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First of all, let me say that I think iEchoic's build is great and I'm glad that people are developing such innovative and effective strategies. However, it seems like since his 2fact/2port build was featured on the Day9 daily, TvT on the North American ladder has transformed overnight from a positional marine/tank/viking game into a hellion-banshee elimination race with both players having free reign over their opponent's mineral line.
What can I do to combat this build effectively? I have tried going straight up marauder/viking and it actually didn't work: the hellions and banshees killed my marauders with incredible ease and my opponent could make more vikings than me because not only was I wasting 25 gas a pop on marauders, but he was periodically killing off a large amount of my scvs.
iEchoic himself said that a thor rush can be dicey to defend with this build, but do I really need to all-in to win vs this? Has anyone found a solid way to play vs this build that can safely go into the mid and late game?
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i havent seen this build effectively but would it be possible if you just wall in and put up some turrets?
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IMO walling with tanks and just taking over the sky with vikings (aka viking tank) can win this. Sensor towers + vikings will nullify pretty much any pressure this build can do since you will spot every drop and every banshee regardless of cloak.
Basically the terran of the beta. And use the oh so underused sensor towers.
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I've faced it long before it was featured on Day9 and I don't think it's broken or will change TvT that much. It's gimmicky at best and as long as you learn how to react to it you should be able to win. That is, it is a viable strategy but it's far from too strong and won't change TvT as we know it. I'm sure any high amount of usage is just a phase where everyone wants to try what they saw on Day9. Though, I assume this mostly affects the lower leagues.
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It's gimmicky at best and as long as you learn how to react to it you should be able to win.
How would I do that exactly?
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now that tons of people will try to copy this build, then its weaknesses will shine out, like a marauder push followed by turrets to stop banshee play and then so on and so forth to correctly counter the build.
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iEchoic's build expands ridiculously late. You invest SO much into production and units before expanding.
I've seen players at the 15 minute mark continuing to throw banshees at their opponent without expanding.
I've seen it beat by a simple rax expand with good defense.
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Air superiority seems to be key in all terran fights basically. So why not open 2 port vikings and never stop making them. If you have air superiority iEchoic's build is no longer as effective. No dropping hellions. Wall-ins are fine. Mass viking marauder w/ a raven or two should be perfect vs 2fact2port.
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In my humble opinion marine / marauder + tank is superior to it. I'm 3500+ masters on EU.
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I agree, iEchoic is an amazing player and strategical genious and the build is great, well thought out and seems to be very solid. But I still hate it because TvT had developed into an amazing macro matchup involving all kinds of units, positioning and expanding and now the TvT metagame has essentially been dumbed down to what PvP is at the moment, two players having to do the same build because the person who do not do the build dies. Metagame has also gone from fast expand into being infinitely stuck on one base when both players are doing this build, just trading all of each others workers and then trying to win by getting one more viking.
But I am actually confident that it is solveable in much the same way that marine kings all rax shenanigans proved to be.
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As excited I was to see iEchoic's build on Day9's daily (the thread I've been reading for the last few days all of a sudden featured on the exclusive Day9's dailies?!?!), I'm somewhat leery of the influx of Hellion/Banshee/Viking builds on the ladder. It would have been nice to have gotten a handle on things before they exploded into the mainstream, but I suppose that's solely my fault for being "late" on the TL thread.
As for "breaking" TvT, I haven't played quite enough TvTs on the ladder for me to comment. Of the maybe 5 I've played since being knowledgeable of this strategy, I don't think any have tried this build, whereas I've done it every time with varying success.
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In my humble opinion marine / marauder + tank is superior to it. I'm 3500+ masters on EU.
In that case, if you could give a little bit more insight I would greatly appreciate it. When do you expand, how do you defend both hellion/banshee harass, and how do you use your starports? Do you even bother trying to get air control, or is it too hard against this build?
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On February 12 2011 12:53 Leaky wrote:Show nested quote +In my humble opinion marine / marauder + tank is superior to it. I'm 3500+ masters on EU. In that case, if you could give a little bit more insight I would greatly appreciate it. When do you expand, how do you defend both hellion/banshee harass, and how do you use your starports? Do you even bother trying to get air control, or is it too hard against this build?
I think a 1 rax fast expansion is a very well counter all around to the harass early on. You can defend against banshee, be it with cloak or without amazingly well if your timings are good. As well as a 1 rax fast expansion is the counter to a blue flame hellion drop as ridiculous as it might sound, because you have so much units.
If you defend early on you have an expansion with superior economy but a very marine heavy build, you should now work on your tech and maraudercount. I don't think you can pressure a lot with a marine heavy style since its vulnerable against well positioned banshee hellion play, but in the defence you definately are ahead.
As soon as you have a good amount of marauder and combat shields with a few medivacs you should be fine against the AoE of hellions. The AoE tanks deal is a lot worse and kind of hits in circles while the hellion AoE is a straight line which can be reduced a lot by a good split, even more than the tank AoE.
Obviously the hellion player can re-counter it with positioning the hellions, but that is hard to do against marauders with concussive shells.
If you do not lose all of your marines, the banshees should be no problem at all, because they don't really stack up and marines do and are a lot cheaper. So overall your combo is cheaper and easier to get and is as mobile as his army.
For defence you can use tanks, turrets, planetaries.
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I would think that Thor Viking might work pretty well. Make sure to wall off your mineral lines. If you can gain air control then you can do thor drops. If you can't then you can try to do small 4 marauder harass groups and kill as many SCVs as possible. You will have more of an army than him but it would be hard to push out... maybe just wall off EVERYTHING, get a bunch of turrets and push out at about 80 supply when he's getting his third?
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Here's some of my random thoughts:
1) I don't think this is or will be the only viable build in TvT. If you outplay your opponent, you can win the game with marine/tank or MMM (although I think MMM is at a disadvantage personally). Kind of like how in ZvZ you can go lings, or mutas, or you can go roaches, and you can win with different styles.
2) I don't think the build will be 'solved'. I've tried as hard as possible to keep the build from relying on gimmicks, only relying on hellion economic damage when hellion economic damage is guaranteed (i.e. if you rush thor and attack with it, you WILL lose SCVs to a hellion drop - this is a fact of the game and a vulnerability of the thor build), not when it's just lucky. I've played against a lot of the same people at the top 100 US level many times and nobody has yet solved it. If an adaptation does come, I think a counter-adaptation can be made just as easily.
To imply that the build will be solved is to say that there's no value in the hellion/air composition. There's no way that can be true, in my opinion:
3) I do think hellion/air is going to remain a viable composition and will actually get stronger as skill levels increase. A player higher level than me that could be doing multiple drops while expanding and keeping map presence is truly going to be a damn scary sight. The incredible mobility, harassment potential, and oftentimes raw strength of the composition is too much to simply disappear from the metagame.
4) One problem is that people try to 'hard counter' the build. If you're trying to run a marine/tank build and you see someone running my build, resist the temptation to go "OMG! I NEED TO MAKE 2X THORS ASAP" or "OMG I NEED TO SWITCH INTO MASS VIKING PRODUCTION!". Terran isn't suited to make quick tech switches. You will definitely lose.
5) We're going to have to wait and see until some pro-level players run the build many times. Most of our experiences are going to be limited by our opponent's skill (for example, one person above said their opponents are sitting on one base 15 minutes into the game, which clearly is not the way the build is supposed to function). I've gotten some messages telling me TLO ran the build or something similar and won in the Assembly Winter, but I haven't been able to verify this yet as I can't find vods or replays.
6) I'd have to disagree with mTwNaruto's statement that 1rax FE is a counter to it... I actually think the opposite - I think the 1rax FE is one of the easier openings to beat. We saw MarineKingPrime try a 1rax FE and fall way behind against a weaker version of the build by Jinro (whereas Jinro just blueflame/banshee but made less hellions and less banshees). MKP is about the best in the business at defending a 1rax FE opening so I have a hard time believing people on ladder will be able to do better. I've played 1rax FE many times and it is probably the easiest thing to beat in my experience. As I said in (6), if you're 1rax FEing and he's failing to do damage I think you may just be way way better than your opponent.
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It didnt break it but it was a well thought out idea that im glad he managed to make work and congratz to him for getting it featured but this is defeintly a mid game kinda strategy, early game IMo you can only do so much and late game you have no meat so you could easily get chewed to bits, mid game it seems to really shine.
I have used it to successfully but only on big maps so that I can manage to expand and such, I go 1 factory 1 starport expand and use hellions to hold towers and kill marines with a banshee to "contain". then expand and add the other two on later and from there use my micro and macro to try and make it work it's magic, I add on more starports and factorys as the game goes on but I really think just a maurder heavy build could beat this. It they relize this is the kinda thing your going for it could be even worse because they will make sure they have the viking count over you. (hopefully, if they dont it could go downhill quickly for the mauder heavy army)
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On February 12 2011 13:10 iEchoic wrote:
Here's some of my random thoughts:
1) I don't think this is or will be the only viable build in TvT. If you outplay your opponent, you can win the game with marine/tank or MMM (although I think MMM is at a disadvantage personally). Kind of like how in ZvZ you can go lings, or mutas, or you can go roaches, and you can win with different styles.
2) I don't think the build will be 'solved'. I've tried as hard as possible to keep the build from relying on gimmicks, only relying on hellion economic damage when hellion economic damage is guaranteed (i.e. if you rush thor and attack with it, you WILL lose SCVs to a hellion drop - this is a fact of the game and a vulnerability of the thor build), not when it's just lucky. I've played against a lot of the same people at the top 100 US level many times and nobody has yet solved it. If an adaptation does come, I think a counter-adaptation can be made just as easily.
To imply that the build will be solved is to say that there's no value in the hellion/air composition. There's no way that can be true, in my opinion:
3) I do think hellion/air is going to remain a viable composition and will actually get stronger as skill levels increase. A player higher level than me that could be doing multiple drops while expanding and keeping map presence is truly going to be a damn scary sight. The incredible mobility, harassment potential, and oftentimes raw strength of the composition is too much to simply disappear from the metagame.
4) One problem is that people try to 'hard counter' the build. If you're trying to run a marine/tank build and you see someone running my build, resist the temptation to go "OMG! I NEED TO MAKE 2X THORS ASAP" or "OMG I NEED TO SWITCH INTO MASS VIKING PRODUCTION!". Terran isn't suited to make quick tech switches. You will definitely lose.
5) We're going to have to wait and see until some pro-level players run the build many times. Most of our experiences are going to be limited by our opponent's skill (for example, one person above said their opponents are sitting on one base 15 minutes into the game, which clearly is not the way the build is supposed to function - you can actually expand whenever you want and as much as you want as long as your gamesense is good). I've gotten some messages telling me TLO ran the build or something similar and won in the Assembly Winter, but I haven't been able to verify this yet as I can't find vods or replays.
6) I'd have to disagree with mTwNaruto's statement that 1rax FE is a counter to it... I actually think the opposite - I think the 1rax FE is possibly the worst thing you can do against it. We saw MarineKingPrime try a 1rax FE and fall way behind against a weaker version of the build by Jinro (whereas Jinro just blueflame/banshee but made less hellions and less banshees). MKP is about the best in the business at defending a 1rax FE opening so I have a hard time believing people on ladder will be able to do better. I've played 1rax FE many times and it is probably the easiest thing to beat in my experience. As I said in (6), if you're 1rax FEing and he's failing to do damage I think you may just be way way better than your opponent.
If you are up for games, we can play. Should benefit both of us to refine our gameplay. I can't tell if the opponents were lesser skilled or just didn't use your build correctly, but since you are the creator (lets just state it like that) you should be able to execute it very well.
So PM me if you are interested :-)
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wouldn't marine, marauder, viking and a single raven do pretty damn well against this? concussive shells will stop the run by of hellions, assuming good building and unit positioning, and then just expanding and turtling up a bit before pushing out and rolling over him with a well timed stim/good medivac count push. Should be pretty easy to keep your marines fairly spread out behind your marauders.
I don't really have experience with it just yet but in theory I think it'd work just fine and to answer your question I definitely don't think it breaks the match up, it's just a style (didn't seem OP on day9's daily)
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I think if you play carefully with Siege Tanks, wall-ins and turrets you should be able to protect an FE on most maps (cliff maps and mains with lots of air exposure would be harder of course) and get a gas advantage to start going tank/viking. Just think of it like a Brood War Siege Expand.
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I'm having a tough time seeing how this would win versus a walling tank+viking player.
He can match your viking count, while having a strong ground force. Of course, blue flame hellions can do ridiculous damage to mineral lines, but wouldn't one or two sieged tanks in the base completely shut it down? Not to mention the stop+F1 trick to spread workers.
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Played with this build a couple times, couple of things I figured out:
1. The terran using the build relies on banshees against everything the hellions aren't too efficient against- tanks, thors and marauders. Since the terran using the 2fact2port build can't really make banshees and vikings at the same time, if you can challenge the air enough there's really nothing stopping marauders from running the 2fact2port player over.
2. There is a good timing for the 2 rax no gas fast expand build if the terran does not put a bunker up. 1 rax reaper can also expand off this build since reapers are good against marines can bypass the bunker at the ramp, and deny map control because they beat hellions before blue flame.
3. Good sim city on certain maps can greatly reduce the damage this build can cause on most maps(not scrap station). Good supply depot placement can seriously affect hellion mobility.
4. Make turrets, don't rely on marines for anti air.
5. Expanding is only a weakness if you can't defend the expo from banshees and hellions.
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On February 12 2011 13:41 Genome852 wrote:
I'm having a tough time seeing how this would win versus a walling tank+viking player.
He can match your viking count, while having a strong ground force. Of course, blue flame hellions can do ridiculous damage to mineral lines, but wouldn't one or two sieged tanks in the base completely shut it down? Not to mention the stop+F1 trick to spread workers.
The entire point of the build is to gain air control. If you don't then yeah you're going to lose. But the way that the build works you're supposed to have more air production early on so that you can get more vikings first and then keep up air control.
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On February 12 2011 12:34 Ponyo wrote:
now that tons of people will try to copy this build, then its weaknesses will shine out, like a marauder push followed by turrets to stop banshee play and then so on and so forth to correctly counter the build.
2 people tried this on me on the ladder today and I crushed it pretty easy by just getting a viking early turtling a bit once it came. I didn't spot the drop until hellions were in my base but running scvs with tanks and rines to kill the hellions quickly it didn't do enough damage to pay off considering 400 min of otherwise useless hellions and even more for the blue flame upgrade and cloak. If their rush fails it really, really hurts them since they spend all their gas minerals units and upgrades that really, really aren't good in actual combat.
I also haven't seen this before today and had no idea it was on day9 ha.
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I got faced with this a lot, and I found the best way to limit him is to turtle and push out with a 200/200, but you should keep an eye on his expansions and limit him to 2 the max. My main comp was Marauder/Thor/2 or 3 vikings and a Raven. That was my main bulk. As soon as I scouted he was going for that build, I threw down a sensor tower and missile turrets. Block the back of your mineral line using supply depots and go as far as building a second Engy bay to lock of the back of your mineral line.
Sensor towers are best here, you just need at least two to cover your main and natural. Mass up a good army and rush in to crush him, leaving Missile Turrets or a thor to protect the base from Banshee backstabs.
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IMO Marauder/Thor sounds good. Go for your own hellion pre-ig rush and then into marauder/thor with raven support to detect banshees. Use the excess Minerals on a ton of depots and Turrets to block your mining and if your desperate enough, build a lot of CCs to quickly reproduce SCVs as your bound to lose some to a hellion based strategy. I think if you did the regular MMTank viking stuff really well you could overcome this build too, it wouldn't be standard if it wasn't a kind of all-round effective unit composition.
I haven't played in awhile tho so i have yet to face this build.
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Sim city neutralizes blue flame hellion drop (unless they drop IN the mineral line, giving the dropship THAT much longer to be vulnerable to interception). Thors clear out the skies. I don't see the big deal. iEcholic just has brilliant execution and decision making regarding where his units should be at what time. Most players using this build aren't going to be at that level of familiarity.
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You have to tech to thor get 2bases and then get ravens to detect cloaked banshees. You have to use PDD for the ravens to survive vikings. Turrets are needed at both mineral lines at least 2.
I like to open 1rax 1fact armory cc ebay making 5marines before a reactor and make a hellion while you make your armory. Once you get to 2 bases add on factories and a starport go hellion/thor/raven and get cannon upgrade for the BC tech switch. He will be ahead constantly and you are mostly likely going to have to finish it in one good death push with some mech attack upgrades.
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The build will never break TvT because, with all TvT's, its about air superiority (not so much if yo go MM)
This build requires air superiorty and thus tank/viking/raven WILL rape it
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The build is really a hassle to deal with, luckily alot of people have kinda poor controll and will lose too many vital units instead of keeping to a harass early on.
Luckily i'm in the habit of making a viking in most tvt games so I can sometimes stop the hellion drop clear and cut then mop up with a nice amount of stim marines, walling off my mineral lines if i scout the build, but yeah, this is kinda a difficult build to deal with, especially since its a fairly new build, I remember alot of people having trouble with thor/banshee awhile ago, mass marauder all ins could be affective I suppose?
Maybe do a 2rack 2 port build massing Maruaders and vikings, focusing on attack upgrades?
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United States7483 Posts
All of you guys who keep saying "tank viking" are missing the point. The player using this build gets 2 fast starports, and dumps virtually all his gas into air units (just a little for the buildings and blue flame). If you're getting tanks, there's just no way you can beat them in the air. Hellions are the mineral dump with gas being the restrictive resource. This build, when well played, also expands reasonably early, because if their foe pushes out, they lose econ. To beat it, you simply need to outplay the person using the build, there is no build that 'counters' it.
Unless you are also going fast double starport and pumping pure vikings to win early air superiority, you aren't going to get air superiority.
The only real way I can think of to beat this type of build, besides just playing better overall, would be to slow expand with mech and infantry being careful to not be vulnerable, and use sensor towers and careful drop play to punish your opponent expansions, since the response to a slow expand with turtling is to mass expand.
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On February 12 2011 15:25 RiceMuncher wrote:
The build will never break TvT because, with all TvT's, its about air superiority (not so much if yo go MM)
This build requires air superiorty and thus tank/viking/raven WILL rape it hellions use no gas so he gets to devote all his gas to air thus you should not be able to win the air war. so you cant build tanks and win the air war.
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I hope this build doesn't become a match breaking build :/. I'll miss the good ol' Battle of Kursk every TvT. Tank's wars are cool.
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no viking hellion player has beat me yet, and no u cant win the air war. Its actually not possible vs a semi competent terran because you can't make thors. ( marauders > thor )
so its a waste of minerals/gas... also its very hard for the them to figure if your going mass viking or not so they dont know when to switch to only viking
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it doesnbt break TvT at all.
its rather easy to stop once you see it coming... people over react and post without thinking.
siege expand + wall ins + turret and he cant do shit.
take a quick 3rd and get a strong thor + marine + tank army
and he'll have a hard time taking you out.
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You don't have to cheese every game vs something new and scary, just figure out why it's strong, and what parts of it are weak and develop something that you think deals with the weaknesses of this build.
Also, saying he broke TvT is rediculous. Did Bisu "break" ZvP? No, he reinvented it. That being said, I think this is just the flavor of the month, and you'll see players adjusting their standard tank compositions to deal. Not to say that it isn't valid or strong, as it is, but I don't see every pro picking this up and doing nothing but this for months at a time.
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Sure, the banshee player is putting all their gas into air, but banshees don't give air control. Even if they make loads of vikings, you can go even more vikings than they if you aren't building banshees. Am I missing something?
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When I played with this build, it seemed like a coin flip for me i would either win or lose and yes i do believe that the fact that you expand so late is what may be the reason for it. but all in all i do believe that this build has its flaws and can be exposed easily by simply defense and turret placement
I do give him credit he made this build insanely popular and a decent thought process.
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If you guys Naruto and iEchoic are going to play to do some testing on this, could you please stream it?
I think it would be very insightful and fun to watch.
Thanks :D
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I have played this many of times so far and the best thing ive done is go mara/tank/2portreactor vikings and get air upgrades, If they wanna match u on vikings, throw up a 3rd reactor port
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iEchoic didn't break TvT, it's always been this way.
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I've played against this build a few times(it's super trendy right now) and the players must not know it well because I win every time. I just turtle hardcore on two base and get tanks which pretty easily deal with blue flame hellion drops/abuse and turrets deal with banshees. The banshees are the real strength to the build so as long as I can gain air control with two reactored starports and a handful of tanks and rauders I win easily. But then again, it's probably because my opponents aren't doing it right.
The 2port2banshee is a lot like playing as zerg(as i Echoic points out) so I play against it the same way I play against zerg. Turtle on two bases and push out with tanks and a ton of vikings(against zerg you push out with tanks + marines + other stuff).
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On February 12 2011 13:13 mTw|NarutO wrote:
If you are up for games, we can play. Should benefit both of us to refine our gameplay. I can't tell if the opponents were lesser skilled or just didn't use your build correctly, but since you are the creator (lets just state it like that) you should be able to execute it very well.
So PM me if you are interested :-)
And then please post the replays here 
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I faced only 2 T doing this on LA server, but if this is the broken TvT, i like it.
Much better than those tank line wars.
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On February 12 2011 16:47 nodule wrote:
Sure, the banshee player is putting all their gas into air, but banshees don't give air control. Even if they make loads of vikings, you can go even more vikings than they if you aren't building banshees. Am I missing something?
no your not. the idea is that if ur going the 2factory2port u respond to what ur opponent does. the idea being that if ur opponent goes for mass vikings u go mass vikings as well and b/c u have 2ports can get out the vikings faster.
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welcome to the world of mirror matches, toss player here
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I really don't think turtling is a good response to this build. That allows the other player to mass expand and then they can just throw their units at you and drown you in a sea of minerals and gas from around the map. The whole point of the build is to make ur opponent afraid to move out. If you sit back and turtle you give your opponent free control over the map they can expand anywhere they want to.
Also I think that this build is a great build and has a good transition which would be into BCs.
Stimed marines also is definitely not the answer, unless you can control them really well. Marines die sooooo quickly to blue flame its sometimes painful to watch.
There is no "hard counter" to it. Which is what makes it a great build.
This build really illustrates the importance of air in TvT. If you control the skies u control the corse of the war.
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This doesn't break TvT but lowers the level of play which used to be decent up until now. People will flee from positional tank lines, which is very hard to control, to whatever build gives them access to easy wins. In this case some cheesy BO. I watched Day9 daily and i have to give props to Echoic for nice execution but other than that, on the ladder this is a total mess as the level of play is significantly lower both for attacker and defender.
Now about the concerns around this. I always wall off in TvT because of helions. Yes, it's general acceptance you shouldn't, because of tanks but then again when you have a sieged tank with vision outside your base, supply depots are the least of your worries.
Standard tank opening will be hellion proof. As long as you have some map awareness and opponent's actions and composition suggest heli opening, there's absolutely no reason to keep the first siege at entrance, but close to CC. Only one is enough to stop a full blue flame drop as long as you dont panic with SCVs. Best reaction is STOP+F1 spam click, next reaction is let them mine and pull some at a time as if you were splitting marines from banelings. Most common but worst reaction possible is to pull them all away.
Now after the heli drop failed, just build a CC inbase, overproduce some SCVS and execute your standard anti-banshee you're fond of (i'd advise against mass marines+ raven, instead go for vikings) dont forget to add a thor later.
Overall you don't wanna go bio against this one even if that seems the best response in the heat of the moment. Oh and you'll definitely need to one-base turtle with 2 cc, as he's offensively one-basing.
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The build basically relies on doing economic damage. Protect your econ and you can "hard counter" the build.
PFs and/or bunkers around the mineral line (with cargo space upgrade) can help mitigate the hellion harass by sending your workers into them when you see the harass.
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I'd have to say this and I am sorry it sounds kind of micro intensive.
The same reason Hellion/Air is so good against Marine Tank is the same reason Mutalisk Baneling is so good against Marine Tank.
I think its just a matter of splicing our marines into large rows instead of clumping them together and focus firing the hellions before they get in range and using turrets to defend tanks.
The only thing about this build that is "unbeatable" is the fact you can do a load of damage to their economy. I forsee the direct counter to that would be building bunkers on either side of the mineral patches. Or even building 2 supply on either side and leaving them up.
Here is an unorthodox build that I am not sure will beat this build. Doesn't hurt to throw stuff out there I guess =D
To get gas first before rax, get an engineering bay. Get the extended sight range on the turrets etc.
Save up 400 minerals to build command center and land it in his base, Because none of his units can actually kill it (no high DPS units) you'll be free to make a planetary fortress. Bring a few scvs a long to repair it while the PF is making. Once its finished if you have it in a good position you can snipe certain structures. I'd say land it near a SP or factory. Closer to the main CC the better.
After you get the planetary fortress up save up another 400 minerals and build another CC at your expo. Because your supply depots have blocked in your mineral line, it negates the hellion drop. Have constant marine scoutage around your base and with the early engineering bay you can make turrets where you please (not to snipe medivacs but to spot + do damage) Then run in with marines. Because the PF and the Orbital take so much money to do your ground army won't be large. But because the harass of the hellions is negated and the SP is delays and he has a base in his base you can make up the economy quickly.
Once your second base is up and running build 2 factories and get double gas. You can start to produce mass thors. If you see banshees shooting your PF (Your brought along scvs can build turrets against banshees) you can immidiatly throw down 2 starports. And pump only vikings. I would suggest to build a raven as well but that depends if he gets cloak or not. Because his build requires that he builds more vikings than you I would use your thors against the vikings, lots of thor shots can kill vikings.
Some of you professionals can test this I guess.
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I've faced this once and I went 1 rax FE that game. Problem is they want to fight over air control, but rely 100% on the helions and banshee harass to do enough damage otherwise I'm on 2 base and there is no way you'll take air control when your opponent has double the gas income.
Long story short I defended the harass with only losing a couple of SCV's which i can afford as I'm already ahead and in the end he lost air control and lost horribly to marauder viking.
I believe for this to work he'd have to kill so many workers I'd be dead anyways. So it really wouldn't come down to what the follow up is, but how much damage the drop would do.
And if you for some reason do manage to lose air control you can still do something like marauder thor. Basically same principle as a late game TvT transition where the player with air control gets BC's. Sure, he dominates the air, but they're so slow stimmed marauders can just do run by's and snipe expansions etc.
I believe the same would be true for this, although I haven't tested it yet. If you don't wait for his banshee numbers to grow too big (as he obviously has to fight you for air control so he's making vikings) you can freely add rauders and roll over him. Again, if you snipe his expo and you're mining double his gas again, you should be able to catch up in air control pretty easily, imho!
Still a cool build tho! Will test it out some time
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It seems that tank+viking would exactly counter this build are you sure it's not just positioning/timing mistakes from the replays your talking about?
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I don't play T much but when I tried this, I couldn't beat someone who would simply mass thors from 2 bases and attack. I don't see how you can get enough bcs in time but what do I know.
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I like this build. Not to do it though, to fight against it.
1)sim city - it is always a danger that hellions can come in your mineral line in any TvT. With this build it is a given.
2)Thor opening - very strong against Banshees
3)Build Hellions of your own to haras.
4)Thor Tank Hellion +sometimes Ghost if to many Ravens are out. A lot of turrets around the base.
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Standard Tank+Viking+7min'ish expand should beat this. The trick behind blue flame drops or banshee play is that even when you scout with your first helion or scan you are not pretty sure about what to expect. But this build has to many tells and you can spot these and counter accordingly by positioning tank marauder or splitting marines in the mineral line. If you can defend the harass without losing too much, you can outproduce your opponent in viking count and win simply by defending your base for more helion harasses and clearing the skies.
It is a very good build well written and well thought out and it is deadly against people who do not scan or scout at ~6 min mark. It counters almost all of the agressive terran opponents out there as well(tank-viking early contain etc). But since it expands too late and is dependent on dealing eco damage early on, it is kinda risky imo. If you can incorporate an expand after the initial helion drop or maybe turn into a 1 rax expand with this follow-up(quite hard), it should be golden.
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I've played a good amount of this. I've won, mostly. Games I did not win were purely through my own failing or through the build's weakness to really early bullshit (like 3 rax marauder stim, close position metalopolis marine/tank/viking push or something else that would basically require a completely random bunker).
Or it was because I fucked up. For example, in one game I got trashed by thors and I hardly had any BC's out to deal with it.
But usually it's because they fuck up. They build way too many tanks or marauders and don't get thors. The trick to fighting this build is to identify it immeadiately and focus on getting tons and tons of vikings and thors out, with plenty of turrets for drops and marines to just roudn out the minerals. Try and secure 3 bases, max out with good upgrades and just trash him in fights. Viking/thor/marine is, i would believe, the strongest counter, but an awful lot of it just comes down to good manouvres from both players.
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On February 12 2011 20:23 joheinous wrote:It seems that tank+viking would exactly counter this build are you sure it's not just positioning/timing mistakes from the replays your talking about?
Marauder+viking is more likely, it's cheaper and you dont need tanks to kill hellions.
The build hinges on two things: Air superiority and economic damage with blue flame hellions.
Its impossible for this build to gain air superiority if it is actively contested, this build sinks minerals/gas into banshee's, which means you will always have less vikings than the opponent if he's going vikings-only. If that is the case, the build can still work if the hellions do enough economic damage. If you can somehow stop that from happening (simcity) or do equal economic damage of your own, you should be ahead.
Also, i think due to the low marine count (and no marauders) at the start of this build, there's a decent window of opportunity for reapers to come in and do economic damage. You can see an example of this in the first pokebunny replay in the main thread, although there's only one reaper it does demonstrate that at that point in time there are only 2 marines to deal with it. If it was micro'd properly and backed up with a second/third reaper, there's really not much you can do about it. Hellions get owned by reapers, especially without blue flame.
So, i'd love to see a 2-3 reaper opening against this build.
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Good simcity will help a ton against this build. If you can force the hellions to have to be dropped right into your mineral line in order to damage your SCVs, instead of to be dropped at any random place in the map, then it makes it much much easier to defend.
Thors: I dont think rushing for a thor, and then rushing it to the opponent's base is a great idea, since then you will lose all your SCVs. But building up some thors, and then later attacking with them can be great. like 4-5 thors, banshee are ok, but not amazing against them, and have to be magic boxed. And hellions are straight up bad, each thor can take down 9 hellions
Another option is just marauders, quite a lot of them.
Sure enough, eventually the marauders will all die to banshees.
But if you look at for example the first push that happens on the d9 daily. 15 marines, 2 banshees and 4 tanks. Doesnt do much damage, and the banshee and the marines die almost instantly.
But if instead, that attack had been 15 stimmed marauders, that could have done a ton more damage, and it wouldnt really have been any easier to kill.
Positioning: the idea is really for the hellions to instakill the marines, and then for the banshees to clean upagainst the tanks, thors, marauders, and so on.
If you always keep your marines at the back, its going to be much harder for the hellions to do that.
Looking again at that first battle on the day9 showcast of the build, the marines were leading the way, clumped up, got fried, and the tanks were behind. I imagine that if that army had been 15 marines, 5 tanks, and siege, instead of the banshees, and for example 3 tanks sieging up below the ramp, 2 tanks moving up the ramp to grant vision, and then sieging up top, and then leapfrogging the back tanks, keping the marines safely betweeen/behind the tanks, and spread out, that would have been much much harder to deal with.
If the hellions cant easily fry the marines, then the banshees also cant easily engage the tanks to clean up, and thus good micro should work. By focusing on keeping the marines to the back, and focusing the hellions before any air units such as the banshee, good micro should help a ton.
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I would just go balls crazy viking/marauder
for sure I'll have more vikings since no constraint on gas in banshees
And for marauders I'm sure they pwn helions
And it should be easy to get to I believe.
With that being said I do like the addition of banshees and helions to existing terran army.
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And yeah, reaper openings could spell trouble with this build, but that doesnt really help all that much, since you cant see he is doing this build, and then go back in time to make reapers.
You can, however, see that he is doing this build, and then make 2 sensor towers. You can see that he is doing this build, and decide to position your army differently.
Yet another possibility could be to take an expo as soon as you scout the build, and throw down 8 turrets and 2 sensor towers.
Whats he going to do about it really? Not like he can decide to just friggin kill you with hellions. Best he can do is probably just expand himself too at this point. So then you have a headstart on your expo
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No. You can win with standard play. It's just a wierd unit combination nobody has played against before. There is a reason korean pro's aren't doing this. I think any standard unit composition in TvT can beat this. If you have air control this build is comepletely useless. Bio can also beat this.
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The way i see it, this build is just another way to play TvT. It does by no means hard counter standard tank/viking play, it's just a viable alternative. It has been very successful lately, mainly because a lot of players weren't familar with it yet and didn't know how to respond.
There are basically 3 ways to play TvT now (in the mid-lategame, openers are a completely different story): Bio (MMM), Tank/Viking and Hellion/Banshee/Viking. Every one of those styles is able to win vs the other, what matters in the end is who plays the best.
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As many ways as there are to play against this build/composition, I think everyone would agree this makes a fucking mess of the early game no matter what.
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Ok, ok, ok, I've experienced a MASSIVE fucking hole in this build.
Say you're a terran and you're playing against another terran. You build 5 marines and a hellion and you attack the other terran. Then you get cloaked banshees. Pretty goddamn standard shit when you scout a terran who gets his gas, right?
You will NOT have a raven up in time to deflect their banshees (even on cross shakuras the timing will result in quite a few dead scv's) and you WILL have to pull (ie, lose) scvs to deal with that first poke because you skip marines. It's happened quite a few times.
In one game the other guy had 2 tanks ready from my hellion drop. 2! I'm not staying for long in his mineral line against that! Oh, plus all that other stuff.
This build is not the be-all end-all of TvT, but it is a cool build to throw out sometimes. I think I might just fall back on regular 1/1/1 blue flame hellion drops, if that's ok with you (faster raven means I'm a happier man!)
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On February 12 2011 22:16 morimacil wrote:
And yeah, reaper openings could spell trouble with this build, but that doesnt really help all that much, since you cant see he is doing this build, and then go back in time to make reapers.
You can, however, see that he is doing this build, and then make 2 sensor towers. You can see that he is doing this build, and decide to position your army differently.
I dont agree you cant know he's doing the build, there are several indicators.
-Fast 2nd gas
-Only 2 marines and barracks not producing
-Fast 1st and 2nd factory
You have to go blind on the first reaper, but that isn't such a big deal and is a common opening anyways. The reaper can scout the two fast factories, that alone is worth it.
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On February 12 2011 16:32 PhiliBiRD wrote:
it doesnbt break TvT at all.
its rather easy to stop once you see it coming... people over react and post without thinking.
siege expand + wall ins + turret and he cant do shit.
take a quick 3rd and get a strong thor + marine + tank army
and he'll have a hard time taking you out.
This is what I was looking for. I haven't ladder yet since I saw this build come out, so I haven't faced it -- but that's what I was thinking. Spread out tanks and turrets around could at least stim some drops from happening. Thor range at least HELPS in air dominance.
Only thing for me is... I hope blue flames. lol so I'm going to be blue flame vs blue flame which is my down fall completely.
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Well a fast second gas, along with a fast factory isnt really uncommon at all, if hes going for banshees for example, which is a very coomon opening, then thats what you will see. No marines production after the first 2 would be pretty hard to scout with anything else than a reaper, same thing with the second factory, so yeah, you would have to do a blind reaper opening.
So unless you plan to do a blind reaper opening against everything, its not a great idea.
Plus, Im not sure that reapers would really do all that well anyway.
The first one is up against 2 marines and a hellion, so kinda hard to do all that much damage with it.
If you wait too long, and he starts to get multiple hellions, blue flame, or a banshee, then the reapers become quite bad.
Plus, you would need like 4 rax with tech labs to keep up with the production off 2 factories, 1 with reactor.
And SCVs can be pulled and set to autorepair. At which point a reaper doesnt stand a chance against a hellion plus his SCV.
Its the same thing every single time a new build pops up. People always ask themselves: "What unit can I make to counter it?!"
Instead, in most cases, the better question is, what timing can I abuse? How can I simcity? How can I position better? Should I expand more, or less, or play more aggressively, or more defensively?
Its very rare for the answer to any decent build to be "just build unit X!"
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Agreed, I get the feeling once you see someone with 2 factories and 2 marines (which a standard reaper scout timing will see, it comes at roughly when the first hellion comes out to kill it) you can greatly suspect this opening. Especially if you see a tech lab on a factory. At that timing it's safe to assume it's blue flame hellions and not a thor as the tlab is too early.
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On February 12 2011 23:06 iAmJeffReY wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2011 16:32 PhiliBiRD wrote:
it doesnbt break TvT at all.
its rather easy to stop once you see it coming... people over react and post without thinking.
siege expand + wall ins + turret and he cant do shit.
take a quick 3rd and get a strong thor + marine + tank army
and he'll have a hard time taking you out. This is what I was looking for. I haven't ladder yet since I saw this build come out, so I haven't faced it -- but that's what I was thinking. Spread out tanks and turrets around could at least stim some drops from happening. Thor range at least HELPS in air dominance. Only thing for me is... I hope blue flames. lol so I'm going to be blue flame vs blue flame which is my down fall completely.
Assuming its iEchoic's build vs iEchoic's build and you are making just vikings and hellions. Just land all your vikings on his hellions before he can respond so you can kill his ground army and he can't actually do anything about it.
Reminds me of Beta with the 3 tank 20 viking armies and the constant landing vikings game.
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Very often, the counter to something is unexected, and isnt just a single unit.
For example, against blue flamed hellions, you know what would be really good? Mass marines!
But hellions kill marines, right? Well not if the marines are in bunkers!
You could slow push your way into his base with bunkers filled with marines, and a couple of turrets
Whats he gonna do? Kill bunkers filled with marines with his hellions and banshees? considering that 1 bunker with 4 marines kills 4 hellions and a banshee... that seems unlikely
So really, its often not about what units you make, but more about how you use them. Mass marines could win against mass blue flamed hellions, as long as they are used properly, in bunkers.
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I recall him saying that Thors are most effective thing that work versus that build, but there is a very small timing for it to work.
IMO, sensor towers and fast expanding should do the trick. As for army composition, you should go 2port vikings(1 reactor maybe) to control air, and go for tank/thor to shut down hellions.
DON'T go bio. Even marauders are completly shut down by it, because hellions deal ridiculous amount of AoE when in mass.
The trick is to have more air than your oponent, and to shut down the first few drops/banshees.
Funny how 80% of the people in this thread don't understand how the build works. It was designed to deal with most terran openings(only thor rushes are really effective against it, and there are workarounds; maybe very early 4marines on steppes), it was designed to deal with most styles(tank/viking simply won't work, you have to MAAAASSS vikings), and for surely TO SHUT DOWN BIO(hellions lol at marines, banshees lol at marauders; hellions also deal a reasonable damage to marauders thanks to aoe).
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I have one plea to iEchoic and mTwNaruto. They were discussing a little on page one of this thread and Naruto invited iEchoic to play some games with this build vs FE. If those games actually happened or as soon as they DO happen, would you mind uploading some of these that show if a FE is actually viable or some other strats that might work? I think it would contribute a lot to the discussion seeing how this build works out several games in a row against the same qualified opponent. I think those replays might give a bunch of insight. So, iEchoic and Naruto, would you mind?
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I regularly 1 rax FE and I got torched by this on Blistering Sands.
Worst thing is, my opponent was P player that queued as T just to get a TvT to try this out. I scouted it early, massed marauders and threw down a few turrets. He turned up with his hellions and they got destroyed. I marched to his base for the quick damage but a banshee popped - it got 12 marauder kills. From there he constantly traded his hellions for marines and his banshees killed all my marauders and as I had FE and had no tech, I just gave up.
I'm not saying this build is retarded or unskilled or anything of the sort, but it's definitely not a playstyle I want to continue playing against. I wasn't a massive fan of tanks in TvT but with this build so rife on the ladder it feels just like PvP. Whichever player rushes this fastest wins - 1 base FTL.
3k masters.
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Dominican Republic913 Posts
On February 12 2011 13:13 mTw|NarutO wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2011 13:10 iEchoic wrote:
Here's some of my random thoughts:
1) I don't think this is or will be the only viable build in TvT. If you outplay your opponent, you can win the game with marine/tank or MMM (although I think MMM is at a disadvantage personally). Kind of like how in ZvZ you can go lings, or mutas, or you can go roaches, and you can win with different styles.
2) I don't think the build will be 'solved'. I've tried as hard as possible to keep the build from relying on gimmicks, only relying on hellion economic damage when hellion economic damage is guaranteed (i.e. if you rush thor and attack with it, you WILL lose SCVs to a hellion drop - this is a fact of the game and a vulnerability of the thor build), not when it's just lucky. I've played against a lot of the same people at the top 100 US level many times and nobody has yet solved it. If an adaptation does come, I think a counter-adaptation can be made just as easily.
To imply that the build will be solved is to say that there's no value in the hellion/air composition. There's no way that can be true, in my opinion:
3) I do think hellion/air is going to remain a viable composition and will actually get stronger as skill levels increase. A player higher level than me that could be doing multiple drops while expanding and keeping map presence is truly going to be a damn scary sight. The incredible mobility, harassment potential, and oftentimes raw strength of the composition is too much to simply disappear from the metagame.
4) One problem is that people try to 'hard counter' the build. If you're trying to run a marine/tank build and you see someone running my build, resist the temptation to go "OMG! I NEED TO MAKE 2X THORS ASAP" or "OMG I NEED TO SWITCH INTO MASS VIKING PRODUCTION!". Terran isn't suited to make quick tech switches. You will definitely lose.
5) We're going to have to wait and see until some pro-level players run the build many times. Most of our experiences are going to be limited by our opponent's skill (for example, one person above said their opponents are sitting on one base 15 minutes into the game, which clearly is not the way the build is supposed to function - you can actually expand whenever you want and as much as you want as long as your gamesense is good). I've gotten some messages telling me TLO ran the build or something similar and won in the Assembly Winter, but I haven't been able to verify this yet as I can't find vods or replays.
6) I'd have to disagree with mTwNaruto's statement that 1rax FE is a counter to it... I actually think the opposite - I think the 1rax FE is possibly the worst thing you can do against it. We saw MarineKingPrime try a 1rax FE and fall way behind against a weaker version of the build by Jinro (whereas Jinro just blueflame/banshee but made less hellions and less banshees). MKP is about the best in the business at defending a 1rax FE opening so I have a hard time believing people on ladder will be able to do better. I've played 1rax FE many times and it is probably the easiest thing to beat in my experience. As I said in (6), if you're 1rax FEing and he's failing to do damage I think you may just be way way better than your opponent. If you are up for games, we can play. Should benefit both of us to refine our gameplay. I can't tell if the opponents were lesser skilled or just didn't use your build correctly, but since you are the creator (lets just state it like that) you should be able to execute it very well. So PM me if you are interested :-)
this is very interesting, u both should do a Showmatch or something... so the comunity can watch 2 great players clash in their own style :D
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I'm pretty sure a marauder FE, or a 2rax timing before blue flame, would be unstoppable by the build with being crippled. Also, because the unit composition you're getting is so weak you have to do econ damage or you'll have no lead, a useless mid-game army and you should just get steamrolled by a good player.
On February 12 2011 23:50 Baggiez wrote:
I regularly 1 rax FE and I got torched by this on Blistering Sands.
Worst thing is, my opponent was P player that queued as T just to get a TvT to try this out. I scouted it early, massed marauders and threw down a few turrets. He turned up with his hellions and they got destroyed. I marched to his base for the quick damage but a banshee popped - it got 12 marauder kills. From there he constantly traded his hellions for marines and his banshees killed all my marauders and as I had FE and had no tech, I just gave up.
I'm not saying this build is retarded or unskilled or anything of the sort, but it's definitely not a playstyle I want to continue playing against. I wasn't a massive fan of tanks in TvT but with this build so rife on the ladder it feels just like PvP. Whichever player rushes this fastest wins - 1 base FTL.
3k masters.
I see what you did there...
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Did he break TvT?
No, but he made it a lot easier for those of us who play standard.
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On February 13 2011 00:10 SiN] wrote:
Did he break TvT?
No, but he made it a lot easier for those of us who play standard.
Lol. I was thinking the same thing. The only time I lost to this hellion/banshee was when I was practicing 1 rax FE. Other than that, never lost to it with good play. They throw hellions/banshees into a brick wall, and then they have nothing left over lol.
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On February 13 2011 00:14 avilo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 00:10 SiN] wrote:
Did he break TvT?
No, but he made it a lot easier for those of us who play standard. Lol. I was thinking the same thing. The only time I lost to this hellion/banshee was when I was practicing 1 rax FE. Other than that, never lost to it with good play. They throw hellions/banshees into a brick wall, and then they have nothing left over lol.
Problem is, when you play people that are actually good they don't suicide banshees and medivacs into turrets and things like that. As rational of a thing as that may seem to do in the platinum league.
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Thors absolutely destroy this build. The time it takes for him to get a BC is huge. Don't open thor, no need. Play normal until you get your 2nd up. Get a 2nd factory and an army and push with 2-4 thors + whatever you normally build.
If you effectively defend harass, you will win.
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On February 13 2011 00:19 Space Invader wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 00:14 avilo wrote:On February 13 2011 00:10 SiN] wrote:
Did he break TvT?
No, but he made it a lot easier for those of us who play standard. Lol. I was thinking the same thing. The only time I lost to this hellion/banshee was when I was practicing 1 rax FE. Other than that, never lost to it with good play. They throw hellions/banshees into a brick wall, and then they have nothing left over lol. Problem is, when you play people that are actually good they don't suicide banshees and medivacs into turrets and things like that. As rational of a thing as that may seem to do in the platinum league.
We are both 3500+ masters. I've played vs iEchoic doing this build, and had a very easy time dealing with it.
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Three words counter this build.
Slow, turret, push.
If you read the original thread (as well as try out the build itself) you'll realize that it's just MutaLingBling in a terran's clothing. Move out slow with a pack of scvs building turrets/bunkers while leap frogging siege tanks.
Will you be behind economically? Yes. Either you have no defenses at your mineral line and lose all your scvs, or a small clump of your already immobile army is staying at home on guard duty, in which case your opponent expands over and over again.
Move slow, defend your base and army with turrets, snipe expansions, expand yourself, know tha this game will last for about an hour.
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I dont know if its the general bad execution, but I am relieved when I see my opponent go for this build.
Thors, vikings, bio, everything counters it really.
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On February 12 2011 23:12 morimacil wrote:
Well a fast second gas, along with a fast factory isnt really uncommon at all, if hes going for banshees for example, which is a very coomon opening, then thats what you will see. No marines production after the first 2 would be pretty hard to scout with anything else than a reaper, same thing with the second factory, so yeah, you would have to do a blind reaper opening.
So unless you plan to do a blind reaper opening against everything, its not a great idea.
Plus, Im not sure that reapers would really do all that well anyway.
The first one is up against 2 marines and a hellion, so kinda hard to do all that much damage with it.
If you wait too long, and he starts to get multiple hellions, blue flame, or a banshee, then the reapers become quite bad.
Plus, you would need like 4 rax with tech labs to keep up with the production off 2 factories, 1 with reactor.
And SCVs can be pulled and set to autorepair. At which point a reaper doesnt stand a chance against a hellion plus his SCV.
Its the same thing every single time a new build pops up. People always ask themselves: "What unit can I make to counter it?!"
Instead, in most cases, the better question is, what timing can I abuse? How can I simcity? How can I position better? Should I expand more, or less, or play more aggressively, or more defensively?
Its very rare for the answer to any decent build to be "just build unit X!"
Its not just build unit X, the timing of the first reaper is faster than the first hellion. When the reaper is in the base, the hellion is far from finished. So you're up against two marines that can be avoided due to the speed of the reaper, you dont have to lose it. You can at least get a few scv kills with it.
I'm not saying you should always open with a blind reaper, but a blind reaper opening is not uncommon and this build is not the only build its useful against. So, it can happen. A fast reaper will scout this build, without question. Two factories with one techlab means blue flame hellions, that's all you need to know at that point. It also means the banshee's will not be coming right away, since they are delayed due to the 2nd factory and blue flame research. That's valuable information, it gives you time to prepare for the blue flame drop instead of a banshee rush.
Anyway,the reaper isnt important, its just a means to scout. The underlying aspect is that this build can be scouted early, giving you 2-3 minutes to prepare for the blue frame drop. What if you get a viking out and kill the dropship? Can the 2fact2port build recover from that? Is the build still viable if the first blue flame drop is stopped?
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Whenever I see something odd or gimmicky, I simply respond with as standard play as possible- it's been used for months well, there's a reason for it. Simply position stuff better- I found that I needed to move things around, and I was ok.
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I think a big part of defeating this build will be improving simcity. It's been noted a few times that building placement was generally more important in BW than in SC2, but to beat this build it seems like you're really going to have to start considering doing things like walling in your mineral line with depots and your e-bay.
I can't say this for sure, since I don't know the timings, but I'd imagine a 1 rax FE that rushed for a defensive thor would stand a good chance of weathering the storm. That's not to say it wouldn't suffer any economic damage, but all you have to do is come out with a net positive, and the FE is going to put you significantly ahead of the build's very late expand, and also give you access to 2x the scans.
I'm generally rushing to siege when I FE in TvT, so I just have to figure out, by the time my factory finishes, whether I should be building an armory or not.
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you just gotta play better. the build is a viable option in tvt but it is not unbeatable. I have played with it like 20 times and my success rate is around 50-60% (could be higher, you can lose pretty easily if you make tiny mistakes). I've also played standard builds against opponents going for it.
I believe a good response to the build is to get a few of everything. don't let the opponent relax, build vikings out of a reactored starport. get more marines and save some scans for fighting cloaked banshees. getting just 2 thors is enough to force the opponent into going either BCs or marauders (no infrastructure for those).
overall, I like the build and I'll probably use it from time to time, especially in bo3s and stuff but I'm not sure if it will continue to be that strong. although as iEchoic said the build has much more potential, the proper response to it (being really really good structure positioning/base defense) might end up nullyfing its effectiveness.
either way, the build certainly did not break tvt but more like exactly the opposite.I love the build and it's good to see even more variety in TvT ^^
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The way to beat this is to place tanks at your mineral lines and deny hellion harass and a turret to deny if the other dude is going for stealth ban.cheese.Your response to this build should be marine,tank,viking.iEcholic said that this build is like muta,ling,bling so what u do against it?You spread your marines position tanks right deny muta harass.I almost forgot...and the build is 1 base play because with that build you can't afford to expand and build from all 4 buildings so in some point you have to stop making units and make a expo so that is where the build fails i think.If you deny harass and attack when he is expoing you have the game in the bag
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In the original post by iEchoic he said repeatedly that you have to think of what you would do if you were a zerg in ZvT (ie hellions as bane vikings/banshees muta) could it not be possible just to employ the tactics that you would use against a Zerg player on this stratagy and still be able to make a decent play of the game?
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Pretty fuuny, I've played 2 guys who tried to beat me with this strategy, at first I thought they weren't trying but when I saw them nerd raging really hard, I was like wtf you should try time boob.
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On February 12 2011 23:50 Baggiez wrote:
I regularly 1 rax FE and I got torched by this on Blistering Sands.
Worst thing is, my opponent was P player that queued as T just to get a TvT to try this out. I scouted it early, massed marauders and threw down a few turrets. He turned up with his hellions and they got destroyed. I marched to his base for the quick damage but a banshee popped - it got 12 marauder kills. From there he constantly traded his hellions for marines and his banshees killed all my marauders and as I had FE and had no tech, I just gave up.
I'm not saying this build is retarded or unskilled or anything of the sort, but it's definitely not a playstyle I want to continue playing against. I wasn't a massive fan of tanks in TvT but with this build so rife on the ladder it feels just like PvP. Whichever player rushes this fastest wins - 1 base FTL.
3k masters.
your actions, unit choice and decision making don't hint even diamond, let alone masters.
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I haven't read every post in the tread, so forgive me if this has been mentioned already.
But many people have mentioned that you can just outproduce your opponent's vikings. How do you expect to be able to do that when your opponent opened with 2ports? The original build calls for the player to absolutely, at all costs, have more vikings than his opponent. There's no way your opponent should be able to do that unless they started producing them before you.
Also, I'm just some midlevel Diamond scrub, but I do kinda think this will break TvT. It makes me wonder if Blizz will bring goliaths back just so there's an armored ground answer to vikings. The only other option is marines, which of course, are microwaved by our adorable hellions.
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this isn't even close to breaking tvt lol.
I think it's a great build to use sometimes, but I would not rely only on this style.
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On February 13 2011 02:01 Ramivacation wrote:
I haven't read every post in the tread, so forgive me if this has been mentioned already.
But many people have mentioned that you can just outproduce your opponent's vikings. How do you expect to be able to do that when your opponent opened with 2ports? The original build calls for the player to absolutely, at all costs, have more vikings than his opponent. There's no way your opponent should be able to do that unless they started producing them before you.
Also, I'm just some midlevel Diamond scrub, but I do kinda think this will break TvT. It makes me wonder if Blizz will bring goliaths back just so there's an armored ground answer to vikings. The only other option is marines, which of course, are microwaved by our adorable hellions.
when he's producing vikings he's not producing banshees.
just play standard siege, marine, add a thor, mass vikings and stop complaining.
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Get thors they own banshees and kite battlecruisers
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Reading through all the comments that have been put as responce to this question, i am happy that i dont have this same problem or the amount of different opinions on here would drive me insane lol,
If one of you has a repaly or video showing how to beat it then show, otherwise ur just giving a meaningless opinion of how to do something without knowing that persons skill playstyle or particular problems in that matchup, give us useful information please,
At what time would you be able to scout or scan to see if thats the build he is going,
On what maps does it work better or worse on,
The general idea every1 is putting foward is the fact that vikings beat banshee and thor rush is very strong ect ect, When really instead of worrying about units watch a replay of the match you lost,,, see when he was weakest, where agression from you may have either threw him off his build a bit or completly crushed him, these terrans are working from a build order they have seen, they are copying sum1 else's compositions, it would not take much aggresion early on to throw them off a bit, most games are lost becuase of a silly mistakes like waiting around too long or not using ur units too their potential, not because he went banshee helion and thats OP, becuase tbh i have heard the same thing about 3 rax stim push,,,2 factory tank push
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Doesnt break TvT
However this build is sick, extremely creative cool style. Im a huge micro player and this style is just perfect.
Keep em coming iechoic!
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5rine 1 hellion push hits @ a critical timing if i'm not mistaken and can do a significant amount of dmg.
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I don't understand what the problem with adding turrets is and walling your mineral line with your depots. This build is essentially blue flame hellion harass dependent. If that doesn't go well this build is absolute rubbish. Even if it gets to mid game you can use banshees and hellions like muta/bling, but once you get 2 turrets around your tanks and slow push, there's nothing that build can do.
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The problem with the whole "free reign on mineral line" thing
I think would work very well with what I do as Protoss VS Zerg early game against Zerglings.
Instead of walling off the front, wall off the mineral line.
This is by no means "new" but it might work vs hellions.. and switching into vikings shouldnt be too hard
But it's kind of iffy if you block off your own base =S
I'm by no means a Terran player but the idea is that there's no way iEchoic's build breaks TvT
Take the GuineaPig build back in GSL 3.... [Forge FE 1 gate 2 stargates, 3 voidrays + 5 phoenixes + mass VR into chargelot colossi]
It still works great but once infestors are in, it's over.
my point is that TvT hasnt been "broken" at all.
I argued with this topic against my friend.
But after seeing the build, it works stronger early game than late game vs a tank viking player for sure
Once marines and tanks reach critical mass... it's done for the hellion / banshee player imo, but i really haven't seen this done yet cuz the build just works so well in denying everything early game.
This definitely turns heads on how to turtle, not just the front but the base itself as a whole
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It seems to me that the lesson TvT has been teaching in stages is the crucial importance of air-dominance for TvT. First, it was when tank-viking became popular, but people realized that a higher-vikign but lower-tank count would win due to sight advantages. Now Echoic has realized you don't even need the tank part, you can just spam air/hellions and then clean up ground with banshees. Perhaps the next evolution is going to a 2-base three-port build (perhaps with mech support to take away hellions), and then have a couple of either tanks or thors run over hellions.
In the short term, I think a 2 or 3 thor push would do horrible, horrible things to Echoic's build, particularly if the thor player can prevent significant economic damage by walling his front and then stationing troops in his mineral line.
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So the general solution people seem to be saying is well I'll fast expand, or go tank viking maybe turrets so i'm harass proof get air dominanacy, or turtle to 200/200 then attack, or just get thor army.
So many things wrong with this. First off its already been shown, if you try and fast expo, 1 rax or 2 rax, you will lose scv's period. You simply don't have the forces to kill the helions in time. It has also been shown that tank/viking will not get air superiority. Some people say he spends all his ga/time in banshee. The 2 prt 2 fact should only make alot of banshee's if you are going heavy maraduer, he only needs a couple otherwise.
Do to the iechoic build you can't deny his scouting, he can easily poke around the base, and if u did turtle it up with turrets etc, he still has scans. This means he should know what to stop making vikings/banshees etc.
Next point, 1 siege tank in mineral line stops harass. It takes a seige tank 9 shots to kill a typical 3 blue flae helion push, meaning you need alot more than 1 tank to stop the harass, he's more than happy to trade 3 helions for 10 marines OR 10 scv's.
Well what if I turtle with sensor towers and push with missle turret/tank/bunker etc. Well the build actually tells you to expand like zerg against a turtle, fi you both 2 base 2 base and he can't harass, he should just double expand knowing u won't move out.
Why can't i wait for 200/200 tank thor viking mix etc and push? The iechoic build specifically calls for him t tech switch to upgrade BC's with vikings. Meaning a 200/200 army shoudl be mainly against BC/viking/banshee mix with just a couple helions. Once BC's come out he uses helions as expansion check not major army comp so he gets fewer. Btw gl stopping BC's if he has more vikings(cause u have so many tanks/thors) or without mass marines(you stopped makign cause helions burnt them all).
Honestly the weakness of this build, is that requires TONS of scouting and reacting. This build is very techinical and can theoretically deal with any build/push thrown at it. The problem is that a player needs to react appropriatly to what he sees. Most terrans won't expand to 3-4 base and will prolly just make helion/banshee with handful of vikings cause they don't scout proactively.
Iechoic has been running this build for a good while and is one of the top NA terrans, so he has played alot of very good players and considering he still supports this build; even top players haven't come up with a hard counter or gaurnteed strat. This build just relies on great execution and reaction, aka your typical mid level masters of diamond terran player will not execute it properly (especially considering their inexperience with the build) and will get beat by standard builds that players can execute very well do to tons of practice with it already.
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On February 13 2011 02:05 danielsan wrote:
when he's producing vikings he's not producing banshees.
just play standard siege, marine, add a thor, mass vikings and stop complaining.
I'm not complaining. I plan on using this playstyle exclusively in TvT.
Also, you only need a few banshees for this to work. There's no way your opponent should be able to out-viking you if they're getting tanks and vikings. If the game goes on long enough to where your opponent can even get a thor, you should be able to get cruisers.
If your hellion drop gets shut down (which is hard to accomplish) and he was getting vikings before tanks, it's possible he could have more. He likely won't have a second starport. Have a reactor ready and swap out a techlab and then you can outproduce him.
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On February 13 2011 02:00 danielsan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2011 23:50 Baggiez wrote:
I regularly 1 rax FE and I got torched by this on Blistering Sands.
Worst thing is, my opponent was P player that queued as T just to get a TvT to try this out. I scouted it early, massed marauders and threw down a few turrets. He turned up with his hellions and they got destroyed. I marched to his base for the quick damage but a banshee popped - it got 12 marauder kills. From there he constantly traded his hellions for marines and his banshees killed all my marauders and as I had FE and had no tech, I just gave up.
I'm not saying this build is retarded or unskilled or anything of the sort, but it's definitely not a playstyle I want to continue playing against. I wasn't a massive fan of tanks in TvT but with this build so rife on the ladder it feels just like PvP. Whichever player rushes this fastest wins - 1 base FTL.
3k masters. your actions, unit choice and decision making don't hint even diamond, let alone masters.
From my OP you can infer:
actions - FE, build turrets, moving out with marauders
unit choice - marine marauder
decision making = same as actions?
Considering I went 1rax FE and took a relatively late gas, I was pretty restricted in my unit production capabilities. I had to produce from what I had while trying to tech but I was overwhelmed pretty quickly (and considering he was constantly harassing my mineral line, I wasn't doing too great economy wise). iEchoic has stated that he considers that a 1/2 rax FE is an awful opening against this build, but I'd already FE'd by the time I saw the factories and I'd not played against it before, so I was caught off gaurd.
I don't really see where you get off insulting my skill.
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I'm only at 2k masters (and I'm a random player), but I used this build in my last 3 TvTs and won even though my macro was astoundingly terrible. I don't understand why people keep saying that the mid-game army of helion/banshee/viking is weak -- I've found that even macroing horrendously (like 1500 minerals banked) I've been able to wipe the floor with bio or marine/tank in head on battles doing little more than 1-a ing and then microing the helions to get good splash on marines.
I'm not at a super high level (i get matched against usually 2500-2700 pt master's), I've been able to win even though I've executed the build relatively poorly. Some of my opponent's have put a siege tank in the mineral line, but 1 tank in siege mode doesn't stop 4-8 helions from torching 50-100% of the scv's before dying.
Since a lot of people seem to say that they get easy wins against the build by playing standard (where as I have gotten easy wins by using the build), could people please post some replays of them beating the build? I won't post mine of winning since they are ugly, my opponents are not that great, and Echoic's replays are better anyways.
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Not a single replay posted. 
Could some of the masters-league players posting in this thread post some replays, it would be VERY interesting.
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On February 13 2011 02:55 Baggiez wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 02:00 danielsan wrote:On February 12 2011 23:50 Baggiez wrote:
I regularly 1 rax FE and I got torched by this on Blistering Sands.
Worst thing is, my opponent was P player that queued as T just to get a TvT to try this out. I scouted it early, massed marauders and threw down a few turrets. He turned up with his hellions and they got destroyed. I marched to his base for the quick damage but a banshee popped - it got 12 marauder kills. From there he constantly traded his hellions for marines and his banshees killed all my marauders and as I had FE and had no tech, I just gave up.
I'm not saying this build is retarded or unskilled or anything of the sort, but it's definitely not a playstyle I want to continue playing against. I wasn't a massive fan of tanks in TvT but with this build so rife on the ladder it feels just like PvP. Whichever player rushes this fastest wins - 1 base FTL.
3k masters. your actions, unit choice and decision making don't hint even diamond, let alone masters. From my OP you can infer: actions - FE, build turrets, moving out with marauders unit choice - marine marauder decision making = same as actions? Considering I went 1rax FE and took a relatively late gas, I was pretty restricted in my unit production capabilities. I had to produce from what I had while trying to tech but I was overwhelmed pretty quickly (and considering he was constantly harassing my mineral line, I wasn't doing too great economy wise). iEchoic has stated that he considers that a 1/2 rax FE is an awful opening against this build, but I'd already FE'd by the time I saw the factories and I'd not played against it before, so I was caught off gaurd. I don't really see where you get off insulting my skill.
sorry, don't take it personal. It wasn't about your overall skill, which should be quite high considering you're 3k masters but your gameplan for that specific match.
"I regularly go 1 rax FE" makes me think you just go FE and try to make it happen, you don't have triggers to do so or to delay. More so, FE on Blistering?
"I scouted it early" - you had plenty of time to prepare. For some reason, and this is more like a general rule, I see everybody rushing to mine natural even though they know it's not safe. I've seen it happen in GSL, i've seen it happen in random casts, i've seen it happen on master streams. It's kindergarden risk management. You know he's one basing, and doing the Echoic stuff, why not keep your cc inbase a little longer, benefit from mules and overproduce scv. You are still miles ahead.
You would be even further mining natural, but you will also be dead.
On February 13 2011 02:41 snadmonkey wrote:
It has also been shown that tank/viking will not get air superiority. Some people say he spends all his ga/time in banshee.
How exactly has it been shown?
Slow down apocalyptic monkey, it's just a build like every other
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On February 13 2011 03:46 danielsan wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 02:55 Baggiez wrote:On February 13 2011 02:00 danielsan wrote:On February 12 2011 23:50 Baggiez wrote:
I regularly 1 rax FE and I got torched by this on Blistering Sands.
Worst thing is, my opponent was P player that queued as T just to get a TvT to try this out. I scouted it early, massed marauders and threw down a few turrets. He turned up with his hellions and they got destroyed. I marched to his base for the quick damage but a banshee popped - it got 12 marauder kills. From there he constantly traded his hellions for marines and his banshees killed all my marauders and as I had FE and had no tech, I just gave up.
I'm not saying this build is retarded or unskilled or anything of the sort, but it's definitely not a playstyle I want to continue playing against. I wasn't a massive fan of tanks in TvT but with this build so rife on the ladder it feels just like PvP. Whichever player rushes this fastest wins - 1 base FTL.
3k masters. your actions, unit choice and decision making don't hint even diamond, let alone masters. From my OP you can infer: actions - FE, build turrets, moving out with marauders unit choice - marine marauder decision making = same as actions? Considering I went 1rax FE and took a relatively late gas, I was pretty restricted in my unit production capabilities. I had to produce from what I had while trying to tech but I was overwhelmed pretty quickly (and considering he was constantly harassing my mineral line, I wasn't doing too great economy wise). iEchoic has stated that he considers that a 1/2 rax FE is an awful opening against this build, but I'd already FE'd by the time I saw the factories and I'd not played against it before, so I was caught off gaurd. I don't really see where you get off insulting my skill. sorry, don't take it personal. It wasn't about your overall skill, which should be quite high considering you're 3k masters but your gameplan for that specific match. "I regularly go 1 rax FE" makes me think you just go FE and try to make it happen, you don't have triggers to do so or to delay. More so, FE on Blistering? "I scouted it early" - you had plenty of time to prepare. For some reason, and this is more like a general rule, I see everybody rushing to mine natural even though they know it's not safe. I've seen it happen in GSL, i've seen it happen in random casts, i've seen it happen on master streams. It's kindergarden risk management. You know he's one basing, and doing the Echoic stuff, why not keep your cc inbase a little longer, benefit from mules and overproduce scv. You are still miles ahead. You would be even further mining natural, but you will also be dead.
You're right in what you say, but we live and learn.
Regarding your specific point - I did scout it early and in response switched to triple tech lab marauders and got down some quick turrets. After doing this and losing I guess one my options would have been to stick with 1/2 tech lab rax and quickly tech to viking (even if he produces more than me eventually, it'll halt his banshee production long enough for me to get up more static defence). Maybe someone with more experience can come in on this one?
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![[image loading]](http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/5817/hellionproof.jpg)
Im thinking sim city similar to this would work quite well at stopping any hellion or banshee harass.
They can harass a bit from the edges, but nothing very scary.
Or actually, now that I think about it, youd actually want to set the turrets farther out, and not clumped up in the building ring.
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On February 13 2011 03:46 danielsan wrote:
"I scouted it early" - you had plenty of time to prepare. For some reason, and this is more like a general rule, I see everybody rushing to mine natural even though they know it's not safe. I've seen it happen in GSL, i've seen it happen in random casts, i've seen it happen on master streams. It's kindergarden risk management. You know he's one basing, and doing the Echoic stuff, why not keep your cc inbase a little longer, benefit from mules and overproduce scv. You are still miles ahead.
To be fair, the build has no tells. You force out the scouting worker before the 2nd refinery goes down and the 1rax FE comes before there's any way you could tell what build he's doing. Shortly after you'll see one hellion poking around but that reveals nothing.
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Why do we have two threads for the same topic? Why can't this discussion exist in the existing thread about the build order?
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I don't play T at all, but it seems like iEchoic's build relies on econ harass and has very little ability to attack a front early. 1-rax expand struggles to keep SCVs alive because it's spread out and doesn't have tech to shut down the mobility of hellions and banshees, but what's stopping the 1-rax expanding player from putting up 2 bunkers at each mineral line? I know that's a big investment in defense, but the expansion is so much earlier than all you really have to do is keep your SCVs alive long enough to get your tech online to secure a big lead. Ordinarily, devoting 400 minerals in bunkers and 12 marines (3 in each bunker should be plenty) to defending mineral lines would leave your front open, but a couple bunkers at the front will keep you safe against a much larger force of hellion-banshee.
Again, I don't play T, but it seems like turtling really hard on 2 bases should work.
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On February 13 2011 06:05 iEchoic wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 03:46 danielsan wrote:
"I scouted it early" - you had plenty of time to prepare. For some reason, and this is more like a general rule, I see everybody rushing to mine natural even though they know it's not safe. I've seen it happen in GSL, i've seen it happen in random casts, i've seen it happen on master streams. It's kindergarden risk management. You know he's one basing, and doing the Echoic stuff, why not keep your cc inbase a little longer, benefit from mules and overproduce scv. You are still miles ahead.
To be fair, the build has no tells. You force out the scouting worker before the 2nd refinery goes down and the 1rax FE comes before there's any way you could tell what build he's doing. Shortly after you'll see one hellion poking around but that reveals nothing.
EDIT:Misread horrible.
I apologize.
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On February 13 2011 08:32 DemiSe wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 06:05 iEchoic wrote:On February 13 2011 03:46 danielsan wrote:
"I scouted it early" - you had plenty of time to prepare. For some reason, and this is more like a general rule, I see everybody rushing to mine natural even though they know it's not safe. I've seen it happen in GSL, i've seen it happen in random casts, i've seen it happen on master streams. It's kindergarden risk management. You know he's one basing, and doing the Echoic stuff, why not keep your cc inbase a little longer, benefit from mules and overproduce scv. You are still miles ahead.
To be fair, the build has no tells. You force out the scouting worker before the 2nd refinery goes down and the 1rax FE comes before there's any way you could tell what build he's doing. Shortly after you'll see one hellion poking around but that reveals nothing. No tells? Doesn't your build involve stopping marine production after 2 marines? I strongly think that a standard 1hellion, 4marine push will give me a sufficient amount of information to determine what you're doing.
The guy said he was FEing, a FE comes before a 4marine 1 hellion poke hits. Someone was telling him not to FE if he scouted it.
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Im 3200 T and countless terrans are attempting to use this.
I just open quick banshee cloak (if you follow iechoics BO your first banshee with cloak will come the same time ur opponents medivac is half way done)
My cloak banshee can see the drop coming (lotsa hellions) and i can prepare effectively (move whole army into mineral line and FE (cus you know he wont be FE-ing anytime soon)
Sadly, you still lose a shit load of SCVS because blue flame is pretty ridiculous and cost effective so this is pretty tricky...
I then usually move out with my tank marine banshee composition. No lie though..its a very solid strat
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iEchoic's strat is basically like SeleCT's strat at MLG DC where he dropped and expanded but for TvT. It just takes knowing where your units are at all times and knowing when you have the ability to be backstabbed. The Protoss figured that build out, and I can't say that I don't think people won't figure this one out.
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sounds like a fun build but i don't think its game breaking. especially if both players do this strat they end up killing each others eco. Its always fun to see both players doing an early drop when close air killing each other eco lines because no defense is at home.
I saw some really nice stalker blocking vs hellions etc, looked really awesome and should work for terrans as well heh.
This build sounds like a good conter against 1/1/1 with an expansion heh. Wonder if we will ever see no orbital neo steel upgrade and 2 bunkers at a base and if hellions come. Whooosh all scvs loaded in laughing. (easy way to have 44 save workers on 2 bases haha which is better then 1 base with orbial x3)
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Just played against this build, its damn annoying. I shouldn't have kept building marines lol. Was able to win with viking dominance and plantetary fortresses with seige tanks to starve him out.
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I was playing around with this build over the past few times I have been online and have found one good weak spot. This build doesn't allow for you to be ready for a cloaked banshee rush. Even with two gas up either you can get a raven first, which would allow you to prevent the banshee rush, but will delay your first medivac, which delays your initial helion drop, or you miss scout and you will have no detection at 7:20. You could save up energy on your CC, but then you will be tight on money/supply. I tried to rearrange things so that I could get out both detection and a medivac in optimal time but found no way to get both out. Just some thoughts.
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I haven't yet ran into this build yet. I want to try my hand against it.
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On February 13 2011 11:23 WhiteBuddha wrote:
I was playing around with this build over the past few times I have been online and have found one good weak spot. This build doesn't allow for you to be ready for a cloaked banshee rush. Even with two gas up either you can get a raven first, which would allow you to prevent the banshee rush, but will delay your first medivac, which delays your initial helion drop, or you miss scout and you will have no detection at 7:20. You could save up energy on your CC, but then you will be tight on money/supply. I tried to rearrange things so that I could get out both detection and a medivac in optimal time but found no way to get both out. Just some thoughts.
This partially highlights why we shouldn't have 2 threads for an identical topic.
For the record, it was stated in the other thread that running SCVs around while getting out a Viking and a Raven allows you to lose a couple SCVs, but not too many. Meanwhile, you have nothing at home to stop a few Blue-Flame hellions killing every single SCV you have.
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In all seriousness, the basic raven build counters it effectively. Get marines/tank/raven and bring all your scv when he drops with helion
if you use your auto turrets you will auto win. ^^
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did qxc just use this build in PvT in the TLOpen finals?
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A two barracks stimpush into expo counters this nicely, provided your first push is primarily marauders. He won't be able to fend it off with just hellions, and banshees won't be out, so he'll be forced to pull SCVs leaving you ahead economically. 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.
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One turret will not stop a medivac from dropping in your line, and I'd gladly pay a medivac to have some alone time between 4 blue-flame hellions and all your SCVs. Also, a combination of hellions to kill off the marines and banshees to kill off the marauders leaves this build in the green. Lots of strong pushes may cause trouble, as you are likely to cause some sort of damage with the marauders before they die, but with all your SCVs killed off for the low, low price of one medivac and 4 Hellions, I rate your chances of constant pushes as "low".
Also, this build seems like it would love maps like LT for the island expansions.
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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.
That's quite a lot of buildings to seal your minline with by the time the first drop comes after your attack (not push, damn! Such a misused term). Timings are important regarding the amount of defenses you can gather, especially when you're dropped during your attack (or on your way to it).
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On February 13 2011 12:09 Alaric wrote:Show nested quote +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. That's quite a lot of buildings to seal your minline with by the time the first drop comes after your attack (not push, damn! Such a misused term). Timings are important regarding the amount of defenses you can gather, especially when you're dropped during your attack (or on your way to it).
Well it's very map dependent (Xel'Naga being easier that Steppes, for example), but it's very doable, even if the other player is sprinting to a blue flame drop. Try it for yourself, and note the timings. You'll see what I mean
One turret will not stop a medivac from dropping in your line, and I'd gladly pay a medivac to have some alone time between 4 blue-flame hellions and all your SCVs. Also, a combination of hellions to kill off the marines and banshees to kill off the marauders leaves this build in the green. Lots of strong pushes may cause trouble, as you are likely to cause some sort of damage with the marauders before they die, but with all your SCVs killed off for the low, low price of one medivac and 4 Hellions, I rate your chances of constant pushes as "low".
Then build two turrets. And again, if you execute a bio push before building a CC, banshees will NOT be out in time to help defend.
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Im a Plat player, Ive saw this build 3 times the day after that daily, though it was effective the people who tried it didnt have the greatest control ever. I lost twice, the third I beat him with Superior viking and marine tank. I kept my marines in range of the tanks at all times, the hard part was taking air control since he starts 2 port.
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Most under-used and under-appreciated terran tool in the game:
Sensor Tower
marauder/tank comes out just as fast at hellions, same with reactor viking. Throw up a sensor to see when the harasses are coming, and do drops to keep this super-aggressive harassing build on it's toes. if they can harass, why can't you?
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On February 13 2011 13:04 TheCookieMonster wrote:
Most under-used and under-appreciated terran tool in the game:
Sensor Tower
marauder/tank comes out just as fast at hellions, same with reactor viking. Throw up a sensor to see when the harasses are coming, and do drops to keep this super-aggressive harassing build on it's toes. if they can harass, why can't you?
because you have the 3 most mobile units in the game that can instantly reposition
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i've seen this on ladder quite abit, and although the people i play arent too high up (~2600-2800 diamond), i have noticed some issues with this build. this build relys on 3 units, the hellion, viking, and banshee (occasional medivac/raven)
i think that if some1 scouts this build, going 2 port vikings and massing marauders can be quite effective, with 2 port vikings you will most certainly have the air control, due to the fact the opponent needs 1 of their ports for banshees, and if they dont make enought banshees the marauders can easily clean up the hellions. the marauders are there to attack the hellions, and their high hp allows them to tank alot more dmg than marines. the issue with this ofcourse if that if they transition into the standard tank play, you have too many vikings/maruaduer force, but there is a timing window if he does decide to switch unit composition that you can attack
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The void in the metagame will be filled with an idea similarly brilliant to iEchoic's, and the metagame will shift in order to adapt. It might be a bit of a rough patch for a while, but we've seen styles come and go in each matchup: this may just be another one of them.
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On February 12 2011 22:30 Endorsed wrote:
No. You can win with standard play. It's just a wierd unit combination nobody has played against before. There is a reason korean pro's aren't doing this. I think any standard unit composition in TvT can beat this. If you have air control this build is comepletely useless. Bio can also beat this.
bio can beat it if the bio has a lot of marauders and air control. if there are large numbers of marines they will die to the blue flame. marauders would clean up the blue flame but the whole point of the hellions is to b expendable. this build just really demonstrates that TvT is all about the air. IMHO
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If you have air control and tanks this build crumbles. With early enough scouting you can pump out vikings and a raven or two to counter banshees athen transiton in marine/marauder/tank with vikings.
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On February 13 2011 13:14 TheSCII wrote:
i've seen this on ladder quite abit, and although the people i play arent too high up (~2600-2800 diamond), i have noticed some issues with this build. this build relys on 3 units, the hellion, viking, and banshee (occasional medivac/raven)
i think that if some1 scouts this build, going 2 port vikings and massing marauders can be quite effective, with 2 port vikings you will most certainly have the air control, due to the fact the opponent needs 1 of their ports for banshees, and if they dont make enought banshees the marauders can easily clean up the hellions. the marauders are there to attack the hellions, and their high hp allows them to tank alot more dmg than marines. the issue with this ofcourse if that if they transition into the standard tank play, you have too many vikings/maruaduer force, but there is a timing window if he does decide to switch unit composition that you can attack
If they make a raven PDD is very very very effective against your vikings.
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On February 13 2011 15:12 JaFFsteR wrote:
If you have air control and tanks this build crumbles. With early enough scouting you can pump out vikings and a raven or two to counter banshees athen transiton in marine/marauder/tank with vikings.
How do you propose to gain air control when A) The build is facking optimized for it, as the creator and others have stated many times, perhaps due to the necessity thereof, and B) Investing a crapton more gas in Tanks than he is in Banshees of Hellions?
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lol OP, can you please link iEchoic's Thread into the post?
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=189624
Majority of the people here don't understand the build at all, and suggest things that basically what iEchoic was aiming to beat.
It should be a requirement to read that thread before you offer a "if you use X and Y you should beat it".
The other half thinks beating some random scrub on Ladder/Custom games means the build is shit, when in iEchoic's post he states in BOLD that the build is EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO EXECUTE. He even thinks HE, himself, can't use the build to its full potential.
I honestly don't think any1 below 3k Masters (average master league) can even remotely execute the build cleanly.
People don't even realise that the build is not called "helion + banshee" but 2fact + 2 port with responses outlined in his Guide for each popular openers and unit comp.
If anything, this build should raise the skill level for TvT. In order to play this style effectively, you're going to need good multitask as well as map awareness and game sense. I don't find placing tanks on ledge etc to be extremely challenging. Whenever I off race as T, i can place tanks around towers or w/e and just macro my heart out knowing, I only really have to worry about drops+banshees.
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On February 13 2011 08:40 iEchoic wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 08:32 DemiSe wrote:On February 13 2011 06:05 iEchoic wrote:On February 13 2011 03:46 danielsan wrote:
"I scouted it early" - you had plenty of time to prepare. For some reason, and this is more like a general rule, I see everybody rushing to mine natural even though they know it's not safe. I've seen it happen in GSL, i've seen it happen in random casts, i've seen it happen on master streams. It's kindergarden risk management. You know he's one basing, and doing the Echoic stuff, why not keep your cc inbase a little longer, benefit from mules and overproduce scv. You are still miles ahead.
To be fair, the build has no tells. You force out the scouting worker before the 2nd refinery goes down and the 1rax FE comes before there's any way you could tell what build he's doing. Shortly after you'll see one hellion poking around but that reveals nothing. No tells? Doesn't your build involve stopping marine production after 2 marines? I strongly think that a standard 1hellion, 4marine push will give me a sufficient amount of information to determine what you're doing. The guy said he was FEing, a FE comes before a 4marine 1 hellion poke hits. Someone was telling him not to FE if he scouted it.
he said he scouted early (dont know how, maybe lucky scan, maybe a reaper). It doesnt really matter, point is he knew about it quite fast. So even if he did open with FE, he didnt have to use it as it's extremely difficult to cover both main and natural with few units early vs mobile hellions. just keep it in base and stack scvs.
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Ide just keep absolute air dominance.. like when ur on 2-3 bases have 2-3 starports with reactors and make siege tanks / marauders to kill his helions. if he transitions you will have air dominance for the tank battle.
Basically, if you lose air dominance vs his build, you will lose. If you keep it, it nullifies his banshees and he will have to spend all his gas on vikings to keep up, but you will be ahead from the start.
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On February 13 2011 17:16 EternaL_9 wrote:
Ide just keep absolute air dominance.. like when ur on 2-3 bases have 2-3 starports with reactors and make siege tanks / marauders to kill his helions. if he transitions you will have air dominance for the tank battle.
Basically, if you lose air dominance vs his build, you will lose. If you keep it, it nullifies his banshees and he will have to spend all his gas on vikings to keep up, but you will be ahead from the start.
It so easy to keep air dominance when all your workers are dead and you're hemorrhaging gas through your factories and barracks. I should try going HTs and Void Rays in my PvP games to complement my Colossi, I mean, as long as I have more Colossi my Void Rays and Storms can just roll the field with the gateway units.
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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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On February 14 2011 14:47 ZasZ. wrote:
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.
I don't understand when players say they've reach their "skill cap" for terran and/or protoss. Like TLO said that yet he was never winning tournaments and he failed to get Code S with Terran. How can you reach the skill cap for a race and still constantly lose I just fail to grasp this. I don't even think MVP has hit the skill cap for Terran yet.
And personally I prefer positional Tank battles Because that's as close as possible to BW and anything BW is amazing.
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On February 12 2011 12:22 Leaky wrote:
First of all, let me say that I think iEchoic's build is great and I'm glad that people are developing such innovative and effective strategies. However, it seems like since his 2fact/2port build was featured on the Day9 daily, TvT on the North American ladder has transformed overnight from a positional marine/tank/viking game into a hellion-banshee elimination race with both players having free reign over their opponent's mineral line.
What can I do to combat this build effectively? I have tried going straight up marauder/viking and it actually didn't work: the hellions and banshees killed my marauders with incredible ease and my opponent could make more vikings than me because not only was I wasting 25 gas a pop on marauders, but he was periodically killing off a large amount of my scvs.
iEchoic himself said that a thor rush can be dicey to defend with this build, but do I really need to all-in to win vs this? Has anyone found a solid way to play vs this build that can safely go into the mid and late game?
i swear to god make 2 starport reactor and make pure vikings, you'll win with ease, oh, and make bunkers at strategic points in your base near workers to stop hellions either from getting lots of kills, or getting behind at all, bunkers also deal with medivacs well especially if u got the upgrade for 6 in it. it may sound nooby, but mass viking is the only way to beat this strategy effectivlely and cost efficiently. you can also rape his economy by splitting up your masses of vikings and dropping 4-6 at each of his expos to kill workers simotaneously
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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.
You can't just say this without posting a replay. 1 rax into expo and you won't have anything but a few bio units to defend 2 bases from 4 blue flame helions... it seems odd that you didn't feel threatened at all. Please post the replay if you want people to believe you.
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On February 14 2011 15:00 Raiznhell wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2011 14:47 ZasZ. wrote:
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. I don't understand when players say they've reach their "skill cap" for terran and/or protoss. Like TLO said that yet he was never winning tournaments and he failed to get Code S with Terran. How can you reach the skill cap for a race and still constantly lose I just fail to grasp this. I don't even think MVP has hit the skill cap for Terran yet. And personally I prefer positional Tank battles Because that's as close as possible to BW and anything BW is amazing.
While the Races overall Skillcap might be higher, a specific persons Skillcap with either a race, or in the total game, can still be significantly lower. Not everyone can become a Pro Basketball player, even if they would train Basketball the whole day for years. The same with Starcraft. Sure, everyone can get pretty good, but i am sure that most people, even if they would dedicate their whole life to starcraft, would never win any major tournament. And some people might be more predetermined to play good with one race than with another, up to the point when their own specific skillcap with one race, which ould be far lower than the overall skillcap of the race, is not enough to win anything. There is a difference between what is theoretically possible, and what each specific person can achieve, even with absolute dedication.
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On February 14 2011 16:01 JDub wrote:Show nested quote +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. You can't just say this without posting a replay. 1 rax into expo and you won't have anything but a few bio units to defend 2 bases from 4 blue flame helions... it seems odd that you didn't feel threatened at all. Please post the replay if you want people to believe you.
I completely agree with this. You either played against a shaky version of the build, he didn't do what he was supposed to at specific times, or are outright lying.
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this build won't stay around long, and if it does Marine Tank Viking will still match it. It will go down to control. Sensor Tower usage seems to stomp it for me, but i haven't played anyone who used it properly so i dont know.
Only time will tell.
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On February 12 2011 17:53 Teddimijia wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2011 16:47 nodule wrote:
Sure, the banshee player is putting all their gas into air, but banshees don't give air control. Even if they make loads of vikings, you can go even more vikings than they if you aren't building banshees. Am I missing something? no your not. the idea is that if ur going the 2factory2port u respond to what ur opponent does. the idea being that if ur opponent goes for mass vikings u go mass vikings as well and b/c u have 2ports can get out the vikings faster.
You will never be able to outviking someone who goes 2reactor starport with your standard banshee/hellion build unless you throw down more starports of your own, because of these factors.
You have at least one tech lab.
You are making banshees.
You need to preemptively know that he's making 2x reactor starports if you want to match his viking count.
And if you make to many vikings, he'll have the superior ground force of the marauder to waltz into your base and kill you, but that will be situation dependent. If your viking count beats him, he can snipe your banshee and land his vikings and continue on waltzing into your base with the marauders.
The main point is that if you go to heavy on air control of your own, i.e mass vikings, he'll have a ground force that will beat yours, and if you go to heavy banshee, he will have more vikings that can kill them.
As far as the hellion drop goes, treat it as a standard drop and intercept it. How you do that is up to you. Sensor towers rule for TvT tho. It's not like people weren't dropping in TvTs before this, although it was mainly marine drops against a tank heavy player.
I shall make a disclaimer again that the banshee helion build is a solid build and my way is in no way a hard counter, but a pretty basic way to deal with it.
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Even if you see them with 2fact2port, you will most likely not have 2ports yet, maybe not even 1. It's a come from behind race that you aren't likely to win, especially since you are likely behind 5+ SCVs from the BFHellion drop.
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I've found that marauder/viking beats this.
Banshees are more expensive than marauders, and hellions suck against them. So they will have to stop producing banshees in order to keep up with my viking count, giving my marauders time to kill him.
He cant keep up in viking numbers AND make banshees.
The only time i've lost is when he's done alot of economic damage, but it rarely happens.
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From the replays shown in day[9]'s show, I would think good bunker placement goes a long way, because they protect against banshees and hellions alike. Also check iEchoic's own post. He points out the similarity with the TvZ matchup. How do you beat muta/bling with tank marine? You run the marines until the blings are dead and then clean house. Zerg relies on taking out one component of your 2-component-army and then he wins the battle. I would guess a marine/marauder force works the same way. When he enganges, you pull back the marines with stim, the marauder with concussive engage the hellions and you end up with a few marauders and your marines vs his air force. Like in the TvZ, the hellion player will be forced to flank and engage multiple sides, but unlike the TvZ, there is no speedling equivalent that can block the marines movement.
EDIT:
Also simcity you base, so that hellions cannot reach your mineral line. Supply depots and raxes can create a wall around a mineral line and you just need turrets to fend off banshees and dropships dropping inside the wall. Ever saw a toss expecting iEchoic's hellion drop? That's the spirit!
As an opening I suggest my own one: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=191771
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On February 14 2011 20:25 Deadlyfish wrote:
I've found that marauder/viking beats this.
Banshees are more expensive than marauders, and hellions suck against them. So they will have to stop producing banshees in order to keep up with my viking count, giving my marauders time to kill him.
He cant keep up in viking numbers AND make banshees.
The only time i've lost is when he's done alot of economic damage, but it rarely happens.
So how do you go about this? 1rax FE? 3 Rax Rauder into 2base play with 2-3ports?
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On February 14 2011 15:00 Raiznhell wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2011 14:47 ZasZ. wrote:
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. I don't understand when players say they've reach their "skill cap" for terran and/or protoss. Like TLO said that yet he was never winning tournaments and he failed to get Code S with Terran. How can you reach the skill cap for a race and still constantly lose I just fail to grasp this. I don't even think MVP has hit the skill cap for Terran yet. And personally I prefer positional Tank battles Because that's as close as possible to BW and anything BW is amazing.
People are different, some people don't have the inclination for a race and cannot improve past a certain point. Everyone has a race of preference, one that best fit the player's style.
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did you notice that in his replays he never fought a turtle terran with sieged tanks... 1st game, no siege, 2nd game MM, 3rd game, marauder heavy.
This build is very similar to the way a zerg plays (bling/muta), It can be beaten by a turtling terran (bunkers/turrets/s-tanks) and a large but slow push with tanks and thors.
Thors are the primary counter to this build (it is never discussed on the daily really, they state that it comes down to "unit control"), you can magic box the thors with your banshees, but if u miss micro you will loss infinity banshees in three volleys from a thor.
Or as others have said mass vikings (hide a port), and defend with turrets/bunkers. take air control, push with marauders.
its in no way broken, just a little bit inventive, there will be many more builds like this in all match-ups in the future, the game is very young.
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Looking for a diamond/masters player who feels they can execute this build competently, who would be willing to play as many practice games as it takes for me to have a grasp on playing against it. If nothing else than helping a fellow TL poster, you get to burn my SCVs for what could be hours.
EU server
Baggiez
135
(or send me a pm on here)
<3
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On February 14 2011 20:56 VashTS wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2011 20:25 Deadlyfish wrote:
I've found that marauder/viking beats this.
Banshees are more expensive than marauders, and hellions suck against them. So they will have to stop producing banshees in order to keep up with my viking count, giving my marauders time to kill him.
He cant keep up in viking numbers AND make banshees.
The only time i've lost is when he's done alot of economic damage, but it rarely happens. So how do you go about this? 1rax FE? 3 Rax Rauder into 2base play with 2-3ports?
I open 1/1/1, scout what he is doing, then if he is doing that build, i expand, and go either 3 barrack 2 port, or 3 port 3 barracks (this allows for flexibility, but you cant really afford it). Usually with double reactor ports i am able to keep up though. But you obviously also have to pressure him abit. If you pressure him with marauders you're forcing him to build something besides vikings, which will let you get ahead.
Though most terrans will abandon hellion/viking/banshee once i get ahead in the viking count.
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IMO fast cloak banshee owns this build, your cloak banshee arrives to face off against 2marines and a medivac with a good 45seconds until a viking even pops never mind a raven. People always claim that they won't lose that much whereas you will lose everything to the hellions...but one bunker with marines in it behind the mineral line and sim city should do the trick i think, AND they will definitely lose alot more then they claim the banshee just gets their too early if executed properly gas before rax.
Also a couple of people have mentioned bunkers and marines....seems to me that a 1rax FE with bunkers everywhere would own this build no problem, helps with the sim city as well.
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On February 14 2011 23:33 Jayzo wrote:This build is very similar to the way a zerg plays (bling/muta), It can be beaten by a turtling terran (bunkers/turrets/s-tanks) and a large but slow push with tanks and thors.
Thors are the primary counter to this build (it is never discussed on the daily really, they state that it comes down to "unit control"), you can magic box the thors with your banshees, but if u miss micro you will loss infinity banshees in three volleys from a thor.
Or as others have said mass vikings (hide a port), and defend with turrets/bunkers. take air control, push with marauders.
Well, you're supposed to be pro-active with this build, so that your opponent won't be able to hide a starport, of course. Scouting is that important when it comes down to unit composition from your own starports, it's been said times and times again.
Also, a death push will destroy this composition. Nobody denies that. But the thing is, once you've established 3 or even 4 bases to your opponent's 2, you've secured a lead, so you don't have to keep using this mix, like a Zerg will go t3.
If I see my opponent turtle hard and gather a powerful force, I'll use my economic lead to transition into something that'll allow me to slow, or even beat his army, making me further ahead as he'll need to expand.
Lots of people here seem to act as if they were going to face stubborn opponents unable to adapt or react. It's already not quite pertinent when you expect a minimum level of play, but now that we're currently talking about a reactive and versatile build, that's just hoping for your opponent to be outplayed.
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1 rax FE into 3 rax into 1-2 SP, all you need to do is scout and turtle a bit till the drop's toast then push out with marauders and a few marines. Scouting I've been working off 3 things: 17 gas, poke to see 2 marines, hellion. Any banshee or tank build works off gas on 20-22, all builds have more then 2 marines and you see the hellion later as a confirmation after confirming at least one of the other two. Generally you can do a lot of damage with the marine marauder charge as long as you keep the marines safe long enough to kill the banshee and then just slaughter his SCVs. You turn it into a macro war, you're on 2 base he's on one. Win with constant production. I'll admit my friend's not that great at the build, but it's hard to stop banshee production with constant marine marauder pressure and then to see vikings can topple you as I did it to him once and he beat me.
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As iEchoic said himself, this is a VERY mechanically demanding build that has a very high learning curve before being able to execute it at an acceptable level. It holds a ton of potential, though there are many places where miscontrol or mismacro can completely make the entire build fall apart. I don't think it will break TvT, though it has the possibility to become another viable strategy alongside tank-heavy or MMM-heavy as long as the player wants to be creative and has the mechanical prowess to execute it properly.
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How about a reaper expand? Reapers handle hellions incredibly well, especially compared to the standard gasless 1rax expand. Reaper in bunker and hellions can't go near it, some simcity to handle the rest of the area? I dunno, it seems good on paper... Would need to practice it.
And no, a walling tank viking player will NOT match the hellion-air player's viking count. 1 player is putting gas into tanks, the other has 2 ports and only using factories to build hellions.
I think to combat this, we're going to see some TVZ style play - expand-turtling into mech pushes across the map. You'll need turrets and stuff with your tanks, just marines won't cut it. Also, marine spreading will become pretty clutch, as hellions rely ENTIRELY on their splash to do good dps - their fire rate is as slow as tanks!
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I faced it thrice now. Twice in ladder, once in practice. I've come to the conclusion that a decent early pressure does wonders.
I do gas first
10 supply 11 gas 13 rax 16 OC 17 factory 3 marine 1 hellion poke up the ramp. Kills both marines easy, and they are forced to pull scvs. After 1 hellion, tech lab for blue flame research, and a port after you start 2nd hellion.
Worked decently well. Quick poke -> blue flame drop -> tank mara viking expo. Didn't make it that far, because the poke + drop killed enough.
Just wondering how some of the better T's who run this build think of an early poke to gain eco advantage before hellions run amuck?
![[image loading]](http://www.gamereplays.org/community/uploads/repimgs/repimg-33-189122.jpg)
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How about a reaper expand?
My friend did this one against me once, it's actually quite effective mostly because it confirms that it's the hellion air build and you can do a bit of damage with them. You can also transition into marauders very easily because of the tech labbed rax too.
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On February 13 2011 14:12 Pl4t0 wrote:
The void in the metagame will be filled with an idea similarly brilliant to iEchoic's, and the metagame will shift in order to adapt. It might be a bit of a rough patch for a while, but we've seen styles come and go in each matchup: this may just be another one of them.
Nothing shifted at all..lol. Standard marine/tank/viking/medivac beats this. So does any mech play...the only thing that this absolutely destroys is 1 rax FE's or abusing cloak banshee/hellion vs marine marauders n such...
At maybe gold/diamond level, and lower masters, it seems "omg amazing," but beyond that no one sees this build ever...for good reason. It's more of a 1 time thing you can catch someone off guard with, not at all something you can keep doing over and over again for wins versus tip top Terrans that build siege tanks.
Not to mention it's a heavy 1 base play, and the times they don't 1 base it...defeats the entire purpose of doing it in the first place so it's not optimal then.
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On February 15 2011 06:03 avilo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 14:12 Pl4t0 wrote:
The void in the metagame will be filled with an idea similarly brilliant to iEchoic's, and the metagame will shift in order to adapt. It might be a bit of a rough patch for a while, but we've seen styles come and go in each matchup: this may just be another one of them. Nothing shifted at all..lol. Standard marine/tank/viking/medivac beats this. So does any mech play...the only thing that this absolutely destroys is 1 rax FE's or abusing cloak banshee/hellion vs marine marauders n such... At maybe gold/diamond level, and lower masters, it seems "omg amazing," but beyond that no one sees this build ever...for good reason. It's more of a 1 time thing you can catch someone off guard with, not at all something you can keep doing over and over again for wins versus tip top Terrans that build siege tanks. Not to mention it's a heavy 1 base play, and the times they don't 1 base it...defeats the entire purpose of doing it in the first place so it's not optimal then.
I've experienced it and countered it absolutely fine with a FE, on multiple occasions. Simple marine marauder pump is fine against it, stimmed MM trashes hellion/banshee combo simply because of numbers. You don't even need the medivacs, as you instead get more MM (since the healing doesn't do much to keep alive the marines anyways), and concussive shells nab retreating hellions that try to poke in and engage.
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I've seen Root.Drewbie defend against it using a turret and a siege tank in every mineral line and getting air superiority (he got it by throwing down 4 reactored starports). Other than that, you can go the usual MM tank business.
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On February 15 2011 06:14 Linz wrote:
I've seen Root.Drewbie defend against it using a turret and a siege tank in every mineral line and getting air superiority (he got it by throwing down 4 reactored starports). Other than that, you can go the usual MM tank business.
Indeed.
I dont understand how someone can say its hard to keep up with the viking count. 2 reactored starports is all you need and you'll be in a huge lead, since one of his will have a tech lab on it. If you cant get an expo up (not likely since this push comes so late) and cant figure out what to do, just spend all your gas on vikings. Maybe some thors and build a few well placed turrets and he wont be able to do anything.
The hellions are not that hard to deal with, especially since 75% of my opponents start their TvT with blueflame hellions. I always simcity and leave one tank behind.
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its not broken its just a new play style against the basic mass infantery or marine tank viking
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marine + bunker + tank slow push across the map with lots of turrets in your mining bases to kill off medivacs and banshees?
Marines in bunkers next to siege tanks... the hellions are useless against and the banshees die to stimmed marines in bunkers, no? Just throwing ideas out there
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I posted earlier that I open TvT basically protecting my mineral line and then if a harass comes, I usually shut it down and then either counter or if a harass never happens I get into a good position to transition into tank/marauder/viking (thors later on once I take a 3rd). I open 1-1-1 to get a raven while also getting seige/marines and then just get some vikings after. This is my standard, if I scout and see the 2fact/2port, I wait for the drop shut it down, and then move to seige up and take control of the game. The raven ends up PDDing to pretty much stop the few vikings and banshees, and I usually get a marauder or two to help out the marine dps, I usually exchange against the hellions but I have 3 tanks by then to do some serious damage, an auto turret also does a great job. I'm sure other things work also.
#1http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=download&&id=189306
#2http://www.gamereplays.org/starcraft2/replays.php?game=33&show=download&&id=189306
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I've read a lot of posts about this and people never really say anything about thors. I go marine/thor/siege tank/viking, and with careful micro, it is a pretty easy win. You can usually put pressure on them before they can tech to bc's without sacrificing a large army count.
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I gave this build some thought and what I would do against this is fast expand and defend for a while. Sim city your base to defend against Hellion harass. When moving out I would plant a bunker in your Mineral lines with a Turret to detect for you.
I think your army would be more efficient and with an economic advantage you can afford to drop some base defense in your mineral line.
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On February 15 2011 06:03 avilo wrote:
At maybe gold/diamond level, and lower masters, it seems "omg amazing," but beyond that no one sees this build ever...for good reason. It's more of a 1 time thing you can catch someone off guard with, not at all something you can keep doing over and over again for wins versus tip top Terrans that build siege tanks.
I don't understand how you can say this when the guy who came up with the build is near the top of Master's and has had success with the build all the time. The first part of your statement is just blatantly false.
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On February 15 2011 13:52 JDub wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2011 06:03 avilo wrote:
At maybe gold/diamond level, and lower masters, it seems "omg amazing," but beyond that no one sees this build ever...for good reason. It's more of a 1 time thing you can catch someone off guard with, not at all something you can keep doing over and over again for wins versus tip top Terrans that build siege tanks.
I don't understand how you can say this when the guy who came up with the build is near the top of Master's and has had success with the build all the time. The first part of your statement is just blatantly false.
You could argue that people didn't quite understand the target of the strategy until he explained it in detail. For example, when I saw it I thought after seeing mass banshee hellion "I know as soon as I start pumping vikings he's going to contest my ability for air dominance."
If I hadn't known that, I probably would have lost last time I played.
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On February 15 2011 06:03 avilo wrote:Show nested quote +On February 13 2011 14:12 Pl4t0 wrote:
The void in the metagame will be filled with an idea similarly brilliant to iEchoic's, and the metagame will shift in order to adapt. It might be a bit of a rough patch for a while, but we've seen styles come and go in each matchup: this may just be another one of them. Nothing shifted at all..lol. Standard marine/tank/viking/medivac beats this. So does any mech play...the only thing that this absolutely destroys is 1 rax FE's or abusing cloak banshee/hellion vs marine marauders n such... At maybe gold/diamond level, and lower masters, it seems "omg amazing," but beyond that no one sees this build ever...for good reason. It's more of a 1 time thing you can catch someone off guard with, not at all something you can keep doing over and over again for wins versus tip top Terrans that build siege tanks. Not to mention it's a heavy 1 base play, and the times they don't 1 base it...defeats the entire purpose of doing it in the first place so it's not optimal then.
Yeah true. It's easy to get caught with the wrong unit combo though. I played vs it earlier tonight vs poke in a tournament and I had WAY too many tanks. I opened tank/medivac/viking and I stopped the hellions easily but found myself with 7 tanks vs banshee/viking, it was tragic.
QXC does a build with a really fast reactor hellion, I think that would semi hard counter this build without a bunker, this build has two strong timings, when blueflame finishes and when banshee/cloak finishes. Reactor hellions would give this build troubles I feel. Also fast expand with a bunker into reactor vikings so you don't fall behind in vikings, the trick honestly is scouting so you know 100% they went 2fact/2port.
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i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players.
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United States7483 Posts
i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players.
This isn't how it works. It doesn't rely on economic damage like people keep repeating. If your opponent turtles on one base, you have map control and expand. Bam, you're ahead. If your opponent fast expands, you are guaranteed to do economic damage. Stopping 4 blue flame hellions before they roast a ton of scvs takes a lot of firepower, something you can't do early on with two bases. If he slow expands after it's safe, you expand again and you're way ahead (earlier expansion and you're taking your 3rd as he takes his second). The iEchoic build plays like a zerg, but with terran units. In other words, it's reactionary, and it punishes you the moment you have an opening available. If your opponent moves out, you're guaranteed to do econ damage with the counter drop, unless he splits a bunch of his forces and leaves them in his base, which is also a win because his push is weaker.
This build isn't hope based, and it isn't a one trick pony. You pin your opponent with the build: either he turtles and gives you free reign to expand, OR he moves out and takes econ damage. Either way, you're ahead on econ.
You cannot counter this build if it's played properly, the term does not apply. There is no 'counter.' The way to beat it is to simply outplay it. Use whatever strategy you were going to and execute it better.
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i've faced a few players using the strat, and won all of them using mass marauder/tank/vikings. place a few siege tanks at each expo and hellions become useless.. and even if they get a few banshees on you, stimmed marauders/sieged tanks do way too much dps. i'd just suicide in and steal CCs while expoing myself. maybe once people get better at the build it'll become more viable (my opponents were 3000-3300 masters)
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not to mention proper building placement to block of path to mineral line and tactical turrets at the edges of your base to stop easy drops at all. And yes this build does really on economic damage to win.
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On February 15 2011 18:53 Dephy wrote:
not to mention proper building placement to block of path to mineral line and tactical turrets at the edges of your base to stop easy drops at all. And yes this build does really on economic damage to win.
I've done this build a few times. My medivac was shot with turrets(did the build before on the same guy), but I got 3 helions out before it died. Still did tons of damage. If you simcity it gets harder, but also harder for your probes to move away.
Personally I think the build is awesome. But now every terran I meet goes this build, so it becomes a fight for air control again.
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On February 15 2011 17:49 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players. This isn't how it works. It doesn't rely on economic damage like people keep repeating. If your opponent turtles on one base, you have map control and expand. Bam, you're ahead. If your opponent fast expands, you are guaranteed to do economic damage. Stopping 4 blue flame hellions before they roast a ton of scvs takes a lot of firepower, something you can't do early on with two bases. If he slow expands after it's safe, you expand again and you're way ahead (earlier expansion and you're taking your 3rd as he takes his second). The iEchoic build plays like a zerg, but with terran units. In other words, it's reactionary, and it punishes you the moment you have an opening available. If your opponent moves out, you're guaranteed to do econ damage with the counter drop, unless he splits a bunch of his forces and leaves them in his base, which is also a win because his push is weaker. This build isn't hope based, and it isn't a one trick pony. You pin your opponent with the build: either he turtles and gives you free reign to expand, OR he moves out and takes econ damage. Either way, you're ahead on econ. You cannot counter this build if it's played properly, the term does not apply. There is no 'counter.' The way to beat it is to simply outplay it. Use whatever strategy you were going to and execute it better.
Why do you say this is guaranteed to do economic damage to a FE? On a map like Metal, you could put a bunker on each side of your mineral line in your main and another on the far side of your mineral line at your natural and you'd be safe against hellion and banshee harass. It's not hard to get 12 marines after a FE....
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On February 15 2011 07:46 Bagi wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2011 06:14 Linz wrote:
I've seen Root.Drewbie defend against it using a turret and a siege tank in every mineral line and getting air superiority (he got it by throwing down 4 reactored starports). Other than that, you can go the usual MM tank business. Indeed. I dont understand how someone can say its hard to keep up with the viking count. 2 reactored starports is all you need and you'll be in a huge lead,
You can't produce 4x vikings on one base.
On February 16 2011 03:09 kcdc wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2011 17:49 Whitewing wrote:i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players. This isn't how it works. It doesn't rely on economic damage like people keep repeating. If your opponent turtles on one base, you have map control and expand. Bam, you're ahead. If your opponent fast expands, you are guaranteed to do economic damage. Stopping 4 blue flame hellions before they roast a ton of scvs takes a lot of firepower, something you can't do early on with two bases. If he slow expands after it's safe, you expand again and you're way ahead (earlier expansion and you're taking your 3rd as he takes his second). The iEchoic build plays like a zerg, but with terran units. In other words, it's reactionary, and it punishes you the moment you have an opening available. If your opponent moves out, you're guaranteed to do econ damage with the counter drop, unless he splits a bunch of his forces and leaves them in his base, which is also a win because his push is weaker. This build isn't hope based, and it isn't a one trick pony. You pin your opponent with the build: either he turtles and gives you free reign to expand, OR he moves out and takes econ damage. Either way, you're ahead on econ. You cannot counter this build if it's played properly, the term does not apply. There is no 'counter.' The way to beat it is to simply outplay it. Use whatever strategy you were going to and execute it better. Why do you say this is guaranteed to do economic damage to a FE? On a map like Metal, you could put a bunker on each side of your mineral line in your main and another on the far side of your mineral line at your natural and you'd be safe against hellion and banshee harass. It's not hard to get 12 marines after a FE....
This is sort of the problem with theorycrafting - these builds are verging on the ridiculous, and then the huge downsides of them are ignored. You're going to FE and then blindly just build 3 bunkers in your mineral line? I guess if you want to die to a bio push, a tank push, or, like, anything. Also you'll have no prouduction structures and no detection unless you also build an ebay and turrets, which puts you even more behind. I'll address that anyway though because even if a ridiculous build, someone could theoretically do it.
First of all - forcing your opponent to build three bunkers instead of barracks is already damage. But beyond that, a bunker with marines doesn't prevent economic damage. By time I drop or attack the front you're going to have piss for units - let's say 12 marines, like you said, which is idealistic after making 3-4 bunkers and expoing. Hellions laugh at that. You can actually sit there and just sponge damage from 3-6 unstimmed marines and kill lots of SCVs.
You're underestimating how hard it is to stop hellion/banshee harassment off a FE - if you think it's easy while FEing, watch Jinro do a tamer version of the build and wreck MarineKingPrime's FE with it.
If you play it right, you should do guaranteed damage against a FE. The FEing player only has a limited amount of units (let's call it x) at time y off a FE and you never have to encounter more than half of them (because you can attack whatever expo less are at). That amount of units (we'll call it x/2) cannot stop your hellions before they do economic damage.
There's a difference between gimmicky luck drops and guaranteed drops. For example, dropping blindly into your opponent's base is a luck drop. The build does not ever rely on those. There are some situations where you do guaranteed damage, such as when your opponent moves out, or when he FEs and you get an early attack.
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On February 16 2011 03:31 iEchoic wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2011 07:46 Bagi wrote:On February 15 2011 06:14 Linz wrote:
I've seen Root.Drewbie defend against it using a turret and a siege tank in every mineral line and getting air superiority (he got it by throwing down 4 reactored starports). Other than that, you can go the usual MM tank business. Indeed. I dont understand how someone can say its hard to keep up with the viking count. 2 reactored starports is all you need and you'll be in a huge lead, You can't produce 4x vikings on one base. Show nested quote +On February 16 2011 03:09 kcdc wrote:On February 15 2011 17:49 Whitewing wrote:i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players. This isn't how it works. It doesn't rely on economic damage like people keep repeating. If your opponent turtles on one base, you have map control and expand. Bam, you're ahead. If your opponent fast expands, you are guaranteed to do economic damage. Stopping 4 blue flame hellions before they roast a ton of scvs takes a lot of firepower, something you can't do early on with two bases. If he slow expands after it's safe, you expand again and you're way ahead (earlier expansion and you're taking your 3rd as he takes his second). The iEchoic build plays like a zerg, but with terran units. In other words, it's reactionary, and it punishes you the moment you have an opening available. If your opponent moves out, you're guaranteed to do econ damage with the counter drop, unless he splits a bunch of his forces and leaves them in his base, which is also a win because his push is weaker. This build isn't hope based, and it isn't a one trick pony. You pin your opponent with the build: either he turtles and gives you free reign to expand, OR he moves out and takes econ damage. Either way, you're ahead on econ. You cannot counter this build if it's played properly, the term does not apply. There is no 'counter.' The way to beat it is to simply outplay it. Use whatever strategy you were going to and execute it better. Why do you say this is guaranteed to do economic damage to a FE? On a map like Metal, you could put a bunker on each side of your mineral line in your main and another on the far side of your mineral line at your natural and you'd be safe against hellion and banshee harass. It's not hard to get 12 marines after a FE.... This is sort of the problem with theorycrafting - these builds are verging on the ridiculous, and then the huge downsides of them are ignored. You're going to FE and then blindly just build 3 bunkers in your mineral line? I guess if you want to die to a bio push, a tank push, or, like, anything. Also you'll have no prouduction structures and no detection unless you also build an ebay and turrets, which puts you even more behind. I'll address that anyway though because even if a ridiculous build, someone could theoretically do it. First of all - forcing your opponent to build three bunkers instead of barracks is already damage. But beyond that, a bunker with marines doesn't prevent economic damage. By time I drop or attack the front you're going to have piss for units - let's say 12 marines, like you said, which is idealistic after making 3-4 bunkers and expoing. Hellions laugh at that. You can actually sit there and just sponge damage from 3-6 unstimmed marines and kill lots of SCVs. You're underestimating how hard it is to stop hellion/banshee harassment off a FE - if you think it's easy while FEing, watch Jinro do a tamer version of the build and wreck MarineKingPrime's FE with it. If you play it right, you should do guaranteed damage against a FE. You only have a limited amount of units at x time off a FE and you never have to encounter more than half of them (because you can attack whatever expo less are at). That amount of units (we'll call it x/2) cannot stop your hellions before they do economic damage. There's a difference between gimmicky luck drops and guaranteed drops. For example, dropping blindly into your opponent's base is a luck drop. The build does not ever rely on those. There are some situations where you do guaranteed damage, such as when your opponent moves out, or when he FEs and you get an early attack.
First, a FE Terran doesn't have to 'blindly' turtle his mineral lines. He can scout 2 fact, 2 port with with scans or a rax float. At that point, he knows that there's no deadly push that can bust his front and all he has to do is keep his SCVs alive. Secondly, it's not like you can get a medivac and 4 pre-ignitor hellions instantly. There is time to prepare, and if you know what's coming, I suspect that you can defend.
I'm not a TvT expert so I'll defer to your knowledge just as I'd expect you'd defer to me on PvP, but it really seems like if a FE T scouts 2 fact, 2 port, he'd realize that he just needs to turtle his mineral lines really hard in order to win, and I suspect that there's a way he could get it done.
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United States7483 Posts
I'm not a TvT expert so I'll defer to your knowledge just as I'd expect you'd defer to me on PvP, but it really seems like if a FE T scouts 2 fact, 2 port, he'd realize that he just needs to turtle his mineral lines really hard in order to win, and I suspect that there's a way he could get it done.
If you're turtling at your mineral line, your opponent can just pick off anything NOT at your mineral line because that's where your defensive structures are. You pop out of your bunkers, and your tiny army because you dumped tons into defense at the mineral line gets roflstomped.
If you don't build bunkers, your marines are screwed. There's no way with a FE to have enough marauders to stop the hellions in time.
FE is not the way to combat this build, you're opening a glaring vulnerability against a build designed to exploit vulnerabilities.
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On February 16 2011 03:42 kcdc wrote:Show nested quote +On February 16 2011 03:31 iEchoic wrote:On February 15 2011 07:46 Bagi wrote:On February 15 2011 06:14 Linz wrote:
I've seen Root.Drewbie defend against it using a turret and a siege tank in every mineral line and getting air superiority (he got it by throwing down 4 reactored starports). Other than that, you can go the usual MM tank business. Indeed. I dont understand how someone can say its hard to keep up with the viking count. 2 reactored starports is all you need and you'll be in a huge lead, You can't produce 4x vikings on one base. On February 16 2011 03:09 kcdc wrote:On February 15 2011 17:49 Whitewing wrote:i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players. This isn't how it works. It doesn't rely on economic damage like people keep repeating. If your opponent turtles on one base, you have map control and expand. Bam, you're ahead. If your opponent fast expands, you are guaranteed to do economic damage. Stopping 4 blue flame hellions before they roast a ton of scvs takes a lot of firepower, something you can't do early on with two bases. If he slow expands after it's safe, you expand again and you're way ahead (earlier expansion and you're taking your 3rd as he takes his second). The iEchoic build plays like a zerg, but with terran units. In other words, it's reactionary, and it punishes you the moment you have an opening available. If your opponent moves out, you're guaranteed to do econ damage with the counter drop, unless he splits a bunch of his forces and leaves them in his base, which is also a win because his push is weaker. This build isn't hope based, and it isn't a one trick pony. You pin your opponent with the build: either he turtles and gives you free reign to expand, OR he moves out and takes econ damage. Either way, you're ahead on econ. You cannot counter this build if it's played properly, the term does not apply. There is no 'counter.' The way to beat it is to simply outplay it. Use whatever strategy you were going to and execute it better. Why do you say this is guaranteed to do economic damage to a FE? On a map like Metal, you could put a bunker on each side of your mineral line in your main and another on the far side of your mineral line at your natural and you'd be safe against hellion and banshee harass. It's not hard to get 12 marines after a FE.... This is sort of the problem with theorycrafting - these builds are verging on the ridiculous, and then the huge downsides of them are ignored. You're going to FE and then blindly just build 3 bunkers in your mineral line? I guess if you want to die to a bio push, a tank push, or, like, anything. Also you'll have no prouduction structures and no detection unless you also build an ebay and turrets, which puts you even more behind. I'll address that anyway though because even if a ridiculous build, someone could theoretically do it. First of all - forcing your opponent to build three bunkers instead of barracks is already damage. But beyond that, a bunker with marines doesn't prevent economic damage. By time I drop or attack the front you're going to have piss for units - let's say 12 marines, like you said, which is idealistic after making 3-4 bunkers and expoing. Hellions laugh at that. You can actually sit there and just sponge damage from 3-6 unstimmed marines and kill lots of SCVs. You're underestimating how hard it is to stop hellion/banshee harassment off a FE - if you think it's easy while FEing, watch Jinro do a tamer version of the build and wreck MarineKingPrime's FE with it. If you play it right, you should do guaranteed damage against a FE. You only have a limited amount of units at x time off a FE and you never have to encounter more than half of them (because you can attack whatever expo less are at). That amount of units (we'll call it x/2) cannot stop your hellions before they do economic damage. There's a difference between gimmicky luck drops and guaranteed drops. For example, dropping blindly into your opponent's base is a luck drop. The build does not ever rely on those. There are some situations where you do guaranteed damage, such as when your opponent moves out, or when he FEs and you get an early attack. First, a FE Terran doesn't have to 'blindly' turtle his mineral lines. He can scout 2 fact, 2 port with with scans or a rax float. At that point, he knows that there's no deadly push that can bust his front and all he has to do is keep his SCVs alive. Secondly, it's not like you can get a medivac and 4 pre-ignitor hellions instantly. There is time to prepare, and if you know what's coming, I suspect that you can defend. I'm not a TvT expert so I'll defer to your knowledge just as I'd expect you'd defer to me on PvP, but it really seems like if a FE T scouts 2 fact, 2 port, he'd realize that he just needs to turtle his mineral lines really hard in order to win, and I suspect that there's a way he could get it done.
The problem is that you can't 1rax, scan, and build 3 bunkers, and expect to be in a good situation. You'll notice when pros like MKP run the 1rax FE, they almost never scan early - that money is nearly 100% crucial for the infrastructure you need to kick up quick to defend from attacks. Scanning costs money, and then you lose your scan vs cloaked banshees (which I can have, and produce 2x of), so you need an ebay and turrets. You have to lift your first rax before you have any more producing to scout the build in time if you go that route. Losing a mule, building 3 bunkers, an ebay, and two-three turrets, after building costs, mule costs, and worker construction time, is around 1000 minerals. There are huge costs associated with taking that kind of path.
The timings of the T FE build don't work that way. I understand that you're just brainstorming ideas, and that's cool, but it sort of turns into a "I want some defense, I want production, I want to scan, I want bunkers, and I want detection" without actually being able to do all of those things. There are lots of tradeoffs in starcraft, you can't just have everything while sacrificing nothing. We have to think of what you're sacrificing to do things and not just think of what things would be cool to have at x time.
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I've played against this a few times with my typical marine/tank/viking bullshit and won some and lost some.
People are looking at this as an instant-freewin-recipe for TvT. It's not. It's just a more aggressive style of play. If you spot this sort of bullshit going down, be prepared to protect your economy and try to wrestle air superiority from him instead of ground, and the better player will win.
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I'm far from an expert, but lets assume that you can defend a FE without taking much if any damage from the drop. If this is the case can't your opponent simply choose not to drop and double expand? 3 bunkers + 12 marines is a big investment of 900 minerals that your opponent can use on their own economy. Your scouting will be limited because you only have marines/marauders out and hellions/banshees can snipe them out. This leaves your only option of spotting the double expand is by using 2 scans which will put you further behind.
I'm a zerg player so I could be completely wrong but saying simply if I stop the drop I win doesn't seem like the right mind set. The investment in stopping the drop itself might be enough damage to give your opponent the lead.
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United States7483 Posts
I'm far from an expert, but lets assume that you can defend a FE without taking much if any damage from the drop. If this is the case can't your opponent simply choose not to drop and double expand? 3 bunkers + 12 marines is a big investment of 900 minerals that your opponent can use on their own economy. Your scouting will be limited because you only have marines/marauders out and hellions/banshees can snipe them out. This leaves your only option of spotting the double expand is by using 2 scans which will put you further behind.
I'm a zerg player so I could be completely wrong but saying simply if I stop the drop I win doesn't seem like the right mind set. The investment in stopping the drop itself might be enough damage to give your opponent the lead.
Well, the assumption is wrong, but that aside, not really. Terran expansions cost more than zerg ones do, and they can't build workers anywhere near as fast. Double expanding works for zerg because of how quickly you can saturate a base once you have it, terran can't saturate as quickly, and spreading out like that when you can't take advantage of it for a loooooooong time is foolhardy.
That said, if your opponent turtles THAT hard to stop any harass, you can just walk up and kill him, he'll have no units. You aren't forced to only build hellions/banshee/vikings early on if your opponent does something really stupid, you can make some more marines or marauders out of your barracks, get a few tanks and just walk over your opponent. He'll have no troops at all, or infrastructure to match your production due to spending a lot of early game resources on turrets, bunkers, and a command center.
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Well, the assumption is wrong, but that aside, not really. Terran expansions cost more than zerg ones do, and they can't build workers anywhere near as fast. Double expanding works for zerg because of how quickly you can saturate a base once you have it, terran can't saturate as quickly, and spreading out like that when you can't take advantage of it for a loooooooong time is foolhardy.
Makes a lot of sense now that you say it. I guess I took the play it like a zerg a lil too literally because walking up and killing my opponent is never really a thought that passes through my mind.
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I ran into this a bit today on ladder, but even though the hellions harass did good damage, I was able to produce 4x vikings and thors off my fast expansion. With that it was pretty easy to kill the enemy army.
Even if they have battlecruisers, no one magix boxes vikings or banshees, so once the Thors took out a ton of the vikings my superior viking count can kill the BCs easily.
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On February 16 2011 03:54 iEchoic wrote:Show nested quote +On February 16 2011 03:42 kcdc wrote:On February 16 2011 03:31 iEchoic wrote:On February 15 2011 07:46 Bagi wrote:On February 15 2011 06:14 Linz wrote:
I've seen Root.Drewbie defend against it using a turret and a siege tank in every mineral line and getting air superiority (he got it by throwing down 4 reactored starports). Other than that, you can go the usual MM tank business. Indeed. I dont understand how someone can say its hard to keep up with the viking count. 2 reactored starports is all you need and you'll be in a huge lead, You can't produce 4x vikings on one base. On February 16 2011 03:09 kcdc wrote:On February 15 2011 17:49 Whitewing wrote:i think its to easy to spot and counter, your basicly relying your drop to do the economice damage, but any 3k+ master terran will be ready for it. after that he got expo running earlyer then you and just mass viking and marauders+tanks, not to mention if your drop didnt do any damage he will already be army wise ahead. And i believe there is timing window, when 2port2fact got his first expo and trying to get his 3base up, just like tvz as you sayed, where you can just roll the opponent with superior army. I played it myself agains good terrans and got tryed to do it on me couple of times to.
All in all, its good strategy for lower league players. This isn't how it works. It doesn't rely on economic damage like people keep repeating. If your opponent turtles on one base, you have map control and expand. Bam, you're ahead. If your opponent fast expands, you are guaranteed to do economic damage. Stopping 4 blue flame hellions before they roast a ton of scvs takes a lot of firepower, something you can't do early on with two bases. If he slow expands after it's safe, you expand again and you're way ahead (earlier expansion and you're taking your 3rd as he takes his second). The iEchoic build plays like a zerg, but with terran units. In other words, it's reactionary, and it punishes you the moment you have an opening available. If your opponent moves out, you're guaranteed to do econ damage with the counter drop, unless he splits a bunch of his forces and leaves them in his base, which is also a win because his push is weaker. This build isn't hope based, and it isn't a one trick pony. You pin your opponent with the build: either he turtles and gives you free reign to expand, OR he moves out and takes econ damage. Either way, you're ahead on econ. You cannot counter this build if it's played properly, the term does not apply. There is no 'counter.' The way to beat it is to simply outplay it. Use whatever strategy you were going to and execute it better. Why do you say this is guaranteed to do economic damage to a FE? On a map like Metal, you could put a bunker on each side of your mineral line in your main and another on the far side of your mineral line at your natural and you'd be safe against hellion and banshee harass. It's not hard to get 12 marines after a FE.... This is sort of the problem with theorycrafting - these builds are verging on the ridiculous, and then the huge downsides of them are ignored. You're going to FE and then blindly just build 3 bunkers in your mineral line? I guess if you want to die to a bio push, a tank push, or, like, anything. Also you'll have no prouduction structures and no detection unless you also build an ebay and turrets, which puts you even more behind. I'll address that anyway though because even if a ridiculous build, someone could theoretically do it. First of all - forcing your opponent to build three bunkers instead of barracks is already damage. But beyond that, a bunker with marines doesn't prevent economic damage. By time I drop or attack the front you're going to have piss for units - let's say 12 marines, like you said, which is idealistic after making 3-4 bunkers and expoing. Hellions laugh at that. You can actually sit there and just sponge damage from 3-6 unstimmed marines and kill lots of SCVs. You're underestimating how hard it is to stop hellion/banshee harassment off a FE - if you think it's easy while FEing, watch Jinro do a tamer version of the build and wreck MarineKingPrime's FE with it. If you play it right, you should do guaranteed damage against a FE. You only have a limited amount of units at x time off a FE and you never have to encounter more than half of them (because you can attack whatever expo less are at). That amount of units (we'll call it x/2) cannot stop your hellions before they do economic damage. There's a difference between gimmicky luck drops and guaranteed drops. For example, dropping blindly into your opponent's base is a luck drop. The build does not ever rely on those. There are some situations where you do guaranteed damage, such as when your opponent moves out, or when he FEs and you get an early attack. First, a FE Terran doesn't have to 'blindly' turtle his mineral lines. He can scout 2 fact, 2 port with with scans or a rax float. At that point, he knows that there's no deadly push that can bust his front and all he has to do is keep his SCVs alive. Secondly, it's not like you can get a medivac and 4 pre-ignitor hellions instantly. There is time to prepare, and if you know what's coming, I suspect that you can defend. I'm not a TvT expert so I'll defer to your knowledge just as I'd expect you'd defer to me on PvP, but it really seems like if a FE T scouts 2 fact, 2 port, he'd realize that he just needs to turtle his mineral lines really hard in order to win, and I suspect that there's a way he could get it done. The problem is that you can't 1rax, scan, and build 3 bunkers, and expect to be in a good situation. You'll notice when pros like MKP run the 1rax FE, they almost never scan early - that money is nearly 100% crucial for the infrastructure you need to kick up quick to defend from attacks. Scanning costs money, and then you lose your scan vs cloaked banshees (which I can have, and produce 2x of), so you need an ebay and turrets. You have to lift your first rax before you have any more producing to scout the build in time if you go that route. Losing a mule, building 3 bunkers, an ebay, and two-three turrets, after building costs, mule costs, and worker construction time, is around 1000 minerals. There are huge costs associated with taking that kind of path. The timings of the T FE build don't work that way. I understand that you're just brainstorming ideas, and that's cool, but it sort of turns into a "I want some defense, I want production, I want to scan, I want bunkers, and I want detection" without actually being able to do all of those things. There are lots of tradeoffs in starcraft, you can't just have everything while sacrificing nothing.
Like I said, I don't know the timings. If the only way to scout 2 fact/2 port in time with a rax float is to send your first rax, then that obviously won't work. At that point, you're blind, and you'll die to almost anything if you FE with no active barracks. I'm not convinced that the drop hits so early that you need to float your first rax, but I don't know the timings.
Regarding scanning, I have no idea if scanning after a 1-rax FE cuts into your econ too much to defend against other common builds. If there's not a stable way to FE and work in a scan, then it's not an option. I don't know. If you want to defend the harass well, you need to know it's coming, so you're probably going to have to either scan or float a rax. Terran players will have a better sense of what the options are.
As for the defense spending, I agree that it will be expensive, but you don't need everything right away. Assuming it's possible to scout the 2 fact/2 port, you don't need turrets immediately. With 2 fact/2 port, pre-ignitor and a medivac, I don't believe that your opening has the gas to immediately start cloak. Additionally, cloak is really expensive, and a FE player can afford to lose ~5 or so SCVs due to cutting it too close with his detection timing and still be economically ahead.
It seems to me that a FE will have an expansion so much earlier than your opening will that if they can scout your opening, they just have to defend their SCVs to come out ahead. If it costs 1000 minerals, so be it. If they can keep their mineral lines defended, they can afford to dump 1000+ minerals into defense.
Comparing this to my experiences as a Protoss player, if my opponent goes muta-ling really hard, I'll need to dump 1000+ minerals into cannons in order to keep 3 bases running, but I know that if I can just keep my economy healthy, I'll eventually have a timing push with archons or storm that will kill him. He's investing so much into econ harass that it's okay for me to invest heavily into econ defense.
Your opening seems similar to muta-ling in this way. It's a huge investment into a very powerful econ harassment force. It seems to me that if a FE player could scout this, he'd be able to invest heavily into defense and sim-city his infrastructure in a smart way and he'd be relatively safe. This is pretty theory-craft-ish at this point, so when I get home, I'll look a little closer at the timings.
I do want to say that I think your build is really smart and solid. If someone took half the time you spent developing this style and committed that time to figuring out a clever way to timely scout your opening and efficiently defend 2 mineral lines, I suspect they'd come up with some ideas that would work decently. Time will tell.
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United States7483 Posts
As for the defense spending, I agree that it will be expensive, but you don't need everything right away. Assuming it's possible to scout the 2 fact/2 port, you don't need turrets immediately. With 2 fact/2 port, pre-ignitor and a medivac, I don't believe that your opening has the gas to immediately start cloak. Additionally, cloak is really expensive, and a FE player can afford to lose ~5 or so SCVs due to cutting it too close with his detection timing and still be economically ahead.
But the player using this build can expand and doesn't need ANY of those defensive structures.
Your opening seems similar to muta-ling in this way. It's a huge investment in a very powerful econ harassment force. It seems to me that if a FE player could scout this, he'd be able to invest heavily into defense and sim-city his infrastructure in a smart way and he'd be relatively safe. This is pretty theory-craft-ish at this point, so when I get home, I'll look a little closer at the timings.
There are two distinctions that are very important. First, you don't rely on harassment, you rely on pressure. Even if your opponent is completely immune to harass damage, you're applying a ton of pressure and pinning him. He can't threaten you at all, making you completely safe. Yes, you get very strong harass and map control, but the build itself will crush a lot of builds in a straight up fight. You get fast access to a lot of units that are just plain strong, like banshees and ravens. Hellions DEMOLISH marines, so much so that it's not even close. The build threatens a lot of harass but it's strong enough to crush a lot of forces, and those it can't have other weaknesses against the build, like lots of immobility. Muta ling is similar, but it's also a lot more expensive. Mutalisks are very very expensive on the gas, hellions are literally 0 gas. Banshees cost a lot of gas too, but you need a flock of mutas to accomplish what 1 or 2 banshees can do. To justify the cost of going muta ling, you almost have to do damage.
Second, the units in this build are flat out stronger than muta/ling. Blue flame hellions are more effective than banelings at destroying marines and don't auto die when they do their damage. They're also faster off creep, making them more threatening. You can shut down almost any time of anti-air units the terran has with just hellions and vikings. The thor is the only real danger, but using a thor opens lots of holes and banshees aren't actually THAT bad vs. a thor, 3 banshees beat a thor on equal upgrades, 2 banshees beat a thor if the banshees are ahead on upgrades (or if they get off a few rounds while cloaked before the scan goes down or something). 2 Banshees also cost AS much as a thor, and then there is the battlecruiser transition later.
The point is, this build is, in this one particular matchup, a lot more robust than muta ling is, because it uses units that are absurdly good at punishing the vulnerabilities of the terran race in particular.
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well i though ppl use there first 50energy from second oc(1rax expo) to scan, atleast that's, what i do, and i will ussualy see what my opp is doing. He talks about invesment in defence of being 1k, but 4helions + medivac + blue flame 650minerals and 250gas, and not to mention you will have better econ than 2port2fact user. Not to mention he spent so much on his early 2fact and to 2port, his expo will be alot later.
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I generally 1Rax FE in TvT all the time. Once I scan my opponent and see they're doing 2fact/2port I just sim city around my barracks to create chokes at my natural, put some turrets around the edge of my base and some sensor towers. I can afford to do all this because I get such an economic advantage because tech is researched so quickly with this build making expanding nearly impossible.
I then pretty much just go MM and keep some Medivacs at home for healing. Marauders on one control and marines in another. I will just stim my marauders into his army until his hellions are removed, then I stim up my marines to kill his air fleet. I just keep pressing him so he can never get a massive banshee fleet and generally win a war of attrition.
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I dunno, so much theorycraft going around. All I know is that from experience on ladder, 1rax FE is the easiest thing to beat, and whenever we see hellion/banshee in GSL vs FE, the FEing player almost always loses. So I guess i'm going to have to go with the experience over theorycraft side here. Too many variables to decide on a discussion board. There are good ways to handle the build but I don't think 1raxFE is one of them.
Post up reps beating it with 1rax FE and it'll be easier to analyze. There's bound to be tons of people playing the build incorrectly on the ladder so we're gonna need to make sure it's not just an operator error.
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I don't think is breaking it, the game has always revolved around change and innovations the proper thing to say is iEchoic has REVOLUTIONIZED TvT,
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On February 16 2011 04:52 iEchoic wrote:
I dunno, so much theorycraft going around. All I know is that from experience on ladder, 1rax FE is the easiest thing to beat, and whenever we see hellion/banshee in GSL vs FE, the FEing player almost always loses. So I guess i'm going to have to go with the experience over theorycraft side here. Too many variables to decide on a discussion board. There are good ways to handle the build but I don't think 1raxFE is one of them.
I'm not even going to pretend I'm as good as you nor are the people I'm playing executing the build to your expertise. However I do fancy myself a pretty smart player and after losing to this build twice in a row I did some theorycrafting in the shower the next morning and watched the daily regarding the build. I came up with my ideas to beat it and it seemed to work fairly well. The idea was to turn the map control advantage on it's head by going bio and keeping my base fairly secure from hellion drops via sim city, turrets and towers. I don't think I've lost to anyone going 2fac2port since I've started doing this. Grant you I'm only a 3100 Diamond player and play people of similar skill.
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It's true that production is quite expensive for all these productions structures, so one thing I was thinkg about was the idea of balancing: if we're going to balance add-ons and unit composition according to what we scout, why wouldn't we also balance the quantity of units?
I mean, even if I can't drop against a 1 rax FEing player, I know he's not going to attack anytime soon, allowing me to expand myself earlier than I would against a one-basing player who might threaten me if I cut too much. Perhaps not to the point of double expoing, but as long as he's pinned in his base, it's all good for me.
Also, it should promote a more banshee-heavy play since he's not going to get starports too soon himself. Or the gas can be used to skip one or two banshees and get an armory and upgrades if he seems to be focused on bio.
I've yet to run into these builds, as they don't seem that common at my level of play (about 2800 diamond, I still have to spend 800 bonus pool after a pause), so I might be wrong on when a FE-ing player can start to be a threat in TvT.
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On February 16 2011 04:10 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +I'm far from an expert, but lets assume that you can defend a FE without taking much if any damage from the drop. If this is the case can't your opponent simply choose not to drop and double expand? 3 bunkers + 12 marines is a big investment of 900 minerals that your opponent can use on their own economy. Your scouting will be limited because you only have marines/marauders out and hellions/banshees can snipe them out. This leaves your only option of spotting the double expand is by using 2 scans which will put you further behind.
Well, the assumption is wrong, but that aside, not really. Terran expansions cost more than zerg ones do, and they can't build workers anywhere near as fast. Double expanding works for zerg because of how quickly you can saturate a base once you have it, terran can't saturate as quickly, and spreading out like that when you can't take advantage of it for a loooooooong time is foolhardy.
I do believe this is false. Double expanding as Terran in that situation is certainly viable. The comparison with Z is correct since a Command Center is actually cheaper then a hatch:
CC= 400 mn (+10 supply so you save 100 on a depot)
Hatch= 300 mn +50 from drone (+2 supply)
Furthermore with a 3rd OC your income does jump up significantly. Off course you are more vulnerable for a small window but the since the entire build revolves around butchering scv's the second the defensive force moves away, chances are the opponent will either:
1. build to many bunkers/turrets to effectively threaten you.
2. keep his forces in his base since losing all his scv's for an attack that might succeed is not that attractive.
3. not even know you have an expo since he doesn't have mapcontrol (barring a lucky random scan).
So personally I feel this build does have quite a lot in common with ZvT Muta/ling where you take your third the second your muta's start harassing since he can't really attack you immediatly without losing all his scv's or with a weak army due to many defensive structures
(and Hellion/Banshee >>>>>Muta :D)
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I've played against this build and player before, with success, and I can tell you what I beleive counters this type of play. Note that he did beat me the first time I saw the usage of this build. As i'm sure the higher level T's in usa would definitely agree, this build has flaws at top levels. I am in no way saying I am a top player, although I'm working on that  .
* Good scouting, it is hard to hide 2 factories and the use of gas.
* An ideal base layout, supply depots preventing helion runbys in the back
* When you see two factories, you block your base with 3 buildings, at least one being a bunker, keep a couple marines in there throughout the opening. All units are kept near your mineral line until you expand. Due to the nature of gas in this build, he really won't have an ideal siege tank count to push you, and without loses you will be able to also win the viking war, given you don't spam too many tanks.
* Rallying all starport/factory/rax units to a mobile point by the command center.
Note- the build involves adding gas into extra production facilities, an optimal tank/viking macro will keep you in a solid position.
-Not guarenteed to win if you play like this, control/gamesense/scouting are all aspects that should be on par with the opponent.
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United States7483 Posts
I do believe this is false. Double expanding as Terran in that situation is certainly viable. The comparison with Z is correct since a Command Center is actually cheaper then a hatch:
CC= 400 mn (+10 supply so you save 100 on a depot)
Hatch= 300 mn +50 from drone (+2 supply)
This sort of logic is arguing long run vs. short run, and it doesn't really apply here. A CC is 400 minerals right now for a return later, a hatchery is 300 now for a return later. You already made the drone, that's a sunk cost. By this logic, a zerg building is absurdly expensive beyond belief because the drone could be mining instead this whole time. The main problem with a terran double expand is how long it takes to saturate it. Yes, you 'can' do it, but it's almost always a better idea to expand once now, and while saturating it to do some tech and build infrastructure, then expand again. The whole supply thing is also a long run vs. short run thing. What matters is opportunity cost, and 400 minerals NOW for a large return MUCH later (because of how long it takes to saturate) is a big opportunity cost this early on.
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On February 17 2011 00:46 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +
I do believe this is false. Double expanding as Terran in that situation is certainly viable. The comparison with Z is correct since a Command Center is actually cheaper then a hatch:
CC= 400 mn (+10 supply so you save 100 on a depot)
Hatch= 300 mn +50 from drone (+2 supply)
This sort of logic is arguing long run vs. short run, and it doesn't really apply here. A CC is 400 minerals right now for a return later, a hatchery is 300 now for a return later. You already made the drone, that's a sunk cost. By this logic, a zerg building is absurdly expensive beyond belief because the drone could be mining instead this whole time. The main problem with a terran double expand is how long it takes to saturate it. Yes, you 'can' do it, but it's almost always a better idea to expand once now, and while saturating it to do some tech and build infrastructure, then expand again. The whole supply thing is also a long run vs. short run thing. What matters is opportunity cost, and 400 minerals NOW for a large return MUCH later (because of how long it takes to saturate) is a big opportunity cost this early on.
However, if you have map control, you can make riskier expands such as the gold in metal or the gold in Xel Naga instead of your natural.
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United States7483 Posts
However, if you have map control, you can make riskier expands such as the gold in metal or the gold in Xel Naga instead of your natural.
This is true, you could do that (those pesky rocks might have something to say about it on Xel'naga though).
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i dont understand the ops post. maybe im missing something, but the gas consumtion of 1 banshee, and 1 helion is the same as 1 viking and 1 marauder. so he isnt "wasting 25 a pop" and then he says the banshees kill his marauders before the vikings can kill the banshees. i really, really dont believe that would happen.
if you watch the first replay on the day9 daily he only beats pokebunny because he cut siege tech for an extra tank. if he had had siege and sat back with his tanks, then base traded he would of won easily.
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The hard counter to this build is thors. I an currerntly enjoying the way tvt seems to be shaping up.
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On February 16 2011 03:58 Kyandid wrote:
I've played against this a few times with my typical marine/tank/viking bullshit and won some and lost some.
People are looking at this as an instant-freewin-recipe for TvT. It's not. It's just a more aggressive style of play. If you spot this sort of bullshit going down, be prepared to protect your economy and try to wrestle air superiority from him instead of ground, and the better player will win.
This is right. The build is not superior. I was hit with this build all day today. At first I don't know anything because I don't watch Day9. But I gradually can counter it using simple stuff. Of course the success rate is ~50%, but aren't all TvT strat like that?
One of the major flaw of this build is it relies on the bunker to hold off people, and star port unit to go out. A simple push with 7,8 marines, 1 tank, 1 viking is enough to roll this strat since viking can pretty much run around your base, and tank range 7 can outrange marines in the bunker with viking as spotter for high ground.
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It's funny because hellions are almost broken... banshees are almost broken... put them together and you get an even more almost broken combination. Banshees probably should cost 150 gas to slow them down off of one base.
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On February 17 2011 04:14 RemrafGrez wrote:
It's funny because hellions are almost broken... banshees are almost broken... put them together and you get an even more almost broken combination. Banshees probably should cost 150 gas to slow them down off of one base.
You wanna break all the Terran match ups too?
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ive countered this build pretty easily- im in plat so players in my league are not as polished obviously- but this is what works for me. I like the build and try to do it but its just difficult to execute and sustain.
To counter I build hella marines and tanks - build an ebay and get 1/1 and throw up a turrent and then expand. If you can make it to that point its pretty easy to win.
I find that building an extra rax early before my gas, helps a lot. the extra marines are a great defense, have a bunker at ur entrance and a couple marines stationed around ur mineral line and you can defend easily. When you can afford it, get up another factory and a port or two and pump out tanks and vikings and LOTS of barracks which render his build pretty much useless.
But as the build is so difficult to execute well, its a lot easier to counter for lower leagues.
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I agree abt this build's easiness to beat when executed poorly.
But as long as you make more vikings than the guy doing this build, and tanks positioned in ur mineral line, you can crush it
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United States7483 Posts
On February 21 2011 14:47 dbkim92 wrote:
I agree abt this build's easiness to beat when executed poorly.
But as long as you make more vikings than the guy doing this build, and tanks positioned in ur mineral line, you can crush it
So what you're saying is, if the guy doing this build is doing it completely wrong, you can beat him easily. If he's doing it right, making more vikings than he is and getting tanks at the same time is impossible, literally impossible. You're spending gas on tanks and vikings, he's spending it only on vikings until he has more vikings than you and kills your air army. You can't win that way if he plays it right. You can beat this with tank/viking with very careful turret positioning and marine support, while tanks keep hellions off your marines. You can't beat it with tank/viking by crushing his air force with more vikings than he has.
Regardless, iEchoic never claimed this build was better than the other TvT builds, he simply said it's a completely viable alternative that has an excellent chance of winning when played well, and that he finds it more fun than tank/viking chess battles.
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I've found this effective against standard comp against me. However, after a couple of times I just mass vikings and Marauders, you dont even need medivacs as long as your viking count is higher, and you will completely run over him. Hellions dont do any damage marauders even on mass.
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On February 21 2011 14:49 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On February 21 2011 14:47 dbkim92 wrote:
I agree abt this build's easiness to beat when executed poorly.
But as long as you make more vikings than the guy doing this build, and tanks positioned in ur mineral line, you can crush it So what you're saying is, if the guy doing this build is doing it completely wrong, you can beat him easily. If he's doing it right, making more vikings than he is and getting tanks at the same time is impossible, literally impossible. You're spending gas on tanks and vikings, he's spending it only on vikings until he has more vikings than you and kills your air army. You can't win that way if he plays it right. You can beat this with tank/viking with very careful turret positioning and marine support, while tanks keep hellions off your marines. You can't beat it with tank/viking by crushing his air force with more vikings than he has. Regardless, iEchoic never claimed this build was better than the other TvT builds, he simply said it's a completely viable alternative that has an excellent chance of winning when played well, and that he finds it more fun than tank/viking chess battles.
U dont simultaneously produce tanks and vikings, but focus on vikings first. Only a couple at first are necessary to deter helions. Also, banshees are almost as taxing on gas as tanks are.
And this is by no means a bad build. I thought the OP was asking for ways to deal with it
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On February 17 2011 01:06 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +
However, if you have map control, you can make riskier expands such as the gold in metal or the gold in Xel Naga instead of your natural.
This is true, you could do that (those pesky rocks might have something to say about it on Xel'naga though).
it's not like your marines and hellions have anything better to do while your opponent is turtling lol
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I dont think it breaks tvt, but its certainly THE build right now. Its all over the place. Heck, I've lost a couple games due to people blindly going with a marauder timing push anticipating this build. It hits after factories are up but before banshees.
People need to realize this needs to be executed perfectly to work. One game I was late with my starports, and I lost to a marine tank timing push because my banshees weren't there in time. If I had executed correctly I would of had banshees popping up within seconds of the push arriving.
In addition, you need to make sure you do damage with your hellions. This build's main weakness imo is how late it expands, so you need to compensate by dealing massive scv damage.
In dealing with this build; scouting is huge. 95% of the time if you suspect this build, expect blue flame hellions to be paying your mineral line a visit. So basically if you scout and see hellions, immediately throw a bunker up in your mineral line, and put marines in it. If you went a bio opening make sure your marauders got concussive shell. The bunker wont prevent all of your scvs from dying, but it will definitely save a lot of them. Just make sure to micro around it, staying away from the hellions. If you have a couple marauders stick them in the mineral line; they dont need a bunker because hellions dont do anything to them. Place any additional buildings your making in places blocking entry paths into your mineral line. This is pretty much the best you can do. Expect some scvs to still die though. Its that effective.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://img201.imageshack.us/i/hellionproof.jpg/)
