EPTAnyway, continued to use it to great success and felt a little smug in your ZvT with IdrA where he thought it was pretty cool :3
[G/D] Skipping Mutas for Infestors in ZvT - Page 12
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Scrimpton
United Kingdom465 Posts
Anyway, continued to use it to great success and felt a little smug in your ZvT with IdrA where he thought it was pretty cool :3 | ||
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Yagulare
Poland42 Posts
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StarBrift
Sweden1761 Posts
On February 15 2011 03:47 Orome wrote: I play at about the same level as you and I've tried this a few times and had two main problems with it. First problem is drops of course. You can try to split up your infestors so you can catch medivacs, but defending multiple drops against a competent terran's just extremely hard. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'm definitely not capable of the precise multitasking needed. The second thing is army engagement. My problem was that since you don't have mutas to snipe stuff, the T army can be spread out much more. The efficiency of a mainly ling army decreases dramatically when the T has his tanks spread out well. Also, it's really hard to actually get to the marines with your infestors. Any decent Terran's going to keep his marines in the back vs infestors while leapfrogging his tanks forward. If you want to get anywhere near the marines, you'll have to walk into siege tank fire. I guess you should try to catch him unsieged, but what's stopping the terran from turtling and slowly expanding towards you? It's not like you can punish him for being too spread out like you can with mutas. edit: exactly what I wanted to say as well: These two comments are spot on. The 2 base tank heavy terran will just slow push you to death and there is nothing you can do without mutas at that point. You would have to fungal a big number of marines to even be able to engange marine / tank without mutas and if you play a good terran he will spread his marines and slow push the last bit to your base. | ||
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morimacil
France921 Posts
You go for the upgrades, infestation pit, and infestor-lings after the lair, and so on as normal. Till then, you shouldnt really have problems with drops, since you are on 2 bases. Then you got your strong army, with upgrades, and get your third up, at that point, if he hasnt already added medivacs to his mix, he probably soon will. Youve got infestors, youve got lings, youve got +2/+2 going and perhaps are upgrading to a hive, but at that point, as you get your third base up, with 6 geysers, you should have extra gas you dont need, since you already invested in all the upgrades you need, and already have some infestors chillingt around getting their energy up. So you can then afford to make around 7-8 mutas (7 is the number needed to 3-shot a medivac), and use those to force some turrets on his bases, and deny any drops. And then keep on expanding, and upgrading, and get ultras, and so on. If you have 5 bases, and leave an infestor at each one to stop drops, then thats the same amount of gas as getting 8 mutas and a spire. So its not really that expensive to get mutas as a defensive unit, and you get to force him to make a few turrets too with them. Your +3/+3 should still be on time, along with the ultraden, and the armor upgrade, and your ultras will probably only be delayed by a few seconds if at all. Sounds like the easiest way and the most effective to deal with the problematic drops. Getting the spire is also good if you wanna get broodlords later on, or ever techswitch to a bunch of mutas if hes going for a lot of units that cant shoot up, and so on. I can agree with not getting the spire straight away, I dont really think its that useful before you get your third, and/or before the terran gets his, unless you are willing to spend thousands of gas to get 30+ mutas. But I really think that skipping the spire altogether is a mistake. | ||
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Dromar
United States2145 Posts
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Deadeight
United Kingdom1629 Posts
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c0ldfusion
United States8293 Posts
Thanks for the build. Like what Idra said, the upgrades make a huge difference. | ||
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Hairy
United Kingdom1169 Posts
I disliked how micro intensive mutalisks are, how scary Thors were (with mutas), and how big army engagements with mutalisks always felt very fragile. So, instead, I would go Infestors when I hit lair tech with loads of lings. As the OP has found and demonstrated you really don't need much gas using this approach, so you're free to really upgrade fast. And, because you've already got the infestation pit, it's also very easy to go for Ultralisks relatively early on in the game. Be sure to make a (macro) 3rd hatch pretty early on though, as zerglings are really expensive on the larvae. Reading through the thread, I see other people have run into the same problem I did though - feeling very vulnerable early-mid game before the Infestors and upgrades have really got up and running properly. I'll definitely be keeping a super close eye on this thread now to see if anyone comes up with some good solutions. Building a bunch of extra queens earlygame perhaps? *ponder* | ||
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Super_bricklayer
France104 Posts
Wonder if neural can be a temp solution against low colossus count, force feald are a true problem here but will be useless once the ultra pop out ( as always, how do you survive until them ^^ ). Seems very risky but man, i wish it could be doable, i had so much fun with that build in ZvT. | ||
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.Enigma.
Sweden1461 Posts
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Jermstuddog
United States2231 Posts
On February 19 2011 01:09 Super_bricklayer wrote: Did someone try it against protoss ? With a fast +1 melee, like dimaga used to ? Wonder if neural can be a temp solution against low colossus count, force feald are a true problem here but will be useless once the ultra pop out ( as always, how do you survive until them ^^ ). Seems very risky but man, i wish it could be doable, i had so much fun with that build in ZvT. That was actually Dimaga's whole build back in beta. +1 lings into ultra. Then they nerfed the Ultra... hard... and it stopped being a good unit vs pretty much everything. | ||
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DuncanIdaho
United States465 Posts
I'm definitely going to try this out, and I remember you speaking about this "skipping mutas" stuff, which is scary, as a muta/ling/bling player myself, but I like it, and I'll have to try it.  | ||
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Trainrunnef
United States599 Posts
just throwing the idea out there. might not be worth it in terms of energy cost. | ||
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Bitters
Canada303 Posts
On February 19 2011 02:02 Trainrunnef wrote: Has anyone tried using NP on a marine ball to force tank friendly fire? just throwing the idea out there. might not be worth it in terms of energy cost. would be cheaper/less risk to the infestor to burrow in and toss IT | ||
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bdair2002
Israel51 Posts
Another thing, with this build, you need to tech to hive very fast, I have lost a lot to siege tanks play, they get critical number of tanks which LzGamer talked about, and you have no chance to win if you don't have broodlords, I am thinking to tweak the build and add roaches (upgrade missile and melee attack and skip carapace upgrade), it feels the midgame army you have is not "reliable" and not "larvae" efficient, I am having a hard time against terrans lately using this build. Also, terrans spreads his army, and push very very slowely toward you, you will never be able to catch his marines (even if you do, you only FG 5 - 6), and if you want to NP, you won't be able to cut the tanks number in half, you will only be able to NP one or two. the range of NP and the how easily you can kill infestors (one shot from anything basically) makes it way way too hard to deal with such army, even if it is very small. Dunno if it is me or the build, but it feels like the build is lacking something (I need to figure what that is). | ||
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philipov
United States81 Posts
On February 19 2011 02:16 bdair2002 wrote: Dunno if it is me or the build, but it feels like the build is lacking something (I need to figure what that is). As has been stated before, it is quite possible what it is lacking is an emphasis on constant queen production. One of the core ideas of this build is that we are giving up early map control in order to have a stronger midgame army. Because of this core idea, I think that too much emphasis on zerglings, and a halfhearted attempt to exert map control with them, would be detrimental to the build by deviating focus from this core idea. Also, zerglings are extremely costly in larva, and some people have pointed out they feel it is necessary to get a macro hatch (although, I don't think it should ever be necessary to get a macro hatch with good injections). Queens are extremely strong defensive units. They benefit from natural armor+1 without being Armored, they are no-gas antiair, and they can heal. They are ideal for taking aggro from the tanks to let your zerglings run in and rip stuff apart.The benefits of integrating queens into your army have been discussed in plenty of detail in other threads recently, and have been demonstrated at a high level of play in a recent day[9] daily with contributions from ROOTCatz. Their main downside is that going queen heavy gives up early map control (but compensates for it by letting you spread creep to every corner of the map), and that is in keeping with the core idea of this build. So I would propose substituting queens for zerglings as the core of your early defense. You would use larva for drones, and get a smaller number of zerglings to reinforce your queens and provide DPS. The big issue this strategy has to overcome would be really early pressure that occurs before you have a critical mass of queens with enough energy for transfuse. You need to cut one queen early on in order to get a decently timed lair, and you would need some number of spine crawlers. I think that with constant queen production, you would not have enough minerals left over to have constant injections on 2 hatches, so the very first queen you get should probably save energy for transfuse, and the second one would begin to spread creep (or perhaps the other way around) and all your larva would go to drones until you have enough saturation to begin doing regular larva injection cycles to pump zerglings and infestors in addition to your queen production. The important things would be to work out the specific timings of when to put down your first creep tumor vs saving for transfuses, how many spine crawlers to get, when to start larva injections, when to cut a queen to get lair, when to possibly cut queen production entirely in favor of more zerglings, all the usual fun stuff. EDIT: Added link to ROOTCatz Mass Queens on Day9: + Show Spoiler + Pay particular attention to the first game, where Catz demolishes HasHe's higher-food mech army with queens and broodlords. He uses mutas in that game, but my point is to show how strong a mass queen opening is in supporting any tech-based zerg build. Suppose instead of mutas popping out and scaring away the hellions, they were infestors and all the hellions got fungalled and killed by the queens. EDIT2: What I really would love to see, and requires more testing, is a queen-based opening that is capable of defending 2-rax aggression. | ||
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ebs
16 Posts
A few issues that I have been seeing: - Typical bio/balls only with a ~30-50% marauder composition in the mid-game instead of the typical smaller amount. Fungal doesn't kill marauders effectively even with zergling support and they kill infestors incredibly quick. More than once my opponent has been knocking on my expo when I'm at ~4 infestors and +1/+1 almost done. Fungal the ball, try to engage with zerglings and typically I wind up with no energy, no lings, and they have maybe 5 marauders and reinforcing marines taking out my base. Baneling/Muta play doesn't have this issue because mutas mop up any remaining marauders. - Spending my money before ultras. Once I get up to 8 or so infestors, I'm noticing that a macro hatch is definitely required, but even still I'm having a hard time spending. Zerglings and Queens are inefficient dumps when I'm over 150 food and already have 70+ zerglings, and dumping into even more infestors just seems pointless. I try to get hive up quickly and dump all my money/supply into ultras, but sometimes I get hit by a timing push right before I'm able to dump into T3 and I'm down on supply and have a ton of unspent minerals. The biggest cause for this is because I'm not able to put much pressure on the opponent to delay them until ultras hatch. I'm going to try putting down the spire a touch before starting Hive and getting a handful of mutas to delay until T3 hits. | ||
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goswser
United States3519 Posts
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Yagulare
Poland42 Posts
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KiaL.Kiwi
Germany210 Posts
I really think most people overestimate the efficiency of drop-play against it. At least in the midgame your ling-upgrades are so far ahead that you are able to fight of drops with ridiculously low amounts of units. The Lair and Evo Chamber timings definetly have to be refined a bit, but beside from builds and spawning positions that forces muta/ling/bling to deviate into other units as well I could see the build becoming a new kind of standard for ZvT. | ||
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