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On February 10 2011 03:33 Dalavita wrote:
I think I saw you doing this build in a stream one or two days ago. It was pretty impressive to see, but I can really see it dying to mass vikings and marauders.
Hell, not even mass vikings, just enough to kill your banshees.
Regardless, I really liked the build, and I'll integrate it into my gameplay whenever I can. I have in fact been wondering why more people haven't gone full air as Terran before.
How is he going to get Mass Vikings when you have Two Starports which can easily turn into Two Starports with Reactors?
The one thing that's def solid about this build is the Air Control mid game. Air Control means Banshees > Marauders.
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My favorite part of this build is NO TANKS. I don't like tanks either. I quickly get impatient with the tank vs tank standoff.usually to my own demise.
I really enjoyed the writeup and the strategy sounds solid to me.
The theorycraft in me keeps saying "beware the early marauder push". It seems like a pack of Marauders could cause some serrious damage while I'm trying to get the two starports up and running. I have visions of a ball of marauders messing up my base while two banshees try their best to clean them up.
But that's just desktop theorycraft. I can't wait to try my hand at this, and I'm eager to hear your interview and a see demo on Day[9] tonight.
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I forget which ones specifically, but I remember some of the replays have him encountering early bio pushes / early marauder pushes with nearly no units. It's similar to what you described, relying heavily on the banshees, but it seemed to work somewhat well. Bunker up hard I suppose, if you even have enough marines, if you spot it, even just for delay. The timing was a lot like you described, but it didn't look as scary as I'd expect.
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On February 10 2011 03:27 Daystar wrote:Thread is 18 pages long so forgive me if i do not read every page to get teh answer i need  After coming back to terran after a short stint trying out Toss, i thought i would give this build a try, needless to say i lost to a terran going 2 rax marine push on 7 mins. With only 2 marines and 1 helion, how do you thwart his attack? I "should" have had a bunker up sooner no doubt, is a repaired bunker the only defense really early game?
If you execute it properly, you'll have a lot more than 1 hellion by the 7 minute mark. And it's not a build that benefits much by the use of bunkers, since you won't have marines to put in them.
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On February 10 2011 03:44 SecretA5DC wrote:Show nested quote +On February 10 2011 03:33 Dalavita wrote:
I think I saw you doing this build in a stream one or two days ago. It was pretty impressive to see, but I can really see it dying to mass vikings and marauders.
Hell, not even mass vikings, just enough to kill your banshees.
Regardless, I really liked the build, and I'll integrate it into my gameplay whenever I can. I have in fact been wondering why more people haven't gone full air as Terran before. How is he going to get Mass Vikings when you have Two Starports which can easily turn into Two Starports with Reactors? The one thing that's def solid about this build is the Air Control mid game. Air Control means Banshees > Marauders.
You get air superiority by actually going for vikings while he's going for banshee+vikings+medivacs+raven thus having one starport with tech lab and one with reactor.
I'm going purely by memory from watching the streams, which might or might not have been iechoic playing, but scouting this build is fairly easy (the blueflame hellions combined with 2x starports is a pretty telltale sign), at which point you drop down 2 or more starports with reactors for the vikings, and start pumping marauders. There is no way you won't get air superiority if you go viking focus compared to his banshee/viking focus (although like I said, you don't even need to focus on getting a lot of vikings, just enough to snipe his banshees and then land them on the ground where they can help your marauders clean house.) So what if you lose 3-4 vikings flying up to snipe his incoming banshees again, as long as he doesn't have any banshees up in the air to kill off your marauders, you could just waltz into his base and eat him up
Note: What I'm describing is a build that is made with this current build in mind, since I acknowledge that it's a viable build, and thus will end up having specific builds tailored toward it, and I believe the conc shell stim marauder + 1-2 reactor'd starports pumping mass vikings to retain a) enough vikings to snipe his banshees before they're taken out, and land the remaining one if he has lots of vikings, and b) just have flat out air superiority and depend on marauders to clean house with remaining ground, which will mainly be hellions.
It's essentially a tank viking combination with more mobile marauders.
Edit: Hell, you might as well get marauders and one thor. As long as you can hit a good timing before he has BCs, and just charge into his base with sim and annihilate him.
I say again, these builds take into account that you know about the existence of this build, and know how to scout it early enough.
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Awh man, I like the tank wars, it's gunna suck if i start getting beat in every TvT with hellion/banshee junk.
good write-up tho.
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On February 10 2011 05:13 Raiznhell wrote:
Awh man, I like the tank wars, it's gunna suck if i start getting beat in every TvT with hellion/banshee junk.
good write-up tho.
Agreed. I also love the biomech/mech viking play. This will spice it up tho, and the more spice, the more fun 
TvT is so the best matchup.
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So I've thought about this build and how it works and what an opponent should do to stopi t etc. In basically every aspect you have created the terran version of Muta/Ling. Your medivacdrop/banshees are the harassment or mutas, the vikings are the air dominancy of mutas and banshee's are the no AA cleanup of Mutas. Your helions are the ling/banelings of the composition, suicidal cheap ground units meant to kill marines. You gain map control in same method as muta/ling, make just barely enough units to survive fast attacks and basically engage the same method.
My question then is, what if a Terran player approached this game the same way he would TvZ? Basically Mass marine with a staggered seige line. Force the engage then stim kite the helions into the tank line. Use occasional thor or turrets or bunkers PF etc to defend 2-3 base . Can the helions stop the marine kite through tanks. Surrounding and approaching from multisides can be helpful just like in muta ling, but the terran should have a sensor tower or something to also be detecting. The terran knows against muta/ling if you can take out his ground force without losing all your marines that he can push and prolly win the game. He is also able to quickly reproduce and make a couple attempts at achieving this.
I plan to watch some replays and see if this comes up, it feels to me if a terran adopted a TvZ mentality against it, instead of going for typical TvT strat they could beat this build.
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On February 10 2011 06:29 snadmonkey wrote:
So I've thought about this build and how it works and what an opponent should do to stopi t etc. In basically every aspect you have created the terran version of Muta/Ling. Your medivacdrop/banshees are the harassment or mutas, the vikings are the air dominancy of mutas and banshee's are the no AA cleanup of Mutas. Your helions are the ling/banelings of the composition, suicidal cheap ground units meant to kill marines. You gain map control in same method as muta/ling, make just barely enough units to survive fast attacks and basically engage the same method.
My question then is, what if a Terran player approached this game the same way he would TvZ? Basically Mass marine with a staggered seige line. Force the engage then stim kite the helions into the tank line. Use occasional thor or turrets or bunkers PF etc to defend 2-3 base . Can the helions stop the marine kite through tanks. Surrounding and approaching from multisides can be helpful just like in muta ling, but the terran should have a sensor tower or something to also be detecting. The terran knows against muta/ling if you can take out his ground force without losing all your marines that he can push and prolly win the game. He is also able to quickly reproduce and make a couple attempts at achieving this.
I plan to watch some replays and see if this comes up, it feels to me if a terran adopted a TvZ mentality against it, instead of going for typical TvT strat they could beat this build.
One problem is that hellions are faster than banelings though, and don't require creep. While against mutabling you can be pretty safe early on against this you will be the most vulnerable very early in the game.
I think a few key elements to beating this has been mentioned in various posts.
1) Scout for this build and know it when you see it.
2) Do not lose all your scv's to the first harass. It seems that it really is time to start walling behind your mineral line so that there is no way to do runby's but the hellioning player has to drop the hellions right into the mineral line. A few units should be able to deal with it then, ideally even take the medivac out before it can drop anything.
3) Marauder/viking and double port reactor to challenge air dominance and then use the enemy's obsession with air to his disadvantage. If you start to get just one or two thors out to shut down airspace the opponent has to go battlecruisers. Know to scout for this and if/when he goes bc's keep massing vikings from dual reactor ports and you will take air control since he needs to drop viking production in order to get bc's. It might seem that you making thors would even the economy out but while you only need to have the presence of thors in smaller numbers to completely deny viking/banshee he needs multiple battlecruisers to really break through. Thus you have way more gas to spend on vikings.
4) Expand with PF's and turrets and keep walling off the back of mineral lines.
If you at any point succeed in taking air control you should have won the game outright and just go fucking kill him with marauder/thor.
Ideally it seems that a marine tank opening is ideal since it sets the tech up for fast ports if you scout this build, and you can place marines in your mineral line to stop the drop and have one tank to pick off early hellions as well.
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wow cheers day 9 would of missed this other wise
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I think the "get two reactored ports" thing will have to be refined, since it can cost a lot if you make marauders during this time : you'll need at least 2 bases worth of gas, si the results of the first drop are going to be quite important, I believe.
Also, since marauders don't kill hellions very quickly, and your vikings take some time to land, you'll be at risk of runbys.
Though I guess if the drop does enough damage, you're supposed to expand behind, and use your first banshee to scout the dual starports, and make sure to outproduce him. I lost a game where I lost the air dominance because I didn't scout enough the reactions of my opponent inside his base, I think it's very important as the build rely on balancing your production/composition.
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On February 10 2011 07:42 Alaric wrote:
I think the "get two reactored ports" thing will have to be refined, since it can cost a lot if you make marauders during this time : you'll need at least 2 bases worth of gas, si the results of the first drop are going to be quite important, I believe.
Also, since marauders don't kill hellions very quickly, and your vikings take some time to land, you'll be at risk of runbys.
The point of the blueflame hellions is to kill off any marines that are there to kill off the air, and eventually kill off SCVs. A good walloff will stop any hellions trying to runby marauders, the marauders will slow the hellions down to prevent any runbys if they're close enough, and absolutely trash them on ground, even if its relatively slow.
That first medivac hellion drop is going to be crucial and I expect I'll end up losing to it a couple of times before I learn to scout the build and how to react (wall off mineral field fully and trap stuff with scvs/keep some marauders in the mineral line with conc shell.
The problem with this build is that it can't kill things quickly, so it gives the opponent a lot of time to react to it.
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I'm about 5-0 against this strategy. This strat is helping me climb up the ladder. One guy tried to1-base it to BC's against me (in masters league) when he saw my thors. Interesting strat, but ppl are messing it up.
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On February 03 2011 22:26 Janook wrote:
The key to beating this type of composition is marauders with concussive shells. These, plus marines, kill helions and stop them from toasting your marine force, which then lets you kill the air force.
I played iEchoic while he was doing this build and beat it with Marine/Marauder/Thor/Viking.
Well of course I don't think there is any build that is your win all against any situation even builds that are considered standard have a weakness. Standard builds just have more ability to transition if your opponent tries something unorthodox.
On a completely unrelated not I thought I would point out.+ Show Spoiler +On February 03 2011 23:32 Antisocialmunky wrote:Thanks for the rep. I forgot to ask iEchoic for some failure reps. That was fairly well played. I guess if I see a barracks scout, I know its a factory/port opening . Not really a mule gains you approximately 300 minerals over the course of its life so even if you are going a bio build, building a barracks outside your opponents base (or in the case of scrapstation you could still build the second rax in your base) and fly it in. It is just dependent on whether or not you have 150minerals for a down payment or not. (even if you don't a barracks scout can usually see more of the base and has the added bonus of being annoying as you saw in that replay that jimmy posted. The barracks flew off and landed where the CC wanted to land so Jimmy was forced to pull a good number of marines to go kill it or defend against a potential air/drop attack. Echoic got quite a few scv kills when the marines left to kill the rax.
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Typically you don't float your production structures out unless you can afford the hit to unit production that early on. Sure you can build an extra barracks to float around but its not going to be '150' down payment or not that early. Its going to be a planned and calculated risk.
But anyway, all I was saying was that the rax was a huge tell.
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So I've got to say, those replays are quite impressive. I've looked through this thread as I could, but there's a lot here so lmk if I'm rehashing something that's already been settled. In all your games, but especially when you bring out the BC's, you would have been able to crush your opponent if you'd already had even one air upgrade for armor and weapons. Past the 15 minute mark seems like when you'd need the BCs since that's when your opponents are either on their last legs or are starting to move to Thors, which as you've noted shut down banshee hellion fairly well.
It seems to me that it would be wise to invest in upgrades preemptively so when the thors come up, you can do so much more damage. That, and by that time people will be closing in on 2/2 or 3/3 infantry which eat up nonupgraded units.
I do see you say to make Air Armour the number 1 priority for upgrades, which I agree with and just want to acknowledge that I did indeed read through your post, but I wanted to bring up what I did.
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Having played 5-10 ladder games with this build, I can confirm that surviving a marauder (5-6 w/ 3-4 rines) push that comes before banshees is extremely difficult. However overall the build is simply solid, especially since it basically forces an attack because hellion drops will always do damage.
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Eh, I suppose you can use reapers but they aren't so great if he's sitting on a small number of bases.
Still support late game nukes though :D
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thanks for coming on the daily iEchoic. good to have the first hand insight. idk if you're still reading this thread but if yes i want to ask (since i couldn't get into chat1 on the daily ):
do you think this is going to become some sort of standard / did you already hear about other top players incorporating this build or a variation? it really seems so strong and solid and just stronger than the styles that are standard right now.
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On February 10 2011 13:16 drooL wrote:thanks for coming on the daily iEchoic. good to have the first hand insight. idk if you're still reading this thread but if yes i want to ask (since i couldn't get into chat1 on the daily ): do you think this is going to become some sort of standard / did you already hear about other top players incorporating this build or a variation? it really seems so strong and solid and just stronger than the styles that are standard right now.
Yep, still reading the thread, I have a ton of schoolwork to do at the moment, so I'll come back in here later and answer any questions that weren't addressed on the show.
I would love to see this used as a standard in high-level play, and I personally think it can be - a lot of people have had success with it, but only time will tell if it holds up. Let's work it and see.
Thanks to Day[9] for having me on and having an awesome show in general, I'll update the OP with a vod when it goes up.
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EPT
