed the potential to harass. If the T sees a spire, he'll have to know that at any moment you can pop 10+ mutas when he sees you've been doing nothing but making ling/bling. It is the threat of muta harass that exists here and that regardless of how many mutalisks you have, will force the terran to spend money on turrets.
As I mentioned in my starting thread, stopping the terran mid-game push is all about positioning. You need your banelings to hit his marines. Not the smartest statement there, but that's basically what it comes down to. His tanks are there to make sure your banelings don't hit his marines. You stay on your creep, you attack him when his tanks are unseiged. You get as many muta/ling/bling as necessary to make sure that happens. I've never once gone into a game thinking "I'm gonna get my hive tech started at 14 minutes this time around." Zerg is a reactionary race. There's no build order here: just a goal to head towards.
I need to survive, and if necessary I will make more mutas than I originally wanted if it will mean I survive the next terran push. The ultralisks are something you transition to once you've gained sufficient advantage after disabling the earlier pushes. Of course, if the terran decides to turtle and NOT DO anything... then by all means tech to hive with only lings in front of your natural and third. Heck, I've done that, too, because the T's practically let me. Do watch the replays. You'll find this isn't "rush to ultras, win" but more "survive to ultras, win."
I also disagree that broodlords would also work, as they don't tank for your banelings and are easily countered by vikings. Every T worth their salt will have a reactored starport in a TvZ. Ultras are not so easily countered.
I can agree with all that, but that changes the message of this guide from a complete strategy and a very different way of playing ZvT to mostly a statement about a new unit composition. 'Ultra baneling's great. Use it if you can.' Still a very nice find, I'll try to test it tonight, I've been very frustrated with ZvT recently.
I can't agree with you when you said bling/ultra combo decimates a maxed out mech army. Unless flanked or caught unsieged, a maxed out mech army, ie tank count > 20 + supporting thors and hellions can easily wipe out a 200 supply ultra/bling combo with negligible casualty. This is especially true when you are fully upgraded in vehicle damage.
I know this because I've played a ton of mech TvZ. Muta is a must for zerg's map control. If you have a low muta count, you easily give away the other half of the map to terran. In that case I'll be able to control the midfield very early with tanks and hellions and in late game I'll just build PFs at the map center and abuse mass viking to take out your expos.
Great post, I really enjoy a developed idea for late game zerg. It seems too often that zerg gets stuck in that midgame composition without getting to use its power units.
On January 25 2011 16:05 Orome wrote: I can agree with all that, but that changes the message of this guide from a complete strategy and a very different way of playing ZvT to mostly a statement about a new unit composition. 'Ultra baneling's great. Use it if you can.' Still a very nice find, I'll try to test it tonight, I've been very frustrated with ZvT recently.
Well, the goal of the guide is "This is how you use Ultralisks in ZvT." Nothing else, really. =o I just wanted to show that Ultralisks can be used in ZvT, have perfect synergy with banelings, and are the perfect ender to the game. I wanted to set the idea of using Ultralisks as a late game goal rather than keeping the focus on massing up a critical number of mutalisks.
On January 25 2011 16:18 Terranium wrote: To the OP:
Broken image links.
I can't agree with you when you said bling/ultra combo decimates a maxed out mech army. Unless flanked or caught unsieged, a maxed out mech army, ie tank count > 20 + supporting thors and hellions can easily wipe out a 200 supply ultra/bling combo with negligible casualty. This is especially true when you are fully upgraded in vehicle damage.
I know this because I've played a ton of mech TvZ. Muta is a must for zerg's map control. If you have a low muta count, you easily give away the other half of the map to terran. In that case I'll be able to control the midfield very early with tanks and hellions and in late game I'll just build PFs at the map center and abuse mass viking to take out your expos.
2.5k master terran
Are you sure images are broken? They still work fine for me.
I faced mech armies twice, and both times I caught them out of position, unseiged, and on creep. The terran didn't even have time to react before everything was dead. Baneling damage is huge, and it's instant. Whether this works vrs 20+ sieged tanks with thor/hellion support, I can't say. I am willing to say that it might, as banelings are fast, and their damage instant. You just need the ultras to take the first hits and absorb the splash.
Yet even still by the sound of those tank numbers I'm worried it might not, but regardless, you're under the false assumption that this is a "how to rush to Ultralisks" guide when in fact it's a "this is how you use Ultralisks" guide.
If you're right, then in your case sticking with mutalisks would be the better answer. I'm just providing a good alternative for everything else.
On January 25 2011 15:51 Encrypto wrote: For example, every game when you open 15 pool 14 gas you drone to 15 supply and then make 6+ zerglings. And this is every game. Why make so many zerglings at the start of the game? Those could be drones.
I couldn't find the exact replay, but from what I remember you never really "drone hard", and in some ways I like this. You seem to treat zerg as if it were toss or terran. For every round of injects you make, at least 1 or 2 are drones and the rest is army. This way, you never have a timing attack that completely slaughters you. Instead of treating zerg as a reactionary race (in this regard), you macro the same as, say, a terran would. Anyway, maybe I was wrong for the mostpart, but instead of staying significantly ahead in the drone count (like most zergs attempt to do), you generally seem to stay the same or a little on the lower side, and maybe this isn't a bad thing. Maybe your build doesn't need a stronger economy than your opponent as is usually recommended?
Well my analysis is somewhat vague and haphazard, but these are just my thoughts. I love your build from what I have seen so far (and btw it works really well in team games), and don't get me wrong - I am not trying to critique you, just better understand your motives. Thanks again.
Ah, I see what you mean. Well for starters I do in fact feel that zerg can do without an "amazing" economy. As an example in BW you could saturate 4 bases with 30ish drones. In SC2 you need like 60 to saturate 3. This fact means your late game army is smaller - I personally like to have the smallest amount of drones I can have, but I know a good economy is necessary to sustain a good army so I'm never going to recommend zergs start cutting drones.
The reason I make so many lings after my opening is because I can never be sure what the terran is doing. I don't like to think they are a waste as I get ling speed as soon as I have 100 gas and continually use the speedlings to scout the map. The reason I can get away with this is because I stop mining gas for a bit to get my lings/queens/expo out. When I'm no longer mining gas, I've got 15 drones mining minerals in my main so I can afford to not make more for a short amount of time. At least until my queens are out and my expansion is up. Again if I feel a timing marine push might come out, I might resume mining gas a bit earlier and put up a baneling nest to prepare. In general I like to make my drones when I know I'm able to. Early game there are too many risks in over-droning and not having the larva available to make overlords or units when you find you need them like right this instant.
ok maybe its not common knowledge but Ultralisk is the definitive counter to large amounts of tanks and Thors (though I'm sure with good Thunderstrike Canon use thors can do decent vs ultralisk). I thought people knew it, this was something we figured out in beta and early on in sc2. Fruit Dealer was known for using some ultralisks vs mech.
Ultras are not nearly as good vs lower tier units.
As soon as the terran plays MMM (and perhaps its one of the reasons we see so much MMM) the ultralisk's value because pretty worthless as upgraded bio destroys ultralisks (and just about anything else that moves).
Tanks are nearly worthless vs ultralisks (their armor is too high and the tanks attack speed too low), and ultralisks are nearly worthless vs bio (dps is tooo high on single targets, very easy to stim and kite).
On January 25 2011 17:02 jgreen46 wrote: ok maybe its not common knowledge but Ultralisk is the definitive counter to large amounts of tanks and Thors (though I'm sure with good Thunderstrike Canon use thors can do decent vs ultralisk). I thought people knew it, this was something we figured out in beta and early on in sc2. Fruit Dealer was known for using some ultralisks vs mech.
Ultras are not nearly as good vs lower tier units.
As soon as the terran plays MMM (and perhaps its one of the reasons we see so much MMM) the ultralisk's value because pretty worthless as upgraded bio destroys ultralisks (and just about anything else that moves).
Tanks are nearly worthless vs ultralisks (their armor is too high and the tanks attack speed too low), and ultralisks are nearly worthless vs bio (dps is tooo high on single targets, very easy to stim and kite).
rofl do you honestly know what you are talking about? Stop trying to mislead people. I'm sure you haven't tried this yourself. I know through tons of games that equal supply tanks absolutely decimate ultras if they engage sieged tanks from their maximum range. Of course if you are talking about flanking or 20 ultras vs 10 tanks or something like outnumbered ultras that would be a different story.
If you still don't believe me, try this in the unit tester, 30 tanks (90 supply) vs 20 ultras (120 supply) and tell me which side wins. (Bare in mind that this is not even equal supply and the current map pool provides very few open fields)
So my zergies, I'd be interested to hear how this framework might holp up against MM(M) builds from Terran. Both from experience or conjecture.
I ask because, as T, I almost always use a '4OC' mass MM build vs Zerg. I know the OP said he had a hard time with the mass Marine-ing player and adding Marauders into the mix is certainly not going to help the Z's situation.
It seems to me that this might be weak to a Bio/Macro oriented Terran style on two front. First, there doesn't seem like there is too much opportunity for early harassment/pressure allowing Terran to macro up. The second, as I said before, is the battle. I just have my doubts that and ultra/bling mix is going to break a large MM ball. Of course it can, as the OP said, positioning can turn the entire battle in ZvT. A large number of marauders will take out the ultras before they get to do much at all, and mass MM running off 3 bases should have reinforcements coming out of 12-15rax so it would be tough to overwhelm.
What do you guys think? Am I way off base thinking the Bioball is going to be too tough to crack? Is pure MM not something you see all that often?
To the OP, are you planning on using this vT under almost all situations or is this better suited against tank/rine, mech, or other tech options.
It seems to me that the framework is a really great place to come from. I feel pretty comfortable saying that the general stuggle for Z is getting to a place where you're comfortable to macro so using the usual fast muta/ling army to get you by until hive is solid zerg playstyle. My opinion, get a good sense of what T's army is as Hive is coming up, against MM or even some pure mech you'd be better off going broodlord/roach and you can do it without really missing a beat. (I know this is about Ultras, but sometimes the best way to use ultras is not using them)
Random other thought: Couldn't the Ultra/bling push be further reinforced with a (relatively) large number of queens moving in with or right behind the ultras. They give you good anti-air and more importantly healing. Just four full energy queens can give your ultras up to 2000 extra HP if they can get all their transfuses off. I know they don't fit with the synergy of bling/ultra from the movement speed point of view but it seems to me like they would really help with a final push. Ultra/bling is really gas heavy and queens might be a great use of the extra mins.
While I agree that Ultras are really good against terran with baneling, I think you are underrating mutas. Having a big flock of 20 to 30 mutas is overwhelming, because you can take out turret, rax and add on there and there and the terran is forced to stim pack run everywhere, not doing anything. Also forcing him to go thor and lower his mobility. Ling baneling muta is good only for defense and harass, I don't see myself winning (crushing my opponent base) with it. I'm not sure rushing strait to ultras is a good idea.
On January 25 2011 11:45 ShatterZer0 wrote: Ultralisks are the final nail in the coffin. The finishing blow. Now they might be used more often. I am happy.
No it's not and this is exactly the ignorant bile that he's trying to remove.
I've been using a similar strategy that I got from two high level master zerg players and it's a dominating strategy that doesn't have a solid counter. (As tested many times with two other high level master league players).
They weren't going to publish it because it's been working well, but now that the cat's out of the bag, it's still going to be a tough strategy to beat.
Their basic strategy is very similar....
FE with speedling into baneling, at lair tech pop a handful of mutas for harass (don't suicide them), take 3rd/4th as you get hive/evo chambers, pump 3/1 ultras and many banelings.
It's damn near impossible to stop, even when you know it's coming.
There is a weakness in that it's a bit greedy toward the mid-game where it is susceptible to some blue-flame hellion shenanigans with poor micro, but other than that, it's just a very, very solid strategy.
this sounds really interesting, however im thinking that going hive that fast off rather low tech (it seems youre relying on pure speedling/baneling to fight mid game pushes) dies to well executed 2 base marine tank with 2 factories pumping tanks (mvp vs nestea on shakuras f.e.). If you get slowpushed by a Terran that abuses Terrain to make some of his tanks untouchable by ground (like Shakuras and Blistering) there isnt much you can do without a good amount of roaches / mutas imo. i love speedling / baneling because its so cost efficient but good opponents wont allow you to erase their entire ground army with one big a-move. If you have some reps I would enjoy seeing them, maybe I'm just completely and it doesnt have that weakness
I am still worried a little about the "getting ultra" timing where i feel very weak as a zerg. As ultra cost 6 supply and takes 70 second to build, you are extremely vulnerable to any attack during those 70 secs ( as most of your supply are eggs :p ). So how do you make sure that you'll not get ROFLstomped just before your ultra are out. ( This is actualy the main reason i stopped to use ultra in ZvT :p)
Hi, this is a great thread and its got me and I'm sure a lot of other zergs thinking. When I'm reading this thread I can't help but to feel that a lot of extra Queens are going to really compliment this whole strategy. Allow me to list why I think this is.
1.Right off the bat you mention a need for a lot of creep for map control and for the speed of banes and ultras well for a lot of creep extra queens are definately going to help with this.
2. One problem with a lot of queens is it maxes your supply very quickly however banelings are zergs most supply efficient unit, so many ling/bane leaves a lot of extra supply for queens.
3. Your low on muta count so having a lot of transfuses to keep your muta ball healed is going to make your harass that much more effective through out the game.
4.Your composition and fast teching is very gas heavy and so (I presume, havent seen reps yet because i'm at work) you have the spare minerals to make some extra queens.
5. Going mainly ling/bling with less muta is going to make an already larvae intensive strat even more intensive, however making queens takes no larva so getting some extra units out when your low on larva is only gonna be an advantage
6. With less muta your more vulnerable to drops, having a few queens at each base is going to help A LOT with holding off drops, targetting down the medivac quickly and then stalling the units while your army arrives.
7. Before you have the ultras queens make pretty decent tanks at taking siege shots and especially with all the carapace upgrades this MAY very situationally be helpful
8. When the ultras finally come out the queens provide really effective AA against your main air fear (banshees) and transfuse's on ultras is one of the best healing effects in the game, it is very cost efficient and makes an awesome tank so much more awesome allowing them to survive much longer and actually deal alot of dps as well.
There may be more I havent though of, but this feels like a pretty strong reason to get like5 or 6 extra queens.
Newbie question... in maps like Scrap Station you have a lot of choke points. Is this strategy good at that map [or maps like that]? because you can't use all of your ultralisks on key choke points, and that basically means "use more banelings", making it weak to army trades.
I'm very interested. That's a nice thread and I need to see the replays, but the core composition army and transition seems ok. I've always struggled with ultras myself and find them too big and their pathing kinda bugged, so I'm really curious to see how you manage to use them. Especially interested in maps where you don't have a lot of open space to play with (Muun mentioned scrap for instance).
Hi, i cant watch replays atm (gg harddrive), i was just wondering if anyone could tell me what kind of formation the ultra/bling ball was in before engaging the terran? i.e. ultras in front/middle/behind? at the sides?
I dont agree, against tanks i find broodlords the better choice. Sure, ultras can work as a techswitch from broodlords, or if you are very far ahead, ultras also work. but in a close game i have never had any success with ultras, whereas only a few broodlords can be a great help against a tank + x push.
Tbh I thought this was rather common knowledge, but then again I've always been a bit surprised coming to TL where everyone says ultras suck(and I go daydreaming of wtf I must be doing wrong as t player bar letting the game go into macro game). Ultras _with_ the armor upgrade can deal so much pain against the rine/tank combo, since the rines do almost no dmg and it's crucial that the tanks take out the blings, else you're fucked no matter. But yer nicely put in the OP.
On January 25 2011 16:05 Orome wrote: I can agree with all that, but that changes the message of this guide from a complete strategy and a very different way of playing ZvT to mostly a statement about a new unit composition. 'Ultra baneling's great. Use it if you can.' Still a very nice find, I'll try to test it tonight, I've been very frustrated with ZvT recently.
Well, the goal of the guide is "This is how you use Ultralisks in ZvT." Nothing else, really. =o I just wanted to show that Ultralisks can be used in ZvT, have perfect synergy with banelings, and are the perfect ender to the game. I wanted to set the idea of using Ultralisks as a late game goal rather than keeping the focus on massing up a critical number of mutalisks.
I've read the post, but I haven't seen the replays (I'm at work right now =P).
I have a question for you: If the terran suspects that you are going ultras, do you think that the best counter (not to mention the obvious ones as multi drops etc etc) is a lot of marauders?
They fare quite well against ultras when you have a lot of them, and they also tank baneling damage quite well.
I understand the problems that a terran would have to get that many marauders late game after spotting the ultralisk den, and how risky it would be to just assume that the Z is going mass ultras (as marauders won't do very well against other compositions, other than roaches), but I want you opinion simply based on army composition for this situation.
As far as i can tell this is a baneling centric strategy. The Ultra will tank the dmg and banelings will kill everything on ground. Yeah, banelings are very good against EVERYTHING ground from terran, just make sure to avoid the tank splash.
Good post OP. I hate banelings, and i play mech...
This is probably one of the best posts in this forum for a while.
I've wondered about this but didn't think you guys could get enough gas but looking back on this, isn't this what Fruitdealer used to do late game in his GSL1 run? Except FD shoved his blings in ovies instead...
I saw Destiny do a variation of this last night and it was brutally effective. Only instead of ultras tanking, he just used roaches. He moved about 10ish roaches out in front of his ling b-ling muta army, and basically just a-moved over everything. Raped concentrated tanks, marines, and turrents. The thing is, all the roaches really have to do is take the initial shots from the tanks and let the b-lings/slings run in and do the damage, but really, roaches are pretty solid vs tanks and marines too, plus they stack damage with the slings and blings.
I hope to see a lot more of this strategy and variations thereof in the months to come. I'd love for T to go back to being the turtling, harassing, micro/positioning race, not the current, turtling master, harassing master, offensive master, eco master, a-move to win race. Wouldn't it be great if Ts HAD to rely on drops and great harass to keep things even, and THEY were the ones cringing when you move out of your base?
man, I can't wait to get home and watch the reps. I'm really interested in how you manage your mineral/gas ratio. Even the Muta/ling/bling is way too gas heavy and lately I tried out 1-2makro hatches and expos where I'd only mine gas.
Even if Ultralisks cost 3/2 m/g while mutas are 1/1, I don't see that saving enough gas for morphing all my slings into blings. But fortunately, you included replay and I'll be able to have a look at your play as soon as i get home.
Isn't it also true that Units on move command get targeted after the units on attack move? If this works, you might send in mass Banelings on move, as well as lings and send the Ultras on attack move. If an ultra is almost dead, make it a move command so it survives to do damage?
On January 25 2011 22:41 Google. wrote: man, I can't wait to get home and watch the reps. I'm really interested in how you manage your mineral/gas ratio. Even the Muta/ling/bling is way too gas heavy and lately I tried out 1-2makro hatches and expos where I'd only mine gas.
Even if Ultralisks cost 3/2 m/g while mutas are 1/1, I don't see that saving enough gas for morphing all my slings into blings. But fortunately, you included replay and I'll be able to have a look at your play as soon as i get home.
Can't wait!
I think the idea is to not mass- Ultralisk, but instead have some gas leftover to get banelings and upgrades. You can upgrade quite early if you don't invest a lot in your Mutalisk!!
Sorry that i have to chime in here again, but i read the rest of the post, and it just tilts me super hard when i read stuff like the following:
"For the majority of his games I was wishing Nestea would abandon his ling/baneling/muta builds and just go for ultralisks."
In my opinion Nestea is currently the best zergplayer, and it seems very strange to me that some rather mediocre player thinks he knows way better than nestea does..
"The first terran push will always come before Ultras are ready, thus a good flank on creep is a necessity. Luckily zergs shouldn't have too many problems with the first push"
Yes, youre right, the first push comes before Ultras. And no, its not easy to defend against if youre heavily investing in your ultra tech and melee/carapace upgrades.
Furthermore, looking at your "battlereports", to me it seems like these games were decided early on, and not by your bright usage of ultralisks.
As i said in my other post, ultras can be useful, but i think you are way exaggerating their usefulness.
On January 25 2011 23:11 DarKFoRcE wrote: Sorry that i have to chime in here again, but i read the rest of the post, and it just tilts me super hard when i read stuff like the following:
"For the majority of his games I was wishing Nestea would abandon his ling/baneling/muta builds and just go for ultralisks."
In my opinion Nestea is currently the best zergplayer, and it seems very strange to me that some rather mediocre player thinks he knows way better than nestea does..
"The first terran push will always come before Ultras are ready, thus a good flank on creep is a necessity. Luckily zergs shouldn't have too many problems with the first push"
Yes, youre right, the first push comes before Ultras. And no, its not easy to defend against if youre heavily investing in your ultra tech and melee/carapace upgrades.
Furthermore, looking at your "battlereports", to me it seems like these games were decided early on, and not by your bright usage of ultralisks.
As i said in my other post, ultras can be useful, but i think you are way exaggerating their usefulness.
Maybe he is "exaggerating", but the main point of the post is: ultras are not useless, they can be very usefull if used with X units against Y composition. I don't think he meant this post to be a revolution on the way ZvT is played, breaking the tabu that ultras are an april fools joke, adding another strategy the zerg players can rely on.
On January 25 2011 11:39 Pandain wrote: I haven't read everything yet but sounds really interesting. Just some questions: 1.While your teching up to hive, wouldn't there be a timing for terran to hit? Especially considering(if I'm correct) your saving supply to use for ultras? 2.Do the replays really show a true terran, not doing any gimmicky BC stuff? Just making sure. 3.When do you tech to ultras.
why do people always say "i havent read the post but here's some questions"
and without fail every time all of those questions were addressed more than satisfactorily in the post.
Because they'd rather read 50 short and useless posts and watch not-so-funny youtube videos instead of reading one long and good post.
Yet they want information out of it without reading it. In our time and society I believe it is called "spoiled kids", no offense.
OT: Nice read, I also like ultras a lot and didn't really understand all the QQ threads about ultras being weak. I suppose if someone tries to go mass ultras it can't be good, but why would anyone think of doing that? O_o
This idea of mixing in queens is intriguing.. I cant help but wonder what if... you added a nydus into the play and placed it just behind your troops as they moved in, then sent several of your base queens into the nydus, and popped them into the battle made some quick transfuses after the initial clash, then got back into the nydus for base duty. And then rally all your hatches into the nydus network for rapid reinforcement.
The implications of unit speed are a mind blowing epiphany!
I cant tell you how many games would have turned out differently had this idea been in the arsenal
Problem with the nydus is that it costs 200 gas + another 100 for every worm you make thats 8 banelings and another 4 for every worm if youd spent the gas on blings instead.
Thing is Im talking about making some extra queens with the extra minerals your going to have using this strategy, So you dont need to keep them in your base (unless its defending drop play) they can be with your army and while they are slower that blings/ultras on creep it isnt a huge difference, they can catch up once the engagement starts to heal the ultras.
Also someone mentioned Destiny using roaches to tank the first shots from tank lines so ling/bling could rush in, I guarantee queens with carapace upgrades are better tanks than roaches, being able to transfuse each other and being bigger so take less splash damage. They make a nice alternative tank for the siege fire until the ultra's get out.
Unfortunately I haven't seen the replays yet, so if I'm off-base, feel free to correct me. However, based on the comments and the images provided, this appears to be a "tons of Banelings / X to tank" kind of strategy.
It's fairly well known (I thought) that if you can afford to throw tons and tons of Banelings at your opponent, you've got a pretty good chance to break them. I can see where using Ultras to tank damage would make such a strategy more cost-effective and increase its success rate, but the fact remains, a lot of the difficulty in playing Zerg is getting to a point where you can afford to throw that many units at your opponent.
It's still noteworthy, sure. The problem is that it doesn't really help Zerg get into a good position, it's just a good thing to do once you're there. I know from the games I've played and those that I've seen, Zerg seems to have more of a problem getting there than figuring out something to do once they're there at this point in the meta-game.
I've always thought ultras were really good but the problem is surviving long enough to tech to hive and having a good enough economy to afford them, I almost always prefer them over brood lords because they are so robust and when they survive a battle with low health I just take them back to my queens to get healed up.
GREAT POST your discovery of the great sinergy of ultras and blings is amazing,ultras work better in open spaces,and blings will clear clumped units, or force the enemy to spread. blings have bonus vs ligth and ultras have splash , and ultras also do bonus vs armored =)
your writting was pretty neat and descriptive too. i think i migth start using this transition in the future,i always did muta ling bling , with some roaches sometimes.. and then corruptor broodlord
I've been playing with the idea of Roach heavy builds in ZvT but have hit a strange lack of terran opponents in the ladder the past week or so and haven't been able to put it to the test.
Anyway, I'm wondering if they wouldn't make your composition even stronger.
The biggest drawback of using something like roach/ling/bling over ultra/ling/bling would be that roaches don't use the same upgrades offensively. This is fine as the only upgrade that REALLY matters for the roach offensively is +1 ranged. With +1 range, regardless of how much armor a stimmed marine has, it will never take more than 4 shots to kill him. Marauders are a losing fight anyway, so we don't worry about getting the shot lead on them.
Other things to note:
Roaches actually move slightly faster than Ultralisks but not so much that they'd separate away like lings do (0.05 speed faster).
3 Roaches have a total of 435 HP as compared to the 1 Ultralisks 500 HP.
Roaches have a 3:1 gas ratio compared to the Ultralisks 3:2 ratio. For those same 300 minerals, you would only spend half the gas and get a 4th roach for free (still costs supply)!
vs armored units, 1 non-upgraded Ultralisk does 40 DPS + splash, but vs unarmored targets, that same Ultralisk only does 17 DPS. 3 Roaches (lets not count the 4th one) do a standard 24 DPS against everything, so they sit somewhere in the middle.
Roaches are more susceptible to splash damage and need to be manually rammed into the T army to be most effective (they take more micro).
All of the supporting tech for roaches would be 350/200 + 1 drone in costs. This would get you the warren, +1 ranged, and roach speed (speed and +1 could be researched simultaneously), if you need another evo chamber it would be another 75 min + drone for a total of 425 minerals, 200 gas, 2 drones. Everything else would already be covered by the upgrades you're already getting.
Not trying to replace the Ultra-based idea, but perhaps augment it as balancing Roaches in there will let you spend more minerals/supply and less gas if needed.
On January 25 2011 23:11 DarKFoRcE wrote: Sorry that i have to chime in here again, but i read the rest of the post, and it just tilts me super hard when i read stuff like the following:
"For the majority of his games I was wishing Nestea would abandon his ling/baneling/muta builds and just go for ultralisks."
In my opinion Nestea is currently the best zergplayer, and it seems very strange to me that some rather mediocre player thinks he knows way better than nestea does..
"The first terran push will always come before Ultras are ready, thus a good flank on creep is a necessity. Luckily zergs shouldn't have too many problems with the first push"
Yes, youre right, the first push comes before Ultras. And no, its not easy to defend against if youre heavily investing in your ultra tech and melee/carapace upgrades.
Furthermore, looking at your "battlereports", to me it seems like these games were decided early on, and not by your bright usage of ultralisks.
As i said in my other post, ultras can be useful, but i think you are way exaggerating their usefulness.
Maybe he is "exaggerating", but the main point of the post is: ultras are not useless, they can be very usefull if used with X units against Y composition. I don't think he meant this post to be a revolution on the way ZvT is played, breaking the tabu that ultras are an april fools joke, adding another strategy the zerg players can rely on.
I think its more of the maps that make BroodLords > Ultras. The blizz maps are small with mostly narrow attack lanes with lots of cliffing opportunities. Like people who have been play testing the big new GSL map have indicated, Ultras do much better when spaces are open.
I like the general composition and idea but as DF said, it may be tricky to get there when Terran isn't making mech fail blobs. But such is the problem with coming up with new stuff... You can have a nice unit composition but you must find a way to viably get there. I think this is the task for the OP if he wants to make this more than just a 'hey you can do this late game' thread.
I think the unit composition is mutually complementary though because Ultralisks are great against mech due to their super high DPS + splash over time but need to be able to force their way to the key mech units or they are completely useless. Banelings on the other hand have super high burst damage per population point and thus can easily destroy a large portion of the stuff in the way of the ultras but they are single use so they can't finish off what's left over. Put them together and the banelings are able to clear out all the supporting units so the ultras can go right for the Tanks and Thors.
Sure Roaches are good for burst damage but they are 2 food and banelings are .5. Banelings upgrade via melee upgrades and they naturally don't screw up the ultra AI because they all explode so there's nothing for the ultras to get stuck on.
Broodlords are nice if you can use them in such a way where they can't get hit easily but that's not always the case.
One more big difference is that ultras will/should have 2 more armor than roaches in a late game engagement.
If you're engaging a more tank/thor/rauder heavy army, then the bonus to armored is going to be super huge, and the +melee ups are going to tilt the scale further in the ultra department. Each up vs. armored for ultras is 4.6ish dps, while each up vs. armored for 4 roaches is just 4 dps. (You already mentioned the splash and the ups synergy.)
OTOH, if you're engaging more rine heavy army, that 2 armor is gonna be crazy. 3/0 rines will be doing 3 damage a shot against 0/(3+1+2) ultras, about half of what they'll be doing to upped roaches.
I'm not saying roaches are can't contribute, but I just don't see them filling a niche that ultras don't fill better. If you can't spend your minerals, moar lings!
One more big difference is that ultras will/should have 2 more armor than roaches in a late game engagement.
If you're engaging a more tank/thor/rauder heavy army, then the bonus to armored is going to be super huge, and the +melee ups are going to tilt the scale further in the ultra department. Each up vs. armored for ultras is 4.6ish dps, while each up vs. armored for 4 roaches is just 4 dps. (You already mentioned the splash and the ups synergy.)
OTOH, if you're engaging more rine heavy army, that 2 armor is gonna be crazy. 3/0 rines will be doing 3 damage a shot against 0/(3+1+2) ultras, about half of what they'll be doing to upped roaches.
I'm not saying roaches are can't contribute, but I just don't see them filling a niche that ultras don't fill better. If you can't spend your minerals, moar lings!
Err, if youre engaging tank thor marauder you really dont wanna be using ultras or roaches anyway.. broodlords are the unit of choice there for sure.
A few things to note when you are comparing roach to ultra:
ultra does max damage as long as it is alive. Roach dps decreases as each one dies. As for the general point regarding dps comparison, there are many other randomizing factors (more wasted damage from roaches due to overlapping shot, concuss slow down, etc) that cannot be cured with infestor support vs bio, and slower spike dmg vs mech (which may or may not be an issue depending on how well the AI autotargets units).
Secondly, as you said, splash dmg makes the actual dmg output of tanks significantly higher against roaches, so the hp comparison isn't accurate in that regard. Also, roaches do not take dmg as well against other units for obvious reasons, so the hp efficiency of roaches needs to be taken into account here.
I can speak from experience that when going against a fortified position, a certain supply of ultra fair much better than equal supply of roaches, which is more often than not the limiting factor than resources. And I personally feel ultra is more resource efficient, although that is much harder to back up due to it being a situational claim.
As for contribution to the thread, I suggest trying to use ling infestor spread all over the map to control instead of mutas. I think it's a very good alternative. I've been having good success polishing up the ling/infestor + hydra (if necessary)>ultra/bling (delay bling against mech for more ultra, get bling with ultra against bio). I've only lost when I was outplayed, and never because my build progression was weak against any specific build that T may throw out.
On January 25 2011 23:11 DarKFoRcE wrote: Sorry that i have to chime in here again, but i read the rest of the post, and it just tilts me super hard when i read stuff like the following:
"For the majority of his games I was wishing Nestea would abandon his ling/baneling/muta builds and just go for ultralisks."
In my opinion Nestea is currently the best zergplayer, and it seems very strange to me that some rather mediocre player thinks he knows way better than nestea does..
"The first terran push will always come before Ultras are ready, thus a good flank on creep is a necessity. Luckily zergs shouldn't have too many problems with the first push"
Yes, youre right, the first push comes before Ultras. And no, its not easy to defend against if youre heavily investing in your ultra tech and melee/carapace upgrades.
Furthermore, looking at your "battlereports", to me it seems like these games were decided early on, and not by your bright usage of ultralisks.
As i said in my other post, ultras can be useful, but i think you are way exaggerating their usefulness.
Maybe he is "exaggerating", but the main point of the post is: ultras are not useless, they can be very usefull if used with X units against Y composition. I don't think he meant this post to be a revolution on the way ZvT is played, breaking the tabu that ultras are an april fools joke, adding another strategy the zerg players can rely on.
I think its more of the maps that make BroodLords > Ultras. The blizz maps are small with mostly narrow attack lanes with lots of cliffing opportunities. Like people who have been play testing the big new GSL map have indicated, Ultras do much better when spaces are open.
I like the general composition and idea but as DF said, it may be tricky to get there when Terran isn't making mech fail blobs. But such is the problem with coming up with new stuff... I think the unit composition is mutually complementary though because Ultralisks are great against mech due to their super high DPS + splash over time but need to be able to force their way to the key mech units or they are completely useless. Banelings on the other hand have super high burst damage per population point and thus can easily destroy a large portion of the stuff in the way of the ultras but they are single use so they can't finish off what's left over. Put them together and the banelings are able to clear out all the supporting units so the ultras can go right for the Tanks and Thors.
Sure Roaches are good for burst damage but they are 2 food and banelings are .5. Banelings upgrade via melee upgrades and they naturally don't screw up the ultra AI because they all explode so there's nothing for the ultras to get stuck on.
Broodlords are nice if you can use them in such a way where they can't get hit easily but that's not always the case.
Also, while it has been said several times already. Wouldn't it be good to add some roaches in the mix for the midgame push before Ultras?
Not commiting to roaches, just use them to tank the fire damage so that the tanks don't destroy the blings?Roaches do have a nice speed compatibility with Blings and if a terran tries to kite chances are that your roaches will get free shots.Carpace upgrades work pretty well with this.
Anyways, I feel like this is a nice thread, and lets remember that while Pros are better players than us they are still humans. They can make mistakes ,be biased or just didn't think of this. Also we should care about stuff working for us and if something like this stops working at higher levels we just have to adapt.
I am not saying that we know better than pros, but I guess I am tired of people just saying that stuff won't work because Pros aren't doing it.
On January 25 2011 23:11 DarKFoRcE wrote: Yes, youre right, the first push comes before Ultras. And no, its not easy to defend against if youre heavily investing in your ultra tech and melee/carapace upgrades.
In my experience, the midgame push is a lot easier to defend with bling/ling if you've invested in carapace/melee upgrades.
On January 26 2011 03:38 windsupernova wrote: Also, while it has been said several times already. Wouldn't it be good to add some roaches in the mix for the midgame push before Ultras?
Not commiting to roaches, just use them to tank the fire damage so that the tanks don't destroy the blings?Roaches do have a nice speed compatibility with Blings and if a terran tries to kite chances are that your roaches will get free shots.Carpace upgrades work pretty well with this.
Anyways, I feel like this is a nice thread, and lets remember that while Pros are better players than us they are still humans. They can make mistakes ,be biased or just didn't think of this. Also we should care about stuff working for us and if something like this stops working at higher levels we just have to adapt.
I am not saying that we know better than pros, but I guess I am tired of people just saying that stuff won't work because Pros aren't doing it.
terran might get a few marauder to block banelings but if you go roaches as well it might encourage the use of even more marauders which will rip your ultras apart.
You will be weak versus late game Air however, which is a risk.
Aren't infestors with 2.50 Speed a very nice addition, also to stop kiting attempts? You'll be to short on Mutalisk to defend properly and I can think of some ways Infestors can help very, very well. Wasting Siege shots with IT from Burrow, Fungalling Marines, Adding general DPS with ITs?
What do you think about this? Only disadvantage is a lower Gas count to spend, but with 4-5 Infestor in your main army you should be perfectly set for the whole game, if you treat them well?
Cutesmallhydra - badass first guide! Very well written and an interesting change from the "standard" play. I always enjoy seeing original strategies, and I'm looking forward to trying this one out.
Excellent post and fantastic guide.. I only have one 1 question and I did read it twice to make sure it wasn't answered already.
Ultras will tank the damage, their large size means that tank splash won't be landing on many banelings, and thus your banelings are free to target the marines while your ultras handle the tanks.
Do the ultras actually absorb the splash from the tanks more than a smaller unit would? it sounds completely logical, but never thought about it this way.. going heavy baneling its important that the splash is mitigated and if this is the case its brilliant. what is the footprint of an ultra anyway? is it more than 1 block?
On January 26 2011 05:07 bri9and wrote: Excellent post and fantastic guide.. I only have one 1 question and I did read it twice to make sure it wasn't answered already.
Ultras will tank the damage, their large size means that tank splash won't be landing on many banelings, and thus your banelings are free to target the marines while your ultras handle the tanks.
Do the ultras actually absorb the splash from the tanks more than a smaller unit would? it sounds completely logical, but never thought about it this way.. going heavy baneling its important that the splash is mitigated and if this is the case its brilliant. what is the footprint of an ultra anyway? is it more than 1 block?
omg its my birthday in Korea!
I remeber in the old days when the size of the units didn't matter for the splash damage, I even recall a GSL game (I think it was FruitDealer vs oGsTop on scrap station) where FD's Ultras were hitting the PF and the marines that were touching it died from the splash.
When that happened I remeber Tastosis commenting that it was a bug. I think it was fixed, and the splash now considers a certain radio centered on the core of the unit (but I might be wrong on this).
Do the ultras actually absorb the splash from the tanks more than a smaller unit would? it sounds completely logical, but never thought about it this way.. going heavy baneling its important that the splash is mitigated and if this is the case its brilliant. what is the footprint of an ultra anyway? is it more than 1 block?
omg its my birthday in Korea!
Happy Bday!
and Yes, blizz did fix at one point in the beta where splash damage is centered. Found it from patch 11:
We have changed how splash works for several units across the game to make it always hit the dead center of the target unit. Previously splash was centered on the front of the target unit. This makes splash generally more effective, though against certain large targets (buildings, Thors, Ultralisks) you will now not get any splash damage since the splash radius will be contained entirely within the radius of the large target.
On January 26 2011 03:38 windsupernova wrote: Also, while it has been said several times already. Wouldn't it be good to add some roaches in the mix for the midgame push before Ultras?
Not commiting to roaches, just use them to tank the fire damage so that the tanks don't destroy the blings?Roaches do have a nice speed compatibility with Blings and if a terran tries to kite chances are that your roaches will get free shots.Carpace upgrades work pretty well with this.
Anyways, I feel like this is a nice thread, and lets remember that while Pros are better players than us they are still humans. They can make mistakes ,be biased or just didn't think of this. Also we should care about stuff working for us and if something like this stops working at higher levels we just have to adapt.
I am not saying that we know better than pros, but I guess I am tired of people just saying that stuff won't work because Pros aren't doing it.
terran might get a few marauder to block banelings but if you go roaches as well it might encourage the use of even more marauders which will rip your ultras apart.
And then lings and mutas will rip the T to shreds. Ling muta vs marauder tank is a slaughter.
Do the ultras actually absorb the splash from the tanks more than a smaller unit would? it sounds completely logical, but never thought about it this way.. going heavy baneling its important that the splash is mitigated and if this is the case its brilliant. what is the footprint of an ultra anyway? is it more than 1 block?
omg its my birthday in Korea!
Happy Bday!
and Yes, blizz did fix at one point in the beta where splash damage is centered. Found it from patch 11:
We have changed how splash works for several units across the game to make it always hit the dead center of the target unit. Previously splash was centered on the front of the target unit. This makes splash generally more effective, though against certain large targets (buildings, Thors, Ultralisks) you will now not get any splash damage since the splash radius will be contained entirely within the radius of the large target.
Excellent, thank you.. So not only will they mitigate the damage from the tanks, they will eat it entirely! thats huge.. Now as far as priority is concerned, if the tanks are left to AI control, I assume they will also naturally target the ultras given that they are the biggest threat. Can anyone confirm?
I can make ultras, destroy the T army, and then reinforce the Ultras. The big advice people would give against turtle terrans is go broodlord to force vikings and then reinforce with Ultras. Umm... Ultras have a 70 second build time. I don't know about any of you zergs, but anytime I've tried going ultra after broodlord... I died. Why? Because broodlords don't tank your damage, and allow your ling/bling army to die. After the broodlords are dead to vikings, the terran still has a rine/tank army that your ling/bling failed to kill and are able to kill off your expansions one by one as you twiddle your thumbs waiting for ultralisks to spawn.
This is like a summary of every single one of my late-game losses to Terran. I think what makes Terran so disgustingly infuriating to play against is the fact that they can pull of ridiculous early aggression and still compete in these late macro games.
If incorporating ultralisks into my army before the trade/remax phase of ZvT starts is the answer to this (as opposed to remaxing WITH ultralisks), they're my new favorite unit.
I've noticed that some people are mentioning the use of infestors, and I want to experiment with that too. I feel like infestors might help shut down the medivac harass that's causing you some trouble. Additionally, infestors are strong against bio, necessary against marine stim micro and decent against large numbers of thors because of NP (which you probably won't see, considering you didn't go heavy mutalisk). Finally, getting infestors at lair tech instead of the spire will get you hive faster.
As for contribution to the thread, I suggest trying to use ling infestor spread all over the map to control instead of mutas. I think it's a very good alternative. I've been having good success polishing up the ling/infestor + hydra (if necessary)>ultra/bling (delay bling against mech for more ultra, get bling with ultra against bio). I've only lost when I was outplayed, and never because my build progression was weak against any specific build that T may throw out.
Being a fan of ling/infestor/hydra myself, thanks for offering up that alternative to muta/sling/bling. I've definitely had many games where I hold on with ling/infestor/hydra until I can get ultras or broods out. I kind of did it randomly without thinking too much about trying the bling/ultra combo, something this thread has definitely convinced me to try out.
Regarding ling/infestor/hydra one of its huge strengths against bio I've noticed, is its ability to just rip up medivacs hardcore. I hate it when I stop a terran bio push with sling/bling and the medivacs just fly away! Also, hydra are pretty decent at finishing off a bunch of wounded infantry as well. Its a unit composition that is really easy to screw up though I've noticed, without perfect micro, so thus far I am not very consistent with it, often times wishing I had just made speed banelings.
When I get hive, I almost always get broodlords over ultras, especially when terran is going marine/tank, for a few reasons:
1. broodlords tank way more cost-effectively than ultras, for quite a few reasons: - they fly, ultras don't; as a result, broodlords aren't affected by tank fire at all. - they have range 9, ultras are melee - every time broodlords attack, broodlings are 'spawned' instantly in melee range, which means they don't have to travel to get into melee range (unlike ultras), and also means that broodlords/broodlings draw friendly tank fire more quickly & efficiently than ultras. Notice that when you attack a staggered siege tank line with ultras, terran goes and stims his marines and runs back, and when you attack a staggered siege tank line with broodlords, terran goes 'OH SHIT UN-SIEGE AND HAUL ASS NOW' - broodlings are free and instant with every broodlord attack, ultras cost resources & time...A LOT of resources & time. Let me emphasize here, until terran gets vikings, broodlords are constantly reinforcing instantly and for free. I mention this because you talk about reinforcing...NO unit reinforces as efficiently as broodlords, it's not even close. - tanks do bonus damage vs armored, ultras are armored, broodlings are not. You're actually lowering a marine/tank army's overall damage if you use broodlords over ultras.
2. ultras require upgrades to be effective, broodlords don't, however that leads to my next reason...
3. broodlords benefit from melee/carapace AND air upgrades, whereas ultras only benefit from melee/carapace upgrades. Thus, when you go muta/ling/bane mid-game, your upgrades match up, and as a result late-game broodlords actually synergize better with muta/ling/bane than ultras do.
The only drawback is that broodlords are more vulnerable to vikings, however if you are ahead in bases and don't throw away your muta ball in the mid-game, you can use your mutas to defend your broodlords.
My ideal late-game army against marine/tank is fully upgraded crackling/bane, my ball of mutas (anywhere from 15-30 mutas), and 4-6 broodlords, with level 2 air attack upgrade (once greater spire finishes, I can resume upgrading air armor as gas allows).
Now if terran starts to overproduce vikings to counter my broodlords, at that point I'll switch to ultralisks.
I saw this exact strat in an older Day [9] video. The guy held to terran down with ling/bling and teched until ultras at which point he rolled over the terran army.
tanks do bonus damage vs armored, ultras are armored, broodlings are not. You're actually lowering a marine/tank army's overall damage if you use broodlords over ultras
Actually, this is false. Tank damage is so high because of splash and almost nothing else. Their single target damage to armored targets in siege mode is actually less than their unsieged DPS. Ultralisks, when hit by tanks, are so large they absorb ALL splash. A tank shot hitting an ultralisk will result in 0 zergling or baneling deaths. A tank shot hitting a broodling will probably spill over onto zerglings and banelings.
ultras require upgrades to be effective, broodlords don't, however that leads to my next reason...
The downside is that broodlords are slower.
A greater spire takes 100 seconds to morph. An ultralisk cavern takes only 65 seconds. Granted, the upgrade does take 110 seconds to finish. However, if you start the upgrade once the cavern completes, that means that your first round of ultras will have the upgrade within 40 seconds after spawning.
If you add the build time of a corruptor to the time it takes to morph a broodlord, it's actually 4 seconds longer than the build time of an ultralisk (74 seconds). Something for your consideration:
Cavern+armor upgrade= 175 seconds (ultralisks are out by 135 seconds) Greater spire+corruptor build time+morph time= 184 seconds
Ultralisks are also much less vulnerable to marines after the upgrade. A fully-upgraded ultralisk against a fully upgraded marine will only take 3 damage a shot.
broodlords benefit from melee/carapace AND air upgrades, whereas ultras only benefit from melee/carapace upgrades. Thus, when you go muta/ling/bane mid-game, your upgrades match up, and as a result late-game broodlords actually synergize better with muta/ling/bane than ultras do.
Broodlords don't synergize better, they just synergize. Ultralisks share all the same upgrades too. If you don't go mutalisk heavy, spending money on air upgrades isn't necessary, which offsets (imo) the cost of the ultralisk armor upgrade. Why spend 100/100 or more on air attack upgrades if you'll only build 8-12 mutalisks all game long?
The only drawback is that broodlords are more vulnerable to vikings, however if you are ahead in bases and don't throw away your muta ball in the mid-game, you can use your mutas to defend your broodlords.
This isn't always the case. Often, vikings are parked on top of thors next to tanks. A broodlord will take damage from vikings and if mutalisks intervene, they'll eat thor missile damage. Corruptors are a slightly better response, due to being armored and have 2 base armor. If he doesn't have any thors, then yes, you're correct... but can you really remember any times you've come up against a late-game Terran without thor support?
Personally, I think it might be better to give switching the tech a shot. Start with a couple ultralisks and then switch into broodlords to help unsiege tanks and then swarm in with a couple ultralisks to take shots while the ling/baneling cleans up. I still think the OP's use of ultralisks shows promise.
I would have to say that I think you won because of good micro. Since your "positioning" was so good in the beginning, that caused you to be able to hold off potential game winning pushes. The terran's "positioning" was not as good. It's a good strategy(after reading the whole post i applaud you very much), and i am definitely not saying it's bad. It's just that it can be countered, then its up to micro to win. In other words, it's a good strategy made almost OP by micro.
Even if they did Selkie, the ultras would have soaked a ton of tank damage running in first and the banelings would be detonating by the time the thors were in range to use the cannon, and it doesn't stun the ultras so they'd keep charging until dead.
I do something like this guide says. I make tons of lings and a few banelings, maybe a few infestors. I use all my gas on upgrades and infestors while expanding. How do I expand with just ling baneling? Tons of nydus worms. Sometimes I'll throw down 2 nydus and attack 2 different spots while using creep to defend. I expand while this is happening while teching to hive. IF I don't win while nydusing (happens a lot) then when they finally attack after fending off the nydus worms i'll have a ton of ling/baneling/ultras - usually fully upgraded. Baneling/Ultra has worked amazingly well. I would watch the battle happening - and all of the sudden a group of marines would just explode. It's hard to see the banelings under like 4 ultras. It's almost like the ultras having baneling tusks or something.
I don't think you even need many banelings. I usually have like 10~ banelings with a maxed army.
I'm in platinum- should be in diamond(lag problems).
Finally a zerg who doesn't think that Ultralisks are useless. I use ultras all the time because they tank so well and do extremelly well if you get a surround which isn't that hard. Hot key the lings, blings, and Ultras, and send them from 3 different directions. Boom, you have ultras just raping mmm.
I've only read the first page lol but I feel this kind of similar. Im top plat so I'm not sure if this would work higher... But my composition was ultra hydras (hydras are my favorite units and I was doing hydra nydus vs toss before the pros were ) the only purpose for the ultras to tank the take fire so my hydras weren't melted. The reason I had hydras were cuz he opened fast banshees so he scouted the hydra den but didn't think twice about it. After the game he typed in that he's never played that composition before. As long as its unexpected does that composition have validity? Bcuz the hydras only real weakness vs t are tanks....
On January 25 2011 17:02 jgreen46 wrote: ok maybe its not common knowledge but Ultralisk is the definitive counter to large amounts of tanks and Thors (though I'm sure with good Thunderstrike Canon use thors can do decent vs ultralisk). I thought people knew it, this was something we figured out in beta and early on in sc2. Fruit Dealer was known for using some ultralisks vs mech.
Ultras are not nearly as good vs lower tier units.
As soon as the terran plays MMM (and perhaps its one of the reasons we see so much MMM) the ultralisk's value because pretty worthless as upgraded bio destroys ultralisks (and just about anything else that moves).
Tanks are nearly worthless vs ultralisks (their armor is too high and the tanks attack speed too low), and ultralisks are nearly worthless vs bio (dps is tooo high on single targets, very easy to stim and kite).
rofl do you honestly know what you are talking about? Stop trying to mislead people. I'm sure you haven't tried this yourself. I know through tons of games that equal supply tanks absolutely decimate ultras if they engage sieged tanks from their maximum range. Of course if you are talking about flanking or 20 ultras vs 10 tanks or something like outnumbered ultras that would be a different story.
If you still don't believe me, try this in the unit tester, 30 tanks (90 supply) vs 20 ultras (120 supply) and tell me which side wins. (Bare in mind that this is not even equal supply and the current map pool provides very few open fields)
Gotta say I love this post. Even as a lower level silver player, this is the one build I stumbled upon that has killed an MM Tank Terran without terrible micro on his part (although I'm certain bad positioning on my part doesn't help). Thank you for refining the concept and laying it out for all zergy friends to see.
Thanks for showing this to everyone. It is a very impressive writeup. I'm fucking tired of zergs saying NO ULTRALISKS suck. I've found that the best way to stop it is to engage in narrow areas with planetaries, 6-8 tanks (mostly for banelings), a couple of thors then MMM micro the ultras around narrow areas near your PFs.
We tried going in to unit test map trying EVERY reasonable unit compositions against ultras but came up with nothing for terran, though, protoss could stop them using archon, immortal, stalker, collosi.
I can not look at replays on this computer, however I do need something clarified.
The intention of this strategy is to do a normal mid-game of Muta/Ling/Bling (or what have you) and transition into Ultra/Bling/Some Muta 200/200 army, push the bioball/mech/biomech/etc, and once army trades, mass out max supply of Lings again and push with the damaged Ultras and Zerglings, 300 food push style?
I've been trying out this composition out over the last couple of days and I have to say I like it a lot. Some things I've tweaked to make it work for my playstyle.
1.) Skip mutas. I've mainly worked on delaying the spire for as long as possible, getting corruptors just to stop banshees, overlord hunting vikings and drops, it's a much more efficient use of the gas and the corruptors are able to take a LOT of marine fire so they can be used in the middle of a huge ground fight without getting picked off easily. Overall I have to spend less gas on them and it allows me to put that to better uses on the way to ultras. In the late game when the ultras are out, they contribute more to damage against ground targets than mutas ever could because of corruption. Corruption is also really handy if you need to take down a marine thor army before the ultras arrive, it takes quite a few less banelings to drop them which usually give you enough left over to finish off the marines if you aren't very far behind. There's also the fact that shonig him corruptors gives him the idea that you might be transitioning into broodlords, which may make him build useless vikings.
2.) 3 - 4 infestors just before hive to keep me alive. I don't buy pathogen glands because I won't be replenishing them if they die and they aren't a crucial unit in my composition.
3.) Around when the ultralisk den is about to finish I train a new queen for every hatch I have and bring all my queens to the front so that they can transfuse the surviving ultralisks after the first engagement. This keeps my ultralisks fresh for every engagement and makes good use of the excess minerals I'll have stockpiled by this point.
4.) I still use lings in this composition, but mainly as a clean up force, they arrive after the majority of the damage has been done to clean up stragglers cost effectively and be present to morph into the next wave of banelings. I also sometimes use them to hit exposed expansions or for drops.
In those last two pictures, terran made the mistake of sieging tanks against ultras. That's a big nono. I think with that many tanks, the ultras would have died if they had not sieged. Also, once I see a zerg going ultra, I switch to more marauders and possibly thor with 250mm cannon.
Essentially, for 100 minerals extra, Ultras get 100 more HP and 15 more damage against armored. A very goo deal.
Compare that to the tank (which was BW's only way of dealing with ultras):
Siege Tanks used to 70 damage against ultras. Now they do 50. Siege Tanks cost 3 supply Siege Tanks cost 25 more gas
You're also missing the size difference (nerfed too big) the extra supply (6 instead of 4) and the speed difference (imagine if ultras moved as fast as non-upgraded lings do)
I personally would take the BW ultra over the SC2 ultra any day.
On January 26 2011 13:04 azn_dude1 wrote: In those last two pictures, terran made the mistake of sieging tanks against ultras. That's a big nono. I think with that many tanks, the ultras would have died if they had not sieged. Also, once I see a zerg going ultra, I switch to more marauders and possibly thor with 250mm cannon.
I honestly never face ultras in ladder. That being said, I think sieged tanks are essential to stopping banelings. But it might pay off to unseige some tanks as you said; its something worth checking out. Also, it's difficult to switch to marauder production after going marine tank because (at least for me personally) most barracks have reactors, not tech labs. 250 mm cannon is an interesting idea though.
On January 25 2011 17:02 jgreen46 wrote: ok maybe its not common knowledge but Ultralisk is the definitive counter to large amounts of tanks and Thors (though I'm sure with good Thunderstrike Canon use thors can do decent vs ultralisk). I thought people knew it, this was something we figured out in beta and early on in sc2. Fruit Dealer was known for using some ultralisks vs mech.
Ultras are not nearly as good vs lower tier units.
As soon as the terran plays MMM (and perhaps its one of the reasons we see so much MMM) the ultralisk's value because pretty worthless as upgraded bio destroys ultralisks (and just about anything else that moves).
Tanks are nearly worthless vs ultralisks (their armor is too high and the tanks attack speed too low), and ultralisks are nearly worthless vs bio (dps is tooo high on single targets, very easy to stim and kite).
rofl do you honestly know what you are talking about? Stop trying to mislead people. I'm sure you haven't tried this yourself. I know through tons of games that equal supply tanks absolutely decimate ultras if they engage sieged tanks from their maximum range. Of course if you are talking about flanking or 20 ultras vs 10 tanks or something like outnumbered ultras that would be a different story.
If you still don't believe me, try this in the unit tester, 30 tanks (90 supply) vs 20 ultras (120 supply) and tell me which side wins. (Bare in mind that this is not even equal supply and the current map pool provides very few open fields)
it says in the OP MULTIPLE times that ultras are worthless by themselves and are only there to tank for the sling bling. are you fucking blind or just to lazy to read it?
It APPEARS you are saying ling/bane/muta are ineffective and should not be favored over Ultra/bane, but it is clear that we must get to that composition first to safely secure a T3 tech
Well I just give a try twice today.. And it worked wonderful, I think this is game changing :-) Just in case someone care, it was on Blistering Sands and he has like 6 tanks and took the center, so I just walked toward the victory (as Jimmy did with roaches XD) with something like 6 ultras tanking damage and tons of bans + lings with carapece upgrade :D
Great read, I agree with you. I play random, and I always hate the ZvT and TvZ matchups. it always feela to me that T either wins with some cheesy stuff or a marine tank push, or Zerg makes successful muta harrasses that keeps T in the base. Personally, I hate depending on mutas, because they cost so much and are too fragile in a battle.
I've been doing essentially what you wrote recently, getting bored of mutas. I personally try to tech to infesgors quickly, and use them with banes and lings to keep killing off their supply of marines. Then as soon as I get like five ultras out with a near max army, I can typically just make a deathpush. works like a charm.
You made an excellent point regarding the ultras sucking up the majority of splash damage: something I never thought of. Excellent strategy, I hope I can give it a whirl soon
great guide, thanks! i am only a plat zerg but i've been using a similar strat quite often vs terran recently. if the terran is on only 2 bases and fully turtled with bunkers and turrets i sometimes skip mutas completely, race to ultras and make a ton of ling/bling. if i do make mutas i make only 6-8 to harass and then race to ultras. upgrades are important for this strat - it's so awesome to watch a 3/3 ultra/crackling/bling force chew easily thru anything terran puts up
OK - earnt myself a nice 13 pts with my 2/5 ultra/ling/bling into 0/0 tank and marines...
wasnt really a good showcase of the strength of this build but definitely will be putting it in my stratedgy bag... shame I can't get ultras to work well vs P - the pathing infuriates me
Last night I got the chance to try using Ultralisks as suggested here. We spawned at close positions on Shakuras plateau, and I went ling/bling/infestor/muta - just a couple of infestors to help delay any pushes and to help justify the cost of going for hive relatively early. He went marine/tank/medivac and tried to push in through the rocks at the back. We traded armies a couple of times while my ultralisk cavern was building and upgrading, and while my five ultralisks were spawning, and it felt exactly like every other ZvT I've played lately: I was able to hold him off (especially with the infestors) but I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere.
This thread had led me to believe that an ultralisk/baneling attack would be different: that the ultralisk's size and threat priority would cause them to absorb the withering combined damage output of tanks and marines, allowing more of the banelings to get through and do damage.
That's not what happened.
What happened was that versus eight sieged tanks and whatever's-left-over supply of marines, pretty much none of the banelings managed to miss.
The corner of my base which had until a moment before contained the accumulated might of the Terran empire now looked like Silent Hill - if Silent Hill had four slightly scuffed ultralisks stamping around in it - with the essentially atomised constituent parts of my opponent drifting down on top of them like very surprised dandruff.
And thirty seconds later I had the same army ready to go all over again.
In summary, this is an alarmingly effective technique. I recommend protective goggles.
Ultras are actually fairly nice as long as you have some banelings to get the small units like Marines out of the way... Against Tanks and Thors, Ultralisks do a good job.
the main problem with ultras in sc2 is that they lack something very important that they did have in sc1 - dark swarm. this just makes them extremely vulnerable to marauders and siege tanks. most of the time winning with ultralisks means you were doing great anyway, and swapping out of ling roach bling infestor muta wasn't needed anyway.
Essentially, for 100 minerals extra, Ultras get 100 more HP and 15 more damage against armored. A very goo deal.
Compare that to the tank (which was BW's only way of dealing with ultras):
Siege Tanks used to 70 damage against ultras. Now they do 50. Siege Tanks cost 3 supply Siege Tanks cost 25 more gas
All of which are true statements, but you omit the fact that the SCII ultralisk has had a speedreduction, and this is where it's faults lie. The ultralisk was not in Broodwar built to kill off the terran in direct confrontation, but to outmaneuver his slow forces, striking different points, poking holes in his defense, and killing/stalling expansions etc. This way when the battles came, the zerg would have more resources for resupply, (and could do so faster) than the terran, even though his army was quite a bit stronger than zerg's.
[quote=SmallCuteHydra]All games discussed from here on out will be between Master level players averaging 2500-3000 pts as of current date (Jan 24th).[/quote]
I almost stopped reading here. What a load of elitist horseshit really. Why can't us plat and now diamond players dicuss (or even lower)? We have brains too, but maybe not the game time to get the hours played to reach high level Master league. We might not have super crisp timing either, but we can still put together a combined forced to deal with something.
The elitist shit aside I would say that this is a great write up of the experience you have with it. And after reading it yesterday I ended up testing it out against a Terran player that went for Marines\Maurauders and Tanks and it worked great.
Personally I ended up with Infestors instead of having Mutas because I wanted to trap him a posistion where he could not get a nice arch around me. I noticed that it worked great not only because it made the day easier for my banelings. But also because fungal deals AoE dmg. Since the Ultra also deals AoE damage it ended up killing large amount of units fast. The end result was that he lost to much fire power to deal with Ultras and Zerglings at the same time.
Just getting yourself into a good posistion and sending in the units here doesn't require amazing APM either. It's more about reading the terrain and say "This is where I want to fight", and often more important "I don't want to fight here".
On January 25 2011 11:27 SmallCuteHydra wrote: All games discussed from here on out will be between Master level players averaging 2500-3000 pts as of current date (Jan 24th).
I almost stopped reading here. What a load of elitist horseshit really. Why can't us plat and now diamond players dicuss (or even lower)? We have brains too, but maybe not the game time to get the hours played to reach high level Master league. We might not have super crisp timing either, but we can still put together a combined forced to deal with something.
Did you even consider that he might just be talking about the games discussed in his post?
On January 26 2011 23:57 mastman wrote: Fruitdealer was on to something in the first GSL when he used ultras all the time?
I can't remember the games exactly, but no. To my recollection he massed ultralisks, relying upon them to do damage as well as soak it up. This thread advocates combining a more modest number of ultralisks with a considerable number of banelings. The ultralisks stop the banelings getting gibbed before they get in range, and the banelings kill everything so quickly that the ultralisks don't end up taking as much damage. Result: some ultralisks left over which can be quickly reinforced with more banelings to lead a second charge.
@SchLing yeah he was totally talking about his discussion of his games. Cool down man. I'm Bronze and I deal with way more crap than anything you insinuated. OP has really put up something constructive here.
FD was using bugged ultras. But ultras have been useful ever since the removal of speed upgrade (or rather, at least I have been using ultras since the removal of speed upgrade).
On January 25 2011 11:27 SmallCuteHydra wrote: All games discussed from here on out will be between Master level players averaging 2500-3000 pts as of current date (Jan 24th).
I almost stopped reading here. What a load of elitist horseshit really. Why can't us plat and now diamond players dicuss (or even lower)? We have brains too, but maybe not the game time to get the hours played to reach high level Master league. We might not have super crisp timing either, but we can still put together a combined forced to deal with something.
Did you even consider that he might just be talking about the games discussed in his post?
Maybe, I just didn't read it like that. I do hope you are right though
ive read ur post and frankly, I'm not convinced precisely because that ultra/bling costs a LOT of gas. I would prefer just going mass ultra ling and instead of ling/bling/muta for unit comp i simply go for ling/bling/roach and later ling/bling/roach/infestor into ling/ultra because ultras already have the splash damage which kills marines and lings can kill tanks easily. mutas get splash killed by 3-4 thors which leaves the rest of the ling/bling army stranded.and also u never mentioned the all heavy army which consists of mainly thors and marauders that take the hit for banelings and the rest of the ultra army would be cleaned up by the marauders heavy hits. if u can explain to me how u can get enough gas for this ill be happy 2600~ master z
On January 27 2011 00:19 itsme wrote: ive read ur post and frankly, I'm not convinced precisely because that ultra/bling costs a LOT of gas. I would prefer just going mass ultra ling and instead of ling/bling/muta for unit comp i simply go for ling/bling/roach and later ling/bling/roach/infestor into ling/ultra because ultras already have the splash damage which kills marines and lings can kill tanks easily. mutas get splash killed by 3-4 thors which leaves the rest of the ling/bling army stranded.and also u never mentioned the all heavy army which consists of mainly thors and marauders that take the hit for banelings and the rest of the ultra army would be cleaned up by the marauders heavy hits. if u can explain to me how u can get enough gas for this ill be happy 2600~ master z
If he goes heavy on marauder/thors; I would say that muta/ling infestor is your best bet. I like the OPs suggestion and would find it interesting to see it put to test by some good players; but its not an end-all-supersolution-to-everything idea. If you are looking for that sort of thing you should play terran...
And the problem with ultra/ling is that lings get in the way of Ultras, which has been known since Beta, and in suggesting such you bascially disregard most of what the OP is trying to achieve. The baneling-approach is a new one though, so it would be interesting to see it tested out by ppl who are big enough authorities to end this discussion one way or another.
As for mutas vs Thors; i think you need 4 or 5 magic-boxed mutas to kill a thor, so if they go marauder without marines they will still loose to muta/ling; although this is the one rare case where I think infestors can use NP with good effect.
I'm pretty sure ultras can attack over 1 row of lings now. I will have to check replays to confirm, but I'm fairly confident that is the case.
As for gas, while my progression isn't quite the same as the OPs, I've felt that 2 base support infestor/hydra (a handful of each) + upgrades easily, then start teching to ultra as you are grabbing the 3rd. 3 bases for ultra, 4 bases for bling.
Again with 250mm cannon- I use thors a LOT (indeed, my comp almost looks like thor-marine), and as such, my opponents frequently get ultras against me (as I wage a macro war against zerg). 250mm cannon essentially one-shots ultralisks (In unit tester, 250mm strike cannon dealt 498 damage to an ultra)- with all the other booms and bangs in a battle, that means one-shotting. Yes, they're still moving and still attacking while the fight's occuring, but as it's occuring in a choke, and I usually have as many thors as my opponent has ultras, they have 6 seconds of fame before melting. Thors, in general, also eat banelings really well, but I'm unsure nowadays if that'd be as effective, as my entire army recently got decimated by banelings in a fight.
On January 26 2011 23:57 mastman wrote: Fruitdealer was on to something in the first GSL when he used ultras all the time?
I can't remember the games exactly, but no. To my recollection he massed ultralisks, relying upon them to do damage as well as soak it up. This thread advocates combining a more modest number of ultralisks with a considerable number of banelings. The ultralisks stop the banelings getting gibbed before they get in range, and the banelings kill everything so quickly that the ultralisks don't end up taking as much damage. Result: some ultralisks left over which can be quickly reinforced with more banelings to lead a second charge.
I remember being particularly impressed by Fruitdealer's use of ultras, it seemed like he had a much deeper understanding of how to use them than anyone else at the time. Here's game 1 of the final:
He relies on his patented ling/bling/roach/infestor composition during the mid-game (with a few mutas thrown in), and then starts mixing ultras in. At no point is he going pure ultralisk, although he didn't really use the ultra/bane combo. To be fair, this is before terrans started pressuring the shit out of zergs, so the whole character of the game is a bit different.
On January 26 2011 23:57 mastman wrote: Fruitdealer was on to something in the first GSL when he used ultras all the time?
I can't remember the games exactly, but no. To my recollection he massed ultralisks, relying upon them to do damage as well as soak it up. This thread advocates combining a more modest number of ultralisks with a considerable number of banelings. The ultralisks stop the banelings getting gibbed before they get in range, and the banelings kill everything so quickly that the ultralisks don't end up taking as much damage. Result: some ultralisks left over which can be quickly reinforced with more banelings to lead a second charge.
I remember being particularly impressed by Fruitdealer's use of ultras, it seemed like he had a much deeper understanding of how to use them than anyone else at the time. Here's game 1 of the final:
He relies on his patented ling/bling/roach/infestor composition during the mid-game (with a few mutas thrown in), and then starts mixing ultras in. At no point is he going pure ultralisk, although he didn't really use the ultra/bane combo. To be fair, this is before terrans started pressuring the shit out of zergs, so the whole character of the game is a bit different.
I kinda laugh when people talk about how prolific FruitDealers winning GSL1 was. The game has gotten so much difference in those 3 months, its pretty laughable to see Rainbow sitting around in his base with tank/thor/whatever?
Just goes to show the biggest factor that helped FD win the first GSL is that nobody knew wtf they were doing.
IF you have time and the possibility to have ultras (3 running bases with 6 gas at least) I'll definetely agree to have them against T. As long as you don't see them as your damage dealers but as the damage soakers and the front busting units. Having 60+ banelings is quite easy on that many bases, and with a proper execution, they arrives after the first tank volley.
Seeing the cost of the ultralisk, I definetely agree that you can't reinforce with ultralisks everytime. But by the time you have busted the terran front, map is now open for your lings/roach/whatever.
On a side note, I lol'd so hard at the "Damn." picture. The first time we broke a front with a Z friend with alot (25 total) ultras with over 9000 banelings because we were raging effin' hard in our anticipating "HOW COULD WE WIN THIS" end of the game, we were stunned. Then we lol'd.
I do believe the effectiveness of your play is due to the crazy amount of banelings you create. Banelings have the highest burst damage in the game which is why the army dies in a "burst". Ultras may act as a tank for the siege tank shots, but really, is it worth the cost of 300-200?
tanks do bonus damage vs armored, ultras are armored, broodlings are not. You're actually lowering a marine/tank army's overall damage if you use broodlords over ultras
Actually, this is false. Tank damage is so high because of splash and almost nothing else. Their single target damage to armored targets in siege mode is actually less than their unsieged DPS. Ultralisks, when hit by tanks, are so large they absorb ALL splash. A tank shot hitting an ultralisk will result in 0 zergling or baneling deaths. A tank shot hitting a broodling will probably spill over onto zerglings and banelings.
How is a tank shot hitting a broodling going to do splash damage to zerglings & banelings? Broodlings spawn right next to their target in melee range; do you pull back your broodlings and group them with your other units? rofl, of course not. Tank shots hitting broodlings will only splash other broodlings (and tanks, and marines). Who cares if splash damage is hitting free units? Every point of damage that broodlings take, is wasted terran damage. I maintain that tanks will do less damage to your army overall if you're using broodlords over ultras.
ultras require upgrades to be effective, broodlords don't, however that leads to my next reason...
The downside is that broodlords are slower.
A greater spire takes 100 seconds to morph. An ultralisk cavern takes only 65 seconds. Granted, the upgrade does take 110 seconds to finish. However, if you start the upgrade once the cavern completes, that means that your first round of ultras will have the upgrade within 40 seconds after spawning.
If you add the build time of a corruptor to the time it takes to morph a broodlord, it's actually 4 seconds longer than the build time of an ultralisk (74 seconds). Something for your consideration:
Cavern+armor upgrade= 175 seconds (ultralisks are out by 135 seconds) Greater spire+corruptor build time+morph time= 184 seconds
Your math is wrong. You can build your corruptors while the greater spire is building, so that they're ready to morph as soon as the greater spire completes. So actually it's just greater spire + morph time = 134, which makes them about even if you don't wait for the armor upgrade, and makes ultras significantly slower if you do.
Either way, that doesn't change the fact that ultras require upgrades to be effective, broodlords don't.
broodlords benefit from melee/carapace AND air upgrades, whereas ultras only benefit from melee/carapace upgrades. Thus, when you go muta/ling/bane mid-game, your upgrades match up, and as a result late-game broodlords actually synergize better with muta/ling/bane than ultras do.
Broodlords don't synergize better, they just synergize. Ultralisks share all the same upgrades too. If you don't go mutalisk heavy, spending money on air upgrades isn't necessary, which offsets (imo) the cost of the ultralisk armor upgrade. Why spend 100/100 or more on air attack upgrades if you'll only build 8-12 mutalisks all game long?
it's debatable, but I believe even without air upgrades, broodlords benefit more from melee/carapace upgrades than ultras do. So even if you don't get air upgrades, broodlords scale better.
besides, anything more than 10 mutas, and you should be getting level 1 air attack anyway.
The only drawback is that broodlords are more vulnerable to vikings, however if you are ahead in bases and don't throw away your muta ball in the mid-game, you can use your mutas to defend your broodlords.
This isn't always the case. Often, vikings are parked on top of thors next to tanks. A broodlord will take damage from vikings and if mutalisks intervene, they'll eat thor missile damage. Corruptors are a slightly better response, due to being armored and have 2 base armor. If he doesn't have any thors, then yes, you're correct... but can you really remember any times you've come up against a late-game Terran without thor support?
Uh, throwing away your mutas is a big mistake. You can always avoid such a mistake. So yes, it is always the case. Muta + a few corruptors can handle vikings long enough for your broodlords to do their damage.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, are you saying because of 1-3 thors on the field, that the drawbacks of broodlord outweigh the drawbacks of ultras? Let me remind you of some of the commonly-mentioned ultra drawbacks, NONE of which broodlords have:
-can't fly; very slow off creep -requires at least 2-2 in melee/carapace to be cost-effective -melee only -too big, gets stuck on units and runs around dealing no damage. -as a result of the above two, ultras are completely useless in a choke. This one deserves special mention, it means that unless you're fighting in an open area, ultras' effectiveness are severely reduced; broodlords don't have this problem at all.
Compared to the drawbacks of broodlords:
-slower than on-creep ultras -vulnerable to vikings
These points have been made over and over again, by ladder & tournament players alike.
Another thing that favors broodlords: ultras don't force the terran to get a different unit, whereas brood lords force terran to get vikings, which are basically useful only for countering the brood lords.
On January 26 2011 08:26 Toxigen wrote: Personally, I think it might be better to give switching the tech a shot. Start with a couple ultralisks and then switch into broodlords to help unsiege tanks and then swarm in with a couple ultralisks to take shots while the ling/baneling cleans up. I still think the OP's use of ultralisks shows promise.
ultras can certainly be useful, but never as good as broodlords as a first hive tech choice. There's a reason why zerg will almost always opt for broodlords over ultras when they get hive. Actually, there's many reasons, they've all been known for the longest time, I just reiterated them in my post to remind our readers. Because of all of those reasons, the advantages of choosing broodlords first greatly outweigh the advantages of choosing ultras first. But I do think that switching to ultras when terran starts getting a huge fleet of vikings is a good idea.
That was quite a long post, but I wanted to address the each of the points that were made.
Just goes to show the biggest factor that helped FD win the first GSL is that nobody knew wtf they were doing.
Sure, but that's what made it so impressive. He was clearly on a different level to anyone else at the time. I remember watching his games and thinking: "this is incredible, nobody in SC2 plays zerg anything like this".
Blasius, maybe you should post replays like CuteSmallHydra did, otherwise it sounds like pure theorycrafting. I have tested (both Brood and Ultras) and I prefer fast (in the meaning of the tech time) Ultras than Brood. But maybe I'm doing something wrong with my Brood..
As a terran, unless you have an overwhelming amount of mutas, i'm just gonna go ram my entire army into your base and suck up the losses back home. If you are teching that early to ultras you aren't gonna have much out, if you don't have many mutas i can just load up medivacs and drop everything in your main.
Large numbers of mutas are scary, large numbers of banes are scary, large numbers of any zerg unit are scary. It seems like you will be deliberately sitting on lower supply to leave room for your ultras while I'll just keep going for max, if i notice that your army is smaller than mine..... ill go ram my shit down your throat.
Perhaps I've misunderstood the strat, but low muta numbers means i can just make a bunch of vikings or 1 thor and be completely safe at home and able to expand and attack with impunity. If you only have ling/bane to defend with, tanks will crush it. You will be dead before you can get enough Ultras out for them to be effective. 2-3 ultras aren't scary at all, 10 ultras are scary.
How is a tank shot hitting a broodling going to do splash damage to zerglings & banelings? Broodlings spawn right next to their target in melee range; do you pull back your broodlings and group them with your other units? rofl, of course not. Tank shots hitting broodlings will only splash other broodlings (and tanks, and marines). Who cares if splash damage is hitting free units? Every point of damage that broodlings take, is wasted terran damage. I maintain that tanks will do less damage to your army overall if you're using broodlords over ultras.
This is true if you're not engaging with the rest of your army.
However, once (if?) you actually engage, you're still getting splashed. 35+ damage splashed around a ball of lings (or targeting a broodling and splashing onto a ling trying to get in range) is way more damage (and DPS lost) overall than a 500 hit point ultralisk losing a 10% of his life.
The fact of the matter is, ultralisks help mitigate splash which is the number one (if not only) reason why Terrans even use siege tanks. Mitigating splash does more to keep your actual units alive than spawning "free" ones. That's my point.
Your math is wrong. You can build your corruptors while the greater spire is building, so that they're ready to morph as soon as the greater spire completes. So actually it's just greater spire + morph time = 134, which makes them about even if you don't wait for the armor upgrade, and makes ultras significantly slower if you do.
Okay, I'll concede this. However, it's still interesting to note that to make the times competitive, you'll have to spawn corruptors beforehand and they'll be useless supply until the other tech kicks in, which if you're going the ultralisk route, you could actually max on useful units, including ultralisks, while waiting for ultralisk armor tech to finish.
Either way, we're talking a negligible amount of supply and mere seconds, so I won't go into this any further.
Either way, that doesn't change the fact that ultras require upgrades to be effective, broodlords don't.
Every unit requires upgrades to be effective. Ultralisks require one 150/150 upgrade and no spire upgrades. Spire attack upgrades (remember your point about synergy earlier) require at LEAST 100/100. I don't see ultralisks requiring any more upgrades than broodlords do.
it's debatable, but I believe even without air upgrades, broodlords benefit more from melee/carapace upgrades than ultras do. So even if you don't get air upgrades, broodlords scale better.
I'm not sure what you mean by "benefit more," in this situation. If you're talking about broodlings, tanks 1 shot them, so armor doesn't really help them there. Attack definitely would, because there's more of them attacking and at a faster rate than the ultralisk. Then again, the ultralisk has splash and gets a lot of damage vs. armored from upgrades. I guess it's situational. I wouldn't agree broodlords scale better without more proof. Ultralisks do shrug off marine fire like nobody's business (at least when compared to zerglings). Marines are decent against low numbers of broodlords if they can get close enough.
besides, anything more than 10 mutas, and you should be getting level 1 air attack anyway.
I currently overdo it on mutalisks but feel like my army is far too flimsy for most of the mid-game. I'm starting to wonder if there's a better answer out there that provides a bit more security/stability. Eating one bad splash hit from a thor while harassing really hurts when your first line of defense is mutalisks.
Uh, throwing away your mutas is a big mistake. You can always avoid such a mistake. So yes, it is always the case. Muta + a few corruptors can handle vikings long enough for your broodlords to do their damage.
I never advised throwing away mutalisks. You've still not explained how I'm magically able to hit and run engage these vikings within range of thor AA without losing mutalisks. That was my point. Mutalisk range is too short. To get into range of the vikings, you'll eat thor missiles. You'll lose more than the Terran.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, are you saying because of 1-3 thors on the field, that the drawbacks of broodlord outweigh the drawbacks of ultras?
Actually, this would be the opposite of the point you're construing that I'm making. I'm saying that: 1. You shouldn't use ultralisks as a re-max unit. 2. You should transition to ultralisks without throwing away your army to re-max. 3. Opening ultralisks as hive-tech and then switching to corruptors/BL hasn't been explored, and maybe it should be. 4. You don't need to have an army comprised of all ultralisks for ultralisks to be effective -- in fact, more than 3 probably hurts more than helps. 5. Saying that mutalisks can protect your broodlords from vikings is unrealistic if the Terran has thors supporting the vikings. You'll lose the broodlords and maybe mutalisks (again, please don't somehow misinterpret this as me advocating through mutalisks away [?]).
Are these really drawbacks?
-can't fly; very slow off creep
Fair enough -- ultralisks can't fly. But they're the same speed as speed banelings off creep. Would you disqualify the use of banelings against Terran by virtue of their speed? Why the double standard against ultralisks?
-requires at least 2-2 in melee/carapace to be cost-effective
So does the rest of your ling/bling army. You should have these upgrades anyway. This isn't a drawback.
These are actual drawbacks (as opposed to saying that "ultralisks can't fly," while most of the rest of your army can't either). They can be lessened by simply making less of them:
-melee only -too big, gets stuck on units and runs around dealing no damage. -as a result of the above two, ultras are completely useless in a choke. This one deserves special mention, it means that unless you're fighting in an open area, ultras' effectiveness are severely reduced; broodlords don't have this problem at all.
Compared to the drawbacks of broodlords:
-slower than on-creep ultras -vulnerable to vikings
They're also slower than off-creep ultralisks. In fact, off-creep ultralisks are TWICE AS FAST. Off-creep.
Another thing that favors broodlords: ultras don't force the terran to get a different unit, whereas brood lords force terran to get vikings, which are basically useful only for countering the brood lords.
This might be true. The current thinking is: BLs force vikings, Z switches to ultralisks, vikings are useless. However, going ultralisks first means he's not going to have the vikings for a BL switch later, perhaps improving the effectiveness of those BLs. How come the logic doesn't work both ways? It just seems like blind BL bias.
ultras can certainly be useful, but never as good as broodlords as a first hive tech choice. There's a reason why zerg will almost always opt for broodlords over ultras when they get hive. Actually, there's many reasons, they've all been known for the longest time, I just reiterated them in my post to remind our readers. Because of all of those reasons, the advantages of choosing broodlords first greatly outweigh the advantages of choosing ultras first. But I do think that switching to ultras when terran starts getting a huge fleet of vikings is a good idea.
I think the one of the points of the OP is that ultralisks are a shitty standalone unit, yet that's how everybody uses them (a re-max after broodlords of like 10 ultralisks). I think he's arguing for using ultralisks like how people use broodlords, which I honestly rarely (never?) see: 3-4 total as a supplement to your current army. Nobody would suggest that you sacrifice an army and re-max with broodlords. They're easy to kill unsupported and they take too long. Yet people do it with ultralisks even though ultralisks are similar in both regards?
That was quite a long post, but I wanted to address the each of the points that were made.
I'm not gonna keep arguing here. We both seem pretty convinced that our argument is right, but even by trying to refute each and every point I make, you haven't disproven my main point:
Brood lords are a better 1st hive tech choice than ultras in most situations, but especially so against a tank-heavy army. For the reasons I explained. It's not any one reason, it's all of the reasons put together.
On January 27 2011 02:55 TiBe wrote: Blasius, maybe you should post replays like CuteSmallHydra did, otherwise it sounds like pure theorycrafting. I have tested (both Brood and Ultras) and I prefer fast (in the meaning of the tech time) Ultras than Brood. But maybe I'm doing something wrong with my Brood..
pure theorycrafting? lol, I'm not trying to 'convince' anyone, I'm simply explaining why everyone already does this.
Want proof? There's tons of high-level ZvT replays where zerg goes brood lords as a first tech choice. Just pick a replay site and find some long zvt games.
Let me reiterate. Most high-level players have this viewpoint:
On January 25 2011 20:54 DarKFoRcE wrote: I dont agree, against tanks i find broodlords the better choice. Sure, ultras can work as a techswitch from broodlords, or if you are very far ahead, ultras also work. but in a close game i have never had any success with ultras, whereas only a few broodlords can be a great help against a tank + x push.
Looking at the minimap it looks like the OP was just way better than his opponents and they didn't have any units. But I guess ultras are viable afterall.
Ultras counter mech/viking heavy army. We dont see alot of them in the GSLs because many progamers know how to counter mech well, its not very mobile, and a bit all-in ish.
N yeah broodlords good against tanks because they are just epic size manta-rays of death that shred mech units from a RANGE, where as Ultras are Melee and stim marine DPS + Tanks > Ultras unless you forced them into viking heavy with broodlords first.
All the progamers know that Broods > Ultras when it comes to countering sieged tanks and this is a fact that has been accepted long ago... infact 3 seasons of GSLs ago...
On January 25 2011 11:27 SmallCuteHydra wrote: All games discussed from here on out will be between Master level players averaging 2500-3000 pts as of current date (Jan 24th).
I almost stopped reading here. What a load of elitist horseshit really. Why can't us plat and now diamond players dicuss (or even lower)? We have brains too, but maybe not the game time to get the hours played to reach high level Master league. We might not have super crisp timing either, but we can still put together a combined forced to deal with something.
Did you even consider that he might just be talking about the games discussed in his post?
Maybe, I just didn't read it like that. I do hope you are right though
There's no way I'd be able to control who replies to this thread and the thought never even crossed my mind. My statement was referring to my own discussion of my own games in the OP and to give readers an idea of the quality of the players participating in those games.
First off the OP is a pretty solid player, sporting a 170ish APM, and generally good macro. In all the replays he stops the mid game attack by catching the tanks unsieged just as they enter his half of the creeped up map. After that, its muta harassment, and generally defensive/macro play, culminating in one lightning Ultra/Bane/Sling/Muta attack that erases the Terra ball in a flash. Haha nice games man.
Watched the first four replays. Game 4 on Steppes of War was DAMN impressive. The ultra/banes absolutely erased his sieged tanks/w marine backup, haha wow. Sure you had a lead going into that fight, but I've lost a lot of games on that map after having a lead, so nice work.
I've tried your strat and won and lost with it so far. I haven't played much lately so I was pretty rusty. The loss was on steppes of war, and I made the mistake of attacking the Terran's natural with just muta/ling, taking losses and putting me behind. The interesting part is I almost came back with a lower economy with Ultra/Bane, showing me their potential. I am still working on the timing of everything. One really important thing appears to be keeping those muta alive, as I didn't have any at the end of the game to help out. I lost the game because my rustyness caused my macro to slip and I didn't make enough drones, the Ultra/banes were solid.
the thing with broods is that they hit the marines, and then the tanks have to unseige or wipe out his whole army. then the other units can run in. its the run in where we lose most of our stuff.
Nothing that you're saying about broodlords is wrong, as such - and I'm by no means certain your conclusions are wrong, for that matter. But I think they might be.
The first reason is because of what I've seen. In all the endless army-exchanges I've seen in ZvT, I've seen broodlords do damage, but I've never seen them carry the momentum of the fight in Zerg's favour as decisively as the Ultra/baneling combo did in those replays and in my own games. In fact, what I pretty much always see when broodlords come out is a Zerg who has been liquidly mobile and responsive throughout the game, able to pick and choose his battles, suddenly pinned to the spot by the need to fight beneath and protect his expensive aerial siege units. In a great majority of cases I see broodlords struggle to get in position, only to do a small amount of damage before being chased down and killed, often because their supporting units have been distracted by the need to defend elsewhere. I do not recall ever seeing broodlords carry a fight from the open field back to the enemy base.
If you watch the MrBitter VOD with LZGamer, you can see what I'm talking about - although they do not call attention to it. His broodlords accomplish virtually nothing as he struggles to position them and his ground army to best effect - and yet almost every time he attacks with ultralisks and banelings, he obliterates the Terran forces. The only time his Ultras let him down is when he presses home his attack without waiting for baneling support. Had he done so - a matter of a minute, no more - he would certainly have followed through to victory.
The second reason derives from thinking about why the above should come to pass.
For instance, Ultras die to stimmed marines in a straight-up dps race. But you can't win a dps-race with a tidal-wave of exploding banelings. All of a sudden, you're not chewing through 500 heavily-armoured hitpoints while the Ultralisk slowly gives you a haircut, you're chewing through 500 heavily-armoured hitpoints while a grenade goes off in your mouth. Think about attack priorities. Think of three or four ultralisks with a bunch of banelings as a rampaging planetary fortress with siege tank support: the fact you'd be able to kill the fortress eventually seems less relevant when the deadline is right now.
Then there's tank splash. Obviously broodlords are awesome against tanks; far better in terms of damage exchanged if you set them up in the unit tester. Yet it rarely seems to pan out quite that way in the games I've watched and played - plus there's the problem of carrying the momentum of the fight with such sluggish units.
Meanwhile, Ultralisks will each soak up around nine tank rounds, minimising splash onto the damage-dealing payload of banelings rolling with them. If the accompanying marines try to stutter-step or spread out, they'll just shoot the ultralisks too. Again, watch the MrBitter VOD: the only time his opponent wasn't instantly turned from Terran into terrine was when his marines stimmed and just ran the fuck away.
I'm by no means suggesting that broodlords can't be awesome. But I think they're awesome in the way altogether too many Zerg units are awesome: only when deployed with exact correctness - and I think that theoretical awesomeness has potentially distracted a lot of players. Ultra/baneling, by comparison, seems rather like Gary Kasparov winning a chess match by suddenly punching his opponent in the face: unexpected and unorthodox, certainly, but surprisingly effective.
On January 27 2011 04:16 ShindyK2 wrote: Ultras counter mech/viking heavy army. We dont see alot of them in the GSLs because many progamers know how to counter mech well, its not very mobile, and a bit all-in ish.
N yeah broodlords good against tanks because they are just epic size manta-rays of death that shred mech units from a RANGE, where as Ultras are Melee and stim marine DPS + Tanks > Ultras unless you forced them into viking heavy with broodlords first.
All the progamers know that Broods > Ultras when it comes to countering sieged tanks and this is a fact that has been accepted long ago... infact 3 seasons of GSLs ago...
The days of mech will return with Ghosts to fight both Broodlords and Ultras. Mark my words :D
On January 25 2011 11:39 Pandain wrote: I haven't read everything yet but sounds really interesting. Just some questions: 1.While your teching up to hive, wouldn't there be a timing for terran to hit? Especially considering(if I'm correct) your saving supply to use for ultras? 2.Do the replays really show a true terran, not doing any gimmicky BC stuff? Just making sure. 3.When do you tech to ultras.
when i get ultras i usually make a push just to get some of his killed and enough of mine killed to allow me to get ultras. so no.
gotta say pretty disapointed so far. i see the thread, and being a lover of the ultra myself i eagerly dl the reps. turn on a random replay and wat do i find but a guy who gets ultras after hes already won :/ like i said disapointed but ill try 1 or 2 more replays before i give up !
Yeah, in a lot of the replays he was already pretty ahead. I watched the post-patch ones. Still, excited to try this out for myself, I think it should work really well.
Hey, I tried this out on the Protoss 200 ball some games, and it is a small miracle. But it works differently than the 3base ultra-bling vs Terran, because you abuse the fact that a baneling is only 0.5 food, so with 5-8 ultras and the rest (100 or less) banelings it crushes any P land-ball. This only works with good economics, but we have seen that Zerg sometimes have no chance to beat a 200 P ball, but with these 50-100 blings it eats everything, even armored, and having the ultras in front they can not forcefield and the Colox waste their damage on the ultras.
It is not cost effective, but Zerg seldom is, but IF you have the money, it is unstoppable late game vs P. It is also great since it requires Protoss to split their death-ball.
On January 27 2011 20:06 HowardRoark wrote: Hey, I tried this out on the Protoss 200 ball some games, and it is a small miracle. But it works differently than the 3base ultra-bling vs Terran, because you abuse the fact that a baneling is only 1 food, so with 5-8 ultras and the rest (100 or less) banelings it crushes any P land-ball. This only works with good economics, but we have seen that Zerg sometimes have no chance to beat a 200 P ball, but with these 50-100 blings it eats everything, even armored, and having the ultras in front they can not forcefield and the Colox waste their damage on the ultras.
It is not cost effective, but Zerg seldom is, but IF you have the money, it is unstoppable late game vs P. It is also great since it requires Protoss to split their death-ball.
I tried it against Protoss, but my econ was even and he had better positioning, so it didn't work out. I totally agree it should work though.
I think the basic element to mass banelings is they are highly effective against almost ANY concentrated ball of units (except very large ones like Thors, but the Ultras handle them).
Here's a replay last night of me trying out Ultra/Bane/Speedling vs Terran. He was slightly favored, I am currently 2450 Diamond.
That final battle was impressive stuff. In the past I NEVER would engage a terran with his army next to a planetary. In this game I caught his tanks unsieged, and he was mostly MMM with light tank support, so Ultra/Bane was really effective. He had a ton of Mauraders, its surprising how they all died, usually they shred Ultras, but even Mauraders can't handle that many banelings/speedlings. I really tried to follow the OP's advice of keeping my Muta alive. They did a nice cleanup job after the Ultra/Bane tornado.
On January 27 2011 20:06 HowardRoark wrote: Hey, I tried this out on the Protoss 200 ball some games, and it is a small miracle. But it works differently than the 3base ultra-bling vs Terran, because you abuse the fact that a baneling is only 1 food, so with 5-8 ultras and the rest (100 or less) banelings it crushes any P land-ball. This only works with good economics, but we have seen that Zerg sometimes have no chance to beat a 200 P ball, but with these 50-100 blings it eats everything, even armored, and having the ultras in front they can not forcefield and the Colox waste their damage on the ultras.
It is not cost effective, but Zerg seldom is, but IF you have the money, it is unstoppable late game vs P. It is also great since it requires Protoss to split their death-ball.
I tried it against Protoss, but my econ was even and he had better positioning, so it didn't work out. I totally agree it should work though.
I think the basic element to mass banelings is they are highly effective against almost ANY concentrated ball of units (except very large ones like Thors, but the Ultras handle them).
Here's a replay last night of me trying out Ultra/Bane/Speedling vs Terran. He was slightly favored, I am currently 2450 Diamond.
That final battle was impressive stuff. In the past I NEVER would engage a terran with his army next to a planetary. In this game I caught his tanks unsieged, and he was mostly MMM with light tank support, so Ultra/Bane was really effective. He had a ton of Mauraders, its surprising how they all died, usually they shred Ultras, but even Mauraders can't handle that many banelings/speedlings. I really tried to follow the OP's advice of keeping my Muta alive. They did a nice cleanup job after the Ultra/Bane tornado.
And you know what Johnny? The thing is that Collossus (as we all know) stand on top of the other units in the Protoss ball, so that is even more effective with banelings splashing both the Colo and the regular units. With some infestor running in the background, you could lock them all and then it is game.
TL;DR Well late game ZvT is awesome for the zerg as long as they went for muta ling baneling. You have you're air upgrades, a spire, melee and armour upgrades and a lot of bases. You can tech switch to broodlords or ultras and bought are awesome because you have the needed upgrades and tech to make them work.
So since reading this I have been playing with Ultras in mind for the late game, so my past 2 games vs terran haven't even really been close.
In this the terran I face goes marine/tank pressure a couple times that I fend off barely and then expands into marine/tank/thor and then I deny his 3rd for a while with poop ovys and when our armies meet (each of us around 140 supply) I destroy his.
In this my opponent plays passive and is on 3 bases at pretty much the same timing as me as I drop my 4th. Our armies meet on accident all spread out and once again, its not even close.
This sounds like how I've been playing ZvT and ZvP...(I'm only bronze though)
Ultralisk's are awesome IMO. I've never quite understood why no one liked them??? You don't even need many, like 5 - 6 along with your Ling/Bling is just deadly...
In my experience large scale engagements (once the Ultra's are out) almost always end in your favour. Then it's just a matter of reinforcing with speedlings. (I always get the attack speed upgrade though)
I tried this build out, skipping mutas entirely and surviving on lings/blings until I could get my ultras out to make a push, worked amazingly well.
I've actually been doing slings/blings/mutas into ultras for a while now. Going for +3/+3 melee upgrades while teching to ultras and it works really really well. But waiting for extra banelings makes it so much better.
Made a youtube video of it via replay2avi.com, I'll probably recast it nicer later tonight.
i too have started doing this, after losing like 15 straight vs terran. now ive won 5 or 6 in a row. iam rushing infestors, and 3 or 4 infestors give you plenty of time to get the ultras up.
i actually think they work better...ive won several of those games despite being behind on army and food! theyre a small investment, and they still help in late game, as opposed to the mutas -
I really think the trick to winning with ultras is mutas because it forces terran into geting defensive units to take out those mutas. Once they do that tech switch (mass marines, thors) it's time for you to tech switch into this guys build.
Wow, Using banelings with ultras actually really will improve ultras, as mass marine is a really solid (and frustrating) way of dealing with ultralisks. The infestor idea also (since the bane of SC2 ultralisks is being kited to death) If they're in marine-tank mode and you approach with baneling-ultra, it SEEMS like a terran must decide to either stand and fight and try to rely on spreading marines out from banelings, or expose their tanks to your ultralisks - either of these are a situation which you're ready to handle.
Also, what about a mineral dump for this? Lings? Roaches?
On January 29 2011 02:46 sylverfyre wrote: Wow, Using banelings with ultras actually really will improve ultras, as mass marine is a really solid (and frustrating) way of dealing with ultralisks. The infestor idea also (since the bane of SC2 ultralisks is being kited to death) If they're in marine-tank mode and you approach with baneling-ultra, it SEEMS like a terran must decide to either stand and fight and try to rely on spreading marines out from banelings, or expose their tanks to your ultralisks - either of these are a situation which you're ready to handle.
Also, what about a mineral dump for this? Lings? Roaches?
Lings are already a go-to mineral dump. Another option that hasn't really been discussed much is extra queens to transfuse your ultras, ensuring you don't have to invest in more ultras after every fight.
Roaches have been discussed earlier in the thread. Basically, Roaches are fine, but everything they do for you can be better done by Ultras. So there isn't much use for them once your ultra/ling/bling death ball gets rolling.
On January 29 2011 02:24 bearjuice wrote: I really think the trick to winning with ultras is mutas because it forces terran into geting defensive units to take out those mutas. Once they do that tech switch (mass marines, thors) it's time for you to tech switch into this guys build.
I have built a spire but 0 mutalisks in my games so far.
Spling/bling is effective enough at holding off attacks and denying 3rds (along with pooplords)
Also this has allowed me to have ultralisks out much faster than otherwise.
So if it seems possible, skipping mutalisks works quite well. However you should still drop a spire just in case you will need them (drops, heavy marine/tank push thats too early for ultralisks etc.)
On January 29 2011 02:46 sylverfyre wrote: Wow, Using banelings with ultras actually really will improve ultras, as mass marine is a really solid (and frustrating) way of dealing with ultralisks. The infestor idea also (since the bane of SC2 ultralisks is being kited to death) If they're in marine-tank mode and you approach with baneling-ultra, it SEEMS like a terran must decide to either stand and fight and try to rely on spreading marines out from banelings, or expose their tanks to your ultralisks - either of these are a situation which you're ready to handle.
Also, what about a mineral dump for this? Lings? Roaches?
Adrenaline glands should be upgraded immediately upon reaching Hive so as you push with Ultra/bling/ling, you immediately reinforce with cracklings.
i'm sure the top players are already tinkering with this before this post but there are some suggestions about infestors instead of mutas or just forgoing mutas alltogether.
my gut says that mutas are still gonna be necessary for the transition at least at a high level. i say this because i think many terrans aren't used to dealing witht his and probably are not used to being forced to attack before you get ultra/bling. why do that when nobody was going ultra/bling, when you coulda sat back and gotten a 200 army and win. i expect terrans to be vastly more aggressive now.
the good thinga bout this is that you just dont need that many ultras. you just need enough to soak up fire. so its not as gas intensive as one may think. you can just put spines and zlings for mineral dump if necessary.
I read all of it and watched all the replays. I'm really liking this alot. I do muta/ling bling, but a maxed out mech army, just makes my 200/200 ling/bling/muta army feel like paper, regardless if I have maxed upgrades, and a perfect flank, its not even cost effective, and to think about me just a moving in there. I always thought about going ultra's as well, as terrans get thors/tosses get colossus,. and I feel zergs don't feel like teching to hive quick, because really we don't have any motivation unless we are ahead, and can afford to make quick broodlords. This seems about right in terms of unit comps, against other comps, because we are literlly attacking tier 1 and 2 units at tier 2/3 mech. I'm thinking why didn't I try this before lol.
I cringe when playing jungle basin and seeing the terran have his third with a planetary fortress and I can't do anything against it, because 1 thor, 4 turrets and that PF just ruins my day. This is something that I really like as it is finally a cost effective unit versus that slowly moving driving me insane terran mech. Absolutely love this, sick of the straining muta/ling/bling micro. 2600 Masters Zerg <3
On January 29 2011 00:27 vdek wrote: I tried this build out, skipping mutas entirely and surviving on lings/blings until I could get my ultras out to make a push, worked amazingly well.
I've actually been doing slings/blings/mutas into ultras for a while now. Going for +3/+3 melee upgrades while teching to ultras and it works really really well. But waiting for extra banelings makes it so much better.
Made a youtube video of it via replay2avi.com, I'll probably recast it nicer later tonight.
I'm sorry but that game is not relevant at all about the ultra, i should even say about anything.
The terran get such an enormous advantage at his first push, he killed a tone of drone but let you get back in the silliest way, he stay on 2 bases for eternity let you drone like crazy. I mean you ever miss click on the statue lost a good amount of baneling and still compete in the mid game. And the worst part is that at the final battle where your food is ahead and the ultra actually didn't even take a shot !
Actually, your game makes me crying for muta ! He didn't even get a single turret and make so few marine.
Don't get me wrong, i love that OP, and thinking of the ultra as a pure tank splash counter is great considering the speed synergies ( and that's the most important aspect for me ). But we need some more solid play as example ( i do think that the author's game are king off done way before the final battle, still his composition is extremely solid and give a good way of finishing a game against a terran, which i find very difficult sometimes even with a good advantage ).
I'm still struggling against the mid game push when i didn't get a big advantage early, muta allows us to tempo, i do think infestor is a good way of getting to that end game composition too while adding stuff to your armies that will help you survive and ofc, help with fungal later on.
For obvious reasons, muta are still very useful against drops, but nothing force us to get that spire asap, and drops aren't a big problem on 3 bases with some good creep spread and a good scouting/overlord placement. I do think that the actual mass muta ling/bling play require such a perfect execution and can be very frustrating ( i want to say, like a Warcraft 3 game :p ).
I've been experimenting with infestor/ling/bling into ultraling since I saw that on mrbitter's stream and I had a ton of success - I don't know how much of this is due to the fact that 90% do nothing but build marines the whole game. To those who are doubtful about not building any mutas, here's what I have found:
infestors are awesome. They can deal with drops very effectively, you can leave 1 infestor at each expo and with good reaction time you can kill the medivacs before they unload - if you spot it too late you can still fungal the drop force and they most likely wont be able to do any damage before you get some other forces there to clean up.
infestors are also more awesome. they greatly delay any push, terran has to be very very careful moving his forces towards you. thus you don't need mutas to keep him in his base, and you don't forfeit much in terms of map control. Speedlings are still great in denying expansions and counterattacking.
more importantly, spending your gas on infestors instead of a crapton of mutas has a much greater synergy with your lategame ultraling goal. you don't need that many infestors, and the gas can be spent on getting very fast 3/3 upgrades and a fast hive. even though the core of your army is still ling/bling, it feels much more resilient; because of the upgrades, and because fungal makes banelings 5 times more effective - no more losing half of them before they can even make contact with kiting marines. So you are spending a lot less gas on banelings as well.
With mutaling you are constantly spamming the e and t buttons until you run out of gas just to stay alive and you can think of getting hive when you are already mined out at both your main and nat. I think this is why idra says that ultras are just "a finishing move when you are already very far ahead": mutaling is so cost inefficient that you need to costantly dump money into it and very often die even when you have the better economy. Infestor/ling on the other hand is much better and I am starting to think that its a hard counter to marine heavy compositions. Later on you need ultras because taking down a planetary fortress behind a tank line is still very hard to do without t3.
That said, there are situations where you can't really do without mutas, and so far I've found i need them against banshees- and hellion- heavy compositions.
I'm by no means a great player, but I tested this strat many times over the last few days and I simply love it, it just changes the mid to late game for me.
Before that, I felt compelled to win during mid game with strong muta harass, I'm now just playing the ''I will survive till I get 6 ultras and 80 banelings'' and I will break your siege line, reinforce with cracklings or roaches and will be back for more.
I just freaking just love it.
Now, the best thing is: IT ALSO WORKS FOR TOSS DEATHBALL!!!
5 Ultras and 60-80 banelings will annihilate 8 colossus + around 30 stalkers (total gaz costs were nearly equal) in a few seconds.
I did it in a unit tester before trying it with a friend of mine, but it would be awesome if a good player could test this against a high level toss.
My only complaint with ultra, ling, bane, which was my first builds towards Terran was that the Ultras are often cramped or get in the way. I'd send them to the tanks and they get slaughtered before even reaching the guys. I'd have about 16 ultras and the rest lings, usually no gas for banelings and the ultras would hog all the room in the front, squeezed in some choke or just simply decemated before even scratching the tanks, leaving me lings and banes to get crushed by a well-micro'd marine army.
As for the downsides of drops, you can keep overlords around your base in the air-like situations, this will tell you when a drop is coming and position, negating the need for mutas.
I usually go Muta, ling, bane or infestors, ling, bane.
On February 01 2011 05:05 Torte de Lini wrote: I'd have about 16 ultras and the rest lings, usually no gas for banelings and the ultras would hog all the room in the front,
Don't ever make 16 ultras, that's way too many.
You never see a protoss player get 16 colossus, or a terran player get 16 thors. If you're using ultras you probably shouldn't use more than 6 or 8 at the most.
On February 01 2011 05:05 Torte de Lini wrote: I'd have about 16 ultras and the rest lings, usually no gas for banelings and the ultras would hog all the room in the front,
Don't ever make 16 ultras, that's way too many.
You never see a protoss player get 16 colossus, or a terran player get 16 thors. If you're using ultras you probably shouldn't use more than 6 or 8 at the most.
I was just throwing a number out there. But you're right, however, should the rest of my army be purely lings and banelings? Won't I have an excess amount of gas?
So how would I approach a group? Let's say the enemy goes Marine, Tanks and medivacs. How do I get to them? do I just ram my ultras in as they squabble around trying to get in a position to hit?
Or do I do some kind of two-sided attack: Ultras in front. Lings and banelings from the side?
Like I said, I let Ultras go awhile back for two reasons: one; my enemy ends up going banshees that really tear apart my army for some reason and two: my ultras always just end up shuffling amongst one another, too fat to get a decent surround or hit.
In my experience you only need about 6-8 ultras. More than that and they just clump together and become totally cost ineffective on most maps. The ultras are really there as tanks rather than primary damage dealers. And if you can get some queens transfusing then their tanking abilities become absolutely amazing.
I personally have ultra/infestor/hydra moving together and ling/bling moving seperately. It doesn't necessarily have to be from multiple sides. Just make sure the units are flowing into the position seperately (they could be running next to each other and still be fine).
And if you are out of position, you just need to attack where the T isn't. It's not so much about doing damage before T gets to that location, it's about getting there before T can get there. If you don't have positional disadvantage, your army is just as cost efficient as T's.
Yeah i've been trying this in games lately and it's pretty amazing. I rolled over a terran deathball of mostly thors, and some mauraders with about 5 ultras and the rest banelings and zerglings. I even made the mistake of engaging them on my ramp and the ultras ran in, the banelings and zerglings slipped in between them, rolled into the ball of terran units while they were all targeting the ultras and literally ran over the deathball in about 3 seconds. I'm sure it's been mentioned but infestors set up this kind of attack very nicely and make it that much more deadly against a terran who micros well as fungal growth = can't micro. But yea thanks for this OP very nice find.
This was actually a GREAT read (although i am more of a protoss player now, but i have played all the races pretty equally up until like, last month ^^ and i was glad you mentioned the synergy of the unit compositions in SC:BW versus the unit compositions now in SCII. My only "add-on" to this guide will be like others are saying, Infestors adds the cherry on top. in your pictures i see ultras surviving and all but not that many, nor w/ that high of HP. However, if you forgo only a few banelings and get even 2 infestors, fungal growth can DRAMATICALLY increase your advantage. Just having two hotkeyed seperately and moving burrowed around and unborrowing to drop a fungal growth was enough to prevent marines from splitting all together. just TWO! and then you'll have around 50 banelings to just go to town on the tanks while the ultras are hacking away, beefing it through the tank barrage.
I just noticed that you can go from 2 or 3 ultras with red hp and maybe 5 banelings left over, to about 5 in the yellow and maybe 1 in the green left over and maybe 10 banelings left over. meaning you can reinforce better (because you won't be building those 70 second ultras to replace the dead ones) and usually means you can go in with a death charge with the surviving ultras and cracklings.
all i'm saying is that don't make the infestation pit only for the hive ---> ultralisk den, but rather use it for the infestors
nice read, btw its more than a build discussion, its about that small details that make life colourful...
ultras are a nice partner i late game, not need great numbers, just a nice pack to help your combo. , and ofc speedlings and banelings are a must.. are the bread and butter of a zvt army... but i think the key of your reps are the map control, the lack of agression of terran and the nice creep/tumor workout...
very nice reps and reading.. but one question still dont have an answer.. mutas or infestor? maybe its just a matter of map structure or terran decisions, but i think u need that spire early for block banshees play and make some harass, the terran need to waste money in turrets and thor, and u can cover urself pretty well from random dropship play.. more on, in the late game u can switch to corruptor if he goes to BC rollover or some broodlords for more raping action.
I think you could also maybe add some queens into the mix, because u will want more creep and then u can transfuse the ultras, and queens are pretty good at air if the t's come up with any banshees or something along those lines
"The big advice people would give against turtle terrans is go broodlord to force vikings and then reinforce with Ultras. Umm... Ultras have a 70 second build time. I don't know about any of you zergs, but anytime I've tried going ultra after broodlord... I died. Why? Because broodlords don't tank your damage, and allow your ling/bling army to die. After the broodlords are dead to vikings, the terran still has a rine/tank army that your ling/bling failed to kill and are able to kill off your expansions one by one as you twiddle your thumbs waiting for ultralisks to spawn. And as soon as they do they die to mass marines because the terran is able to reinforce them much faster than any other of their units. Which means GG because you've just spent your gas on Ultras and Broodlords and don't have enough to make more banelings to counter the newly made marines."
There is just so much truth in this one I'm going to give it a try!
This looks like such an epic strategy. Have to try this. MrBitter also added a effective way of transitioning from midgame to lategame using his infestor build. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=193058 His midgame build enhances the use of going ultras in ZvT alot. He linked this thread in his thread. Thanks a lot for posting this. This may change the metagame
Essentially, for 100 minerals extra, Ultras get 100 more HP and 15 more damage against armored. A very goo deal.
Compare that to the tank (which was BW's only way of dealing with ultras):
Siege Tanks used to 70 damage against ultras. Now they do 50. Siege Tanks cost 3 supply Siege Tanks cost 25 more gas
Griffith, I don't mean to pick on you, but I've seen a lot of these kinds of posts on strategy forum threads, and many of them have major flaws in logic. You have a tone as if you are unveiling some masterful insight (and sometimes the points you make are good), but many of yours (and other peoples') posts are lacking context or thought.
The post above for example: yes, ultralisks have more damage, health, and splash. But! Things have changed from SC1 to SC2. Their cost is higher (which you do mention), but also their movement speed is GREATLY reduced in comparison to other units, which is CRITICAL for melee units. Ultras can be kited/out microed because they are too slow. Furthermore, their size has increased and so their maneuverability is reduced (also extremely important for a melee unit). Lastly, with the increase in damage dealt per unit and the increase in unit "clumping" from SC1 to SC2, that means that an ultra is under more firepower by more terran units than it was in SC1. So, even though the health was increased, it DEFINITELY feels like ultras die FASTER in SC2 than in SC1.
These are all factors that top level players take into account without thinking that lower level players don't think about. I have probably left out many factors to the "ultra problem" because I myself am not a top level player (mid masters). But instead using an abrasive tone with top players (I am now referring to someone else's battle with CatZ on the "Protoss ball"). Kindly ask them to explain why. You very well might be able to add to the conversation even though you are not a pro. But, don't aggressively argue with pros and scare them away from the strategy section (they are a valuable resource we need to respect -- like polar bears).
Used this again today for the first time in ages (had virtually no Terran opponents lately; don't know why). Shakuras Plateau, cross positions. I go 14h/14p/13g, defend an early marine/marauder poke with lings and a couple of spinecrawlers, then concentrate on droning up, making lings and queens and teching rapidly to hive and ultras via upgraded infestors - which is surprisingly doable on two bases with a third coming online for gas at the end. You just don't need that many ultras - or even that many banelings, for that matter - not right away, and not with infestors to lock marine balls down and delay his pushes. With a macro hatch to tide me over until I'm ready to take my third, I never feel short of anything, and with plenty of lings and queens and only two bases to look after I don't feel too threatened by drops or banshees.
Meanwhile he expands and masses a marine-heavy army with a few marauders and a whole division of tanks - he was at about 170 food when he decided to come get me and I was around the same. The engagement is a bit of a mixed bunch: for some reason (I still don't know why) my ultras didn't move in with my ling/bling ball - but I also caught him unsieged, so it pretty much evens out.
I clean up his remaining forces and in a shockingly short time I'm parked outside his natural with my ultras and another monstrous ball of ling/baneling.
Feeling giddy and out of control, like a battered wife clutching a shaky baseball bat while her husband disbelievingly fingers his broken nose, I decide to frontally assault whatever he has waiting at the top of his ramp. Turns out that was about nine sieged tanks, a full bunker and another bunch of marines - I say 'was' and 'about' because after four seconds it would have taken the kind of team who investigate commercial airline disasters to say for sure. Assuming they weren't trodden on by the ultralisks, exactly one of which had perished in the attack. Pausing only to kill all his SCVs and an unfinished command centre, I waddled them back down his ramp and surrounded them with another carpet of ling/bling, which promptly dispatched the next batch of tanks and infantry he sent out before trundling up into his main and eating it.
In a game rich with moments to treasure (like watching my changeling hang out in his marine ball, just one of the lads), I think his exclamation of "FUCKING BUGS" tops the pile, closely followed by his clarification that I was a "Cheesy Zerg player".
At this point, I want to stress there was a hell of a lot of room on both sides for better unit control, better macro - better everything. What counts, as far as I'm concerned, is that for the first time I felt like I didn't have to play much better in order to actually get in there and win.
So, so often against Terrans I've been two or even three bases ahead, deflected everything he's sent at me with minimal losses, and still lost because I just can't go fucking kill him. I end up nervously massing larvae and resources at 200/200, hoping I can flank, fungal and finesse his army when it finally moves out and stop him taking an expansion when he does so I don't have to go through the whole ordeal again five minutes later. With this unit composition, when I hit 200/200 it's "Heeeeerres Johnny!" time.
I love this strategy so much, I'm a bronze zerg that's always had trouble with terran. I could never break his walls even after I've wiped out his army. But ultra-bling-speedling just DEMOLISH the terran's entire base :D
On February 25 2011 02:36 RudrA wrote:So what did Terrans do? They started adding Hellions to counter the Slings, and marauders against Roaches.
What did the Zerg community do? They QQ
QQ QQ QQ QQ
Just wanted to give props to Mr.Bitters for not QQ'in and instead making Ultras work in a DEADLY way.
Let's not be too unkind. Hellions countering lings and marauders countering roaches isnt exactly rocket science; the game practically spells it out for you. Having a combination of melee units - most of them with no bonus vs armoured - do so well against armoured splash-damaging units with massive range is pretty counter-intuitive.
On February 25 2011 02:36 RudrA wrote: Just wanted to add...
Check did this vers RainBow in the GSL Code S yesterday. Banelings + Ultras.
Could you post a brief summary of the game here? I didn't get the chance to watch it but I'm very curious to hear about what the similarities and differences were between Check's game and the games I posted in the OP.
Some things I'd be interested in knowing:
- what evo chamber upgrades did he opt to get; carapace, melee or both? - did he opt to go muta/ling/bane until ultras popped or did he use infestors as in MrBitter's thread? - was his gameplan all along simply surviving until Ultras, aka a relatively fast hive tech, or did the game merely drag on a very long time that Ultra tech was simply the next step he took? - did he go broodlord first to force vikings or did he go straight to ultras? - how many ultralisks did he make? and what units did he remax with after the initial ultra/baneling attack?
Thanks very much for bringing this to my attention. I'm very pleased to hear my thread ended up having somewhat of an influence on the GSL-scene.
He had Mutas aswell as infestors ( tho very low muta counts).
He used Ultras in the end with banelings to finish off Terrans army and win the game. He was Maxed I believe on upgrades... and the hive tech was about towards the end of the game... so around 20 mins of game time.
No brood lords.
You can ask some1 with access to VODS for more info.... sorry all I remember.
On February 25 2011 02:36 RudrA wrote:So what did Terrans do? They started adding Hellions to counter the Slings, and marauders against Roaches.
What did the Zerg community do? They QQ
QQ QQ QQ QQ
Just wanted to give props to Mr.Bitters for not QQ'in and instead making Ultras work in a DEADLY way.
Let's not be too unkind. Hellions countering lings and marauders countering roaches isnt exactly rocket science; the game practically spells it out for you. Having a combination of melee units - most of them with no bonus vs armoured - do so well against armoured splash-damaging units with massive range is pretty counter-intuitive.
Well.... I mean come on... marines killing u? Make banelings? Its not like Terrans said... hmmm Roaches keep owning Thors... F'em.
I understand its not 100% similar, but really... I honestly find zergs are not necessarily trying. Like... IdrA... the guy says that games are unwinable as zerg in SOTG... I mean come on... Terrans get cheesed after a while.
Check started making the infestation pit around 14:40 and hive started around 15:50, so that's pretty early. He opened lair tech with spire and made about 10 or 11 mutas but didn't replenish. He took 5 bases before 17 minutes and had over 80 drones starting around 15 minutes. He made 8 infestors when hive was about 25% done and started making ultra cavern right as it finished. He had double evo upgrades.
A good build for the map though - Taldarim Altar is much larger than anything on the ladder though.
On February 25 2011 02:36 RudrA wrote:So what did Terrans do? They started adding Hellions to counter the Slings, and marauders against Roaches.
What did the Zerg community do? They QQ
QQ QQ QQ QQ
Just wanted to give props to Mr.Bitters for not QQ'in and instead making Ultras work in a DEADLY way.
Let's not be too unkind. Hellions countering lings and marauders countering roaches isnt exactly rocket science; the game practically spells it out for you. Having a combination of melee units - most of them with no bonus vs armoured - do so well against armoured splash-damaging units with massive range is pretty counter-intuitive.
Well.... I mean come on... marines killing u? Make banelings? Its not like Terrans said... hmmm Roaches keep owning Thors... F'em.
I understand its not 100% similar, but really... I honestly find zergs are not necessarily trying. Like... IdrA... the guy says that games are unwinable as zerg in SOTG... I mean come on... Terrans get cheesed after a while.
I honestly don't think it's lack of effort. Zerg can't just wall in, pick whatever tech they like and push when they feel ready; their builds are a lot more about survival and absorbing all the weird crap that can be thrown at them. I mean, imagine playing Terran if the marine needed an armoury upgrade to shoot air, and your only early AA was turrets. Imagine trying to develop strats while not dying to void rays or mutalisks, or because you rushed to protect yourself from them and they never came. Now imagine doing that without scans.
Zerg play is full of red herrings, too, which doesn't help. Broodlords ought to be the siege-breakers in ZvT, but they just aren't because of the synergy between vikings, thors and turrets - which makes it look like zerg has no answer. Then we find that despite Terran having awesome ranged ground dps, the "right" way to bust down the front door is with... a combo of melee units? Seriously? We're supposed to work that out in the time it took terrans to discover that bf hellions are good against lings?
EDIT:
Another game this morning, another opportunity to test this out against a 'slightly favoured' platinum terran on Xel'naga caverns. Massed speedlings and queens, made infestors (which I didn't really end up needing), teched to Hive at 11:30. Defended against banshees and maxed around the 15:00 mark with 4 Ultras. Was about to attack when he pushed out with his marine/marauder/tank to kill the gold base I was taking. Completely one-sided slaughter: my 200/200 vs his 190/200 became 170 vs 60. Sent what I had left to kill his natural and went back to macroing. Wrapped things up a few minutes later.
I macroed better than usual in that game, but it still struck me just how natural and resource-friendly queen->ling->bling->infestor->ultra seemed, most of that off two bases with, again, a third taken for gas around the time the ultras pop out. I had a macro hatch which was a little late, causing a mineral spike, but the whole build felt smooth, powerful and focused. Hatches, queens, overlords and lings really soaked up the avalanche of minerals I was mining, with upgrades (late; sorry!), tech, ultras and blings accounting for the gas. I'm seriously tempted to give this a whirl against Protoss, too, just to see what happens.
EDIT:
Another game at lunchtime, Shakuras again. Defended a hellion drop with queen and lings, banshees with queens, Hive at around 11:30 again. His big push (tanks, a few marines and a lot of marauders) caught maybe 30 mis-rallied lings by surprise, which meant I didn't quite have enough army to crush his and keep my ultras alive. Used my six infestors to keep the remnants of his force out of my base while spawning lings, then remade six ultras, lings and banelings, ran across the map, up the ramp to his natural and squished the siege tank/thor/marine/marauder ball at the top. All ultras survived. No GG.
This time I tried to get my fifth and sixth gas up a bit quicker - and I really needn't have bothered. I just couldn't spend it; I ended up floating 3000 gas when my final push started. Hardly surprising given that an infestation pit, hive, cavern, plating upgrade, four ultralisks and 24 banelings costs the same gas and food as a spire and 18 mutalisks.
Thank you for this build OP. So far I've watched your Ultra 1 and 2 replays and I was honestly amazed. It's common for people to say that maxed out, Terran have the far superior army because of critical massing, but ultra/bling/ling begs to differ. I especially liked how you start getting armor upgrades early. In the Ultra 2 replay, two of your 0-2 speedlings killed two of his 0-0 marines! At the end of the game, I liked how the opponent talked about how crazy 6 armor ultralisks were
The thing I love with the ling/bling/ultra mass upgrade style is that you can just run head on into the terran's army if he unsieges and roll over him while still having stuff left behind. After that you just morph the remaining lings into banelings and rally a shit-ton of cracklings into him. It's a beautiful sight to behold.
Update: Still doing very well with this. However, I suspect that - absurd as it may seem - there might be a still more powerful variant: Ultra/Roach/Bling.
This emerged from a game where I made a few roaches to defend against hellions, after which I steered my build back on track - but I had these roaches standing around. On impulse, I grabbed their upgrades, and toddled them into battle alongside my huge ball of ultra/baneling.
This time, instead of having some ultralisks left over and re-rallying lings, I found that I had my ultralisks and pretty much all my roaches. Which I could burrow and heal up in five seconds flat. And then charge into his natural and flatten that. Then I could pull back, wait for my reinforcement banelings to morph, and scour the map clean.
After that, I started folding roaches into my army every time. If he shows hellions, I get a few early. If he doesn't, I drip-feed them in over the course of the game. I don't get many - 10-15 max - but they seem to make a huge difference in carrying the momentum of a fight and sealing a win.
I'd be very interested to know if anyone else is doing this.
Love the post. Great replay pack. I actually enjoy going into the end-game against a Terran now.
I had a game yesterday where I busted through two levels of heavy, 200-supply tank-marauder fortification in Backwater Gulch with 8 Ultralisks and speedling-baneling. He even had a bunch of Vikings land to fight the Ultras because he expected Brood Lords.
If I might dare to suggest a name for this end-game composition, I would say "The Poison Fist".
i main terran (3000~ diamond) but as i'm trying to get the dark templar portrait i'm playing a lot of zerg in teamgames and i loooove doing this strat. been in 4v4's where it was just me killing off enemy armies just so easily Great post OP
Having encountered this style play often, it is a pain in the balls to deal with. I find most zergs I'm beating are going too muta heavy and not building crawlers to defend blueflame and reaper harassment.
For zergs playing vs bio: The roach variants of this are much stronger, but even so, MMM tank does just fine against it. The problem is the micro is very intense and requires a lot of practice. Splitting big bio balls vs ultras/roach/bling is really the counter to this build, as an unmicroed 200/200 MMM ball will lose to ultra/bling/roach, but with good micro its an even fight. If you leave the terran room to kite you he will, and you will probably crush him if you can surround or flank him.
Often the game will come down to who controls the most bases anyway- so make sure you have patrol lings.
Er... I've read the whole OP and first pages but not every single post, so i don't know how many people said a similar thing but: ultralisk being good is no news to me, I never understood all the QQing about them... I'm a fresh diamond player, my worst matchup is vs T, but each time I managed to survive until pumping out my ultras, I knew the game was won (considering a similar level of macro at this point, of course... a "rush to ultra" is devoted to fail imo, i tried it in many ways as ultra is my best unit). Actually, it's my ultimate game ender in every matchup : combinated with blings against T (for bio, if mech i prefer cling and more ultra); with roaches against Z (so many units on the ground in each army, useless to get more melee), and finally with hydra against P (just be careful not to get the hydra one-shot by colossi, but with ultra leading the assault, it's quite easy to have a nice dps without too much damage on the hydra). Melee and carapace upgrade against T, range and carapace against the others, and it's done. Of course, against T ling/bling is the best to survive until ultras, against z it's roaches, and against P it's hydras (just careful with colossi again, but the excess of mineral goes into slings that can have nice surround... Corruptors only if he mass them) Again, I'm not a pro and almost always have a lower apm than my opponent, but ultra are just the zerg's ultimate weapon (or "armor", obviously). I just don't see what counters it on the ground (and against air, well, you just explodes his base and thanks to zerg's special power, you have a pure anti air army about 30 seconds later). oh, a small edit "just in case" : i prefer roaches against Z because opponent's slings will just flank your hydra way too easily, even more when all is covered by creep; while upgraded roaches will tank them efficiently and two-shoot them. TLDR: ultra rock since the launching of SC2, thus in every matchup. Imo of course.
I have to bump this because this guide is amazing, and I have a few questions (man this thread isn't nearly as old as I thought it was). I remember reading this, and realizing how amazing ultras were in ZvT. That you always win with it, and they are way better than BL's. Then with the infestor patch and the realization of how awesome NP + Ultra is in ZvP, it further cemented how amazing ultras are (I wrote a guide about going ultra/infestor with NP/bling in ZvP going ling/infestor into ling/bling/infestor into ultra/bling/infestor).
ANYWAYS. My question is this: I've been having a lot of trouble recently with the Goody style of mass thor/siege tank (not sure why it's suddenly getting popular as opposed to when goody first became known). It crushes, and usually the problem is the push before hive is even up. But that's another thread, as from what I understand, a ridiculous Mass broodlord to counter his ridiculous army, is the advice I get about it.
I was wondering how well ultras fare against the sort of Goody style of just mass mass siege tanks and thors. I know you say it deals with mech well, but that was a while ago and I can see in the pics there aren't as many thors, and seem to be a lot of units other than siege tanks and thors, which is completely the opposote of what I face.
Thanks, love this guide. I feel broodlords are worthless compared to the amazingness of ultras, and I don't think I've ever lost a game where I got ultras, and they are always my goal in ZvP and tank/rine ZvT.
I use ultra/baneling vs roach/hydra in ZvZ and people try to give me shit for it. Its not like that melee upgrade makes both the T1 AND T3 unit exponentially better, noooo...
Its not coincidental that the 2 staple units of zerg, ling and bling, share the same upgrade as the two T3 units of zerg, broodling and Ultra. I dont say brood lord, because while it does do damage, its main effect it to spit broodlings all over an army and thus provide the same distraction/surround late game that zerglings provide early game (and for free!), with a bonus of causing adjacent friendly fire splash if its a terran, or forcing HT storm spam on their own army if they went HT strong and have less to deal with the broodlings via colossi. But then again, brood lords hit colossi and then he broodlings are right under the colossi, which is the best position possible for low hp units vs colossi splash.
I have to say that I practically learned ZvZ in extreme depth thanks to 1 ZvZ game. The game was an hour and 6 minute long, and it taught me that corruptors shoot down the brood lords while bling mop up the hydra, and ultras get rid of their switch to roaches, combined with cracklings, and if they bring roach/hydra, you flank with bling to kill the LIGHT hydra, while ultras deal with the roaches along with either roaches of your own, lings, or in some cases, hydras.
people undervalue corruptors as an anti-muta strategy. it takes 28 shots for a muta to kill a corruptor. then you can rock and roll with corruption vs key targets or just softening up their roach balls for your own roaches to decimate them.
On July 13 2011 00:05 Olsson wrote: Why ultras and not brood lords?
without spire, GG lords will take so long in coming that if you're counting on having a T3 to keep you in the running during a game, you will lose if that T3 unit is BL when you haven't even gotten GS yet. an ultra den is pretty quick. GG lords have about the same time as Ultras, when you factor corruptor BT to BL morph BT, in addition to the super slow GS BT on top of an already slow Sp BT on top of more slow lair/hive BT.
On July 13 2011 00:05 Olsson wrote: Why ultras and not brood lords?
The answer is in the OP's post. The point of the Ultras is to absorb damage from tanks/collosi/etc so that your blings/lings/mutas can obliterate their army. Broodlords can't fulfill this role in an initial confrontation because there hasn't been any time to build up a broodling count.
On July 13 2011 00:26 lGy wrote: ive been destroying ultras with mass snipe and tank/maradaur.. broodlord infestor is much harder to deal with.. 1500~ GM Terran
Well, to be fair, at the time the OP was written infestors still had the 8 second fungal and were wildly underused, so broodlord/infestor was a non-existant unit combination. Also, ghosts or marauders are pretty much the counter to ultralisks. It's far and away most effective against the marine/tank composition that is seen in nearly every ZvT these days.
As a 1300 diamond zerg, I make use of this in most of my ZvT's and a lot of my ZvP's too. As long as the ultralisks are sent in first to attack the tanks, you should have enough banelings to clean up any number of marines, no matter how good you are at splits.
Even if it is a completely even army trade, the Zerg can just rally zerglings to the Terran's production line, which is almost always a GG.
I think your comment concerning BW's relevance to SC2 is interesting and worth note and further examination when the metagame is changing- specifically, the way that unit comps in BW were, in part, dictated by the speed of the units involved; while in SC2, that is not yet the case, but when something little, just a detail, is noticed and taken into account, it yeilds powerful results.
The only other question I have is where does all the gas come from? :D (JK)
I think one things players often do not take into account is army synergy. Why are Ultras good with this unit and bad with this unit against this army and so on.
People make Ultra + Roach and wonder why they lose so easily.
It seems to me that Ultra are at their strongest when the fight goes by very quickly. For this reason I fend them most effective with units like Banes, Zerglings, and Infestors. All units that have extreme damage potential in a short amount of time. Not even Hydra have enough dps to work with Ultra that well and certainly not Roach imo.
I did the math once and found that Ultra have more dps than Colossi when hitting 3 armored targets. At full upgrade a Colossi hitting 3 units has 76.2 dps while an Ultra will have 90.304. Hitting a single target it has 54.4. This means hitting enemies with a Fungal to clump them up is essential as it boosts the power of the Ultra enormously.
Against 3 unarmored targets however it would be 40.338 so it would need help from Banelings to cover this. When enemies are more spread out Zerglings cover the rest letting the Ultra take the initial brunt of the Damage. When enemies are more spread out NP is used to mind control the power units instantly giving you a boost in power. A 10 second mind control is fine as the battle will be extremely short.
If it gets really late into the game for a finishing blow I like to transition from BL's to ultras if it even gets that far xD, as any anti air they make gets subtracted out of their ground army. Like one time I versed a terran who made 20 supply worth of vikings all to counter the 6 to 7 BL's I made. He waited to build up an army again before moving out, but by that time my ultras were out, and his vikings just sat in the air with nothing to shoot at XD
The largest problem with Ultras currently is that Ghosts are used to fight the Broodlord Corrupter mix, and the ghost is still wildly effective using snipes vs Ultralisks. At the time this guide was written, infestors still had the less damaging fungal and ghosts were almost unrecognized in the matchup
This guide needs to be updated after the 6 months of patch changes. Also
On January 25 2011 11:27 CuteSmallHydra wrote: But I notice something... he's not really making marines, and the ones he does have aren't being upgraded. FML, I have like 100 banelings and he has a pure mech army.
lol? Maybe I"m being too picky but I want something that sounds like you know what you're doing and you don't blind counter marines to that big of an extent.
coming from someone who watches quite a bit of SC2
is that in every pic you posted of the T army, they are bunched tight, tight enough to allow the Z to not only surround, but decimate the T army with banelings. So how does this strat work against a T who spreads his army? We've seen that a decent T needs to keep his units spread to A) avoid the flank and B) keep all his rines from dying to baneling splash damage.
I've been covering the weakness of this build with just a control group of lings and a few queens/spines at each base (to defend late game drops)
I now find this to be the ending go-to strategy I use vs T. I always just had a better eco but could never quite finish them off and i would either starve them out or lose. Every time I try this strat i just roll into the terran army with my upgraded ultra/bling and wipe them out completely. it's won me games that otherwise i wouldn't know how to win. thanks for the useful guide!
Same here, After studying your post and Replays It sounded very logical to me that this really could happen to work like a charm. Before, I had big problems against a big MechArmy. I tried it the whole day and guess what, I didn´t loose one (!) not one Game ^^
Sure it is a little bit tricky when the Terra attacks with a handfull of Banshees, but in this case a few SporeCrawlers and a queen or two works great, it needs just a little micro. (in one case I even forgot about the Spire - but I needed it badly, so built it and it was okay with a few Mutas) In worst case you are loosing your third on the way to the Hive. But anyway, at about 16 to 18 minutes there are about 5-6 Ultras fully Shieldteched and lot´s of Lings, Banelings that are teched very High too ( something I wouldn´t have done when not racing to teched Ultras - a very big extraPlus). Everytime the Terra wants to attack, you have to be sure to get the tanks unsieged when possible. But it also worked with spreaded and sieged ones.The losses are a little bit higher, but in every case it was just a green Wave ^^ ...and after that a few lings and Ultras survived. Reinforced immediately Lings and sent them to the enemy Base to finish him. If this is not possible immediately, the second Push of him will suffer the same fate. Made 1-2 more expos, didn´t let him one and Bammm.
On July 13 2011 00:05 Olsson wrote: Why ultras and not brood lords?
without spire, GG lords will take so long in coming that if you're counting on having a T3 to keep you in the running during a game, you will lose if that T3 unit is BL when you haven't even gotten GS yet. an ultra den is pretty quick. GG lords have about the same time as Ultras, when you factor corruptor BT to BL morph BT, in addition to the super slow GS BT on top of an already slow Sp BT on top of more slow lair/hive BT.
Just as a note about this
spire and hive upgrades take the same amount of time to build
if you just count the seconds (assume spire made at the same time as hive)
brood lord route -> 100 (hive+spire) + 100 (greaterspire) +34 (build time for broodlords...that is if you build the corrupters ~36 before greater spire finishes) = 234 ultralisk route -> 100 (hive) + 65 (ultralisk cavern) + 70 = 235
On July 13 2011 00:05 Olsson wrote: Why ultras and not brood lords?
without spire, GG lords will take so long in coming that if you're counting on having a T3 to keep you in the running during a game, you will lose if that T3 unit is BL when you haven't even gotten GS yet. an ultra den is pretty quick. GG lords have about the same time as Ultras, when you factor corruptor BT to BL morph BT, in addition to the super slow GS BT on top of an already slow Sp BT on top of more slow lair/hive BT.
Just as a note about this
spire and hive upgrades take the same amount of time to build
if you just count the seconds (assume spire made at the same time as hive)
brood lord route -> 100 (hive+spire) + 100 (greaterspire) +34 (build time for broodlords...that is if you build the corrupters ~36 before greater spire finishes) = 234 ultralisk route -> 100 (hive) + 65 (ultralisk cavern) + 70 = 235
Interesting number crunching results - but also consider the possibility of Ultralisks being decreased from 70 to 55 seconds.
14 seconds less (compared to Broodlords) can sometimes be life-saving...
As a random player who has trouble finishing his zvt, I think this build has definite strengths. However, do you think that adding 3-5 infestors in the mid game since the fungal is so strong would help this build? Or do you think that it would delay the time for ultras too much? Granted, I still need to get hands-on with this build which I intend to do once I have my computer fixed.
On September 03 2011 00:54 Jackhammer19 wrote: As a random player who has trouble finishing his zvt, I think this build has definite strengths. However, do you think that adding 3-5 infestors in the mid game since the fungal is so strong would help this build? Or do you think that it would delay the time for ultras too much? Granted, I still need to get hands-on with this build which I intend to do once I have my computer fixed.
No, you NEED infestors in the timing before hive tech, unless your muta/ling/bane did so much damage that you're really ahead. If you're close to even, Terran will hit that 19-20 minute timing where you are X seconds away from T3 and absolutely demolish you if you don't have infestors. You need Infestors to stop that push.
Just read this and I really enjoyed it. I feel like July pulled some Ultras out of the bag in the recent GSL Ro8 against SlayerS Ryung. I think they're something Terran hasn't had to deal with in a long time, and though there are counters--mass marauder--the current mass reactors don't allow for the production of them.
Re: the ling, baneling, 'ling composition that remains popular, it's just so delicate. As the OP said, it's always an army trade with mutas left over in the best case. And lately, Terrans have been muta-proofing their bases with tons of turrets. And Broodlords are dandy in all, but Terrans are getting way too good at deflecting them--Viking, ghost, planetary walls (Bomber vs. DRG).
Anyway, I'm only a diamond level player, but I appreciate this and will start implementing it. Thanks for the build.
unfortunately the tanks are not really widespread. But this is more to disprove this statement of Flonomenalz:
On September 03 2011 01:20 Flonomenalz wrote: No, you NEED infestors in the timing before hive tech, unless your muta/ling/bane did so much damage that you're really ahead. If you're close to even, Terran will hit that 19-20 minute timing where you are X seconds away from T3 and absolutely demolish you if you don't have infestors. You need Infestors to stop that push.
I had my first Ulli @about 17.15 minutes. So you don´t need really Infestors, you just have to be fast I played yesterday all day long, lost not one game and had not one Infestor ^^
I think it's worth observing that a bane/sling/ultra comp is very robust when used to quickly and decisively smash a supply-disadvantaged terran defense. If you're staring down a fresh planetary behind a smaller army and you're racing against his mules to inflict damage... a comp to win huge in unfair fights is just the thing.
For getting ahead, I think broodlords offer more. But for using your lead like a baseball bat, bane/sling/ultra has that satisfying crunch. When he's playing to recover you need the bat.
Felt the need to bump this because it's awesome...just one question though: When do you make your baneling nest? (as in, before or after infestor pit, or even lair?)
On October 07 2011 05:10 CreativeAlias wrote: Felt the need to bump this because it's awesome...just one question though: When do you make your baneling nest? (as in, before or after infestor pit, or even lair?)
I would say before lair, just to make sure you can get the baneling speed asap to deal with marine tank 2 base timing.
there are quite a few ways to work your way up to ultras.
Hey, firstly very nice post! I have been having alot of trouble against terran lately going mutalisks and this composition has really been working out for me. I was just wondering on your thoughts on the best transition into this composition as I find that going infestor is a waste (as I don't implement them into my late game as they are not needed to kill marines, marauders etc as I have banelings) also mutalisks just seem to be targeted and killed instantly?
On November 18 2011 16:51 neoghaleon55 wrote: Why can't more people use Ultrabanes in tournament plays?! Everytime I see a zerg go pure ultralisks, I die a bit inside (looking at you July!).
A ton of people use ultra bane, but the reason they don't is that banelings tend to either get blocked by the ultras, or block the ultras, you're more likely to see ultra bane. Also, slightly overlapping roles, both ultras and banes are designed to deal with large quantities of bio clumped up and unable to run (usually due to fungal). It tends to cause terran to just kite like mad, so banes don't usually hit anything, and if they're not kiting, they'll have tanks out, which can easily focus fire the banes.
The "best" unit comp will have a few banelings, but their job isn't to actually land, but to force terran to react in a fairly severe manner, redirecting more focus cost in food on the terran side then they sink in zerg's food.
That's at least how I see it, basically at any point in the game, if banes land on your clumped up army (be it unsieged tanks, large numbers of thors, unsplit marines, big ball of ghosts, etc...) then the game tends to just end.
All of the images that I'm seeing here are catching terran out of position, and none of them are showing 5 medivacs harassing zerg expansions forcing tons of cash to be dumped into spines, and allowing terran to build up a deathball (usually the existing marine tank medivac marauder army + ghosts built during the time bought with drops).
Just my thoughts on the matter, I'm a high masters terran player (hit ret yesterday).
zvt is the only matchup it's worth it to make ultras tbh
which is the opposite of what catz said the other day
said they're only good vs stalker collossi, which is reasonably true.
but even that sucks if its a map with high ground (shakuras, for example) or youre fighting near a choke. will win a lot more zvp's if you never make an ultralisk.
All of the images that I'm seeing here are catching terran out of position, and none of them are showing 5 medivacs harassing zerg expansions forcing tons of cash to be dumped into spines, and allowing terran to build up a deathball (usually the existing marine tank medivac marauder army + ghosts built during the time bought with drops).
None of them are showing 7 overlords full of zerglings unloading in a terran base or 39 infested terrans popping up behind a mineral line either.
I think ventral sacs significantly increases the effectiveness and viability of any of these non-mutalisk compositions. it's an insanely useful upgrade.
I begun using this build by myself before finding your post and all I can say is: Thanks for showing me how to polish it.
Most of the time at my level (high plat / low diamond) I find terrans just going blindly to vikings to counter Blords, so ultra tech works wonders. I just have to care to send the ultras first so they tanks the tanks shots, and then run with lings/blings, surround and GG. As in old BW, ultras are the tanks, and lings are the DPS in this composition, while blings offer some AOE to keep the bio running.
All of the images that I'm seeing here are catching terran out of position, and none of them are showing 5 medivacs harassing zerg expansions forcing tons of cash to be dumped into spines, and allowing terran to build up a deathball (usually the existing marine tank medivac marauder army + ghosts built during the time bought with drops).
None of them are showing 7 overlords full of zerglings unloading in a terran base or 39 infested terrans popping up behind a mineral line either.
I think ventral sacs significantly increases the effectiveness and viability of any of these non-mutalisk compositions. it's an insanely useful upgrade.
Basically the point I'm trying to make is that with an army comp like this, you end up being extremely vulnerable to drop play, and counter drops aren't really the solution, as terran is then given the liberty to turtle as hard as they want with sensor towers and bunkers and tanks sieged way back in a defensive position. As soon as zerg's units start running around trying to deal with the drop play, terran can start to become aggressive again. Marine marauder medivac ghost with maybe a few tanks (or possibly ravens) ends up with a deathball, whilst maintaining equal if not greater mobility via medivacs (a few vikings, sensor towers, and turrets, completely destroy the threat of drops, with a very small food or cost investment, terran will usually have the tools to deal with drops fairly easily at the point in the game where they're actually a threat.
As a plat, this is really getting on my nerves. Getting all your lings shredded before the banes are even close. Having same speed would be really nice. That's where Ultras come in.
Nice find! Will check replays.
Basically the point I'm trying to make is that with an army comp like this, you end up being extremely vulnerable to drop play, and counter drops aren't really the solution, as terran is then given the liberty to turtle as hard as they want with sensor towers and bunkers and tanks sieged way back in a defensive position. As soon as zerg's units start running around trying to deal with the drop play, terran can start to become aggressive again. Marine marauder medivac ghost with maybe a few tanks (or possibly ravens) ends up with a deathball, whilst maintaining equal if not greater mobility via medivacs (a few vikings, sensor towers, and turrets, completely destroy the threat of drops, with a very small food or cost investment, terran will usually have the tools to deal with drops fairly easily at the point in the game where they're actually a threat.
Have 10 Mutas sitting around to deal with drops. In addition, you will have excess minerals probably, so get a ton of spines in addition.
As long as pretty much every map has major chokepoints (and sometimes layered chokes like Shakuras), Ultralisks just don't seem very good to me.
If you want your lings and blings to survive, you need to split them up and come from multiple angles. If they are in a choke, you can't do this, but Ultrarisks wouldn't help you in that situation either. They get destroyed by a siege line of tanks, they get destroyed by marauders, they get destroyed by snipe (And are super EZ to target with it), all the while never actually closing melee range to deal damage. And if you want to break a fortified position, Which makes more sense - The huge long range unit that causes tanks to friendly fire, or the fat melee unit which will block your zerglings and die on the way in?
Lots of platinum players in here extolling their virtues but lets be honest, are we smarter than every progamer zerg who thinks they suck? Probably not. Anyone in masters wanna come in here and defend the "Ultralisks > Broodlords" viewpoint in this current patch, even after the Ultralisk build time buff? If not, this thread seems kinda silly. If so, convince me to use them again, because right now I only build them as a joke if my opponent should have already left the game.
Essentially, the ultrabane army is a throwaway army. I always have infestors to defend at home and making broodlords while the ultrabanes are out on their suicide mission.
So ultrabane--->infestor/brood is how to deal with most terrans. Unless I see like 16 tanks, then I dont make the ultras. lol
On November 18 2011 19:02 darkscream wrote: As long as pretty much every map has major chokepoints (and sometimes layered chokes like Shakuras), Ultralisks just don't seem very good to me.
If you want your lings and blings to survive, you need to split them up and come from multiple angles. If they are in a choke, you can't do this, but Ultrarisks wouldn't help you in that situation either. They get destroyed by a siege line of tanks, they get destroyed by marauders, they get destroyed by snipe (And are super EZ to target with it), all the while never actually closing melee range to deal damage. And if you want to break a fortified position, Which makes more sense - The huge long range unit that causes tanks to friendly fire, or the fat melee unit which will block your zerglings and die on the way in?
Lots of platinum players in here extolling their virtues but lets be honest, are we smarter than every progamer zerg who thinks they suck? Probably not. Anyone in masters wanna come in here and defend the "Ultralisks > Broodlords" viewpoint in this current patch, even after the Ultralisk build time buff? If not, this thread seems kinda silly. If so, convince me to use them again, because right now I only build them as a joke if my opponent should have already left the game.
No, but we need to work with our mechanics we have available, too, and here having the same speed comes into play.
Also, "coming from different angles" and "flanking" and stuff sounds really really awesome on paper, but if you mess that up even by a small margins, it ends up with first one half of your army being shred to bits, and then the other half.
If, of course, you are mid master to GM, this may not be for you.
On November 18 2011 19:02 darkscream wrote: As long as pretty much every map has major chokepoints (and sometimes layered chokes like Shakuras), Ultralisks just don't seem very good to me.
If you want your lings and blings to survive, you need to split them up and come from multiple angles. If they are in a choke, you can't do this, but Ultrarisks wouldn't help you in that situation either. They get destroyed by a siege line of tanks, they get destroyed by marauders, they get destroyed by snipe (And are super EZ to target with it), all the while never actually closing melee range to deal damage. And if you want to break a fortified position, Which makes more sense - The huge long range unit that causes tanks to friendly fire, or the fat melee unit which will block your zerglings and die on the way in?
Lots of platinum players in here extolling their virtues but lets be honest, are we smarter than every progamer zerg who thinks they suck? Probably not. Anyone in masters wanna come in here and defend the "Ultralisks > Broodlords" viewpoint in this current patch, even after the Ultralisk build time buff? If not, this thread seems kinda silly. If so, convince me to use them again, because right now I only build them as a joke if my opponent should have already left the game.
Maybe I'm a platinum player but I know when to make Blords and when to make ultras. Against some army compositions I feel ultras are better than Blords due to their mobility and tanking damage. Also against terrans which make preemtive vikings.
Also, I find very arrogant to just discard the OP build just because most PROs don't support it (although I have seen some good zerg using ultras with great success in big maps where BLs are slow as hell) Someone should remember all the high skill gamers in their ivory towers than 95% of people playing starcraft is mid diamond and below, where this composition can work wonders if well used.
Not everyone can have Destiny infestor micro or Idra's muta control. But my enemies are not MVP or MMA to shutter step their ball against my ultra ling bling so... who cares.
On November 18 2011 19:02 darkscream wrote: As long as pretty much every map has major chokepoints (and sometimes layered chokes like Shakuras), Ultralisks just don't seem very good to me.
If you want your lings and blings to survive, you need to split them up and come from multiple angles. If they are in a choke, you can't do this, but Ultrarisks wouldn't help you in that situation either. They get destroyed by a siege line of tanks, they get destroyed by marauders, they get destroyed by snipe (And are super EZ to target with it), all the while never actually closing melee range to deal damage. And if you want to break a fortified position, Which makes more sense - The huge long range unit that causes tanks to friendly fire, or the fat melee unit which will block your zerglings and die on the way in?
Lots of platinum players in here extolling their virtues but lets be honest, are we smarter than every progamer zerg who thinks they suck? Probably not. Anyone in masters wanna come in here and defend the "Ultralisks > Broodlords" viewpoint in this current patch, even after the Ultralisk build time buff? If not, this thread seems kinda silly. If so, convince me to use them again, because right now I only build them as a joke if my opponent should have already left the game.
Nobody needs to convince you of anything. It's a strategy that works for a lot of people. DRG won a match against Jjakji using ultrabanes just recently on the gsl. Take your elitism and condescending attitude elsewhere.
All of the images that I'm seeing here are catching terran out of position, and none of them are showing 5 medivacs harassing zerg expansions forcing tons of cash to be dumped into spines, and allowing terran to build up a deathball (usually the existing marine tank medivac marauder army + ghosts built during the time bought with drops).
None of them are showing 7 overlords full of zerglings unloading in a terran base or 39 infested terrans popping up behind a mineral line either.
I think ventral sacs significantly increases the effectiveness and viability of any of these non-mutalisk compositions. it's an insanely useful upgrade.
Basically the point I'm trying to make is that with an army comp like this, you end up being extremely vulnerable to drop play, and counter drops aren't really the solution, as terran is then given the liberty to turtle as hard as they want with sensor towers and bunkers and tanks sieged way back in a defensive position. As soon as zerg's units start running around trying to deal with the drop play, terran can start to become aggressive again. Marine marauder medivac ghost with maybe a few tanks (or possibly ravens) ends up with a deathball, whilst maintaining equal if not greater mobility via medivacs (a few vikings, sensor towers, and turrets, completely destroy the threat of drops, with a very small food or cost investment, terran will usually have the tools to deal with drops fairly easily at the point in the game where they're actually a threat.
From my experience, as long as I keep my zerglings in multiple control groups I can handle multiple drops with minimal damage and without putting myself too far out of position. Multiple control groups is very very important. Also from my experience, although terran has the tools to deal with drops fairly easily, the drops still always work very well. As soon as terran units start running around trying to deal with the drop play, zerg can start to become aggresive again. >. Out of curiosity, have you faced much zerg drop play? It's something that I have seen very little of, which surprises me because I do it with a ridiculous success rate, but I haven't seen any other zergs really doing it in ZvT since Fruitdealer in season one. Most terrans cut corners against ling infestor and only build 1-2 turrets per base, which seems reasonable, but it does not stop a drop. When you pull units back to try to clear zerglings out of your base, I always try to fungal you on your ramp, and I am using the rest of my army to search for a vulnerability to catch and destroy unprotected siege tanks and planetary fortresses. For fun, I bring a queen along in my big drops to spread creep in your base. It's not a big deal but it'll force a scan later. I am throwing away zerglings, but they are units I had already made (so they aren't potential drones lost) and easily replaced. After the first drop they start adding more turrets, but usually I can just bring empty overlords and drop on the turrets anyway. Or I can drop somewhere else. Or if it really does become impregnable, I'll fly 20 overlords into your sensor tower anyway. do you feel lucky?
I think zerg drop play is very powerful, but still relatively unexplored. Right now to me, it feels completely overpowered, but that's because most terrans I play against on the ladder don't have a response in their playbook yet, because pro players don't have to deal with it and no one has written a guide yet. If it does become standard, I expect that it'll still be a strong strategy with strengths and weaknesses.
If you are interested, I have uploaded a bunch of replays of my ladder games with zerg drop play. Unfortunately not Ultra+bane, but almost always Ultra+ling+infestor. http://drop.sc/search?utf8=✓&mu=tvz&player=oboeman I also made a video compiling my highlights of zerg drops
I would also be happy to practice it against you ingame Oboeman.146 on NA Server. I've been waiting for several weeks for a terran player to handle it well on ladder, to no avail. so I'd love to churn out a bunch of games to see how terrans should be responding (and consequently, how I can take the next step to improve it, or get a better understanding of when to NOT drop)
Definitely late, but I just wanted to say thank you to CuteSmallHydra for this. I started using the build shown in these replays right after reading this thread many many months ago, and I improved my ZvT a TON. Beating Diamond opponents easily while in plat. I quit playing for a while and came back only a few months ago, and started looking for some new build orders to focus on macro and I started using Spanishiwa's Ice Fisher Build, but in ZvT I remembered the basic premises of this thread "zergling baneling, mutalisks to protect from drops, banshees, etc. or to gain map control and harass, and Ultras as soon as possible." Even though I open with the Ice Fisher build, my ZvT game plan is still based on the concepts in this thread, and I don't often lose in ZvT. Thanks CuteSmallHydra, this thread is the basis for everything I do in ZvT.
I am so appalled that it's been more than one year after this great article was published...many pro-gamers are still using ultralisks wrong. Here are some rules to live by after you have read the opening post. I am basing these rules off my own experience and watching all the major tournaments of SCII since the beta...feel free to discuss/disagree.
1. You should never EVER mass ultralisks...EVER 2. Ultrabanes are always better than Ultralings against marine/tanks 3. Do not use Ultrabanes against mass thor/tanks...get broodlords.
Now another thing people need to freaking realize is that Ultrabanes is not the way to finish the game. Ultrabanes is a tool to wipe out something completely from the map...think of it, as a fast moving nuke. Once you nuke the opponent, both you and your opponent will be temporarily weak, but that's the beauty of it...you are abusing the larva mechanic to make another army before they can regain theirs. Thus, we add a few more rules to live by.
4. When you are making ultrabanes, ALWAYS get a greater spire and prepare to get a bunch of corruptors. This is how you end the game.
I think about ultrabanes/ infestorbrood like boxing...Your ultrabanes are your left hand jabs which you can use to take out half an army or a planetary or two...Your right hand of infestorbroods deliver the final knockout punch. You can't fight well without both hands!
5. Ultrabanes must never be used off two bases...you cannot afford it. If you're behinds, just do infestorbrood and pray.
6. Use ultrabanes to hit and run on expansions. Just wipe it out and leave, do not stay to engage the opponent's army.
And most importantly! 7. DO NOT MAKE MORE THAN 4 ULTRALISKS!!!!!!
If you think about it, ultralisks are awful at dealing damage to a Terran ball, they should be used for what they really are...meat shields for your damage dealer: the banelings. And that's the whole point I think a lot of people are missing! YOU NEED A DAMAGE DEALER!! ULTRALISKS don't do that much damage for their costs/collision size!
On April 02 2012 15:07 neoghaleon55 wrote: I am so appalled that it's been more than one year after this great article was published...many pro-gamers are still using ultralisks wrong. Here are some rules to live by after you have read the opening post. I am basing these rules off my own experience and watching all the major tournaments of SCII since the beta...feel free to discuss/disagree.
1. You should never EVER mass ultralisks...EVER 2. Ultrabanes are always better than Ultralings against marine/tanks 3. Do not use Ultrabanes against mass thor/tanks...get broodlords.
Now another thing people need to freaking realize is that Ultrabanes is not the way to finish the game. Ultrabanes is a tool to wipe out something completely from the map...think of it, as a fast moving nuke. Once you nuke the opponent, both you and your opponent will be temporarily weak, but that's the beauty of it...you are abusing the larva mechanic to make another army before they can regain theirs. Thus, we add a few more rules to live by.
4. When you are making ultrabanes, ALWAYS get a greater spire and prepare to get a bunch of corruptors. This is how you end the game.
I think about ultrabanes/ infestorbrood like boxing...Your ultrabanes are your left hand jabs which you can use to take out half an army or a planetary or two...Your right hand of infestorbroods deliver the final knockout punch. You can't fight well without both hands!
5. Ultrabanes must never be used off two bases...you cannot afford it. If you're behinds, just do infestorbrood and pray.
6. Use ultrabanes to hit and run on expansions. Just wipe it out and leave, do not stay to engage the opponent's army.
And most importantly! 7. DO NOT MAKE MORE THAN 4 ULTRALISKS!!!!!!
If you think about it, ultralisks are awful at dealing damage to a Terran ball, they should be used for what they really are...meat shields for your damage dealer: the banelings. And that's the whole point I think a lot of people are missing! YOU NEED A DAMAGE DEALER!! ULTRALISKS don't do that much damage for their costs/collision size!
~end rant.
Agreed, ultra bane is the strongest ground army you can have, it absolutly wipes the terran army and the point is to reset armies so that your crackling reinforcement wave can close in into the production.
It goes very well with a fast melee upgrade style, if you manage to keep at least a 1/1 advantage over the terran it's excellent.
5-6 ultras is all you need, over that they derp over each other, and you don't use for damage first, mostly to tank the damage.
I don't like 6.... 6 is 36 supplies Realistically you only need 4 to charge a tankline. 4 is enough to take down a planetary even with repairs.
Using only 4, you get 12 supplies extra for infestors/broods/corruptors. The point is, you don't need many ultralisks because they don't actually deal the damage.
Does this strategy really work against stutter stepping marines? In the OP, the dangers of hellions kiting this comp was already mentioned, but stutter stepping marines is the same principle.
I personally use Infestor w/ Ultras because the gas going to banelings is just so inneffeceint since they rarely connect with their targets unless you can get a surround. Most of the time they're forced to connect against tanks unless you want them to continue dying for nothing.
I think we can all agree that Infestors are much more effeceint than banelings. If you don't, then watch Stephano win games against Terran while being on equal bases simply because he makes more use out of his gas with Infestors than with Mutas and Banelings. Infestor play allows him to tech faster and get more upgrades for his end-game comp, which is very similar to the end-game comp discussed here.
By sticking with ling / infestor in the mid-game it allows you to not only get Ultra / Bane in the end game, it allows you to get Ultra / Bane / Infestor with Max Upgrades not just max armor.
Granted, ultra/banes take out a planetary much quicker and possibly more efficeintly than ultra/infestor/ling (especially with max attack upgrades), which is why I wait until the end game to get my bane nest (a good timing would be to build your bane nest with your ultra cavern).
On April 02 2012 18:42 neoghaleon55 wrote: I don't like 6.... 6 is 36 supplies Realistically you only need 4 to charge a tankline. 4 is enough to take down a planetary even with repairs.
Using only 4, you get 12 supplies extra for infestors/broods/corruptors. The point is, you don't need many ultralisks because they don't actually deal the damage.
Just a minor critique but, I don't know about just getting 4 Ultras... If that's all you can afford with your gas, then definitely just go for it, but if you have enough gas to get 6-8, and you're left with 3-4 after your initial wave, your reinforcing lings will still have meatshields.
Yes, your initial wave may not have as much DPS as it could have BUT, let's face it, you're not going to be able to remax to 200 with just lings if your entire army is dead.... there's absolutely no way you'll have that much larvae lying around. What happens if the terran opponent has great sim city and walls off from your "onslought" of 25 pairs of lings? You just gave him a chance to get back in it, and now you have to wait for Ultras or Brood Lords, or morphing banes... something!
However, if you still have some ultras left, then you'll be a lot closer to 200 supply once you use up all your larvae on lings. In this way, you'll be able to steadily maintain a maxed army more easily.
In addition, by this point in the game your queens usually have excess energy for transfuses, so if you're fast enough, you can heal up your leftover Ultras and reingage with your reinforcements ASAP.
What's do the ultras do if Terran target fires down the banelings? Sure ultra bane sounds amazing if Terran tank shots hit the ultras, but what if the Terran player is really good, target fires banes and kites ultras.
Hey all, interesting to see my old ultra/bane guide being bumped after over a full year having passed since I'd written it. The bump was brought to my attention by a PM from someone complimenting me on the guide and asking whether I preferred using mutalisks or infestors.
Before I answer that, I must point out that this guide is clearly old and outdated. There are four things that immediately come to mind as to why this is so:
1) Back when this was posted, terrans still did many 1-base all-in's/cheeses and had only just started recovering from BitByBitPrime syndrome. Also as mentioned in my OP, scv repair was truly imbalanced back then. Nowadays, at least from what I know, many T's open 2 fact hellion or BF hellion into fast expo. I mentioned in the OP how it's really, and I mean REALLY hard to deal with mass hellion when all you're making is ling/bane with delayed mutalisks. You'll need some really good sim city or a different opening to combat this. My original openings in the now gone replays (RIP megaupload) are simply no good.
2) Back when this was posted, Infestors sucked hardcore. This was why Idra's muta/ling/bane was the go-to strategy in ZvT. There was simply no other equal at the time. It was only some time after I had already written my guide that Infestors received their many buffs over the next several patches. The style of play Stephano uses, while pretty damn awesome right now, simply wouldn't have worked with the Infestor's fungle doing less damage and having a much longer duration for the full DoT to take effect. If Stephano used Ultras back when I had first written this guide, it would've been the exact same way I used them - basically the ultra/bane composition.
3) Back when this was posted, terrans did not devote even nearly as much of their energy/resources/time to delaying creep spread as they do now. Going back to point one here - if they open hellion and can't find any place to poke, they WILL keep their hellions just outside your creep and prevent further expansion. This greatly reduces the effect of the early speedling/speedbanes that I recommended as the best way of keeping yourself alive to early terran pushes. Stutter stepping marines were never a problem when I engaged on creep. Nowadays it's not as easy to have the entire map covered in purple as it used to be.
4) Back when this posted (I really say that a lot, don't I? Truly shows the age of this guide), Ultralisk build time was 70 seconds. I believe it's now 50? Or was it 40? I don't even know anymore. The point is that one of the main factors of this guide was to make people include Ultralisks in their very first maxed army composition, rather than going 200/200, losing a battle, and then trying to remax/reinforce with Ultralisks. That simply did not work, yet that strategy was common advice found coming from many high level players (the whole brood lord to force vikings, lose entire army then remax on Ultras strat lost more often than not). Now however, with the ultralisk build time having been drastically lowered, it stands to reason that zergs should have an easier time reinforcing an already existing army with Ultralisks, given that they don't blow all their resources into that. Always keep in mind that you need a way to deal with marines when going Ultralisks, as Ultras themselves simply don't fulfill that role. You'll need either infestors or banelings to compliment your ultralisks.
So to answer the original question, at the time this guide was written, I simply could not prefer to use Infestors over Mutalisks. Infestors weren't all that good, and muta/ling/bane was the best zerg could offer to combat all the 1base all-in's terran had and still offer a way to go on the offensive (via muta harrass). My guide did, however, inspire others to further stray away from the standard muta/ling/bane composition and experiment with using infestors as an alternative - such as this guide from MrBitter posted a few weeks after my own - http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=193058 - his OP even links back to this thread here.
In the PM it was also asked what builds I use now, seeing as the guide is hella old. Truthfully, I no longer really play SC2 right now. I don't even remember when I stopped. It must've been around sometime last summer. I still played a bit every now and then, but no longer the excess that I did when I wrote this guide. Back then I considered myself one of the top players, at least on the NA server. Now I'm obviously nowhere near that close. I opened up my SC2 today for the first time in over a month just to look up my ZvT replays and see if I could write up anything about how my play had evolved and post some more modern replays now that all the old ones were gone. Unfortunately when trying to load my latest replay, I was presented with the message that I could only watch it offline since the patches were incompatible so I immediately gave up on that idea.
So to conclude, a big thanks to everyone who read this guide and gave my old playstyles a shot. I like to think that it had at least somewhat of an impact on the zerg scene and how zergs approached ZvT and Ultralisks as a whole. If I end up taking up SC2 again and get high up there on the masters ladder again, I'll be sure to post newer replays and comment on how my ultra/bane playstyle had changed over time. Thanks for reading!
On April 02 2012 18:42 neoghaleon55 wrote: I don't like 6.... 6 is 36 supplies Realistically you only need 4 to charge a tankline. 4 is enough to take down a planetary even with repairs.
Using only 4, you get 12 supplies extra for infestors/broods/corruptors. The point is, you don't need many ultralisks because they don't actually deal the damage.
I think a good rule of thumb is that you never want a second row of ultralisks in a battle. If you do make 6-8 of them, you better have a huge open field to engage in, or some way to flank.
Ultra baneling has been my kill-move for ages against terrans. It's pretty damn good, and 3-3 cracklings are the ultimate remax. No way in hell terran has enough hellions left over after a baneling ultra attack to deflect the numbers of rallies you can throw at them.
On April 07 2012 08:20 neoghaleon55 wrote: FFS!! Stephano just lost because he used ultralings.... FREAKING!! USE ULTRABANES!!! gahhh!!
You don't even need that many banelings. You can have a mainly crackling force with 4-6 ultras and up to 15+ banelings and still crush the Terran army much better than without any banelings.
Cool part of banelings is that if marines runs away from the banelings, then those marines aren't shooting (if they stutter-step they will get trapped by lings, or they'll be shooting lings and not banes), letting the ultras eat the tanks. I think the biggest part is having ultras soak the initial tank volley that decimates 1/3 of your ling bling flood.
On April 03 2012 04:06 CuteSmallHydra wrote: Hey all, interesting to see my old ultra/bane guide being bumped after over a full year having passed since I'd written it. The bump was brought to my attention by a PM from someone complimenting me on the guide and asking whether I preferred using mutalisks or infestors.
Before I answer that, I must point out that this guide is clearly old and outdated. There are four things that immediately come to mind as to why this is so:
1) Back when this was posted, terrans still did many 1-base all-in's/cheeses and had only just started recovering from BitByBitPrime syndrome. Also as mentioned in my OP, scv repair was truly imbalanced back then. Nowadays, at least from what I know, many T's open 2 fact hellion or BF hellion into fast expo. I mentioned in the OP how it's really, and I mean REALLY hard to deal with mass hellion when all you're making is ling/bane with delayed mutalisks. You'll need some really good sim city or a different opening to combat this. My original openings in the now gone replays (RIP megaupload) are simply no good.
2) Back when this was posted, Infestors sucked hardcore. This was why Idra's muta/ling/bane was the go-to strategy in ZvT. There was simply no other equal at the time. It was only some time after I had already written my guide that Infestors received their many buffs over the next several patches. The style of play Stephano uses, while pretty damn awesome right now, simply wouldn't have worked with the Infestor's fungle doing less damage and having a much longer duration for the full DoT to take effect. If Stephano used Ultras back when I had first written this guide, it would've been the exact same way I used them - basically the ultra/bane composition.
3) Back when this was posted, terrans did not devote even nearly as much of their energy/resources/time to delaying creep spread as they do now. Going back to point one here - if they open hellion and can't find any place to poke, they WILL keep their hellions just outside your creep and prevent further expansion. This greatly reduces the effect of the early speedling/speedbanes that I recommended as the best way of keeping yourself alive to early terran pushes. Stutter stepping marines were never a problem when I engaged on creep. Nowadays it's not as easy to have the entire map covered in purple as it used to be.
4) Back when this posted (I really say that a lot, don't I? Truly shows the age of this guide), Ultralisk build time was 70 seconds. I believe it's now 50? Or was it 40? I don't even know anymore. The point is that one of the main factors of this guide was to make people include Ultralisks in their very first maxed army composition, rather than going 200/200, losing a battle, and then trying to remax/reinforce with Ultralisks. That simply did not work, yet that strategy was common advice found coming from many high level players (the whole brood lord to force vikings, lose entire army then remax on Ultras strat lost more often than not). Now however, with the ultralisk build time having been drastically lowered, it stands to reason that zergs should have an easier time reinforcing an already existing army with Ultralisks, given that they don't blow all their resources into that. Always keep in mind that you need a way to deal with marines when going Ultralisks, as Ultras themselves simply don't fulfill that role. You'll need either infestors or banelings to compliment your ultralisks.
So to answer the original question, at the time this guide was written, I simply could not prefer to use Infestors over Mutalisks. Infestors weren't all that good, and muta/ling/bane was the best zerg could offer to combat all the 1base all-in's terran had and still offer a way to go on the offensive (via muta harrass). My guide did, however, inspire others to further stray away from the standard muta/ling/bane composition and experiment with using infestors as an alternative - such as this guide from MrBitter posted a few weeks after my own - http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=193058 - his OP even links back to this thread here.
In the PM it was also asked what builds I use now, seeing as the guide is hella old. Truthfully, I no longer really play SC2 right now. I don't even remember when I stopped. It must've been around sometime last summer. I still played a bit every now and then, but no longer the excess that I did when I wrote this guide. Back then I considered myself one of the top players, at least on the NA server. Now I'm obviously nowhere near that close. I opened up my SC2 today for the first time in over a month just to look up my ZvT replays and see if I could write up anything about how my play had evolved and post some more modern replays now that all the old ones were gone. Unfortunately when trying to load my latest replay, I was presented with the message that I could only watch it offline since the patches were incompatible so I immediately gave up on that idea.
So to conclude, a big thanks to everyone who read this guide and gave my old playstyles a shot. I like to think that it had at least somewhat of an impact on the zerg scene and how zergs approached ZvT and Ultralisks as a whole. If I end up taking up SC2 again and get high up there on the masters ladder again, I'll be sure to post newer replays and comment on how my ultra/bane playstyle had changed over time. Thanks for reading!
You are a hero amongst the zerg. This guide did for late game zerg what Spanishiwa did for early game zerg. complete paradigm shift.
Regarding all your points, yes the game has changed a lot, however, ultralisk/baneling synergy still exists. They are still the same speed. Banelings are still the fastest damage dealer to a ball of stuff in the game, they just need something to tank for them.
Another paradigm since this guide was published is the speedroach/speedbane push mid game in ZvT. Speedroach with armor upgrades is like the poor man's ultralisk. they have a ton of HP for their costs and have roughly the same movement speed.
I want to mention that I am highly against ultralinginfestor as a combination. The speeds are soooooo off from one another. Lings will run in first, ultras get caught in pathing bug after, infestors are too slow to deal with drops. I've seen so many GSL zergs try this and fail miserably... people need to do ultrabanes or just don't ultras...period(in ZvT of course).
EPT![[image loading]](http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/2171/screenshot2011012403553.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/8096/screenshot2011012403562.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/6995/screenshot2011012403573.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img546.imageshack.us/img546/5121/screenshot2011012417091.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/6251/screenshot2011012417114.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/8812/screenshot2011012417162.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img546.imageshack.us/img546/4626/screenshot2011012417181.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/1034/screenshot2011012417183.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/2453/screenshot2011012417242.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/6084/screenshot2011012417251.jpg)
. 
), this is exactly the kind of creative insight I was looking for.
and stims his marines and runs back, and when you attack a staggered siege tank line with broodlords, terran goes 'OH SHIT UN-SIEGE AND HAUL ASS NOW'
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-184430.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-184431.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-184551.jpg)
