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The best I can tell of iEchoic's build, and it is truly great, is to break it the way iEchoic himself in his post said the build can be broken.
There are two ways. Firstly, you must get air control somehow. This will be very tough considering the player using the iEchoic build knows that he must maintain air control. This hearkens back to an age ago when two tanks with 50 vikings overhead determined the game, and the ground army was sort of an afterthought (I exaggerate). Get more vikings at any point in time, and if you maintain viking production the banshees will not work, and neither will the hellion drops. Wall against hellion harass, and a few tanks, marauders, or landed vikings can keep your scvs safe.
The other approach would be to somehow acquire a few thors. An early thor rush is possible to hold with this build, and relying on an early thor to get you the win is not a smart play. Play defensively, don't expand, get out multiple thors, and KEEP THE HELLIONS OUT by any means necessary. You have to be perfect, a couple hellions slipping past by a lack of map awareness or a hole in your defense grid will actually lose you the game. But if you can get a few thors and then push out, maybe bringing marauders and leaving enough units at home to not lose workers to a counter-harass. If you're too slow about this push, there will be battlecruisers waiting. So be careful, but be swift.
There needs to be a new word for a "harass" that will actually kill every worker in a mineral line and win the game. It's not an attack, and it's not a harassment play either.
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Um, actually the easiest logical counter to this build IMO would be super pure Vikings and a raven or two for PDD and cloak? Like, dun even build hellions unless u got lotsa spare
Mins. I suspect building marines and bunkers might be a better choice to hellions. Keep scouting and get one more starport than him and u should win.
Vikings should be able to kill hellions easily since Vikings are armored and not blue flammable.Vikings counter all 4 units iecho build uses.
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On February 13 2011 19:05 Evantas wrote:
Um, actually the easiest logical counter to this build IMO would be super pure Vikings and a raven or two for PDD and cloak? Like, dun even build hellions unless u got lotsa spare
Mins. I suspect building marines and bunkers might be a better choice to hellions. Keep scouting and get one more starport than him and u should win.
Vikings should be able to kill hellions easily since Vikings are armored and not blue flammable.Vikings counter all 4 units iecho build uses.
lol. Next time I scout iEchoic build Im going to try this for the lulz. Take out all the vikings and banshees with more vikings, then land the vikings and mop up the hellions. Funny thing is it could actually work if the iEchoic build player doesnt adapt in time.
We should make a new thread: 4 Reactor Starport Counters iEchoic OMG!!!
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What if terran responded to this like they respond to mutas, except they build bunkers? A few detection turrets of course, but extra bunkers to house marines or SCVs to keep them from dieing? If that worked, you could even have an excuse to get the +2 bunker capacity upgrade, being able to save 6 scv per bunker.
I mean I'm just searching for a reason for that upgrade to ever be useful.
On February 13 2011 19:05 Evantas wrote:
Um, actually the easiest logical counter to this build IMO would be super pure Vikings and a raven or two for PDD and cloak? Like, dun even build hellions unless u got lotsa spare
Mins. I suspect building marines and bunkers might be a better choice to hellions. Keep scouting and get one more starport than him and u should win.
Vikings should be able to kill hellions easily since Vikings are armored and not blue flammable.Vikings counter all 4 units iecho build uses.
Maybe bunker + marine to replace the mineral dump of hellions, and pump vikings to try to take control of the skies?
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On February 13 2011 12:02 barkles wrote:
Also, to counter hellions drops just block off your mineral line with supply depots/engineering bay/armory/starport and put a turret behind it so he cant drop directly on the SCVs. Building placement is super-duper important in TvT, which is something a lot of players fail to realize.
hellions shoot over mineral lines.
If you block off the mineral line completely, scvs can't runaway while hellions are dropped into the mineral line (sacrificing the medivac)
if all your buildings are clumped when scouted, then the hellion drop will bring the two marines with it and allow them to blast supply depots from the safety of your clump.
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best way to beat this is Morrow's Teleportation device as gas dump and vikings in the air.
Build Solve.
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Guys, ask yourselves how to beat MutaLingBling.
When you solve that, you've solved 2fact2port.
EDIT:
I just realized that I might have been too vague when I said what I said so I let me clarify.
Your opponent depends on a highly mobile force.
You beat it by either being more mobile (gain Viking dominance) OR by restricting his mobility (turtle up your base and push out slowly, slowly gain more and more expansions)
There is no "magic composition" that will help you beat a highly mobile force because they always have the option to run away. If you engage them in the middle of the map with your silver bullet attack force, they circumvent you and kill your workers/production and retreat in time to defend their base all the while changing their production ques to build the units that counter your slower attack force.
If you spend your resources building up an army that won't leave your base then he just expands like Zerg and take the map.
But if you go two base turtle, and push out to slowly get your third, your fourth, etc... The player with better macro, micro and scouting wins. Slow, grinding, and with lots of continually changing unit compositions for both sides.
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I'll admit that I'm fairly brutal at actually pulling off anything in a game, but just getting some vikings like Evantas said sounds pretty straightforward if you can hold off the initial harass and aren't too far behind. The only anti-air viking/banshee/hellion has are the vikings and once you're walled in the only way hellions are going to do much of anything would be using drops. So can't you just reactor some vikings and take over air and throw up a tower or a couple of turrets to guard against drops? Vikings and a raven make banshees pretty useless and if they're putting out banshees you should be able to get ahead in vikings pretty quick and will be using less supply. After that wouldn't their air force be pretty much neutralized? I can see the build working really well to get an early lead and put the other player on the defensive but I don't really see it being that great if the initial attack doesn't work. Could definitely be missing something because I'm pretty new to Starcraft 2.
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United States7483 Posts
Crouton, you can't just throw up a reactor and take over the air, because you're foe also has 2 starports and has already invested in taking early air control. He see that you're going vikings, he'll just pump vikings and outdo you there. As long as you are committed to keeping air control, once you have it, it's hard to lose it unless your opponent flat out surprises you and pulls 10 vikings out of nowhere or something.
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Hm... a possible way to get your air superiority as the defender might be to use concussive and some marauders to fight the initial drop off, then attack the 2fac2port player to force him to get a banshee out first.
If he doesn't have any incentive to get this raven from his tech lab starport, and you're on 2 starports too, then perhaps you can keep the viking counts close enough from one another, then a PDD to take the advantage.
Still, unless you put it right on top of his starports to prevent him from building more vikings and hopefully force an engagement, he should be able to flee everytime you want to engage until he gets his own PDD up.
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Whitewing, fair enough, guess it depends on what he goes for with the starports and how quick you scout it. If he's going banshees, at least one of those is going to have a tech-lab, reducing his anti-air production capacity. And if he reactors one of those, that cuts his banshee production so your ground units are a lot safer.
I guess my comment is more directly on iEchoic's plan with the build than just having 2fac2port in general. If he's actually going straight hellion from the factories, he needs banshees or the hellions will just get wrecked by marauders. Banshees need tech labs, so he can't be reactoring vikings and he'll need to maintain one more starport than you to match air production. Even if you can stalemate the air battle enough for him to focus on vikings rather than banshees, the hellions become pretty ineffective. I'm basing this off of how he described the build on Day 9, not just from what you can do with a wide range of production facilities
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I got a lot of success using iechoic build lately for tvt. There are 2 builds that i lost to: 1.) thor rush, 2.) 5 marauder rush all in...
ok the marauder all in i shouldn't have lost to if i scouted enough...but the thor rush is difficult to hold...
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On February 13 2011 03:30 JDub wrote:
I'm only at 2k masters .
lol. only
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Why is it that he broke TvT? I think he fixed TvT so that It has more options in terms of viable builds.
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On February 14 2011 00:44 lorkac wrote:
Guys, ask yourselves how to beat MutaLingBling.
When you solve that, you've solved 2fact2port.
EDIT:
I just realized that I might have been too vague when I said what I said so I let me clarify.
Your opponent depends on a highly mobile force.
You beat it by either being more mobile (gain Viking dominance) OR by restricting his mobility (turtle up your base and push out slowly, slowly gain more and more expansions)
There is no "magic composition" that will help you beat a highly mobile force because they always have the option to run away. If you engage them in the middle of the map with your silver bullet attack force, they circumvent you and kill your workers/production and retreat in time to defend their base all the while changing their production ques to build the units that counter your slower attack force.
If you spend your resources building up an army that won't leave your base then he just expands like Zerg and take the map.
But if you go two base turtle, and push out to slowly get your third, your fourth, etc... The player with better macro, micro and scouting wins. Slow, grinding, and with lots of continually changing unit compositions for both sides.
This exactly. Gaining viking dominance won't happen against anyone with a clue, but the two-base push is dead on. This build hasn't broken TvT at all, just added a new way to play it that actually plays pretty balanced. Think of it like playing vs mutaling. Keep up scouting, make good composition decisions, defend well, tech up and push off two bases. You will have the unit efficiency advantage (tanks explode hellions pretty well). Micro blunders aside, you should mop up the first engagement, allowing you to either go for their expansion (there should be a third up before yours) or secure your own. They will have to tech to keep from dieing and you'll have a TvT lategame. Not broken!
edit: though subjectively, IMO a wall of hellions just looks silly so the game might seem a little farcical.
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I think the key is simply how you stop a hellion drop?
My original point when I saw the build was: Any composition is good after you incinerate your opponents economy.
I know echoic talks about how important his mobile army is, but how mobile does an army need to be when you may have just set your opponent back by 15+ workers?
First, TvT in my eyes opens 1 of 3 ways: Banshee Harass, Hellion Drop, or some tank turtling, and maybe a poke from ground forces. Planting an scv or a marine outside your opponents base will warn you to get your units into position for an attack at your front, otherwise, rally your units near your mineral line and spread them out.
As far as I'm concerned, if you stop the hellion harass, you can buy yourself enough time to get units that count. A thor isn't far off if you open 1-1-1 and barracks units in numbers help. I know hellions are "good" against light, but they pretty can't get into position without taking a lot of damage, or even being killed outright. The cooldown is so slow vs any sort of stimmed bio (this doesn't consider positioning). A high viking count? who cares. If there's no tanks, the vikings will just fly around with nothing to shoot at. 150/75 and 2 food just floating around. The reason we see vikings with tanks is for the vision, if tanks had the full vision of their range you'd never really see vikings at all.
Marine, Marauder, with you gas going to thor. you can easily secure a second base with a few turrets.
As someone said earlier, if you know how to beat muta/ling/baneling. You know how to beat this. Hellions are essentially faster banelings with slightly less efficient damage. Only difference is that no zerg opens up with a baneling drop.
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lol i found this build funny,
3000+ master TvT game where i first never read this thread b4 on xel naga, he did this build, I didn't even know wtf he was doing. I thought he was noob, went the regular 1 rax into expo followed by 3 more rax and just pushed him and did some micro spread when he just got out his first banshee out. Was so easy to beat. didn't feel threaten at all the entire game. I went back and took a look at it and he excuted it fairly well but with my uber spread he couldn't break me
you guys are giving this build too much credit.
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On February 14 2011 14:21 gfever wrote:
lol i found this build funny,
3000+ master TvT game where i first never read this thread b4 on xel naga, he did this build, I didn't even know wtf he was doing. I thought he was noob, went the regular 1 rax into expo followed by 3 more rax and just pushed him and did some micro spread when he just got out his first banshee out. Was so easy to beat. didn't feel threaten at all the entire game. I went back and took a look at it and he excuted it fairly well but with my uber spread he couldn't break me
you guys are giving this build too much credit.
I'm also in this camp of thought, I imagine that you held the hellion drop as well?
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I haven't lost to this build once going marauder viking thor.
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No, I don't think he broke TvT. At my skill level (~3k Diamond) it works fairly well and I've really only lost to players that I could tell were better than me and outplayed me with Tank/Viking or 1 Rax Expand.
Even if the build evolves to the point where it IS like PvP and both players are forced to do the same build, I'd still prefer it to the alternative, Tank/Viking positional battles, which I can't stand.
But this is coming from a Random player who is about to main Zerg because I've reached my skill cap for Terran/Protoss.
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EPT
