edit: For people who are clicking on this for the first time, I've found that this style of play is complimented beautifully by Spanishiwa's no-gas fast expand. You can read about it here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=207017
Hey guys,
I've been working on this style for a while, and I feel like I've finally gotten it to a point that warrants some serious discussion here on TL.
A few weeks ago, I brought LZGamer on my show to talk about ZvT. To my surprise, he told me that he has a much easier time dealing with a Zerg player who's massing mutas than he does against one building infestors. We worked on the style for about 2 hours, but really only managed to scratch the surface of this powerful build. You can see the VOD of the event here: http://mrbitter.blip.tv/file/4663284/
Since then, in literally 100% of my ZvTs, I've skipped mutas (at least initially) in favor of getting faster infestors.
For some perspective, I'm playing between 3100-3200 masters, and practice with top 200 players on a regular basis.
Here's the build, as I play it. Importantly, you can open up however you like. This style of play doesn't really deviate from a standard mutalisk build until lair is started.
- 15 Hatch - 16 Pool - 21 Gas - @ first 100 gas: ling speed - @ second 100 gas: lair
Straight up, and simple. Nothing fancy thus far.
Importantly, understand that you will need to deviate if Terran is doing something silly. If he's 4 raxing you, you're obviously going to want banelings before lair. If he's gone 1 rax expand, then you could probably get away with as little as 2 lings. As is always the case when playing Zerg, you have to be very reactive and adaptive.
After starting lair, things get a little bit more specific.
- Immediately go up to 4 gasses (you've only been mining on one thus far) - And add double evo chambers.
While infestors are very powerful units, the strength of this build isn't solely in the infestor. By skipping mutas (at least initially) we're literally freeing up thousands of gas. This gas has to go somewhere, and upgrades are going to be the first place you put it. People so often fail to realize how efficiently zerglings are able to trade with marines when appropriately upgraded. This is further compounded when the fight happens under fungal growth.
- +1/+1 should be started immediately - And as soon as lair finishes, your infestation pit needs to go down, with the energy upgrade following right behind it
This is where the build really opens up and becomes so powerful. When going muta/ling/bane, you're basically conceding that the Terran player has the stronger army, and making up for that by using your high mobility mutas to harass. Its extremely difficult to engage a Terran ball, but you gain lots of map control.
Infestors are exactly the opposite. You're essentially giving up map control until you have your first 3-5 infestors out, but you're doing so in exchange for the stronger standing army. Your play-style has to reflect this. You don't want to get aggressive until your infestors are out, but once they hit the map, you have to start challening the Terran player for map control, and actively looking to make good trades. While this is happening, you want to expand everywhere.
Trading is a very important concept for Zerg players to understand. The backbone of the Terran army is the siege tank. We can engage marines, marauders, hellions, thors, and banshees, but as soon as we get in range of a siege line, we have to back off. It's wired into our systems as Zerg players. Siege tanks kill banelings, and banelings are what we rely on to engage everything else.
This changes when playing infestors. Instead of engaging up TO siege lines, and then backing off, we want to engage the siege line directly, and crush it. Fungal growth will deal with marines, and upgraded lings work wonders against tanks. When tank numbers get critical, we'll simply add in neural parasite, and use it to halve the tank numbers, once again allowing us to engage the Terran ball.
Back to the build, after +1/+1 completes:
- +2/+2 - Hive - If you haven't added a spire and a baneling nest yet, this is when they both go down
Infestor/Ling will completely dominate a mid-game Terran army, but eventually, Terran is going to get some significant medivac numbers out, and we'll no longer be able to rely on fungal to control marines. At this point, we have to add in ultras and banelings. There is an awesome thread about the strength of ultra/bane here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=187434
Ultras get a bad rap, in my opinion, BECAUSE of muta/ling/bane. A Zerg player going muta/ling/bane will have invested so much gas into banes and mutas that when he finally makes his first ultralisk, he'll have either not upgraded them at all, or will have only gone as far as +1/+1.
Playing this infestor style with such a heavy focus on upgrades changes that. +2/+2 will be done when hive finishes, and +3/+3 should be following closely behind. Add in the ultra armor upgrade, and you get +5/+3 ultras that are to be supported by fungal growth, banelings, and +3/+3 cracklings. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why this is a powerful army composition.
Another beautiful little detail about our reliance on infestors and lings in the mid-game is the fact that our army is sooo cheap. Not only is it cheap in terms of resources invested, but its very cheap in terms of supply. It's not uncommon, when playing this style, for your 150 food army to actually have more stuff in it than the 180 food Terran army.
This gives us lots of extra resources and supply room to add in those ultras.
A stronger standing army with a very cost effective, inexpensive mid-game
Weaknesses of the build:
Banshee play can be tough to handle without lots of queens
Mobility - dealing with drops is possible, but it means splitting up your army on a whim, and spot-on control.
We give up early game map-control in exchange for the stronger standing army
Other important details:
Just because we skip mutas initially doesn't mean we can never add them. A mid-game muta transition can be extremely effective against a Terran player who hasn't added any turrets to his natural or his third.
Roaches are another great transitional unit, especially as mech play is becoming more and more popular.
Speaking of mech: Don't forget to research and use neural parasite.
Never stop teching or upgrading. With such a cheap army, there's no reason to not hit hive in like 14 minutes, and to have your entire tech tree running by 16.
Wow, awesome contribution MrBitter! Great like always, it's nice a see a change of pace. This looks well thought out and actually makes a lot of sense. FG is great against bio and you can grab NP if Terran goes mass Thor or such to counter that.
My concern is, Terran will be able to utilize mobility and drops and such to deal economic damage and harass you constantly. By giving up mutas, what options do you have of harassing back? Zerg wants to go into a mid/late game with a larger economy than Terran, so if you can't harass, won't you be at a disadvantage against a solid 3 base saturated Terran?
i've been playing with this build since leenock showed it in gsl.. mech builds with early blue flame and delayed banshees can own you pretty hard tho..
if terran opens mech and then takes his second and third you can do nothing but suicide your lings and get rolled..
When I dabbled in some Z in beta I used to do this strat it's pretty damn solid, I think most people knew TLO for using it tho? Infestor + zergling into mass ultra. It can be ridiculously good, I wanna watch reps
infestor turtle in general can be pretty ridiculous if you pull it off, because you can't be drop harrassed, and if you play it SC1 style using fungal to delay until hive tech...there's some pretty crazy shit you can do that as a T makes me want to cry lol.
Excellent thread!! I may be a nobody, but from watching this strat being used time and time again on MrBitter's stream, I can most definitely vouch for its effectiveness. I've tried it a few times at my unimpressive gold level, and it positively crushes the Terran player in most cases *if* you take good care of your infestors and micro them properly.
I love you. I've tried to create a infestor style months ago but just couldn't make it work. Maybe it was cause banshee harass was so popular back then but i've always wanted to do this. You're post just opened up a shitstorm in my head to try the infestor style again.
As for the harass, i actually did alot of Burrowed infestor play to do harass when I tried making my infestor play. I would bring 3 infestors 2 for fungal if im hitting the main and 1 for infested to finish them off. or I would just use 3 infestors worth of terran to snipe addons and supply. It worked almost as well as mutas and honestly if you can get them out even better, if not then at least you forced a scan.
I was struggling to make that build works, my ZvT is terribad, i don't have so much time to find all of those timings and prioritys ( i was getting so few gaz, and didn't beleve enought in those speedling ), i'm kind of casu i guess. But let me thanks you here a lot for sharing that build ( and of course, the 12 weeks ).
by giving up map control, you can be outmacroed by the terran easily. his drops will hurt your ability to get 3+ bases going while you not having map control will allow him to get 3+ bases easily.
i'm just trying to weigh the pros/cons here when compared to muta/ling/bling play.
On February 15 2011 03:35 HelloSon wrote: by giving up map control, you can be outmacroed by the terran easily. his drops will hurt your ability to get 3+ bases going while you not having map control will allow him to get 3+ bases easily.
i'm just trying to weigh the pros/cons here when compared to muta/ling/bling play.
Infestors can let you turtle to hive tech though, and with this style of play you'll have anywhere from 6-12 infestors, which absolutely demolishes drop play from Terran, as any dropship that comes within fungal range = 100% dead resources for Terran, and more time to tech to hive for you as Zerg.
Not to mention the mass amount of lings you'll have, you can just swarm any little drop that lands.
I think that this build is a lot tougher to make work when the T plays it properly and slowpushes with a lot of tanks. It's going to be really difficult to break him and you can't do anything like sniping the tanks with Mutas or harrassing the main to delay and so on. Also, if the T adds in a few cloaked ghosts it's really easy to insta-die as soon as he gets one EMP off on your Infestors, since they're all you have.
I'd say that this build has the potential to be stronger than the muta build, but in my opinion you're going to have to play a lot better in comparison for that to happen. So it definitely wouldn't be anything I'd recommend to people below mid master.
On February 15 2011 03:32 bananafever wrote: i've been playing with this build since leenock showed it in gsl.. mech builds with early blue flame and delayed banshees can own you pretty hard tho..
if terran opens mech and then takes his second and third you can do nothing but suicide your lings and get rolled..
This can be one of the tougher things to deal with, because nothing in the Z army effectively deals with the banshees.
Blue flame hellions aren't as big a deal as people are implying. Hellions do kill lings, but not when surrounded, and fungal makes that little detail trivial.
Ultimately, you have to scout well, and be ready to transition. This is just part of playing Zerg.
On February 15 2011 03:27 Synystyr wrote: Wow, awesome contribution MrBitter! Great like always, it's nice a see a change of pace. This looks well thought out and actually makes a lot of sense. FG is great against bio and you can grab NP if Terran goes mass Thor or such to counter that.
My concern is, Terran will be able to utilize mobility and drops and such to deal economic damage and harass you constantly. By giving up mutas, what options do you have of harassing back? Zerg wants to go into a mid/late game with a larger economy than Terran, so if you can't harass, won't you be at a disadvantage against a solid 3 base saturated Terran?
I think the whole point of this is that you are switching playstyle with the Terran. With muta ling bling you're harassing them with muta and have a weaker standing army. In this build you give up your ability to harass and give him the opportunity to harass, but you have the stronger standing army, so you act like you do.
A good way to deal with being harassed is to take it to the dome and make them defend themselves instead of allow them time and units to harass you with. I think that's the OPs point.
I'm no where near his level and havnt gotten to watch the replays yet but sounds awesome.
I've started using this in my ZvT's recently and I am loving Infestor/Ling/Bling. The current metagame for TvZ seems to favor Bio/Mech with mostly Marine/Tank and this just seems to work sooo much better than Muta/Ling/Bling.
It transitions really nicely to Hive Tech like MrBitters says. Mutas just suck up a stupid amount of gas and you have nothing left for your uber units. I had a beautiful game on Saturday using Infestor/Ling/Bling. Terran was on 3 base (w/ gold) and I thought that meant I was gonna auto-lose. Infestors kept me alive long enough for 5 bases and I ended up with a late game comp of (Ultra, Corrupter, BL, Infestor)... GG I was so happy.
The ZvT right before that, I went Muta/Ling/Bling, killed like 5 big terran armies and ended up losing because of a few mis clicks with my muta ball.
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:
On February 15 2011 03:38 Shikyo wrote: I think that this build is a lot tougher to make work when the T plays it properly and slowpushes with a lot of tanks. It's going to be really difficult to break him and you can't do anything like sniping the tanks with Mutas or harrassing the main to delay and so on. Also, if the T adds in a few cloaked ghosts it's really easy to insta-die as soon as he gets one EMP off on your Infestors, since they're all you have.
I'd say that this build has the potential to be stronger than the muta build, but in my opinion you're going to have to play a lot better in comparison for that to happen. So it definitely wouldn't be anything I'd recommend to people below mid master.
Ever since I watched your stream I looked in awe at your ZvT. I've tried first hand to replicate and understand the whats and the hows of infestors, but I never saw a thread that was dedicated to it by you. My ZvT understanding has skyrocketed ever since I started doing other things than muta/baneling.
So here's what I have to say.
THANK YOU SO BLOODY MUCH, just watching the occasional streaming was worth more to me than most of the 12 weeks with the pros video's combined.
The way I see it you don't have to give up complete map control. I actually think, and this is purely speculative on my part, that you can force a terran into his base once you get a few infestors up, expecially with burrow. I say try to treat your army like a terran army. Force him into his base by campin infront of it. You're army is going to be stronger untill he gets a x number of siege tanks. You can build static defenses to try and defend from drops and place overlords around his base to spot them. This might not be ideal but I firmly believe it's possible to contain a terran in the traditonal sense.
1. Denying an early 3rd for the Terran. Even with upgrades engaging marines or marine/tank off creep isn't a good proposition for Zerg. At the same time letting Terran get an early 3rd (especially a gold) is pretty troublesome. How do you handle/deny/delay a 3rd from Terran without mutalisks forcing him to be defensive?
2. As you said banshees, but even more so in mass drop play or a drop + attack. I always found that if the Terran player did a split attack early on or went for banshees I was in serious trouble. With only 2 or so fungals to start with T players were able to run me out of energy on my infestors and still have more to throw my way.
I also vaguely remember it being bad vs things like a marauder/hellion push that can pack a ton of hurt on lings when positioned well. Fungaled or not if the marauders are slowing and protecting the hellions you're in for some pain.
i really like this idea but i think this strategy should not be used no matter what the terran goes - its surely strong against bio/tank and mech but against banshees i would still prefer mutas as the terran will be on one base and if the banshees dont cause heavy damage you are on a huge advantage
else i think this strategy has a lot of advantages as FG+ultras absolutely destroy terrans and ultras are the very best units to kill planetary PF quickly
I don't think you really lose map control maybe a bit of air control... you continue creep spread and have a ton of lings to run around every where... plus the burrow infested terran on unit clumps by tank lines is LOL
This build is actually VERY VERY strong mid game before medivacs come onto the field... If drops are hurting you as zerg then you aren't spreading the creep enough and your overlord placement is bad. Even having a single lings on patrols is helps eliminate drops...
With this paticular build all it takes are 2 fungals and a group of banelings to completely win the game or turn the tide in your favor.
I have been playing an almost identical build for awhile now except with a transition into Blood Lord Infestor late game... Utralisk after that if i don't win.
On February 15 2011 03:56 Logo wrote: The main problems I had with this build were:
1. Denying an early 3rd for the Terran. Even with upgrades engaging marines or marine/tank off creep isn't a good proposition for Zerg. At the same time letting Terran get an early 3rd (especially a gold) is pretty troublesome. How do you handle/deny/delay a 3rd from Terran without mutalisks forcing him to be defensive?
2. As you said banshees, but even more so in mass drop play or a drop + attack. I always found that if the Terran player did a split attack early on or went for banshees I was in serious trouble. With only 2 or so fungals to start with T players were able to run me out of energy on my infestors and still have more to throw my way.
I also vaguely remember it being bad vs things like a marauder/hellion push that can pack a ton of hurt on lings when positioned well. Fungaled or not if the marauders are slowing and protecting the hellions you're in for some pain.
1.) You're not trying to deny the 3rd in the same way that you would when playing mutas. Let him take 3 while you go up to 5. You're going to have the stronger army, regardless.
2.) Banshees can be tough. You don't want to kill them with your infestors. You want to kill them with the extra queens you have from all that extra mineral income.
And yes, marauder hellion is tough. But marauder hellion is tough no matter what build you do... To be fair, if I scout marauder hellion, I'll be putting down a spire before my infestation pit.
Got rolled by this kind of style the other day. He FEed, got infestors and prevented any kind of dmg that I could do and then went very early ultras. Not much to say except that he roflstomped me hard to the point where watching the replay I could see nothing I could've really done(been considering if a ghost would be the ideal response...). Infestors are probably the most underused awesome unit in the game along with for me as a terran player, the unit I fear the most.
Infestors/Ling, seems to always go in and out of fashion every few months, really weird.
If i remember correctly, in the "impromptu showmatch" between qxc and TLO, TLO did this and he got destroyed hard by Marauder/Hellion. I don't play Zerg, but Marauder/Hellion seems to make the ultra switch really hard and you end up getting forced back into muta...
Yeah, marauder hellion forces you back into ling/bane/muta because marauders wreck infestors and hellions are really good against lings. However, the lack of AA means that mutas become strong, and banes are decent against hellions. You make lings just to get surrounds and whatnot.
Once you establish a good number of mutas you can make infestors again. If you make them too quickly you'll get punished because they won't be cost-effective, and if you wait too long the marine numbers will begin picking up again until he has MM/hellion and you won't be able to kill it.
On February 15 2011 03:38 Shikyo wrote: I think that this build is a lot tougher to make work when the T plays it properly and slowpushes with a lot of tanks. It's going to be really difficult to break him and you can't do anything like sniping the tanks with Mutas or harrassing the main to delay and so on. Also, if the T adds in a few cloaked ghosts it's really easy to insta-die as soon as he gets one EMP off on your Infestors, since they're all you have.
I'd say that this build has the potential to be stronger than the muta build, but in my opinion you're going to have to play a lot better in comparison for that to happen. So it definitely wouldn't be anything I'd recommend to people below mid master.
Actually, it's a lot easier to play this style compared to mutaling, because your army is so much more resilient and _cheaper_, which means you can lose more of due to a mistake and still be in the game. Obviously losing all your infestors to tank fire can be game-ending, but so is losing all your mutas to a couple thor volleys. With mutaling terran seeks to force an engagement because he knows he has the stronger army, and it's easy to misgauge and engage too soon, or engage when your only option is to counterattack. With infestors you can just sit on your creep knowing that he has to push very slowly because as soon as his infantry is off tank range splouarch! its all dead. he can't dart forward and stim kite backwards. I'ts much much easier to go into the later midgame safely with infestors. However, I do think your next big gas investment should be mutas (before ultras), as otherwise a terran can keep up with you in bases and rally his stuff in the middle of the map, inching forward while dropping everywhere like crazy. you need some way to harass him in return or you'll get slowly chipped to death.
Actually thought of this today, I usually do my standard muta/lingbling play close spawn LT/meta, and in a lot of my games I lost cause they just crawled out with buildings and then contained me on 2 bases. But if I don't invest like 1600/1600 into spire + mutas at this point I can probably break it with infestor/ling/bling and maybe add a roach warren.
I did that for a long time, and had an excellent w:l ratio, I switcht to muta/ling recently simply because it is so entertaining to control mutas into mineral lines - and because these babies saved my day tons of times.
Well, I hate played w/o map control - as P I'd go fenix or make a lot of observers, for example - but ling/infestor is ridiculously strong overall, and it isn't as gas heavy as muta/ling so you can get away with 3hatcheries in 2 bases, at least for a while.
And seriously, 3/3 Cracklings are WAAAAAAY underrated. People should use them much more.
Too bad ZvT is my best matchup and I don't really feel I need to change something!
Sorry I will definitely watch the replays when I get home, but if someone will satisfy my curiosity, are you still pulling drones from gas after the first 100 for ling speed, or do you leave them in gas to get a faster lair?
Also is baneling nest timing just based on the number of medivacs?
On February 15 2011 03:38 Shikyo wrote: I think that this build is a lot tougher to make work when the T plays it properly and slowpushes with a lot of tanks. It's going to be really difficult to break him and you can't do anything like sniping the tanks with Mutas or harrassing the main to delay and so on. Also, if the T adds in a few cloaked ghosts it's really easy to insta-die as soon as he gets one EMP off on your Infestors, since they're all you have.
I'd say that this build has the potential to be stronger than the muta build, but in my opinion you're going to have to play a lot better in comparison for that to happen. So it definitely wouldn't be anything I'd recommend to people below mid master.
Actually, it's a lot easier to play this style compared to mutaling, because your army is so much more resilient and _cheaper_, which means you can lose more of due to a mistake and still be in the game. Obviously losing all your infestors to tank fire can be game-ending, but so is losing all your mutas to a couple thor volleys. With mutaling terran seeks to force an engagement because he knows he has the stronger army, and it's easy to misgauge and engage too soon, or engage when your only option is to counterattack. With infestors you can just sit on your creep knowing that he has to push very slowly because as soon as his infantry is off tank range splouarch! its all dead. he can't dart forward and stim kite backwards. I'ts much much easier to go into the later midgame safely with infestors. However, I do think your next big gas investment should be mutas (before ultras), as otherwise a terran can keep up with you in bases and rally his stuff in the middle of the map, inching forward while dropping everywhere like crazy. you need some way to harass him in return or you'll get slowly chipped to death.
I'm not sure why it matters that he cant move marines in front of his tanks since he can just attack with tanks and you don't have anything good against it. With mutaling you can reduce the amount, with infestors you can't and you'll eventually be looking at 10+ tanks that you can't engage.
On February 15 2011 04:49 Zephirdd wrote:And seriously, 3/3 Cracklings are WAAAAAAY underrated. People should use them much more.
I'am watching the replay of sir bitter right now, and that was my thought, mind blowing as some like to say. Crackling 3/3 is punishing the terran so hard on the Xel naga 's game just because he didn't have the upgrades on his tanks. Well, i'm not saying it resume the all the game, but seriously, they're eating everything up so quickly and don't melt as they do in my games ! :D
Ho and that come back on that particular one is so nice ! I think i had a nerd-zergasm.
On February 15 2011 04:58 Shikyo wrote: I'm not sure why it matters that he cant move marines in front of his tanks since he can just attack with tanks and you don't have anything good against it. With mutaling you can reduce the amount, with infestors you can't and you'll eventually be looking at 10+ tanks that you can't engage.
upgraded lings work very well against tanks, especially when you have tons of them due not not needing all the banelings. Eventually yes, the tank number will get out of control, but you'll have ultras by then (or mutas). if he tries to push too soon I guarantee you he will lose all his army with you taking only mineral losses.
compare that to mutaling where they have 3-4 tanks with their first push, which happens when you just got mutas. you are counting on your banelings to kill the scary marines, but you need to make a lot of them because most will die before making contact. this leaves you with a few lings and a few mutas to clean up. the terran will try to siege in your base as fast as he can and you will be forced to eventually throw everything you have at him, including your expensive mutas. even if you repel it it's unlikely you're ahead. I'll take infestors anyday
I think delaying the pool after the hatch is very risky. i dont see why you would want to do that. furthermore, it seems strange why you get gas THAT late, especially since a roach warren does not seems included as a standard in your build, but you will have zergling speed so late that you will have quite some trouble defending against any early hellion / hellion+marine push.
also you should add that this is rather weak against a more tankheavy tank/marine army.
Were those replays all from masters league players? Seemed to be quite some mistakes made.
on the actual topic; i really love seeing infestors used well, makes me all excited about the metagame progressing - Im sure at least a few infestors mixed in will eventually become the standard for z. Likewise for T, ravens and ghosts will see more use in the future.
dammit MrBitter you beat me I was compiling the notes I've taken on every lesson you mention this style and from watching you stream to make a post on it Seriously though I've been devouring everything you stream on this style and playing it alot and not only does it work really well you forgot to mention the best pro of it... infestors are FUN!!! I love getting to play with a spellcaster. I used to think infestors were worthlesss but really it was just my troop positioning and control that was worthless. anyways thanks for the awesome build post and all the awesome streaming.
tldr: infestors are fucking fun go play with them.
On February 15 2011 03:56 Logo wrote: The main problems I had with this build were:
1. Denying an early 3rd for the Terran. Even with upgrades engaging marines or marine/tank off creep isn't a good proposition for Zerg. At the same time letting Terran get an early 3rd (especially a gold) is pretty troublesome. How do you handle/deny/delay a 3rd from Terran without mutalisks forcing him to be defensive?
2. As you said banshees, but even more so in mass drop play or a drop + attack. I always found that if the Terran player did a split attack early on or went for banshees I was in serious trouble. With only 2 or so fungals to start with T players were able to run me out of energy on my infestors and still have more to throw my way.
I also vaguely remember it being bad vs things like a marauder/hellion push that can pack a ton of hurt on lings when positioned well. Fungaled or not if the marauders are slowing and protecting the hellions you're in for some pain.
1.) You're not trying to deny the 3rd in the same way that you would when playing mutas. Let him take 3 while you go up to 5. You're going to have the stronger army, regardless.
2.) Banshees can be tough. You don't want to kill them with your infestors. You want to kill them with the extra queens you have from all that extra mineral income.
And yes, marauder hellion is tough. But marauder hellion is tough no matter what build you do... To be fair, if I scout marauder hellion, I'll be putting down a spire before my infestation pit.
Hmm well I can see #1 for some maps, but not others. Under no circumstances do I feel comfortable letting my opponent get the gold base on Xel'Naga regardless of the # of bases I have. same would go for the gold on Blistering Sands. Scrap would be iffy to me as well, but it's also easier to deny his 3rd with lings in that case. Do you change your plans at all for these maps? I'll have to watch the reps when I can to see.
Mrbitters why do you 15 hatch 16 pool? 15 hatch 14 pool delays larva production as you max out at 3 and sit there for a few seconds but 15 pool solves that problem and you get both queens at right about the time your expo hatch is finished. Doesn't 16 pool mess with those timings and delay your queens?
Also Greg says Ultra/Ling/Infestor is the strongest composition against Terran but it isn't as money efficient as Ling/Bling/Muta. I'm sure you'll ask him about your style anyhoo and he probably won't say it's the worst idea he's heard.
My only big issue with this build is letting your opponent take his third so quickly. Terrans can have a scary amount of production off 3 mining bases, especially if their third is a gold. Most Terrans like to gradually get their third, but good players will recognize what is going on when they see upgraded lings and infestors and see that they can expand more aggressively.
On February 15 2011 05:18 Zrana wrote: Were those replays all from masters league players? Seemed to be quite some mistakes made.
on the actual topic; i really love seeing infestors used well, makes me all excited about the metagame progressing - Im sure at least a few infestors mixed in will eventually become the standard for z. Likewise for T, ravens and ghosts will see more use in the future.
I think most those guys have made top 200 lists...
I feel like infestors also give you the opportunity to use brood lords more effectively against terrans. With fungal, suddenly you have one of the ultimate anti-viking weapons - if he gets too close, you trap the vikings, and crush them easily - they're much easier to handle when they can't retreat back to their army!
Zerg relied heavily on casters in BW, and while infestors aren't defilers, I see no reason that we can't use them as a staple.
Wow just reading this made me want to use Infestor now! I try to avoid spellcasters as I have trouble micro-ing them.
Will concentrate on this way of playing for a while and see how it goes. I guess a delayed spire with some mutas may still be an option for mineral lines harass.
I did see you on your stream do it, even coaching someone on how to do it. And it was beautiful to watch
I definitely like the idea of getting attack/armor upgrades throughout the games, i always felt my lategame ultra switches were weak because of the lack of upgrades. The Ultra/ling/bling looked incredibly scary fully upgraded,however im wondering why you 16 pool and gas late, wouldn't it be easier to get a faster lair and be safe from harass with regular 15 hatch 14 pool?
On February 15 2011 05:44 uSnAmplified wrote: I definitely like the idea of getting attack/armor upgrades throughout the games, i always felt my lategame ultra switches were weak because of the lack of upgrades. The Ultra/ling/bling looked incredibly scary fully upgraded,however im wondering why you 16 pool and gas late, wouldn't it be easier to get a faster lair and be safe from harass with regular 15 hatch 14 pool?
16 pool works for me.
You might like 15 pool. Someone else might prefer getting speed before expanding. The beauty of a guide is that it doesn't have to be adhered to religiously.
The reason we don't rush to lair is so that we have more time to drone. Lings are really, really good... They should be able to keep you safe from MOST stuff in the early game.
Again, some Terran builds force deviations. In general, though, just sit back and chill until lair finishes. By taking a little more time in getting to lair, we set our economy up a little bit better for the mid-game.
That said, by all means feel free to experiment. I'm not a world-class player, and its absolutely possible (probable, in fact) that my build is not the most stream-lined.
I was sitting in Geometry today thinking about ZvT and actually sketched out an almost identical build on paper based on some old TLO replays I saw way back. I especially like the idea of getting speed/drops and using it with a few infestors and lings for seriously unconventional for zerg style mineral drops while denying scouting with speedling/infestor. My only gripe so far is delaying the baneling nest. I feel like getting my baneling nest right after lair will help make the whole build more solid due to safety from likely random pushes and imo timely baneling speed should also be standard.
Has anyone put thought into extra macro hatcheries and the possible ease and security in pumping drones in comparison to muta/ling/bane?
On February 15 2011 05:44 uSnAmplified wrote: I definitely like the idea of getting attack/armor upgrades throughout the games, i always felt my lategame ultra switches were weak because of the lack of upgrades. The Ultra/ling/bling looked incredibly scary fully upgraded,however im wondering why you 16 pool and gas late, wouldn't it be easier to get a faster lair and be safe from harass with regular 15 hatch 14 pool?
16 pool works for me.
You might like 15 pool. Someone else might prefer getting speed before expanding. The beauty of a guide is that it doesn't have to be adhered to religiously.
The reason we don't rush to lair is so that we have more time to drone. Lings are really, really good... They should be able to keep you safe from MOST stuff in the early game.
Again, some Terran builds force deviations. In general, though, just sit back and chill until lair finishes. By taking a little more time in getting to lair, we set our economy up a little bit better for the mid-game.
That said, by all means feel free to experiment. I'm not a world-class player, and its absolutely possible (probable, in fact) that my build is not the most stream-lined.
Sounds good thanks for replying, i just started laddering hard as zerg again and i might be grabbing lair to early overall. Probably because i feel unsafe and want detection etc
I was thinking, is that really cost effective to not make banelings until mid/late game? I mean isn't that better to always mix up few banelings in your ling army? And you can always make baneling mines if you have them.
Btw I read all what you wrote about how it's too gas heavy to go mutas and infestors and then I remembered Fruitdealer in GSL1 where he in all of his ZvTs had mutas, infestors, banelings, ultras, drops... lol
On February 15 2011 05:56 Alpina wrote: Very cool that you posted this build
I was thinking, is that really cost effective to not make banelings until mid/late game? I mean isn't that better to always mix up few banelings in your ling army? And you can always make baneling mines if you have them.
Btw I read all what you wrote about how it's too gas heavy to go mutas and infestors and then I remembered Fruitdealer in GSL1 where he in all of his ZvTs had mutas, infestors, banelings, ultras, drops... lol
If you're going to be fighting marines before infestors, banes will help.
In the mid-game, infestors will just straight up kill marines, so banes aren't really necessary. Why not save the gas and put it somewhere else?
Once medivac numbers start climbing, banes become necessary again.
Second: Do you think this has any place in ZvP? I tried it myself on a P going 2 gate robo, and lings/banes seemed incredibly effective against gateway-centric armies. It was even easier to break the front due to infested terrans and FG zealots out of place.
MrBitter i've been doing a similar concept since beta, and drops and banshees become second nature to beat after enough practice. (for instance, i'm closing in on 10 months of practice with the build). the big issue is on small maps, being pushed by heavy tank numbers. HOWEVER on the GSL maps, and shakuras and stuff, you can also beat that push. Infestor play is just safe from everything in general
The variation i have is 14 hatch 14 gas 13 pool, with lair as soon as pool fininshes, pretty much i get infestors about 2-3 minutes game time faster, and get maybe 1-3 drones less by the same point in time(which means you catch up quickly once infestors come out) the strategy in the mid game is roughly the same. except you didn't emphasize the importance of overlord and creep spread during the mid game. you can actually creep up to the opponents base by the time they have enough tanks to leave their base without dying. meaning you have 100% map control.
Great write up, I've tried and it's looking very good so far. It definitely feels like the benefits and the different options with infestors overweighs the strenghts of the mutas.
Infestor play is definitely some of the coolest ZvT style play I've seen along with oGsTheWind's Broodlord timing and Fruitdealer's Muta Contain v Nuke last night (Xeph's Restream). I just think it's a bit difficult on certain maps that allow Terrans to slow push/macro up. It really does remind of HongUn's PvT Style with the Immortals and 2 Forge off of 2 base. I didn't see too much mention of a transition into broodlords from this build though. Why not work on getting a greater spire once you are on 6 gas? You'll have +2/+2 Broodlings most likely, and probably even +1 On the Air Attack. It's a great way to strengthen this build against a transition into mech play. Anyways, thanks for the replays.
I've been doing this build lately (after your awesome VOD with LZGamer) and rolling the bio/mech terran army with Ultra/ling/bling is hilariously fun. Its nice to actually have a super strong 200 food army I see why Protoss like their deathball so much now lol
Artosis mentioned this unit combination in the GSL. It always seemed better to me. Muta harass is a huge investment and it rarely does direct damage, while fungal growth on marines or SCVs is nasty. Plus, freezing units to make kiting less effective seems great. I'd take 6 infestors over 9 mutas any day.
Re: comments about sling/bling/infestor having less chance to harass; couldn't you use a Nydus network? You don't have to do the risky thing and put the exit(s) all the way in their base; just treat them as fast rallies to close-but-less-frequently-scouted positions: halfway down the Tasteless secret hallway on XC, near the 3rd expansions on the edge of the map on JB, etc.
I saw a masters-level game on stream where Z went Speedling-Hydra-Infestor with a Nydus network, and it looked incredibly annoying to deal with from T's perspective.
well this as Protoss was obvious to me to begin with.
Infestors can deal garanteed damage with fungal.
while storm can only deal maybe 80 dmg if the terran is stupid enough to stay in it. (and still you see them crying about it) i doubt the average storm dmg is more than 40 = fungal dmg
and this also is great for zerg, since you have got banelings!! and can stop any micro.
Since ling/bling/infestor is pretty mineral light, how about using a bit more static defense to protect against drops? I know I generally float minerals doing this (yeah bad Macro >.>) until teching to Ultras, but how about using some of the excess minerals for some extra spore/spine crawlers. I know its definitely not the elegant solution most people are looking for but any thoughts?
hey Mr.Bitter... nice write up=) infestor play is definately something I've been experimenting with as well. I've found that I seem to run into a ton of trouble against terrans who like to abuse the fact that I don't have mutas and send dropships all over the map. I know you mentioned mobility as a weakness. I think it is by FAR the weakest aspect of the build. I find multi-pronged drop harassment by a skilled terran player very hard to deal with without mutas and I feel like a good terran can really abuse this fact when going up against this build. Do you run into a lot of trouble with drops or are you able to manage it? Any tips on dealing with it? Obviously fungal plus infested marines will take care of the dropships pretty easily, but do you keep infestors in your main solely to deal with drops? Or just keep a good overlord spread so you can see drops coming and then send your army as needed? I'm thinking some spines in your main & expos could help as well. It just gets difficult to micro at times with multiple drops going on at once, but I supposed that can be improved with practice. I just hate how big & squishy infestors are.. they seem to always die so easily.
I do love the fact that you can completely tear apart a marine/tank army head on with this build though. I may have to start using it again and just work on my defense against drops.Can't wait for Idra session, and to hear his thoughts on this style of play. Keep up the awesome work!
Excellent OP, I've been trying this lately after reading and it's been working very well. I'd like to mention two thoughts I've had on the matter (but am generally not good enough to pull off with any consistency)
1) I try to get an early Overseer, sometimes 2. There are three reasons for this. First it forces a response to air, which otherwise they would be able to skimp on. Second, it lets you delay their upgrades with Contaminate, which makes yours that much better. Finally it makes defending the banshee that much easier (but maybe I'm just not very good with my spore placement).
2) By the late midgame I try to get both my olord upgrades. A drop of 1 infestor + 6 speedlings (I think that's how many fit), wrecks a mineral line so much harder then 4 banelings. FG stops them from running or effectively surrounding, and takes about 1/2 hp, letting the lings clean up. And as a bonus, the moment your FG lands you can put the infestor back in the OL and attempt to make your escape while the lings cause havoc. Compared to baneling drop it's almost always more cost-effective.
Saw that strat on the stream, I love being able to try something a bit different the standard ling/bling/muta. The hive and gas timing are helpful, thank you for this.
WAIT WAIT WAIT, so your trying to tell me that not spending 70%+ of my resources on units that cant attack the unit/s (rines/thors with rines close by) terran is spending most of their money on, is a good idea????????? I think your clearly not thinking straight!
Also i think getting a spire and using corruptors (like 4 total) to stop drops is a good idea. Kind of like you would use a spire in ZvP 5hatch in BW. Because stopping flying things with things that don't fly is annoying. Also if they are still alive in the late game, which is quite likely, then you have half you brood lord already
I use the same built and it is good as long as you react. vs pure mech you have to go roaches and if terran fos marine/tankyou need broodlords fastly to not get killed by mass tanks.
Thanks, good thread! Double evo early sounds solid. I'm curious about how and when you mix in queens and creep tumors in an ideal buildup. With 15hatch 14 pool I usually get 2 queens and 2 tumors asap, but maybe with the 16 pool you've got enough minerals to inject->drone right away? 3rd queen sometime during the lair upgrade?
On February 15 2011 07:42 nanoscorp wrote: Thanks, good thread! Double evo early sounds solid. I'm curious about how and when you mix in queens and creep tumors in an ideal buildup. With 15hatch 14 pool I usually get 2 queens and 2 tumors asap, but maybe with the 16 pool you've got enough minerals to inject->drone right away? 3rd queen sometime during the lair upgrade?
Funny you should mention queens, as I kinda omitted them in the OP.
We're mining on one gas that we get kinda late. (at 21)
This means we can go up to 4 queens before we start our lair.
It means we CAN go up to 4 queens before lair. Not that we MUST.
I like to drop 1 tumor in the main, and inject in my nat with the first 2 queens.
proper infestor micro can shut down terran entirely. medivac drops and banshee harass are pretty much nullified if zerg reacts quickly, and fungals can land pretty easily on a marine tank force as long as there are enough lings to meat shield. played a mid masters zerg who went roach ling infestor with ~8 infestors in the mid game and pretty much shut down rine/thor/tanks without problems. its actually surprising how devastating it is, yet i rarely see it being used.
I'm also curious about how you view your armies, specifically Infestor count, when deciding about tech. Throwing down a spire costs a tad more than one infestor, but after a while it'll really pay off. Good timing on the spire lets you get broods out soon, given your early infestation pit. Assuming a heavy tank composition, how soon do you go for spire? NP and a few more infestors first or tech for the long game?
On February 15 2011 07:42 nanoscorp wrote: Thanks, good thread! Double evo early sounds solid. I'm curious about how and when you mix in queens and creep tumors in an ideal buildup. With 15hatch 14 pool I usually get 2 queens and 2 tumors asap, but maybe with the 16 pool you've got enough minerals to inject->drone right away? 3rd queen sometime during the lair upgrade?
Funny you should mention queens, as I kinda omitted them in the OP.
We're mining on one gas that we get kinda late. (at 21)
This means we can go up to 4 queens before we start our lair.
It means we CAN go up to 4 queens before lair. Not that we MUST.
I like to drop 1 tumor in the main, and inject in my nat with the first 2 queens.
queens have been extremely underrated until just recently, I am a gold level player, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but in a recent game I played (where I used a strategy that revolved around getting extremely fast upgraded ultras + queens) the game went like follows:
early: close position lost temple, not much happens, he techs to tanks, I tech to ultras while adding queens and spinecrawlers for defense (spinecrawler+queen is indeed unkillable by anything that doesn't outrange the crawlers).
mid: he drops tanks on ledge and does a mini-push, missmicro on both parts ends in his tank-drop dying to queens without me losing any (transfusion ftw) and me losing 2 of 3 ultras when defending (those were my first ultras), I have ~8-9 queens with 120ish energy left
late part of mid: I attack with my queens and my ultra (notice the singular in "ultra" indicating 1) onto his adequatly defended natural.
I proceed to lose 0 units for the rest of the game thanks to transfusion. the end.
another example is a game vs toss, 3ultras+10queens (38 supply) vs 10zealots+12archons (68 supply) (funky mix I know, he was forced to turn his mass HT (that he got as a reaction to queens) into archons because he really needed units to fight the ultras)
slaughter commenced. I lost nothing. he lost everything
did I forget to mention that the queen's dps was only used against air units (if there were any)?
anywho, my point is that adding queens to the lategame of that composition is (as day[9] would say) deadry, very, very deadry
As a terran player at high diamond, I can tel you that at my lowly noob level it doesn't work well if the terran plays it right. I lost the first game against it because fungal is brutal. I won second game because I just went into a super slow tank/pfort push, with hellion drops. He can't deal with the hellions well enough, and the etanks are unbreakable. No mutas to harass the pforts either.
I've been trying to find something new to try against Terrans. Getting a little bored of the Muta play atm. (And it's sooo much gas...) This looks like it could be alot of fun, I really like Infestors, Ultra's and Cracklings and wish I used them more.
I've tried this before, and its a great alternative to Mutas in the mid game. Mutas give you good map control and harass options, but infestors are way better especially when terran is going a tank heavy build. One problem is that medvacs are somewhat harder to pick off. Also I find that Mutas help when assaulting a seige line or drawing units away from areas. They can also help stall a huge push.
As well with this build, you are very vulnerable during a period when infestors are just starting to come out. You need to watch out for timing attacks during this time, as I have lost games due to stim pushes and etc. Also don't forget that infestors are only 80 hp. Its very hard to control infestors so that they don't die during engagements, especially for less skilled players. One more thing to note is that infestors can be nullified by EMP. At least mutas can magic box from thors.
Part of me thinks that a lot of the build's success seems to be rooted in the predictable nature of zerg. Terran expects to see muta bling and they probably are just caught completely off guard when they see this. It seems like a goofy unit compositions like mass blue flame hellion + ghosts would do well. Has anyone scouted the early infestation pit and gone cloaked ghosts with emp against this? I remember qxc experimenting with getting a fair number of ghosts and just spamming snipes but it seems like just 2-3 would wreak complete havoc with emp.
This also seems really larvae inefficient, you're going to need a macro hatch up pretty fast + a third queen to try and keep money low. If you have 2 1/2 to 3 mining bases I think that a second macro hatch may even become necessary (though you'd probably be in ultra territory by then). Is the usual hive + ultra timing around the time that the 2nd expansion becomes operational? Also, barring any kind of shenanigans are you holding off on banelings until the ultras are out? In a normalish game where terran does a 2-3 base tank marine medivac push (before ultras) how many banelings will you have if any?
I thought of this very composition before. In fact TLO used this to great effect in the beta. However im not so certain that an Infestor Ling army mid game is more powerful, than the ling bane Mutalisk.
I mean it seems like if i'm not using my not using my infestor's energy efficiently, then i could get rolled by a push.
I do however like the idea of Ultralisks with Infestors, micro is pretty much an ultras worsted nightmare. This seems like a solid way of teching to this composition.
pretty much im just skeptical of the mid game. Though this must have some legs, cause we saw in GSL that LeenockFou was experimenting around with this style.
Did you watch any of the replays? In the the Blistering Sands one, He's down 20 food, throws away 2 infestors due to a bad rally, and still rolls his opponent. The beauty of this build lies in the upgrades, if you have an upgrade advantage, and your opponent can't run away due to fungal, the zerglings just roll through the typical mid-game comp of marine/tank.
1st: I'm in no way saying infestor play is better than muta play. I think it is very powerful. I think it is very fun. And I think its a lot easier. We're basically making a giant "a-move" blob, and just supporting it with infestors. Obviously there is eloquence that comes at higher levels, but infestors are much more forgiving than a mutalisk army that can instantly evaporate with a single misclick.
2nd: This build does very well against the current Terran meta game, and it does okay against everything else. As the meta game shifts (and it will) maybe this style will become less effective. Of course cloaked ghosts with EMP will be a thorn in the side of this build. Its a hard counter to the unit your play is centered around. This is why, as Zerg players, we are constantly scouting, and playing as adaptively as possible.
3rd: Skipping mutas initially does not mean never making any. I played a ladder game just today where I transitioned from infestor ling into about 30 mutas because drop play was annihilating me. After I regained control of the skys, though, I switched right back into ultra/ling/bane, and continued to support it with what infestors and mutas I had left over. This leads me to my last point...
4th: You guys have to let go of this notion that a certain play-style should be concrete, rigid, and unchanging. Watch, or talk to the best Zerg players in the world and you will quickly learn just how adaptive they are. Every decision made by a top level player is made with the purpose of countering his opponent... Just because you open one way or another doesn't mean you have to commit to that path forever.
One of Zerg's greatest strengths is in its ability to smoothly and quickly transition between techs.
Edit:
Also in response to being larvae inefficient:
Sure it is. Watch the first replay on Metalopolis from the OP. I had 4 hatcheries in my natural. This isn't a bad thing. It's a great thing. We have tons of production, and we can afford to utilize it. That's what Zerg is all about, man.
Funny you posted this. I have been playing with this strat after watching your stream last week.
Before using this build i used ling/bling/muta. While this is still a powerful strategy I found it very weak to mid-game pushes. I was losing to tank-bio pushes all the time because they would hit before I had more than a handful of mutas. And IMO mutas don't do much until you have a bunch of them. And a bunch of mutas is a huge gas sink.
With this build I have to micro well against the tanks, but I almost always win. Fungal growth makes a Terran hesitant to commit, which gives me time to mass up my army. Last night, for example, I saw a Terran moving out with 4 tanks and ~15 marines ~5 maruaders. What did I have? 5 infestors and 5 roaches. But I held him at bay for 2-3 minutes with fungals and was able to mass my army and crush him.
Another aspect of this build that I haven't heard much discussion about is the use of Infested Terrans. IMO Infested Terrans are great at breaking siege lines. I will launch 3-4 eggs to draw tank fire then rush in with my roaches. While the roaches tank damage I launch eggs all around the remaining siege tanks. Not only the the Infested Terrans take out the tanks VERY fast, they also do good damage to the remaining ground army and clean up medivacs. What is great about this is that Infested Terrans abuse the immobility of tanks. Infested Terrans are painfully slow, right? Well sieged tanks and fungal growthed bio are even more slow :-)
Oh, and quick 3/3 ultras and cracklings are awesome! Once I hit my early 3/3 on 3+ bases I feel almost unstoppable. And since I'm not dumping gas into mutas I can actually afford the Ultras!
Another aspect of this buildt that I love is that I get all of my tech out early. I can often have an army of Ling/Bling/Infestor/Ultra/Brood/Corruptor shortly after the 20 minute mark. There isn't much that can take out that army, especially with 3/3 upgrades.
There are two main problems that people have touched on. First: dropship play. I have found that if a Terran is going to keep drop harassing me I need to leave 1 Infestor and a handful of ling/roach at each base. As long as I have good overlord positioning to see the drop I can hold it off with these few units. Speedlings are especially nice for this since they can get back to the front line in a hurry. Another option is to get 4-6 Corruptors. Corruptors live forever if you are careful with them, and can become Broodlords later (I usually start my greater spire once my Ultras are halfway done). Also, Corruptors give you the scouting you lose by giving up Mutas.
The second problem with this build: I do worry about seeing 5+ banshees on my door. I always build extra queens, but if I fail to scout mass banshees I will die. But its no surprise that Zerg needs to scout...
The Bitter BUILD!, you still need to name it after yourself
My experiences, thoughts: - drop play , it sucks, its annoying, but hes splitting up his army, so its only fair you either do the same or have static D to deal with it. An infestor at each base will almost completely keep a terran from wanting to drop there.
- bancheese , fungal reveals cloak, banshees are snared in place and queen has a greater air attack range then the banshee has ground. BYE BYE banshee, and a kill for your queen. ( she needs a win from time to time) now out in the field your queens are not present and banshees can mean trouble
- map control, you don't surrender map control, you surrender air control. Biggest thing i've noticed while doing this build is that 1 viking can be very effective at clearing all of your overlords that are in space(void areas around bases). at that point, drops become hard to spot
- turtle Terran and a quick third, if your aware of him attempting this, just roll out with the your superior standing army before that PF is finished. This is where zerg can end a terran in mid game
Harass is the single biggest weakness I see in this build, but the power of burrowed infestors is highly underused and harass doesn't just mean his worker line or addons. Killing marines for only energy is a great harass IMO(popping up and using fungal, or lobbing ITs in the middle of them so tanks shell the marines)
Great thread! I've been looking to try an infestor style for a long time now. I'm still skeptical about how you're engaging a slowpushed marine tank force. If you can't catch them unsieged, can you fight head on? Do you need to get roaches first?
Another benefit: ling/infestor into ultra/bane has better upgrade synergy. If you go muta, you either upgrade ground, or air, or both. Whichever you pick it'll be that much harder to get a large 3/3 army. With ling/infestor you focus entirely on ground upgrades. If your opponent is going tank/marine/thor, you will probably have an upgrade advantage.
Tryed in two games. Liked in both, but.... Vs Mech i roflstomped terran in meta, even after i let him get gold as third. BUt in other game, one terran went or ghost the same sec he saw infestors. Medivac drops a ghost, EMP, enage with marines/tanks = u are dead.
It's not a typical harass drop, he drops at front a suicidal ghost and emps infestors and engages asap after that. I strongly recommend to start spreading infestors and starting normal baneling production as soon as you see ghost.
What happens if they push out with a couple seige tanks and marines before your infestors can come out for fungal? Ive tried infestors before but they are just not good enough. Map control and scouting is far too important for the zerg compared to having a stronger army. Maybe once you have 10-15 mutalisks you can start getting infestors once you have established map control can snipe seige tanks and force the terran to make a thor/missile turrets. But this usally allows you to get a forth base and more units. Infestors are underused but they are also really bad spell casters. Only 2 abilites and both are only good if you can do some damage with them. If you are having success with this build keep doing it. Its just terran dont scout and blindly assume you will go mutalisk(most the time). The big potential I see here is if terran lets you get to T3 and allows for broodlord/infestor you can win the game alot of the time. Attack with broodlords, fungal the bio army and watch as they die. Get 2-3 fugnals off and throw the rest as infester terrains to tank some damage whileing running in with zerglings/banelings and ultras if you have those and watch as the terran army almost evaporates. Then reinforcing with Roach hydra maybe since those units build quick, easy to max out again with and do relativly decent against terran. Better then reinforcing with pure ling.
I've been experimenting sans mutas for the last few months and agree with many of the strengths you've pointed out. A few of my preferences:
- Roach base instead of ling base (I still get both but focus fast upgrades on roaches - burrow, claws, +2 attack). I find this composition to be more robust and gives you more options during a tank push (its amazing how fast his army disappears when you swarm, FG and at the same time half your roaches unburrow under his tanks or even infantry). It is also more resistant to ghost plays as even if your 6-11 infestors are incapacitated you still have viable options.
- I have found that a spire before hive can do wonders for offense and defense. If the T is insisting on drop / banshee play I normally get ~6 corruptors and am set for most of the game if I'm smart with them(I'll get +1 carapace if he's going heavy medivac / marine). Other T's have started going heavy marauder / tank in response to this build...a large round of mutas can really tip the scale.
Have you tried using a heavier roach base? Do you have any thoughts on the benefits of lings over roaches (besides faster upgrades for ultras)? Personally I have felt the ling base to be a bit squishy.
Hide your infestation pit and burrow your infestors. He wont see whats coming until its too late. After the first big battle I usually tech switch to ultras.
You were investing all game into melee upgrades, have cracklings and you want to build roach/hidra? :DD DUde 3/3 cracklings RAPE marines/tanks and even hellions if u micro normaly.
Zerglings are so fast that any reasonable player should be able to deal with harass, especially with good overlord coverage.
As a 2900 player terran player, I have the same opinion. I would WAY rather deal with mutas (see thors) than try to deal with infestors, particularily when they have more than 3-4 and speedlings/banelings. If the terran player starts going banshees, infestors can counter pretty well. And theres nothing stopping you from putting up 5-6 mutas just to deny banshees/drops.
I am looking forward to trying this out in my ZvT though I do enjoy the mobility and harassment offered by mutalisks.
One of the reasons this excites me is because I feel like playing with this unit composition of infestor/ling/ baneling may allow for drop and/or nydus play to be more effective (and this is something I am trying to incorporate into my style of play).
One question I have is if it is worth getting the + range attack for the infested Terran, this would also help if we decided to suddenly switch into roaches for drops/tech switches and such. Any thoughts?
I was trying to figure out how to play this style before the T "nerf" of 1.2. It's pretty great if T doesn't adjust, but as people have pointed out, it's a fucking nightmare if the Terran has played against it before, and plays defensively while constantly harassing with 2-3 dropships as he goes 2fact tank. Also, I found it very hard to effectively use my infestors in big fights once the tank numbers get up there. The infestors are such high priority that you usually end up losing quite a few to tanks before they even get a fungal off.
A fun trick with this build though: on maps like Metal, you can abuse the shit out of the cliffs in the empty mains/gold bases to get 2-3 fungals off before T even sees the infestors.
it's not only the damage from friendly fire. You put IT and terran might start unsieging more tanks than needed, you attack at same sec and win By the time he gets that many tanks shouldn't you have Bl or ultra at that point with this build?
IT bombs don't seem very strong. If you drop one in the middle of a marine group near some sieged tanks the tanks will probably not even fire. Even if you drop a ton of them near a bunch of sieged tanks I had it where no tanks died despite 8 infestors with full energy dropping all their ITs (unit tester).
I don't think this was answered but how do you counter a slow pushing terran? Big tank lines, marines and medvacs for drops and expanding towards your base. Would you transition into muta's and force him to build turrets and bunch up while you mass bases and pick off stuff on the outskirts or is there a way to counter it with the straight up build? Well the unit mix described anyway.
Your threads have helped my zerg play immensely. I'm really grateful for your contributions to the zerg community, your 12 weeks series is killer and I can't wait to try out this build on ladder!
Thanks for making the writeup and getting these replays together! I've been impressed by this strat since I saw TLO do it a while ago. Catz has been using this too recently.
Early tank pushes the Terran will have mostly bio with a couple tanks. As scary as that is, sling/infestor can basically overrun that imo especially if Terran doesn't have decent medivac support (and the more medivacs he has, the less tanks will be there).
Late game, I find that Ultra/ling/bling actually does a damn good job of breaking tank lines. Sure, the ultras will probably take a ton of damage but then the ling/bling hits and stuff just vanishes. Its beaaaautiful to watch
Will watch the replays and try this tonight. My main problem with infestors are mine seem to charge in to the front lines (my horrible micro).
I have got the hang of the muta harass but always felt like if i had too many mutas there it was effectively splitting my army, and if i had to few he could just leave a few marines and turrets and just stomp on in to my base. Map control isn't much if you can't get an army that beats his by the time he gets to your base.
infestors are awesome against terran and zergs, but generally scouting is like near impossible before mutas are out and u just make due with whatever hints you are able to force out. And you just said yourself bashees gives u a problem, terran having air control is really scary and those fungals are better suited for marines unless there's like 8 bashees stacked up together.
Not only that, but wouldn't a decent amount of blue flame hellions incinerate all your lings in 1 second? Also, exactly what type of players are u playing against? Tanks are precisely why infestors aren't as popular against terran, the second they pop up from ground they die instantly against because 2 tank shot kills it and it has the highest threat; yet you claim to parasite half their tanks?
Mutalisk really are horrible in straight up combat for their 100 gas price.
I still think this build is going to have trouble with Marine+Tank though, because Infestor's evaporate in just two tank blasts. Neural Parasiting Sieged Tanks is incredibly dangerous and nearly impossible.
I'll have to watch the replays you posted and see if that is actually possible, but until then I remain skeptical on how the Siege Tanks are going to die without Mutalisk/Ultralisk.
Having played a few more games with this style, I've had more success with an earlier baneling nest (during lair upgrade.) In my games I noticed a window between speedlings and infestors that felt vulnerable to 1-base pushes. Could be bad opponents, or loose timing on my part, with delays along the infestor critical path. Do you feel safe going straight for infestors against a 1-base terran who isn't letting you scout much?
Overseers... so good. Contaminate on the armory can help preserve an armor advantage for your lings, and changeling + infestor FG just feels mean
T doesn't have as much opportunity to harass with drops as people seem to exaggerate.
In my opinion fungal growth stops harass flat. by the midgame you can afford to have an infestor hold back in your main at the obvious drop point, which of course you have scouted by multiple Overlords as far as the air around your base allows.
Just quipping in, I also have a much harder time countering this style of play, and to top it off, it typically transitions to faster broodlords.
You have to stop producing marine tank vs this and instead transition to more MMM with a relatively heavy emphasis on Marauders, or go a more mech oriented build.
I mostly have trouble recognizing that the player isn't going muta and is going infestor until I actually SEE the infestor, wherein by the time I try to alter my unit composition Broodlords are close to knocking on my door.
Zerg shouldn't have a lot of trouble with drops if you're playing well, spread those overlords out, and lots of creep. You should have vision everywhere as a zerg player, and should see drops coming a mile away.
Thanks Mr Bitter for this awesome guide, gonna implement it in my ZvT for sure A thing i really want to ask after watching the replays is your larvae spit, do you use some macro? because u have this fast base switch spit mechanic i dont think i can emulate with normal taping and clicking. Can you please enlighten me how you do it? Thanks a lot in advance
Infestors are quite scary compared to mutas and agreed that they are much harder to deal with when controlled well.
With this style, you should consider getting overlord drops and dropping lings in the Terran base since otherwise Terran can doom push you before you can do anything about it. Even if you have a silly amount of infestors, the mass tank army will crush most types of mass ground.
I've got a question for ya Mr bitter. I feel that their is a weak windows in that opening, i'm not too sure about that, but the push on the xel naga cavern ( against Shoey, about 10/12 minutes ) comfort me about it. It feels like you won't have enough fungal to be safe.
Maybe it's the fast third that could be a macro hatch instead ( you are in need of larvae at that moment ), but did you test maybe one upgrade before lair ? It could be armour i guess, not too sure. But won't it make your army more solid against those 10 min push ?
Again i don't know if it's the build that should be refine to have some fungal sooner, or maybe have them a little after and put more gaz on your zergling.
Dimaga played a lot with some fast +1 and it works pretty well ( in ZvP, don't know about ZvT ). The upgrades on your replay are not so fast, you catch them after with double evo, but won't it open a windows where you need some more solid defences ?
Baneling is an option you seems to choose, but i don't like it so much, it's pretty gaz heavy, the speed upgrade is needed and the gaz in your army will be gone once the bane die. I would even prefer roaches actually ( pure theory craft i have to say ) for having a little more solid defence early game if needed and most of all, the option of stop putting gas in the army ( cause baneling will take some regularly ). I feel it's kind of a trap to produce baneling if your goal is the fungal.
The all point is how big the marines ball is. Zergling are good against them if the number you are facing isn't too big. Fungal is our response to that, but it feels pretty late...Not sure i'm clear here, my English sucks pretty hard and it's more of a feeling, which is pretty hard to talk about. I d like too have your thought about that timing ( is it just me ? Maybe infestors come right in time ? ), and how you scout it/answer too it. I'm pretty sure that map distance enter into consideration here too. And now i even feel my question don't have any answer and is pure theory bullshit. ^^
Edit : I have practice it a little with a terran partner, high diamond so i'm not to confident about that, still i'm pretty much convince for the fast +1 armour before lair with that build. It helped me like a lot, as said here Marines take 1 more hit on Ling, [...] Zerglings survive sieged tank shots. It's a gas investment that hit way before lair where you need the pit and 30% of the upgrade before even start producing some infestors.
Back before Idra's mass mutalisk style got popular, a lot of people including Fruitdealer would build just a few mutalisks, use them to take their third with map control and then proceed to do something else. I feel like that style is a lot more stable vs drops and banshees than the infestor opening, and it also has the capability to exploit any timing windows your opponent leaves open (i.e. not having turrets up in time/in the right places).
You could make like 8-10 mutas then cut muta production, expand and add double evos while you're expanding. 6gas makes infestor/ling/bling much more viable IMO, as you have the money to replace infestors you lose in addition to getting upgrades and banelings and teching, and instead of getting the mutas later in REACTION to drops when you're already hurting you already have them because you opened by making a few of them. Mutas can also force defensiveness meaning a slower third which, even though you're ok with it, generally makes the game harder than it needs to be.
Also, as others have mentioned, I think infestor based play struggles vs well played 2fact tank, and so if you saw 2 factories with your initial clump of mutas you could transition into mass muta play by starting air upgrades and continuing ot muta pump, and if it's anything else besides 2fact you can continue on with your funky infestor based play
So I've been trying this build out a bit recently and I really like how much stronger I feel in the mid game, but I am finding that I just can't kill people in the late game even when I have a huge lead. My main problem is that when they get a decent amount of tanks out they really just melt my whole army.
So basically I guess my question is, what should I be doing vs a late game Terran that has a decent amount of tanks? Regardless of the rest of his composition. Here are some thoughts that I have had personally, let me know if they are right or wrong:
1. Get roaches to tank the siege tank damage as soon as you see that they have more then just a few tanks. 2. REALLY rush to ultralisks and deal with them that way. (Not sure if/how I can do this without just dying in the process. It feels like in order to get the resources needed, I need to over-expand to the point where if they attack I am not going to be able to hold it off.)
Here are my thoughts on it, what kind of things are you guys doing and seeing success with in the same situation? Thanks! =)
Edit: I know that in the OP it says to deal with them with Neural Parasite, but I'm really have trouble doing that because my infestors die very quickly. Maybe I'm doing something else wrong, but so far this is the way things have gone for me.
Tried this build last night and my +1/+1 lings got owned by stim marines and blue-flame hellions before my infestors were out... like... not even close...
On February 16 2011 00:22 Jermstuddog wrote: Tried this build last night and my +1/+1 lings got owned by stim marines and blue-flame hellions before my infestors were out... like... not even close...
I hate ZvT...
Did you have banelings? They're amazing vs blueflamehellion/marine openings
On February 16 2011 00:22 Jermstuddog wrote: Tried this build last night and my +1/+1 lings got owned by stim marines and blue-flame hellions before my infestors were out... like... not even close...
I hate ZvT...
Did you have banelings? They're amazing vs blueflamehellion/marine openings
I think that this build gets your banelings out after infestors, I'm curious when doing this build what would trigger laying down a baneling nest early, 2rax? Scouting 4-5 rax?
On February 16 2011 00:22 Jermstuddog wrote: Tried this build last night and my +1/+1 lings got owned by stim marines and blue-flame hellions before my infestors were out... like... not even close...
I hate ZvT...
Did you have banelings? They're amazing vs blueflamehellion/marine openings
I think that this build gets your banelings out after infestors, I'm curious when doing this build what would trigger laying down a baneling nest early, 2rax? Scouting 4-5 rax?
Mrbitter said that you need to react and get banes earlier if needed and so on. I definitely would get banes if I scouted something like 2-3rax with blueflame hellions. At least roaches.
EDIT: I personally would lay down my banelings nest with the next 50 gas after lair if I saw he wasn't expanding but if he's doing blueflame hellions there's definitely enough time to react.
Yeah, its the whole scouting thing, I knew he had marines and lots of em, so I just started pumping lings hard. Then 4 blue-flame hellions come out of nowhere and it was like gg...
I guess the moral of the story is: lings can only get you so far, feel free to throw down a bling nest at the slightest inkling.
On February 16 2011 00:34 Jermstuddog wrote: Yeah, its the whole scouting thing, I knew he had marines and lots of em, so I just started pumping lings hard. Then 4 blue-flame hellions come out of nowhere and it was like gg...
I guess the moral of the story is: lings can only get you so far, feel free to throw down a bling nest at the slightest inkling.
Or a good number of spines. Marine/helion is not that good against few spines+queens to heal them.
I tried this build out yesterday and I have to say I really enjoy the playstyle. The terran kept trying to push in to my main but I would throw some fungals down and stop his advance every time. I still have trouble attacking the siege tank lines with just lings, maybe I don't have enough though. But anyway thanks for showing this build!
On February 15 2011 18:51 vojnik wrote: Thanks Mr Bitter for this awesome guide, gonna implement it in my ZvT for sure A thing i really want to ask after watching the replays is your larvae spit, do you use some macro? because u have this fast base switch spit mechanic i dont think i can emulate with normal taping and clicking. Can you please enlighten me how you do it? Thanks a lot in advance
1. Put all queens on 1 hotkey. 2. Select queens. 3. Press Spawn Larvae hotkey. 4. Press Backspace once to center on a hatch. 5. Hold Right Side Shift. (With left hand thumb, do not release at all) 6. Click Left Mouse Button + Backspace (Hit backspace with left hand index\middle finger) <- Repeat this series of actions rapidly. Hitting LMB and Backspace over and over in succession. 7. All hatches are injected.
With custom hotkeys you can change the Backspace key to a more convenient one (I use the tilda key ~). If you get this down you can inject in <1 sec.
I watched the shakuras-plateau matchup where he went thor + marines. It must have been annoying when he sniped your scouting overlords.
One part of the game he went for his third, you scouted this and moved in but his army got into reasonable position, would it be smart to preemptively plant some infested terrans on the high ground in this scenario? (right after he uses the high ground to plant some thors and shut down any advance while he licked his wounds after the battle)
Is it worth getting overlord speed, and maybe some overseers using this strat? if the terran knows you aren't going for a muta harass can you make them put up AA anyway using overseers or will the marines be enough to fend off any contaminates?
Thanks alot for posting this. Tried it a few times both on ladder and off it. Im currently gold Zerg and still managed to beat diamond/masters T with this. Also being able to directly engage T army is funny as Z.
Also i found out that most of the times i even dont need blings cause fungal+ultras+3/3 cracklings kill bio so fast especially with neuraled units support. Only thing is i hadnt met a Banshee harass yet so dunno how it affects this build.
On February 16 2011 15:00 zergrushkekeke wrote: ...
Is it worth getting overlord speed, and maybe some overseers using this strat? if the terran knows you aren't going for a muta harass can you make them put up AA anyway using overseers or will the marines be enough to fend off any contaminates?
I would prefer him not to get turrets as it leaves the option of burrowing 2 infestors into a mineral line to FG the SCVs (a la Catz). If successful, it can decide games (and isn't a terribly large investment).
I've played against this build before. I won by luck though. I went 15 cc and constantly traded his army/larva with 5-then-8 rax until I got my tanks out.
The problem with this build is you can't stop Terran having other bases though. I was able to have my third base up 2,3 minutes before the zerg having his, and a simple bunker and wallin raxes will be able to hold off the zerglings.
Overall it's a good aggressive build. Have anyone tried to use the gas for nydus worm or overlord's drop instead of the upgrade?
I just tried this, but instead of going mutas or ultras I went broodlords.. works fine too. And I have to say.. HOLY SHIT I have a lot of resources midgame >_>.
I never needed the drop/nydus because a counter after battle with T with festors/ultras that left/reinforcing lings suffice to take his expos so you can remax and crush his main with whatever he managed to build :D
EDIT: also upgrades are critical with the unit comp i use so i wont dare skip it
I played a few zerg last night who were using this. As a terran, I have to play a lot differently. You have to be really slow and careful, use lots of tanks, and not rely too heavily on bio (tough for me). THe most frustrating thing is the infestors/lings force tank/hellion, then the zerg can switch to mutas crazy fast and you have a low marine count and no turrets.
By the time the Terran has SO MANY TANKS, you need tier 3. We all know that broodlords basically turns sieged tanks into suicide for the terran. If you want to go Ultras, try 4 or so Ultras with full upgrades and a nice swarm of banelings just behind him. You can follow your leftover lings behind the ball, but it's rarely neccessary... the last few blings usually explode in their mineral line. Honestly, it really feels like if I can get say 5 Ultras and 50 Blings it's gameover. And I don't even micro well, I have banelings exploding on tanks and marauders and thors and whatever else they happen to see on A-move, but as long as the ultras are in front drawing the siege tank fire, NOTHING can stop a big enough ball of banelings.
Ive been using this build in all of my ZvT games and it totally rocks! I usually have the infestor energy upgrade going around 9 minutes then +3+5 ultras around 14-15 minutes Ultras with upgraded cracklings/Baneling/Infestors w/NP own any terran ground army as long as you engage correctly. By the time I have my maxed army I can throw down a spire for the hell of it and pump mutas after ive cleared out some supply to deal with any banshees/drops the terran might try using. But in most games my mid game maxed army wins the game with cracklings streaming in for reinforcements.
Nothing new imho. I guess TLO was the first who has shown this style of play a long time ago.
As Terrans are evolving nowadays a lot ( overall better mix of units/ more mech), you won't meet a lot of BIO only-builds in the near future anyway - that's at least what I expect.
Ive tried it last week end and got crushed by mass hellions/banshees. My macro wasn't perfect though. It's definitely very entertaining to play, and refreshing not to spawn those mutas in ZvTs.
On February 15 2011 17:28 Whitewing wrote: Zerg shouldn't have a lot of trouble with drops if you're playing well, spread those overlords out, and lots of creep. You should have vision everywhere as a zerg player, and should see drops coming a mile away.
Just tried this and was getting used to it, still won every game so far. It feels great. I dont feel like if I dont harass my mutas are useless. I love the cushion that lings provide, b/c they are so cheap. Just wondering what you do when they get lots of hellions. Was thinking of mixing in banelings since they do alot of damage to them. Blings + fungal growth should deal with it?
Really like the idea behind the build and tested it today - had a lot of fun playing it as it feels a lot less stressful then making Muta/Ling/Bling work. Being able to rush in and crush small and middle sized armys instead of having to dance with your Mutalisk like a madmen sure is very satisfying.
I'd like to test it more against mech/hellion play, since including Ventril Sacks somewhere along T2 and just dropping Ultras into the Tanks could work out quite well. Sadly most Terrans on Europe play Marine/Tank/Medivac only.
This looks very cool, Mr. Bitter. ZvT is my worst matchup by far.
I haven't tried this out yet, but I'd like to know when you can take a third with this build? In the typical ling/bling/muta, it's right when your first mutas pop. So when do you feel safe enough to grab a third with this style? Do you just play it by the ear? Scout a ton with lings?
I've been watching your stream a lot lately when I am on break from classes, and I have really been enjoying watching this new style develop. I am not confident enough to rely on it myself yet, but I think I will start practicing it more. My attempts so far have had me dominating the midgame but then losing to MASS Medivacs later on. I need to transition to Ultra/Bane sooner, it seems. But I definitely realized the power of this style from how well I was controlling the midgame.
Thanks for your contribution, and keep up the good work on your stream.
Well hats off to this gentleman for refining and making a variation of TLOs original build. Lots of ppl have been playing with since it was represented. I myself have my own variation of this build and it definantly works but to those of you who havent seen this yet you now have an active streaming using his variation of TLOs build
On February 17 2011 07:37 Enyalus wrote: This looks very cool, Mr. Bitter. ZvT is my worst matchup by far.
I haven't tried this out yet, but I'd like to know when you can take a third with this build? In the typical ling/bling/muta, it's right when your first mutas pop. So when do you feel safe enough to grab a third with this style? Do you just play it by the ear? Scout a ton with lings?
Same timing basically. You get map control back when your infestors pop. That's a pretty good time to expand.
I can try to answer you Chinese. Since festors and ultras are out hellions aren't worth much cause of fungal and large ultra model, you can also fungal em to death but if you feel uncomfortable there is no reason not to make some roach/blings as you have plenty of gas most of the time
I agree with this completely. In my games, I like to get a 3-5 mutas to start with for scouting purposes, and to force terran to build turrets. I have started to move a lot more heavily to an infestor/mass ling bling style in the late game with lots of success. I think another thing that has not been explored enough is roaches in the mid and late game to take on the role of meat sheilds and tank nullifiers. Many terrans go marine/tank/thor heavy, and a 200/200 food roach army deals with all those units quite well.
I appreciate your contribution Mr.bitter. A big fan of your stream and these are great guidlines for an infestor build.
On February 15 2011 17:28 Whitewing wrote: Zerg shouldn't have a lot of trouble with drops if you're playing well, spread those overlords out, and lots of creep. You should have vision everywhere as a zerg player, and should see drops coming a mile away.
I love theorycraft
Here's the thing though: when you theorycraft, you need to do it for the highest calibur of play. This means you should be able to remember, as a zerg, to spread that creep and spread out your overlords to get vision everywhere, and watch your mini-map. Unless he's going around picking off overlords the whole match (something that is annoying, possible, but leaves him open to various timing windows and slows his build down etc.), you should see drops coming.
It will be interesting to see what Idra thinks about this type of strategy when you go over ZvT with him. I find it interesting to see so little infestor play in the GSL tournaments especially with mass marine play being so prevalent. Fruitdealer used them in S1, no one used them in S2, I think Leenock tried them vs MKP in S3 (but lost); it makes me wonder if there's some kind of timing this tech choice is vulnerable to that the Korean zergs are afraid to go for it.
It would also be interesting to see what kind of early game actions would favour mutas vs infestor midgame builds. For instance, more marine heavy play would favour infestors, but maybe hellion into banshee would be better with mutas. Of course, once you do go mutas, you have to decide whether you want the fast +1 attack and continue massing them, or if you want to just force some turrets, stop drops and then transition into infestor/hive play.
Fought this build the other day. It pretty much shut down any kind of harass I tried to do against the zerg and the longer the game went I just got more and more behind. You would think that you could harass easier with no mutalisks giving the zerg such mobility but you'd be wrong...
Since you don't have AA that early, what do you do vs a terran that sees that you aren't going muta so keeps making banshees and has cloak? On creep a fungal with queens could kill it but do you ever spawn infested terrans? And off creep, it will take a lot of fungals to kill banshees especially if they are spread out - although they will take a while to kill the lings/blings. Still feels if you don't get muta early his banshees will stop you doing any real damage to him
On February 17 2011 20:01 valckrie wrote: Since you don't have AA that early, what do you do vs a terran that sees that you aren't going muta so keeps making banshees and has cloak? On creep a fungal with queens could kill it but do you ever spawn infested terrans? And off creep, it will take a lot of fungals to kill banshees especially if they are spread out - although they will take a while to kill the lings/blings. Still feels if you don't get muta early his banshees will stop you doing any real damage to him
On February 17 2011 20:01 valckrie wrote: Since you don't have AA that early, what do you do vs a terran that sees that you aren't going muta so keeps making banshees and has cloak? On creep a fungal with queens could kill it but do you ever spawn infested terrans? And off creep, it will take a lot of fungals to kill banshees especially if they are spread out - although they will take a while to kill the lings/blings. Still feels if you don't get muta early his banshees will stop you doing any real damage to him
I suppose that if you encounter heavy air play, you can always get a spire in reaction to that after fending off the early attacks. I would imagine that if a lot of resources are invested into banshees, then the later ground attack would be delayed, giving you some time to get some mutas.
It's good to have a build to provide a general gameplan, but that doesn't mean following it without reacting to what types of tech you scout.
On February 17 2011 18:39 ThisIsSparta_ wrote: does your build order ( especially the gas timing) change when terran is opening 2 rax?
IdrA opted for an earlier gas and faster speed. How you open is kinda open to interpretation. The mid-game is what's important.
would you recommend to go 15 hatch vs terran or use the saver pool first build like IdrA did? Is the econ advantage when opening hatch first worth the risk of losing the game coz of 2 rax?
btw thanks for everything! your stream and your coaching sessions helped me out a lot! thumbs up for MrBitter!
What do you guys think ( and if you catch it r Bitter ) of a +1 armour before lair ?
I was wondering that since i read that OP, and now after watching the ZvT with Idra and Lz i feel it has to be a good way of having more solid defenses before infestor pop out.
I've some success with it, still i'm mid/high diamond so i wish i could read some high master & co on that specific point. Lz speaking also convince me here, i felt that his comment were very solid and make a lot of senses ( the Bw logic stuff, +1 armour etc... ) and don't forget that in a way, it's started with his session.
I would be gladly clic a dozen more time before watching your vods on blip sir bitter for your thought on that point. ^^
On February 15 2011 17:28 Whitewing wrote: Zerg shouldn't have a lot of trouble with drops if you're playing well, spread those overlords out, and lots of creep. You should have vision everywhere as a zerg player, and should see drops coming a mile away.
I love theorycraft
It isn't. We have tons of way to scout it. The only downside is the beginning. We really really lack of scouting but when we get speed and pressure the terran, it's just impossible to not see a drop. Most maps have towers that covers a good portion of the map. Not using it with a single gling is just asking for challenges. Later on the game, you can always let an infestor stay in ur base since they deal with drop extremely well untill reinforcement comes. What's best ? spend 900 gas for mutas and snip them out or get an infestor + glings deal with dropping marines for only 150 gas and whatever minerals you have ?
About that +1armor i think you can go for it just after starting lair, cause getting festors fast is crucial imo. With 4 gases running gettin 150 after lair isnt really a long delay . Just drop evos asap and start armor before pit. But i always felt i didnt need more than some lings and spines to def.
Skip muta for extra ling bling and fast upgrades, you need muta to stop drop play though. Infestors, i dislike, killing drops after they land is not important, it's stopping it altogether. Which is what muta allows. with Muta, terren can make a couple vikings and a banshee and fly all over controlling map vision, and map vision is CRITICAL for zerg.
You can easily stop drop before landing just fungaling the medi when its away from your mineral line. Its all about watchin map. Also creep is good for map vision and so are speedlords which you can get rly fast. With mutas its extremely hard to engage T army when its set up on the field and this builds allows you to do it.
honestly I like this style a lot. I feel that Muta/Ling/Bling is such a control oriented style that a few mistakes can set you back really far. With this infestor oriented style of play I feel like I have much more solid control over the game, and for me it seems it's harder to make mistakes that set you back.
Personally I like to focus a lot more on the banelings as opposed to zerglings. I feel that since we arn't really using muta's that we can put that focus into setting up nice positioning for burrowed banelings and baneling drops. And with infestors you can really make it a pain for the terran to move around. Then late game rolls around and Ultra/Bane just owns everybody. Simply put i think this style feels very solid with the ability to do some exceptional harass or burrow shenanigans that can really make a terran player tilt.
I've been playing ling>infestor for about 2-3 months now. From my experience, the most dangerous T composition against ling>infestor is MMMTB. Composition breakdown is ~3 medivacs (this will save about 8-10 marines from getting blown away by fungal), 3 tanks (only way to win war of attrition against infestors. 4 tanks or more is when I start to worry), and 1-2 banshee (move them around the map separately) to clear the path to Z's base to prevent getting ninja-ed by fungal. Rest is MM, no specific ratio of marine/marauder.
The addition of banshee is necessary because without some form of air pressure, ling spotter with infestors spread all over the map will make getting to Z's base without taking massive damage next to impossible (unless you are ok with tank hopping across the entire map).
I feel that the way to approach combating T with this approach is to go directly after his army (unless he is way out of position to defend his 3rd), and worry about taking down his expansion after you have softened him up. In close macro matches, I'd generally beat his first army at the 3rd, but would not be able to do economic damage. But that's not a big deal because you will remax with better unit composition than T does (there is no way T can support 5+ factory at this point in the game). I've had games where I had to trade armies 3-4 times, but eventually, I will break the opponent.
Also, I like to add 8 hydras inbetween lair/hive tech, and I also do not get banelings till I'm on at least 4 bases. But that's a personal preference.
For a month I've been praying a build like this wouldnt get in the spotlight. When i woke up today the first thing that came into my mind was how my entire TvZ would get destroyed if someone went straight to infestors. Needless to say i froze in terror when i saw the title. So now i just have to face my fears.
My question is how do you best counter this with a 1-1-1 if you scout him build an infestation pit? Normally i have 2 reactors and a techlab with it.
On February 18 2011 01:40 Xeken wrote: I've been playing ling>infestor for about 2-3 months now. From my experience, the most dangerous T composition against ling>infestor is MMMTB. Composition breakdown is ~3 medivacs (this will save about 8-10 marines from getting blown away by fungal), 3 tanks (only way to win war of attrition against infestors. 4 tanks or more is when I start to worry), and 1-2 banshee (move them around the map separately) to clear the path to Z's base to prevent getting ninja-ed by fungal. Rest is MM, no specific ratio of marine/marauder.
The addition of banshee is necessary because without some form of air pressure, ling spotter with infestors spread all over the map will make getting to Z's base without taking massive damage next to impossible (unless you are ok with tank hopping across the entire map).
I feel that the way to approach combating T with this approach is to go directly after his army (unless he is way out of position to defend his 3rd), and worry about taking down his expansion after you have softened him up. In close macro matches, I'd generally beat his first army at the 3rd, but would not be able to do economic damage. But that's not a big deal because you will remax with better unit composition than T does (there is no way T can support 5+ factory at this point in the game). I've had games where I had to trade armies 3-4 times, but eventually, I will break the opponent.
Also, I like to add 8 hydras inbetween lair/hive tech, and I also do not get banelings till I'm on at least 4 bases. But that's a personal preference.
Imo, this is a lot less scary than muta ling bane. in general, no matter what opening I do, I get 3-4rax and tech medivac. As soon as you see infestors, just start dropping everywhere and taking a third. Go up to about 3 factories and make a lot of tanks. Its extremely hard to get map control vs a heavy dropping terran, and counterattacking is pretty impractical. Not having to defend from mutas and having excellent scv count will allow terran to also upgrade and take a third pretty quickly, at very little risk. They use the drops to keep your economy from going out of control (defending 3 places from drops + marine pressure is really hard for infestor z) while preparing an army composition to counter yours.
I think zerg needs to make an important choice to either get a spire or an infestation pit. Depending on what zerg whas able to scout in terms of army composition and buildings you make your decision. Id rather go for a group of 16 mutas for map control, scouting, intercepting drops than a couple of infestors who will make you more save but in most cases wont see allot of action until later in the game. Getting infestors later is perfect and in combination with ultralisk + NP you can break most sieges by terran. In fact, I havent lost a lategame against terran using this army and you can get about 6-7 ultras out at around 17-18min. (taking into account that you have been playing the game as usual and not rush to tier 3) . If you attack straight after that and NP the siege tanks while your ultras tank the shots it makes zerg look OP lol
Ya I watched you stream last night while you got coached. It seemed like you lacked a lot of simple mechanics and strategy errors which a weaker player like those you are giving advice to would probably fail with this. The main reason I don't think this would work for lower players is firstly your micro seemed incredibly bad. losing 20/30 lings at a time from not controlling them and letting them auto run into his army as it kept pushing. fungal on small groups is not that worth it(energy is important). They need a very good macro to make up for the time they are buying. Also general decision making, Also you were buying time for ultra? it was almost a full marine army. I don't understand your logic. I only watched the game you did vs LZ gamer on megalopolis. And from what I saw it was extremely 1 sided I understand he's good but if your 3400 like you stated it should have been an even game. I just don't see this strategy alone being to viable without some sort of fancyness involved to it. Just get coaching from catz he'll show you what I mean ^^ .
Played this a little bit on the ladder. My impression so far is that is it really strong on maps like xelnaga caverns, steppes, lost temple, and shakuras where your expansions are relatively close by ground and you can pop back and forth with infestors to deny drops. In a game I played on the ladder on metropolis though, my terran buddy was seesawing between my three bases and I found it really hard to keep up. I think that on maps like metropolis and blistering sands it is probably necessary to build up a force of mutas and then go infestors in the late game, otherwise drop harrass can be pretty difficult to deal with.
Another thing I am noticing is that there is a little less finishing power with the infestor build. You have the ability to very quickly punish your opponent with a flock of mutas by camping over their production facility or wiping out greedy expansions. With infestors you can kill an army out in the open but they are harder to use do to siteing issues and chokes when you move on Ts main.
MrBitters, one thing you don't mention in your OP and I haven't heard anyone discuss here is the Pathogen Glands upgrade. An important part I remember from PrinceXizor's infestor build is getting that immediately when infestation pit finishes and starting your first infestors >30 seconds into the upgrade time, so your infestors pop right after the upgrade finishes and you can immediately fungal with them. This results in a net decrease in the time you wait to have fungal growth to be available.
Are you taking this for granted, or do you think that you don't need fungal that fast and the 150 gas could be better spent elsewhere?
- +1/+1 should be started immediately - And as soon as lair finishes, your infestation pit needs to go down, with the energy upgrade following right behind it
- +1/+1 should be started immediately - And as soon as lair finishes, your infestation pit needs to go down, with the energy upgrade following right behind it
The multi-tasking required to stop multiple drops with infestor/ling seems pretty intensive. If you take that multi-tasking and put it into microing mutas, then you're the one doing the economic damage instead of receiving it. Either way, neither style is forgiving to play that's for sure.
That was also the bane of lategame ultra/ling for me as well, defending drops when you're on like 5 bases and so spread out.
Well articulated and reasoned OP. Wondering if there've been any succinct conclusions as to modifications of the build originally outlined since it was posted?
On February 18 2011 03:47 Crushgroove wrote: Well articulated and reasoned OP. Wondering if there've been any succinct conclusions as to modifications of the build originally outlined since it was posted?
Honestly, nothing has really changed so far...
We went through it with IdrA last night on stream, and he said he liked it.
If he continues to fiddle with the style, I'm sure he'll come up with something more stream lined. If not, then any changes you want to make to it are subject to your own interpretation.
I like the midgame quite a bit but I've been trying to work in a spire just for enough air units to kill medivacs. Defensive infestors are extremely tricky to play with since the medivac can still unload and kill your infestor if it has ground beneath, plus actually getting a kill on the dropship itself takes up a lot of energy. Once you saturate your third seems to be a good time to get the spire, but the trick is not letting it cut into your lategame army--I'd been favoring corruptors just because they do the job better in smaller numbers. I haven't found anything I'd call refined or a solid improvement yet.
I honestly think this will be the dominant strategy. the common thing I see terrans do is attack with siege tanks and run marines behind them when banelings come. with infestors, even if they run and you fail to FG you can still NP the tanks and destroy their marines with their own tanks! I think this will become the dominant strategy and will remain until terrans learn to utilize ghosts to counter.
Mutas are so easy to stop with how strong marines, turrets, and thors are... they can hardly contain and harassing with them does little damage compared to their cost.
One thing Destiny mentioned to defend drops that I haven't tried yet is to burrow 4 or so banelings at each mineral line. Might at well throw up 4 or so spines, Zerg always seems to have extra mineral.
On February 18 2011 04:20 Harbinger631 wrote: Might at well throw up 4 or so spines, Zerg always seems to have extra mineral.
My own preference would be to dump extra minerals into constant queen production and mix this mid-game together with the mass-queen late-game philosophy. Queens play amazingly well with either ultras or broodlords, and integrate better than pure zergling into a strong/low-mobility army strategy.
EDIT: Additionally, queens are great at forcing tank lines, which has been stated as a weakness of this build.
Hi MrBitter, first off I like to thank you for producing this guide it has really opened my eyes to the use of infestors. Having watched all the replays I have a question for you regarding static defenses, particularly in the use of spore crawlers to discourage the use of drops and banshee harass.
Subsequent to securing a 3rd as zerg and having infestors out on the field, it seems like placing spore crawlers in vunerable areas as standard could be a cost effective strategy, effectively compensating for the lack of infestor mobility. The risk to terran of moving inside the range of a spore crawler and getting FG'ed ought to be sufficient to shutdown harass in the places where they are deployed and by the time you have your third their cost would only be minor.
Terran always get missle turrets to fend off mutas and normally to great effect, so why not use spores for fend off banshee/drops!?
Because unlike muta, which has short range, banshee can pick their spot to attack. Likewise with drop, just go where the spore crawler isn't. You will need way too many spore to completely defend against air play.
That said, it is still a good idea to put a spore behind your mineral line to discourage a drop in compact space (harder for you to defend), but do not do this early. Any early/mid game drops can be dealt with just queen/infestor/lings easily (converge other queens and infestors to the location if it's a bigger drop). Only add static defense late game when you want to use all your units for offense.
THis build actually gives me more trouble than the muta/ling build, probably since by now the muta harass is something I expect and can prepare for quite well. It would be really interesting to see infestors used more i this matchup though, and I'd welcome the change.
I've played against this build a couple of times with a friend and I've noticed that even though the zerg sacrifices map control, it's not a complete sacrifice, as upgraded speedlings are still extremely effective at siphoning off parts of the map from the Terran. The zerg's infestor control also has to be quite good, as they're vulnerable to a lot of different things; EMPing multiple infestors, which I usually try, is an extremely satisfying task. Once you're EMPed 3 infestors at once, I immediately feel like I've won the game.
One of the things I love about going infestor instead of muta is the time it takes for Terran to attack my base... Im in 2900 masters at the moment and when terran usually pushes out my banelings are not morphed or I have spent all my larva on Drones... If i have a good creep spread on map and have a few zerglings out to scout I can usually delay the Terran push to finish morhping my banelings or even getting 3 hatch's worth of zerglings out ... and it feels a lot safer than trying to haras the tanks with mutas
I see spore crawlers mostly used for providing detection against cloaked banshees without having to spend gas on overseers. The range on detection is actually quite a bit larger than its firing range, and I think maybe large enough so a single spore can cover all the tech structures and the entire mineral line.You detect with the spore and attack with your hatch-queen. If the banshee tries to kill the queen, kite it to the spore crawler.
Hey Mr. Bitter, I watched your stream last night with idra and was super excited when he decided to try your build out with lzgamer. Though clearly his build during the game were very significant in him taking a much earlier lair and taking his ups a little fast as a result, meaning less drones, this problem seems to still come up in your build. I love the double early ups and would agree with you about NP. However it really seems like early- mid pushes right when you throw down your pit hurts so much. Sometimes you have the 1/1 and sometimes you don't. The difference is quite huge IMO between 1/1 and 0/0 lings against early game bio pressure. Do you have a different style of the build that works upgrade timings earlier rather than beelining towards infestors so hard? The end game comp is amazing, the early mid pre infestors feels a little flimsy. Also it is amazingly important that your infestors stick outside your opponent's base. Buying as much time as possible for essentially free rather than letting your opponent just siege on your third is huge in this build.
On February 18 2011 05:42 Rec73 wrote: Hey Mr. Bitter, I watched your stream last night with idra and was super excited when he decided to try your build out with lzgamer. Though clearly his build during the game were very significant in him taking a much earlier lair and taking his ups a little fast as a result, meaning less drones, this problem seems to still come up in your build. I love the double early ups and would agree with you about NP. However it really seems like early- mid pushes right when you throw down your pit hurts so much. Sometimes you have the 1/1 and sometimes you don't. The difference is quite huge IMO between 1/1 and 0/0 lings against early game bio pressure. Do you have a different style of the build that works upgrade timings earlier rather than beelining towards infestors so hard? The end game comp is amazing, the early mid pre infestors feels a little flimsy. Also it is amazingly important that your infestors stick outside your opponent's base. Buying as much time as possible for essentially free rather than letting your opponent just siege on your third is huge in this build.
This exact style of push/harass (when your pit goes down and/or when you have 1-3 infestors with only ~75 energy each) is why I eventually abandoned my infestor play when I used to do it. I've been watching this thread closely, and still hope to try this style of play again sometime, but it is what drove me away in the first place. I just feel like there have been so many ZvTs I've won due to that first batch of mutalisks coming out at a clutch timing to stop something.
It does make me curious about how something like 5 mutas directly into infestors (start the pit as spire builds maybe) would work.
I think this build has some potential, dunno if it will end up being "better" than muta play though.
I also think in most situations, you don't need to rush to infestors quite so fast, you can focus on getting your economy up, and get a baneling nest earlier. Maybe cut out the early double upgrades and instead get just 1 evo chamber and a baneling nest. Than you can add the other evo chamber after you get infestors out once your econ is going strong.
Of course, how the build plays out is entirely dependent on what the Terran is doing in the particular game you are playing.
On February 18 2011 05:42 Rec73 wrote: Hey Mr. Bitter, I watched your stream last night with idra and was super excited when he decided to try your build out with lzgamer. Though clearly his build during the game were very significant in him taking a much earlier lair and taking his ups a little fast as a result, meaning less drones, this problem seems to still come up in your build. I love the double early ups and would agree with you about NP. However it really seems like early- mid pushes right when you throw down your pit hurts so much. Sometimes you have the 1/1 and sometimes you don't. The difference is quite huge IMO between 1/1 and 0/0 lings against early game bio pressure. Do you have a different style of the build that works upgrade timings earlier rather than beelining towards infestors so hard? The end game comp is amazing, the early mid pre infestors feels a little flimsy. Also it is amazingly important that your infestors stick outside your opponent's base. Buying as much time as possible for essentially free rather than letting your opponent just siege on your third is huge in this build.
You're right. That is a vulnerable time in the game. I don't have a great answer for you right now. I want to say that good scouting will allowing you to key in on what he's doing, and can prompt a reactive baneling nest.
The truth is I just don't know.
I know I'm an ok player, but I'm not at a level where I can make concrete statements about how the build plays out vs very precise timings... Not yet, at least.
First of all, thank you very much for this awesome post ^^ I'll try this out right, and try to mix it with my actual playstyle te get something fancy out lol.
For that trouble you mentionned with the banshees, i think you could add some queen production to your strat, because it will not only deal with air wonderously, but you will also be able to use mass transfuse on your late game ultras, kind of following the idea you can find in this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=190226
Big fan of yours by the way, i watch your stream every time it's possible
I would try constant queen production to defend that early push. It would mean fewer speedlings, but queens are neither light nor armored, and have 1 armor before upgrades. I'm not sure if the timing and resource allocation would work out favorably at that point in the game, but I think queens are just such a strong defensive unit. Something to experiment with, at least.
Thanks for posting this bitterz, ive seen this play in your session with lz and wanted to try it ever since, the reps and this guide are going to hopefully help a bunch BIG <3
I really love everything you do for the community Mr Bitter. I have a secret hatred for you though because I met you on bnet once a LONG time ago (flabulous) and you 1 base muta'd me and you were being a little bit of a prick haha. Not long after I saw your coaching videos and you talked about how you didn't know much about zvz and I was thinking to myself (yeah that little punk..). Anyways all is forgiven
On February 18 2011 05:42 Rec73 wrote: Hey Mr. Bitter, I watched your stream last night with idra and was super excited when he decided to try your build out with lzgamer. Though clearly his build during the game were very significant in him taking a much earlier lair and taking his ups a little fast as a result, meaning less drones, this problem seems to still come up in your build. I love the double early ups and would agree with you about NP. However it really seems like early- mid pushes right when you throw down your pit hurts so much. Sometimes you have the 1/1 and sometimes you don't. The difference is quite huge IMO between 1/1 and 0/0 lings against early game bio pressure. Do you have a different style of the build that works upgrade timings earlier rather than beelining towards infestors so hard? The end game comp is amazing, the early mid pre infestors feels a little flimsy. Also it is amazingly important that your infestors stick outside your opponent's base. Buying as much time as possible for essentially free rather than letting your opponent just siege on your third is huge in this build.
You're right. That is a vulnerable time in the game. I don't have a great answer for you right now. I want to say that good scouting will allowing you to key in on what he's doing, and can prompt a reactive baneling nest.
The truth is I just don't know.
I know I'm an ok player, but I'm not at a level where I can make concrete statements about how the build plays out vs very precise timings... Not yet, at least.
Doesn't the same thing happen in BW TvZ where Zerg has to buy time for his bases/tech to kick in by abusing the hell out of map position with his lings?
On February 18 2011 07:32 justindab0mb wrote: I really love everything you do for the community Mr Bitter. I have a secret hatred for you though because I met you on bnet once a LONG time ago (flabulous) and you 1 base muta'd me and you were being a little bit of a prick haha. Not long after I saw your coaching videos and you talked about how you didn't know much about zvz and I was thinking to myself (yeah that little punk..). Anyways all is forgiven
Thanks a lot!
Hahahah. That's awesome.
I apologize for that <3<3
I promise that your hatred is surpassed only by the hatred that Bonergeist holds for me.
I have found this to work extraordinarily well, even with my limited abilites and with completely improvising the build @ diamond level. Marine tank pushes do get pretty much demolished by a decent number of lings, add in infestors and I usually come out as a completely superior victor in mid game fights vs T.
And ultras seem to come out much much sooner than most T's expect a zerg to get a T3, and they pretty much demolish stuff with the upgrades you have prepared for them.
Kudos for exploring and adding another option to the zerg arsenal vs T.
Hopefully you'll continue to refine this build, maybe even get more feedback from Idra. So far he suggested earlier gas ~17ish, and the jury is out on when to get that baneling nest. I'm also curious about the 3rd queen, lair upgrade and 3rd hatchery timings in a normal progression. Keep up the great work (and don't get supply blocked at 28).
Mrbitter, what do you think about using 1-2 spores per base to help against drops (by killing the medivac thus making the units stranded and waiting to die to your units)? Sure, it won't help kill the marines but your lings are really mobile, so you can run back and kill off the drop much faster than you would be able to with infestors...
infesters to FG the medivac/marines so they cant run/kite, and queens to kill the medivac and lings to kill the marines is usualy how drops are delt with in this build. Spores arnt mobile enough to be able to actualy kill the medivac (as the medivac only needs to come into the very edge of the base somewhere, and you cant have spores everywhere).
Have you experimented at all with a brood transition? idrA had brought it up on your cast and was just curious if you tried it. Seems like they'd rip through stuff with they're upgrading broodlings. Just curious. BTW, i think i'll finally give up and try your build
I just stomped a gold levelish player as a mid to high level platinum using hellion, thor, banshee with a tint of marines. He went for infestor/ling. it wasnt even close. focus fire infestor with banshee and just stomp every thing else. I lost about 300worth of army value.(200/200) o; i reckon he played very passive.
Great post Bitter, i've been following your work lately and you absolutely got some quality play going. Here is a VOD i recorded while streaming of me playing this build (3k EU Zerg) against a 3200 Master Terran on ladder, I'm always trying to stay away from Mutas as much as i can and Infestors are a great solution.
Have terrans responded to this by taking 3 early bases? How have you handled that? I'm imagining this would allow them to keep up with upgrades and go crazy with both mech and bio.
On February 18 2011 11:17 Spicy Pepper wrote: Have terrans responded to this by taking 3 early bases? How have you handled that? I'm imagining this would allow them to keep up with upgrades and go crazy with both mech and bio.
On most maps its very difficult for T to take a quick third with such a significant speedling presence.
Of course, if Z doesn't scout it 'til the PF is done, that changes things.
I have been using infestor heavy play since the LZ video. I was using a lot of banelings with it though. I have played a few games with mass upgrade lings into broodlords and have been liking that more.
I am sure a big reason it is working so well is that it is catching people off guard. But even so I think it is great for the metagame if this build catches on. Terran will be forced adapt their builds to make standard ling bling muta more effective as well since they can't blind counter with turrets/thor and be in good shape against this.
On February 18 2011 10:08 MonsieurGrimm wrote: Mrbitter, what do you think about using 1-2 spores per base to help against drops (by killing the medivac thus making the units stranded and waiting to die to your units)? Sure, it won't help kill the marines but your lings are really mobile, so you can run back and kill off the drop much faster than you would be able to with infestors...
Is it a garbage idea or does it hold some value?
Keeping an infestor in your main/ 3rd base should be pretty easy to defend drops. Queen/fungal/ infested terrans focusing on medivac. Lings are fast enough that a fungal can keep any drop under control until some lings can clean up.
On February 18 2011 10:08 MonsieurGrimm wrote: Mrbitter, what do you think about using 1-2 spores per base to help against drops (by killing the medivac thus making the units stranded and waiting to die to your units)? Sure, it won't help kill the marines but your lings are really mobile, so you can run back and kill off the drop much faster than you would be able to with infestors...
Is it a garbage idea or does it hold some value?
I think this is very good idea. Many players (myself included) put spine or two in base to defend drops but MMM drop kills those super fast. But if you put spore in good position, it will kill medivac when he unloads or even kill full medivac when he is not paying attention. Also fungal in spore's range can kill drop super easy.
I have a feeling that at top level play, the standard procedure is to scan, drop out of range of any static D, stim, and destroy. Spores in the mineral line aren't going to deter this much, if at all. One might try forward spore crawlers to cut off air-attack lanes and intercept dropships before they reach good drop positions, especially with good creep spread, since scans are less likely further out from the mineral line. I think aggressive creep spread and overlord placement, along with infestor/queen/ling/bane cleanup is still a better way to defend expos. A couple infestors at home can stall long enough for an army to come back. 1 fungal and 2 queens can kill a medivac pretty quickly. Another possibility is defensive mutalisks, once the game reaches later stages. (Skipping early mutas doesn't necessitate cutting them out of your game entirely, and you'll have the option to make mutas if you're going for broods) A control group of 6-8 mutas and 12-16 lings can cover most of the map and smash single drops with an attack move.
I believe this question has not be brought up yet, but do you think burrow is an important part of this build or more of a situational upgrade? If so, do you have a timing at wich you get burrow, do you prioritize it over other upgrades? (to use with burrowed banes and harass with the infestors.)
I remember advocating this style many months ago and got instantly shot down because im not a named player, people gave me shit like "lol when IdrA does it then come back kid"
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
Neon burrow is useful to get your festors outta some mess, also blings traps. Generally in this style you can afford it most of the times so why dont get it :D?
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.
On February 15 2011 03:38 Shikyo wrote: I think that this build is a lot tougher to make work when the T plays it properly and slowpushes with a lot of tanks. It's going to be really difficult to break him and you can't do anything like sniping the tanks with Mutas or harrassing the main to delay and so on. Also, if the T adds in a few cloaked ghosts it's really easy to insta-die as soon as he gets one EMP off on your Infestors, since they're all you have.
I'd say that this build has the potential to be stronger than the muta build, but in my opinion you're going to have to play a lot better in comparison for that to happen. So it definitely wouldn't be anything I'd recommend to people below mid master.
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.
Im thinking the easiest way to deal with drops, would just getting mutas after your third. 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.
I find it kind of hard to deal with viking overlord harass without mutas. Kind of have to accept that you'll have to keep overlords in you main or somewhere easily defendable. Can anyone help me on this?
I'm super surprised (and pleased) to see a big post excitedly describing my exact playstyle in ZvT :D I'm only mid-diamond (~900 rated, but with ~2500 BP... I need to play more!) but I've been using this approach in my ZvTs for ages, so it's wonderful to know it's not a flawed strategy and will work right up to the top levels of Masters.
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*
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I have used this build when I saw it on your show, it seems strong at first, but recently I have been losing (literary losing) every game against terran using this build, basically, they start with early push (the moment you start producing infestors) and come to you with 3 - 4 tanks and some marines, the fact that tanks has longer range and they can one shot infestors makes it so hard to me, this is why Idra said in your (last one - zvz -) when you asked him how was that build, he said you probably need to get infestors before evo.
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).
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.
Great post. Over the past few days I have been working with this build. Independently I had come to the same conclusion as many previous posters in that building up queens really helps this build combat banshees, healing spines, blocking the ramp against hellions, and most importantly spreading creep so you can get key fungals off in the middle of the map.
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.
I've messed with fast infestors in zvt a bit, I think its a decent tactic, but I feel that playing muta/ling/baneling with burrow is better. Burrowed banelings can accomplish the same purpose as fungal growth(taking out large groups of marines), and this way your still able to have the mutas you need to harass and defend from drops. Infestors are very strong in the late game and are incredible support (almost necessary even) for broodlords. However I feel like reliance on them early game leaves you very vulnerable to a lot of different styles.
Purpose of fungal isnt only to kill the rines. It helps you choose your engagements as T have to choose between losing the fungaled bio group or fight on your conditions, and helps alot with ultras preventing kiting em. Also if bioball is more rauders than sence i tend to chain a few fungals before running lings in. 2 fungals leave rauders in rather uncomfortable situation (softened and no rines support) :D and this give you time to spawn more lings if necessary :D
This build is fuckin awesome. I just beat Kas and Sjow with it, two players that have always wiped the floor with me if I was trying to play Muta/Ling/Bling against them. They may have had a bad day, they may not be familiar with the style yet, but still - they were even both far ahead in eco and army size, but those heavily upgraded Lings/Ultras just rape through anything that isnt heavily upgraded as well.
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.
On February 19 2011 10:06 KiaL.Kiwi wrote: This build is fuckin awesome. I just beat Kas and Sjow with it, two players that have always wiped the floor with me if I was trying to play Muta/Ling/Bling against them. They may have had a bad day, they may not be familiar with the style yet, but still - they were even both far ahead in eco and army size, but those heavily upgraded Lings/Ultras just rape through anything that isnt heavily upgraded as well.
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.
Wow, what the hell, I just looked at the score screen for the game vs Sjow. He had a higher income (even with you building 140 drones, I guess drops were a bit of a problem after all? ) and much higher army value basically all game. Would you mind sharing that replay? :o
I was interested in this build after seeing the coaching lesson with Idra on ZvT. It seems the big question is really the timings of the build. That is definitely something that can needs finetuning. So I sat down and worked it out a preliminary possibility on a piece of paper. This is what I came up with.
I will count from the amount of time after you reintroduce drones into your extractor. I assume the opening will be similar to a FE, pool, extractor, mine 100 gas, pull drones out, research speedling upgrade, and then at some later point reintroduce drones.
0 sec. 0 gas. Put 3 drones into 1st extractor. Build 2nd extractor.
30 sec. 60 gas. 2nd extractor completes. Fill it with 3 drones. Start 1st evolution chamber.
40 sec. 100->0 gas. Build lair as soon as you hit 100 gas. Start 3rd extractor.
120 sec. 220->120 gas . Lair completes. Start infestation pit.
170 sec. 520->370 gas. Infestation pit completes. Start pathogen upgrade.
200 sec. ~610 gas. Start 4 infestors when you have 600 gas.
This is all assuming a gas mining rate of 2 gas/sec. According to this thread, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=140055, the gas collection rate is actually marginally less. Also, since you won't be able to time things perfectly, you'll probably be delayed for several seconds. That gives you a buffer for not starting the infestors too early. You start them at 200 sec in or later. Pathogen finishes at 250 sec. Infestors will pop shortly afterwards.
I went with a build that got +1 melee attack before +1 carapace instead of timing both or getting carapace first. I hope you guys might test it out yourself and come up with different possibilities.
I hope the timings aren't too complicated. I had it line up so there are cues. This way you don't have to memorize timings or memorize foods. So you can start mining gas early or late. It doesn't really matter, so long as you have the mineral gathering to support it.
The big points are: 1. start 2nd extractor once you start mining the 1st one. 2. When 2nd extractor completes, start 1st evolution chamber. 3. Start lair as soon as you have 100 gas. Start 3rd extractor at the same time. 4. When 1st evolution chamber completes, start +1 attack, start 2nd evolution chamber, Start 4th extractor. All of these need to be done at this time. 5. When 2nd evo chamber completes, start +1 defense. 6. When lair completes, start infestation pit. 7. When pit finishes, start pathogen gland. 8. When you have 600 gas, make 4 infestors at once.
After an extractor is completed, put 3 drones on it immediately.
You'll end up with 4 infestors with 75 energy each about 4 minutes after you start mining gas again.
I looked a bit ahead and you have enough gas to start +2 melee attack and +2 carapace as soon as they are completed. You also can spend 100 gas after your +2 melee attack for something like overlord speed, and you will barely have 225 gas in time for +2 carapace.
It's not super easy to remember, but I think with some practice it should be fairly simple to get these timings down. Best of all, it leaves you the option of deciding when to start mining from the 1st gas again. If you get thrown off early on, having to defend marine pressure or a bunker rush or something, and you get delayed in mining gas, it's no problem. As for getting pressured while you're building evo chambers, starting extractors, mining gas.... just need to remember to do it.
I hope with one set of timings we can test out how robust it is against early/mid game pressure. My impression is that it's possible to get those infestors out in time for a marine tank push, so long as you don't forget anything.
I actually played once vs Marine/tank push and i was able to get like 3festors with glands and about 2-3were spawning so i think its doable to get em in time to punish T push
Thanks so much for this. I'm gonna try it out because the muta/ling/bling is micro heavy and a single mistake means that the terran will dominate ur army. Its good to see the metagame shifting all the time. Its also good that you put the transition into ultras, another really effective unit. I have to try this out.
Yeah I've been doing this right alongside you baby ever since that day with lz. Although I've been transitioning into muta once I get my third rather than getting a fast hive, so it ends up slightly different. Call me an addict. Also my late game will be looking considerably different since I'll be focusing on broodlords (3/3 broodlings bebe) rather than ultras.
Don't forget about burrowed infestor harass too ;0
On February 19 2011 19:12 WingEn wrote: @Frozenserpent: I think that getting +1 Carapace before Melee Attack is better for Zerglings to deal with Marines initially.
Yeah when I have free time I'll see if I can come up with timings for a possible carapace first upgrade. I just like the +1 attack one because the timings work out very well. Every time you add a gas or build an evolution chamber, there is a cue that you sync it up with.
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
i dont believe that units auto-fire on NP'd units.
toss infested terrans into the marine ball is a very good idea though!
On February 19 2011 10:06 KiaL.Kiwi wrote: This build is fuckin awesome. I just beat Kas and Sjow with it, two players that have always wiped the floor with me if I was trying to play Muta/Ling/Bling against them. They may have had a bad day, they may not be familiar with the style yet, but still - they were even both far ahead in eco and army size, but those heavily upgraded Lings/Ultras just rape through anything that isnt heavily upgraded as well.
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.
Wow, what the hell, I just looked at the score screen for the game vs Sjow. He had a higher income (even with you building 140 drones, I guess drops were a bit of a problem after all? ) and much higher army value basically all game. Would you mind sharing that replay? :o
Actually I didn't lose many drones against him, the high number stems from me tending to overdrone if I'm nervous (bout 90 working drones at the end of the game, and a lot of oversaturated bases through the game) and 5 hatches, a full techtree and some spines everywhere
After rewatching the replay I think he just didn't know what he was playing against, since he was using a very strange unit mix (Thor/Marine/Marauder/Medivac/BlueFlame Hellions with only a few tanks) and upgrading very slowly, even with income from 4 bases at his disposal.
Ive acctually started doing this but instead of entirely skipping the mutas first i get my spire but i only make about 11-12 mutas just for harras and usaully the terran responds like he usaully would more rines thors expecting a large amount of mutas then after your 7-8th muta throw down your pit research energy ASAP get about 6-8 infestors and resume muta production as usaul this so u can still keep map control but now u have infestors to completely lock down a terran push this has been working wonders for me lost about 1 out my 12 games against t and i only lost because i got far out played by a 3500 master
I'm only platinum but I love this build. Most terrans I face almost blindly expect muta ling so they start building turrets without even scouting me. Ling/bane is enough to stop very early pushes, ling/bane/infestor stops midgame pushes, and crackling/bane/ultra just roflstomps any lategame marine/tank composition. I think the main weakness of this build is heavy banshee play. If the terran treats them like DTs and splits them up, infestors will have a very hard time dealing with them.
I love this style, but i have trouble against simultaneous drops as my multitasking cant keep up with queued drops (op :p). I have had huge trouble in zvt lately but now everything is going smoother as i get a brood lord infestor army relatively quick. With muta ling I would often have a lot of stupid losses where I was way ahead due to bad engagements.
I do think some of the success I have had with this is due to lack of experience on the terran side though.
Props for doing your show mr bitter, the best zerg resource by far
One question what you guys do if he keeps denying your third with big balls of rauders+some rines? I found it rly hard to kill and even harder to stop from killing your new hatch
On February 20 2011 23:12 Yagulare wrote: One question what you guys do if he keeps denying your third with big balls of rauders+some rines? I found it rly hard to kill and even harder to stop from killing your new hatch
If he keeps denying your third you must be doing something wrong. Upgraded ling + infestor fungal should be able to handle MM balls fairly easily.
I got it again, could anyone give me some advice please?
The T got like one viking to harass overlords. So I pull my overlords in. Then I don't have coverage around my base and don't see the dropships coming. With the overlords out it's conceivable to fungal the medivac over open space, or at least you get your lings there in time. I'm not used to not having air superiority I guess.
@Euclide I can handle bioballs quite easily with fungal as long as they are mainly rines -true, but when he runs his 125hp stimm upgraded rauders and hides rines (like 2-1 rauder/rine ratio) behind its rly hard to fungal without dying and stimmed rines makes mess out of lings that are blocked by rauders. When he positions his rines in a way that they cover rauders but to fungal em you got to get into rauders range... meh i cant think how to deal with that. And in mean time he sets expo up so he can constantly toss new bioballs at me. Still i win like 80%of my ZvT (maybe even more) cause T just sit and make big army, afraid to move cause they are used to muta harassment that never comes.
On February 19 2011 16:50 Frozenserpent wrote: I was interested in this build after seeing the coaching lesson with Idra on ZvT. It seems the big question is really the timings of the build. That is definitely something that can needs finetuning. So I sat down and worked it out a preliminary possibility on a piece of paper. This is what I came up with.
I will count from the amount of time after you reintroduce drones into your extractor. I assume the opening will be similar to a FE, pool, extractor, mine 100 gas, pull drones out, research speedling upgrade, and then at some later point reintroduce drones.
0 sec. 0 gas. Put 3 drones into 1st extractor. Build 2nd extractor.
30 sec. 60 gas. 2nd extractor completes. Fill it with 3 drones. Start 1st evolution chamber.
40 sec. 100->0 gas. Build lair as soon as you hit 100 gas. Start 3rd extractor.
120 sec. 220->120 gas . Lair completes. Start infestation pit.
170 sec. 520->370 gas. Infestation pit completes. Start pathogen upgrade.
200 sec. ~610 gas. Start 4 infestors when you have 600 gas.
This is all assuming a gas mining rate of 2 gas/sec. According to this thread, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=140055, the gas collection rate is actually marginally less. Also, since you won't be able to time things perfectly, you'll probably be delayed for several seconds. That gives you a buffer for not starting the infestors too early. You start them at 200 sec in or later. Pathogen finishes at 250 sec. Infestors will pop shortly afterwards.
I went with a build that got +1 melee attack before +1 carapace instead of timing both or getting carapace first. I hope you guys might test it out yourself and come up with different possibilities.
I hope the timings aren't too complicated. I had it line up so there are cues. This way you don't have to memorize timings or memorize foods. So you can start mining gas early or late. It doesn't really matter, so long as you have the mineral gathering to support it.
The big points are: 1. start 2nd extractor once you start mining the 1st one. 2. When 2nd extractor completes, start 1st evolution chamber. 3. Start lair as soon as you have 100 gas. Start 3rd extractor at the same time. 4. When 1st evolution chamber completes, start +1 attack, start 2nd evolution chamber, Start 4th extractor. All of these need to be done at this time. 5. When 2nd evo chamber completes, start +1 defense. 6. When lair completes, start infestation pit. 7. When pit finishes, start pathogen gland. 8. When you have 600 gas, make 4 infestors at once.
After an extractor is completed, put 3 drones on it immediately.
You'll end up with 4 infestors with 75 energy each about 4 minutes after you start mining gas again.
I looked a bit ahead and you have enough gas to start +2 melee attack and +2 carapace as soon as they are completed. You also can spend 100 gas after your +2 melee attack for something like overlord speed, and you will barely have 225 gas in time for +2 carapace.
It's not super easy to remember, but I think with some practice it should be fairly simple to get these timings down. Best of all, it leaves you the option of deciding when to start mining from the 1st gas again. If you get thrown off early on, having to defend marine pressure or a bunker rush or something, and you get delayed in mining gas, it's no problem. As for getting pressured while you're building evo chambers, starting extractors, mining gas.... just need to remember to do it.
I hope with one set of timings we can test out how robust it is against early/mid game pressure. My impression is that it's possible to get those infestors out in time for a marine tank push, so long as you don't forget anything.
This is a great post. I'm going to play around with these timings, and post some updates later.
On February 19 2011 10:06 KiaL.Kiwi wrote: This build is fuckin awesome. I just beat Kas and Sjow with it, two players that have always wiped the floor with me if I was trying to play Muta/Ling/Bling against them. They may have had a bad day, they may not be familiar with the style yet, but still - they were even both far ahead in eco and army size, but those heavily upgraded Lings/Ultras just rape through anything that isnt heavily upgraded as well.
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.
Wow, what the hell, I just looked at the score screen for the game vs Sjow. He had a higher income (even with you building 140 drones, I guess drops were a bit of a problem after all? ) and much higher army value basically all game. Would you mind sharing that replay? :o
Actually I didn't lose many drones against him, the high number stems from me tending to overdrone if I'm nervous (bout 90 working drones at the end of the game, and a lot of oversaturated bases through the game) and 5 hatches, a full techtree and some spines everywhere
After rewatching the replay I think he just didn't know what he was playing against, since he was using a very strange unit mix (Thor/Marine/Marauder/Medivac/BlueFlame Hellions with only a few tanks) and upgrading very slowly, even with income from 4 bases at his disposal.
Been skimming through this thread and watched all of bitters replays and the SjoW one. But I still have to see a game where terran matches your upgrades? Every replay I saw terran didn't even upgrade once except SjoW who got +1 atk for infantry and mech very late.
How does this fare against, say, fully upgraded mech?
On February 21 2011 08:36 euroboy wrote: Been skimming through this thread and watched all of bitters replays and the SjoW one. But I still have to see a game where terran matches your upgrades? Every replay I saw terran didn't even upgrade once except SjoW who got +1 atk for infantry and mech very late.
How does this fare against, say, fully upgraded mech?
Well for one, even if your T opponent is on top of his upgrades, they should still be considerably behind yours, that's just the nature of trying to do double Armory upgrades. Even so, by the time he has fully upgraded Mech, we're talking about a late-game scenario where you should have plenty of bases to support Ultra/Ling/Infestor, which annihilates Mech play, unless you fight near a bunch of Planetaries or something.
Today I played against a guy who completely denied OL/Ling scouting by keeping Marines on the outer edge of his base and not keeping anything near his wall except a couple Marines to shoot away my lings, then busted out with 12+ blue flame Hellions. What's the correct response to this? I eventually managed to take them down with a combination of crawlers/queens/ling surrounds, but he had killed so many Drones at that point and he followed it up with a one-base Thor/Marine/Hellion all-in and brought all his SCVs.
Frustrating to say the least.
Might post the replay later if anyone is interested, don't really want to do that in this thread though.
Hey im mouzSyck, one of the 2 new mousesports players, since my muta controll is pretty bad ive been struggling with my zvt alot until i found this build:D, ive started to use it (with sucess) and i would like to add some replays(the one vs Sjow included which was already mentioned), im new to this zvt style myself(started 3 days ago)so i still have to work on it myself but i hope it helps u alot,and je sry for my bad english ;p
On February 21 2011 08:36 euroboy wrote: Been skimming through this thread and watched all of bitters replays and the SjoW one. But I still have to see a game where terran matches your upgrades? Every replay I saw terran didn't even upgrade once except SjoW who got +1 atk for infantry and mech very late.
How does this fare against, say, fully upgraded mech?
Well for one, even if your T opponent is on top of his upgrades, they should still be considerably behind yours, that's just the nature of trying to do double Armory upgrades. Even so, by the time he has fully upgraded Mech, we're talking about a late-game scenario where you should have plenty of bases to support Ultra/Ling/Infestor, which annihilates Mech play, unless you fight near a bunch of Planetaries or something.
Well yea double upgrade probably isn't gonna happen, but they can get at least +3atk on mech or inf and that's a huge difference instead of 0/0 against 3/3 lings. I don't know the maths but my guess is that lings die much faster against a 3/0 tank than 0/0 even if they are 3/3
On February 21 2011 09:08 Syck wrote: Hey im mouzSyck, one of the 2 new mousesports players, since my muta controll is pretty bad ive been struggling with my zvt alot until i found this build:D, ive started to use it (with sucess) and i would like to add some replays(the one vs Sjow included which was already mentioned), im new to this zvt style myself(started 3 days ago)so i still have to work on it myself but i hope it helps u alot,and je sry for my bad english ;p
I've found that using burrow harrass forces about as many turrets as my muta harrass normally does. Having a bit of trouble adapting to handling drops with infestors, but I figure I'll work it out in time.
Relying on Infestors (along with evolution chamber upgrades) is definitely a good and fun alternative to Mutalisks when hitting Lair Tech. I done this a few things (I'm in badland Diamond), but I have one big concern.
What have you guys been doing to combat the growing number of Medivacs? I felt that as the number of Medivacs grow, they simply negate Fungal Growth's damage on marines. Now, I know that Fungal Growth also serves as a "snare" and time buyer, but I keep feeling that I need to get other techs besides Fungal Growth to combat Medivacs. In particular, I feel that I need to either get banelings to negate Medivacs' heal and abuse the Fungal Growth snare OR get Mutalisks to keep the Medivac count manageable. From a quick search on Liquidpedia, Medivacs' Heal more than easily out heals the DPS of Fungal Growth. Thoughts?
Maybe bunch of corruptors? You should have spire already thrown down and you 1)discourage banshees and overally air 2) have them rdy to morph into broods :D?
LZGamer, in his coaching session with Bitter states that "Medivacs are actually the counter to infestor play." So I don't think that there is any easy solution to that problem.
Banelings, I would imagine are the key to fighting medivacs. Use the fungal not to deal damage to the marines, but to hold them in place and then clean up with a group of banelings since the marines won't be capable of kiting.
I love the infestor dominated play, both skipping mutas and only building a few, purely because it makes ZvT fun, which with muta ling bling I used to hate and find really boring.
On February 15 2011 06:05 PrinceXizor wrote: MrBitter i've been doing a similar concept since beta, and drops and banshees become second nature to beat after enough practice. (for instance, i'm closing in on 10 months of practice with the build). the big issue is on small maps, being pushed by heavy tank numbers. HOWEVER on the GSL maps, and shakuras and stuff, you can also beat that push. Infestor play is just safe from everything in general
The variation i have is 14 hatch 14 gas 13 pool, with lair as soon as pool fininshes, pretty much i get infestors about 2-3 minutes game time faster, and get maybe 1-3 drones less by the same point in time(which means you catch up quickly once infestors come out) the strategy in the mid game is roughly the same. except you didn't emphasize the importance of overlord and creep spread during the mid game. you can actually creep up to the opponents base by the time they have enough tanks to leave their base without dying. meaning you have 100% map control.
Yeah. I remember watching his most excellent stream. it's actually quite a good build, and he was having good success with it, along with fast evo play.
On February 22 2011 06:35 atenthirtyone wrote: Relying on Infestors (along with evolution chamber upgrades) is definitely a good and fun alternative to Mutalisks when hitting Lair Tech. I done this a few things (I'm in badland Diamond), but I have one big concern.
What have you guys been doing to combat the growing number of Medivacs? I felt that as the number of Medivacs grow, they simply negate Fungal Growth's damage on marines. Now, I know that Fungal Growth also serves as a "snare" and time buyer, but I keep feeling that I need to get other techs besides Fungal Growth to combat Medivacs. In particular, I feel that I need to either get banelings to negate Medivacs' heal and abuse the Fungal Growth snare OR get Mutalisks to keep the Medivac count manageable. From a quick search on Liquidpedia, Medivacs' Heal more than easily out heals the DPS of Fungal Growth. Thoughts?
Fungal Growth can hit way more then one marine at a time, and medivacs have limited energy. If they try and push with bio without medivacs when you have a bunch of infestors, it's basically game over. If they do have medivacs it comes down to positioning and whatnot, although I still think the infestors give the advantage.
Well, I have to say that I am totally in love with this build. It seems like a much, much better option than ling/bling/muta in close positions, especially if your opponent opens 2-rax, and will probably be including bio in his composition. Have not faced pure mech yet, but I think it'd be alright if you transition to roach/speedling rather quickly.
Random question, what is the viability of this sort of melee upgrade play vs Protoss? Ultralisks used to be a really strong transition late game (see Plexa's Old Guide) but aren't as good because Toss can deal with late game ultras a bit better than they used to.
Would it be possible to do ling/bling/ultra/infestor using drop to keep the immobile protoss death ball in his base?
I must admit when I first saw you using Infestors over Mutalisks in your ZvT games a month ago I thought it was a huge mistake. Since then I have been favoring Infestors over Mutalisks in every ZvT game that I have played in the last few weeks and it absolutely works flawlessly. My ZvT win percentage is near flawless since I've been utilizing fungal growth.
I must say thank you Mr Bitter. As a 2700+ point diamond random player, zerg used to be my worst race, straight up. With this new build. I am quickly feeling like zerg is now close to my best, right behind toss. I've been watching your stream for about 3-4 weeks now, and have absolutely fallin in love with zerg, and for that, I thank you Mr B.
That's basically how I play for a while now. With the essential addition of nydus. Ling/infestor/nydus/ultra, adding in banelings or hydras if needed.
Some have alluded to it already that nydus would be a great addition. But I think it's good to explain why. Two man reasons:
1. Zerglings have the best dps to food ratio in the game. Their strengths is doing a lot of damage fast, not taking a lot of damage. Which means they are most effective in places where the opponent has few forces: e.g. in his base/production line. Cracklings don't dismantle bases as fast as they did in BW, but they still do it pretty damn fast and for cheap. Ultras are exceptionally good at that too, and with nydus and not much resistance their speed is not really an issue either. Additionally I think that the most vulnerable piece of a terran is his production. We all know the "No SCVs? No problem got MULES" joke, and there is a lot of truth to it.
2. Infestors control and delay terran army movement. This means you can prevent the terran army from running back to safe his base and from counter attacking while your army wreaks havoc in his base. 50 zerglings and a handful Ultras destroy whole bases in those long 8s a fungal lasts. And once the fungals and the infestor energy run out, your army is back in no time to defend against a weakened terran army that can't be reinforced.
The only time I get mutas is, if there is too much drop play or if I need to create a blind spot in his base for a nydus.
First off I want to say this build is awesome and I've been using it in all my ZvT games.
One problem I have is with the cliff over the natural on LT. What do you guys do about this? Without mutas its pretty hard to prevent the drops onto there since spine crawlers can't cover the whole ledge.
On February 23 2011 16:33 DrDoom wrote: First off I want to say this build is awesome and I've been using it in all my ZvT games.
One problem I have is with the cliff over the natural on LT. What do you guys do about this? Without mutas its pretty hard to prevent the drops onto there since spine crawlers can't cover the whole ledge.
I generally play very defensively on LT vs terran. I try to get a few roaches out early and a sunken to stop any early harass (very minimal ling count). I usually expect that the terran will drop my natural cliff so I go quick lair and start spreading creep on the cliff with overlords. This stops turrets/bunkers which can make a cliff drop virtually unrecoverable. I usually get 3 or 4 queens out and reposition my spine crawler next to the ledge. Between the spine crawler, a few roaches and queens + the overlords spewing creep, this makes it very uncomfortable for the terran on that cliff.
If they do a tank/marine/svc drop, infested terrans will actually finish it off in this scenario. Otherwise if it's a thor you just need a few mutas spread out attacking it preferably while being healed by your queens.
The trick is to basically play the entire early game as though it's going to happen because if they catch you off guard with this, you're usually not in a position to stop it.
Sir, you have given me a lot to think about here. I like the idea because of how fast Mutalisks get downed in the wake of Marines....Infestors would put serious hurt in there for any other main ground units. I am going to review this further and attempt to apply it.
On February 22 2011 06:53 Nemireck wrote: LZGamer, in his coaching session with Bitter states that "Medivacs are actually the counter to infestor play." So I don't think that there is any easy solution to that problem.
Banelings, I would imagine are the key to fighting medivacs. Use the fungal not to deal damage to the marines, but to hold them in place and then clean up with a group of banelings since the marines won't be capable of kiting.
Just a thought, but has anyone tried neural parasiting medivacs in the absence of tanks?
Without tanks to snipe infestors, suddenly fungals do their regular damage, AND you have a medivac healing your own units.
Just a random thought, but might be something to try vs MMM with a lot of medivacs, or against a T with less siege tanks, or against marine tank if you fungal the tanks un-sieged (i.e.: catch him out of position)
Is there a way to deal with tank or thor drops with infestors on lost temple?? coz i find no way to prevent or defend those drops efficiently...ventral sags takes too long, i cannot engage a thor with my mutas, coz ussually there will be scv to repair it and its also hard to defend a tank drop with mutas, coz there will always be a bunch of marines to protect it. and even when i can defend it, i feel like i am behind in econ, for i have to cut drones to get faster tech ( mutas, ventral sacs).
has anyone tried to defend such drops with infestors? are infested terrans enough to deal with it?
I have some questions. You write that if he 1 rax expands you can get away with only 2 lings. How big are the chances to just crush his greedy expand with mass speedling if the natural is open? Second question: In what situation do you use spines to defend your natural. The third question trouble me the most, how can I deal with banshees using this opening. I mean obviously once you have infestors with fungals it gets easier, but how do you do it before (1 port or 2 port banshee).
On February 23 2011 18:09 ThisIsSparta_ wrote: Is there a way to deal with tank or thor drops with infestors on lost temple?? coz i find no way to prevent or defend those drops efficiently...ventral sags takes too long, i cannot engage a thor with my mutas, coz ussually there will be scv to repair it and its also hard to defend a tank drop with mutas, coz there will always be a bunch of marines to protect it. and even when i can defend it, i feel like i am behind in econ, for i have to cut drones to get faster tech ( mutas, ventral sacs).
has anyone tried to defend such drops with infestors? are infested terrans enough to deal with it?
read my response a few posts up infestors can't deal with thors. but a few mutas can - 4 queens can heal a few mutas to take down a thor. You obviously want to snipe the SVCs first though
I use to neural medivacs when battling no tank armies especially when i have ultras. Healed ultra is very very hard to kill, and comes out of the engagement at much better state
On February 23 2011 18:30 Sandermatt wrote: I have some questions. You write that if he 1 rax expands you can get away with only 2 lings. How big are the chances to just crush his greedy expand with mass speedling if the natural is open? Second question: In what situation do you use spines to defend your natural. The third question trouble me the most, how can I deal with banshees using this opening. I mean obviously once you have infestors with fungals it gets easier, but how do you do it before (1 port or 2 port banshee).
Its really hard to deal with banshees. your only chance to deal with it is to scout it. then you can add a few more queens ( i guess 4 are more than enough to fend his first push off) and as you but down 2 evos, when you start your layer you can throw down 2 spores on each expansion. with proper transfusions you should be able to hold it until your infestors are out. when he denies scouting, when you dont see the ports with our overlord...well then you can only hope that he has bad micro and you have luck..
your way to deal with thor drop sounds nice and i am sure it would work, but i will try if its possible to hold it off with infestors, coz they are too awesome against terran. and when i get infestors i get 4-5 at ones and i think they will be able to spawn enough IT to deal with a thor. i just need to test if i can get em out before my hatch is down, because i always wait until pathogen glands are halfway done before i spawn my first infestors. btw i always get 3-4 queens coz i fear terran could just go for banshees, so they can support my infestors to deal with the thor.
How do i know if terran goes for a thor drop and not just for a tank drop? beside scouting an armory of course
On February 23 2011 18:30 Sandermatt wrote: I have some questions. You write that if he 1 rax expands you can get away with only 2 lings. How big are the chances to just crush his greedy expand with mass speedling if the natural is open? Second question: In what situation do you use spines to defend your natural. The third question trouble me the most, how can I deal with banshees using this opening. I mean obviously once you have infestors with fungals it gets easier, but how do you do it before (1 port or 2 port banshee).
Its really hard to deal with banshees. your only chance to deal with it is to scout it. then you can add a few more queens ( i guess 4 are more than enough to fend his first push off) and as you but down 2 evos, when you start your layer you can throw down 2 spores on each expansion. with proper transfusions you should be able to hold it until your infestors are out. when he denies scouting, when you dont see the ports with our overlord...well then you can only hope that he has bad micro and you have luck..
Not scouting the 1/2port banshee is really rough. Getting a fast 3rd queen is always a great idea becasue your infestors LOOOVE creepspread, plus between 3 queens you can generally defend a 1-port banshee play until spores are up. A 2-port banshee play is going to be more delayed than a single starport. Bottom line, if you don't see tanks being made when you poke up, that gas has to be spent somewhere. It's either going heavy medivac, banshees or thors. Find out quick.
I'm a huge muta fan but honestly, I so want to try adapting to this playstyle. I always knew infestors are amongst the best units in my arsenal but was always too afraid to use them since they're quite an investment and require above-average micro. Also, I honestly think queens should be integrated better in these ling-infestor builds since you'll be able to get the air defense early on, the scouting and map control mutas provide through faster creep spread and a bunch of healbots for your ultras/broods later on.
P.S. MrBitter, I saw your stream the other day as you had that epic match against a 2900ish terran on shakuras horizontal. He totally destroyed your main with a marauder push through the rocks but you fought back with fungal/neural to win the game and make him ragequit. I was wondering if there's anywhere I can get that replay from since I can't, for the life of me, remember what his name was (Airforce, airsomething?). Maybe someone else here knows what I'm talking about and can point me in the right direction.
On February 23 2011 18:30 Sandermatt wrote: I have some questions. You write that if he 1 rax expands you can get away with only 2 lings. How big are the chances to just crush his greedy expand with mass speedling if the natural is open? Second question: In what situation do you use spines to defend your natural. The third question trouble me the most, how can I deal with banshees using this opening. I mean obviously once you have infestors with fungals it gets easier, but how do you do it before (1 port or 2 port banshee).
Its really hard to deal with banshees. your only chance to deal with it is to scout it. then you can add a few more queens ( i guess 4 are more than enough to fend his first push off) and as you but down 2 evos, when you start your layer you can throw down 2 spores on each expansion. with proper transfusions you should be able to hold it until your infestors are out. when he denies scouting, when you dont see the ports with our overlord...well then you can only hope that he has bad micro and you have luck..
Not scouting the 1/2port banshee is really rough. Getting a fast 3rd queen is always a great idea becasue your infestors LOOOVE creepspread, plus between 3 queens you can generally defend a 1-port banshee play until spores are up. A 2-port banshee play is going to be more delayed than a single starport. Bottom line, if you don't see tanks being made when you poke up, that gas has to be spent somewhere. It's either going heavy medivac, banshees or thors. Find out quick.
So if this strategies are so hard if unscouted, should I always steal the gas (even on maps like scrap station?)
This is a really interesting build that I like a lot. I've tried this and it seemed quite powerful.
I think Queens is an essential part of it lategame though. I honestly don't think ultras are that powerful even fully upgraded. Incorporating queens in for additional AA and Transfusion seems like a natural choice though. Also, creep spread is amazing with Ultras. The main advantage I see with Ultras over Brood Lords is speed. And with creep spread you can really move across the map quickly with ultralisks.
I'd just like to make a little note that as soon as the Pathogen Glands upgrade has gone past 30/80 in progress you can start building your infestors, and the upgrade will finish before your infestors pop (infestors take 50 seconds to hatch).
On February 23 2011 20:01 Tudi wrote: I'm a huge muta fan but honestly, I so want to try adapting to this playstyle. I always knew infestors are amongst the best units in my arsenal but was always too afraid to use them since they're quite an investment and require above-average micro. Also, I honestly think queens should be integrated better in these ling-infestor builds since you'll be able to get the air defense early on, the scouting and map control mutas provide through faster creep spread and a bunch of healbots for your ultras/broods later on.
P.S. MrBitter, I saw your stream the other day as you had that epic match against a 2900ish terran on shakuras horizontal. He totally destroyed your main with a marauder push through the rocks but you fought back with fungal/neural to win the game and make him ragequit. I was wondering if there's anywhere I can get that replay from since I can't, for the life of me, remember what his name was (Airforce, airsomething?). Maybe someone else here knows what I'm talking about and can point me in the right direction.
I am going to open roach 100% of the time on LT. This lets me deal with cliff stuff much more effectively. After opening roach, though, you can still transition into infestors at lair tech... Really just comes down to what you scout.
Oh man, that supply block immediately before the marauder push was painful to watch. It's the absolute worst feeling - when you not only supply block yourself, but you do it right at the exact moment in a game where you absolutely need to be creating as many units as humanly possible.
On February 23 2011 18:30 Sandermatt wrote: I have some questions. You write that if he 1 rax expands you can get away with only 2 lings. How big are the chances to just crush his greedy expand with mass speedling if the natural is open? Second question: In what situation do you use spines to defend your natural. The third question trouble me the most, how can I deal with banshees using this opening. I mean obviously once you have infestors with fungals it gets easier, but how do you do it before (1 port or 2 port banshee).
Its really hard to deal with banshees. your only chance to deal with it is to scout it. then you can add a few more queens ( i guess 4 are more than enough to fend his first push off) and as you but down 2 evos, when you start your layer you can throw down 2 spores on each expansion. with proper transfusions you should be able to hold it until your infestors are out. when he denies scouting, when you dont see the ports with our overlord...well then you can only hope that he has bad micro and you have luck..
Not scouting the 1/2port banshee is really rough. Getting a fast 3rd queen is always a great idea becasue your infestors LOOOVE creepspread, plus between 3 queens you can generally defend a 1-port banshee play until spores are up. A 2-port banshee play is going to be more delayed than a single starport. Bottom line, if you don't see tanks being made when you poke up, that gas has to be spent somewhere. It's either going heavy medivac, banshees or thors. Find out quick.
So if this strategies are so hard if unscouted, should I always steal the gas (even on maps like scrap station?)
i always steel gas, coz it will delay terrans banshee tech. except i see 2 rax..then its obviosly a waste of time and minerals to steal gas. whats the differents between stealing gas on scrap station or any other map?
On February 23 2011 20:01 Tudi wrote: I'm a huge muta fan but honestly, I so want to try adapting to this playstyle. I always knew infestors are amongst the best units in my arsenal but was always too afraid to use them since they're quite an investment and require above-average micro. Also, I honestly think queens should be integrated better in these ling-infestor builds since you'll be able to get the air defense early on, the scouting and map control mutas provide through faster creep spread and a bunch of healbots for your ultras/broods later on.
P.S. MrBitter, I saw your stream the other day as you had that epic match against a 2900ish terran on shakuras horizontal. He totally destroyed your main with a marauder push through the rocks but you fought back with fungal/neural to win the game and make him ragequit. I was wondering if there's anywhere I can get that replay from since I can't, for the life of me, remember what his name was (Airforce, airsomething?). Maybe someone else here knows what I'm talking about and can point me in the right direction.
I am going to open roach 100% of the time on LT. This lets me deal with cliff stuff much more effectively. After opening roach, though, you can still transition into infestors at lair tech... Really just comes down to what you scout.
when you open roach, do you research overlord drop and speed? its an huge investment, but you can do sick counter attacks while terran is harrassing your natural.
I am going to open roach 100% of the time on LT. This lets me deal with cliff stuff much more effectively. After opening roach, though, you can still transition into infestors at lair tech... Really just comes down to what you scout.
Thank you for the link, I'll check it out since it was one of my favorite games I've seen on your stream
Regarding the roach idea, I used to think a couple of spine crawlers + transfuses would work much better, because then I could skip roach warren. But in the last few weeks or so, every ZvT I play I'm actually forced to make a roach warren since I'm either against a hellion harasser or a tank leapfrogger.
i always steel gas, coz it will delay terrans banshee tech. except i see 2 rax..then its obviosly a waste of time and minerals to steal gas. whats the differents between stealing gas on scrap station or any other map?
I guess any close air/long rush positions immediately spark the possibility of early air and skinny defenses. In a banshee rush, the 15-20 seconds you win on a close air map against zerg are crucial imho, since we either need lair tech or evo + spores. The alternative of course is massing up queens with the extra minerals, a tactic that I always favor over a quick lair
I have done really good with this build haven't been defeated by any terran since i started using this actually. (i'm diamond zerg with ~1700 rating)
I think the key here is to use your infestors wisely i have encountered marine siege tank with really melts away against this, also full mech isn't that good if you can get your upgrades fast enough and put up 2-3 spinecrawlers then tech to ultras banelings with 3 or more bases it is pretty much GG. (especially if you can deny the 3rd base of terran) I don't think hellions really matter if you can use fungal growth with high efficiency. You should scout well against Destiny Cloud Fist or drops and if you macro well enough you are good to go.
This build changed my whole game not only against T but with also against P. Thanks to MrBitter for making game a little bit more interesting for me ^^
Im also moving more towards a roach opening. It seems that the cost of a roach warren early isnt really a huge detriment against things like MMM or marine tank, you can still crush them quite easily, and even against those, making a couple of roaches isnt so bad. And in other cases, like against blue flame hellions or mech in general, and cliff drops on LT you really need that early roach warren to make the roaches. You could make spines instead, but then you are still in a terrible spot to ever move out of your base, take a third, and so on. Making spines just feels dumb, because then, you end up having the weaker army, and also less overall mobility than the terran. So imo, early roach warren ftw.
This build is definitely going to change with the upcoming patch. fungal growth will deal damage faster and stun for a shorter while. As far as I can see the pros are that you dont really rely on banelings and they cant really kite lings, so on the battlefield I dont see the infestors as being any weaker (that is unless PDD can actually stop it since it's a projectile now)
The huge con on the other hand is that drops is going to be a huge pain in the ass to stop without mutalisks now since it takes alot of energy to hold medivacs in place untill IT's can hatch. On the other hand, if you catch the drop as it has already commenced you can make quick work off it seeing as the medivac will have a much harder time outhealing the damage from FG.
Another thing to take into consideration is that you can now within 12 seconds do 140 damage to siegetanks and marauders (3 FGs with 30% increased damage)
It's really going to be interesting seeing how this will turn out, if the strat can basically be negated with PDD's (atleast ravens are a juicy NP target) or changed into zergs answer to psistorm.
But my friend did a fast helion tank push with siege and started sieging my spine crawlers. my infestors popped out but i had only zerglings. Should I delay the infestation pit when I see hes going pure mech? i really need roaches to deal with so much helions.
On February 27 2011 04:10 Falcon_NL wrote: Hey thanks for the build,
But my friend did a fast helion tank push with siege and started sieging my spine crawlers. my infestors popped out but i had only zerglings. Should I delay the infestation pit when I see hes going pure mech? i really need roaches to deal with so much helions.
thanks
Have to be adaptive. Roaches are never a bad idea against big hellion plays.
This new patch really screws up the Infetors. That projectile addition is the WORST. What's the point if you can so easily dodge it? Check it out:
Granted blink is fast but I don't see Stimed Marines being any different. Infestors will now just be useful to harrass at mineral lines and only if they don't have turrents/cannon/& nearby units.
On February 27 2011 07:54 madzumo wrote: This new patch really screws up the Infetors. That projectile addition is the WORST. What's the point if you can so easily dodge it? Check it out:
Granted blink is fast but I don't see Stimed Marines being any different. Infestors will now just be useful to harrass at mineral lines and only if they don't have turrents/cannon/& nearby units.
Nah you're wrong, Fungal is twice as good as it used to be, even with it being a projectile. Its DPS is 2x better and 2.6x better versus armored. I tried it out in the unit tester, its really really strong now, despite the reduced stun duration.
That video was impractical, you don't want to use fungal against a few blink stalkers anyway, a VR/Colossus ball is NOT going to dodge fungal.
On February 27 2011 07:54 madzumo wrote: This new patch really screws up the Infetors. That projectile addition is the WORST. What's the point if you can so easily dodge it? Check it out:
Granted blink is fast but I don't see Stimed Marines being any different. Infestors will now just be useful to harrass at mineral lines and only if they don't have turrents/cannon/& nearby units.
Nah you're wrong, Fungal is twice as good as it used to be, even with it being a projectile. Its DPS is 2x better and 2.6x better versus armored. I tried it out in the unit tester, its really really strong now, despite the reduced stun duration.
That video was impractical, you don't want to use fungal against a few blink stalkers anyway, a VR/Colossus ball is NOT going to dodge fungal.
I hope you're right. However, Fungal was quite practical FOR blink stalkers, stimmed marines trying to get away etc. A delay tactic if you will for your upgraded 3-3 Lings to clean up. How else are you suppose to surround now those darn Stalkers if you can't halt them? According to this post topic I digress. I suppose we'll have to play with this new unit. A once support caster delay unit now mutated to an offense projectile unit. As Mr. Bitter stated its' use will now be tricky.
On February 27 2011 07:54 madzumo wrote: This new patch really screws up the Infetors. That projectile addition is the WORST. What's the point if you can so easily dodge it? Check it out:
Granted blink is fast but I don't see Stimed Marines being any different. Infestors will now just be useful to harrass at mineral lines and only if they don't have turrents/cannon/& nearby units.
Nah you're wrong, Fungal is twice as good as it used to be, even with it being a projectile. Its DPS is 2x better and 2.6x better versus armored. I tried it out in the unit tester, its really really strong now, despite the reduced stun duration.
That video was impractical, you don't want to use fungal against a few blink stalkers anyway, a VR/Colossus ball is NOT going to dodge fungal.
I really feel like you're the one who's wrong here.
Just because you can fungal some stalkers do death in a unit tester doesn't make it anywhere near practical.
If you walk your infestors anywhere near the toss ball, they're going to die. Period.
The extra DPS is meaningless because the overall damage done is virtually unchanged.
Ask yourself this:
How good is fungal growth vs a Toss ball now?
It has minimal application, and none of it revolves around the damage mechanic of fungal.
What makes you think that doing the same amount of damage in less time is going to change anything? The rest of your army is still going to melt just as fast, the projectile mechanic of the spell makes hitting anything a chore, and the units you do manage to fungal are going to giggle because the damage barely even tickles...
The single good thing coming out of this change is the fact that fungal can now out damage Medivac heals. That has no bearing on ZvP, though, which, for some reason, is what this discussion has devolved into.
I just watched the video above, and -- yeesh, that looks easy to dodge.
It makes fungal no longer good for shutting down drops and air play, not to mention hellions. If it's going to be that goddamn slow then it's a huge nerf to fungal. The extra damage vs. armored is pretty irrelevant since the only units against which the damage part of fungal is normally a big deal are lings, banelings, workers, marines, mutas, and hellions -- all of which are light.
On February 27 2011 07:54 madzumo wrote: This new patch really screws up the Infetors. That projectile addition is the WORST. What's the point if you can so easily dodge it? Check it out:
Granted blink is fast but I don't see Stimed Marines being any different. Infestors will now just be useful to harrass at mineral lines and only if they don't have turrents/cannon/& nearby units.
Nah you're wrong, Fungal is twice as good as it used to be, even with it being a projectile. Its DPS is 2x better and 2.6x better versus armored. I tried it out in the unit tester, its really really strong now, despite the reduced stun duration.
That video was impractical, you don't want to use fungal against a few blink stalkers anyway, a VR/Colossus ball is NOT going to dodge fungal.
I hope you're right. However, Fungal was quite practical FOR blink stalkers, stimmed marines trying to get away etc. A delay tactic if you will for your upgraded 3-3 Lings to clean up. How else are you suppose to surround now those darn Stalkers if you can't halt them? According to this post topic I digress. I suppose we'll have to play with this new unit. A once support caster delay unit now mutated to an offense projectile unit. As Mr. Bitter stated its' use will now be tricky.
yes and now its not more for hitting units that are trying to get away but as a dmg dealer spell, against marines its amazingly good, I think I'll need to prespread my marines a lot more now, and I can see muta infestor be a killer in tvz, not even talking about ultra infestor
i think the true test of how this effects things is when the top level competitions have pro replays showing it. i've given up on theory crafting cause its very chaos theory. you alter one thing you change so many dynamics.
hi. long time TL forum surfer but first time poster. here's a replay of my attempt at emulating this strategy in 1v1 ladder (platinum). i had to try it out after watching the IdrA replay linked in the OP. if you have any thoughts feel free to me know
I'm trying a ling/infestor/ultralisk build on the ladder since a few days and it's really extremely strong, though very vulnerable to banshee (esp. double starport) play. You can engage Terran armies cost for cost, especially if you manage to get an upgrade advantage, which isn't too hard since you have a lot of excess gas in the early phases and can afford double-evo with just melee and armor, while the terran needs infantry and mech upgrades (unless he skips infantry completely).
About the strength of Ultralisks to bust Terran strongpoints i made a small video from a recent game where 8 ultralisks and lots of zerglings destroyed about 15 tanks, 2 thors, a bunch of marines and a PF and at the end i still had 7 ultralisks.
The opponent (though ~2.4k diamond) was lacking in upgrades, but his tanks were nicely spread. I mostly a-moved in and didn't micro at all, nor did i use fungal growth (i tried infested terran bombs earlier, but he scanned the infestors and killed most of them).
Important part is: First send in the ultralisks and let them tank siege damage, then follow up with the speedlings immedatly when the ultralisks take the first hits. This way most of your Zerglings will survive until they are close enough to use their high DPS to kill everything.
This build is great but i think its best to swhicth to mutas on 3 bases excactly before the tanks becomes a critical mass. its really good i have checked it myself.
You know, its great that you can change up this build in the later stages of the game.
But really, reacting to what the enemy does while doing this build is devestating to the enemy because its the most solid ZvT build i have seen so far.
When using this style, I've really been struggling at securing a third against terrans who like mobility - dropship play, (blue)hellions, or banshees - any kind of map dominance that lings can't deal with on their own just makes me feel terrified because I can't see ANYTHING. - I often end up underdroning, too.
Sticking to Muta/baneling til I can figure out what I'm missing on this or w/e
Something I have found to work if you are really fearing those drops and unable to split your army or any other poking threat. Is to have a set goal. When I play I Have a direct goal of 5 mutas per base, and 1.5(rounded up or down as I see fit) per base. So Whether I go muta first or Infestor first on 2 bases ill make 10 mutas then make my tech to infestors, or if i go infestor first ill make sure to have my group of 10 lings or so ready to defend my bases with an infestor till spire is ready. infestors are more gas-unit heavy than mutas but you don't need a huge mass of them, and as long as you don't go "I'm going to make as many mutas as possible" you are still free to upgrade/tech etc. I honestly think that the problem with a bunch of people going muta ling/bling is that they make too many mutas which are just terribly cost inefficient but allow for map control and that sense of security.
I forget my rank, 2k plat I guess so I am horrible at this game by pro standards. But I do play with Diamond ranked players who are my friends. And thinking this way has helped me not die Quite so bad vs them.
On March 04 2011 16:31 sylverfyre wrote: When using this style, I've really been struggling at securing a third against terrans who like mobility - dropship play, (blue)hellions, or banshees - any kind of map dominance that lings can't deal with on their own just makes me feel terrified because I can't see ANYTHING. - I often end up underdroning, too.
Sticking to Muta/baneling til I can figure out what I'm missing on this or w/e
Infestors. Lots of infestors.
Dropship play: Dropships can easily get fungaled, then just throw down 3-4 infested terrans and kill them before they can escape. 1 infestor can fungal while the others move in from your main army, if necessary keep 2 infestors per mining base.
Hellions: Fungal Growth -> Fungal Growth -> Fungal Growth -> Hellions dead (You can add queens, too)
Banshees: Fungal Growth (decloaks them) -> Gather queens -> Fungal again -> Kill banshees with queens
The only thing this build is really vulnerable to are double starport banshees without cloak as they arrive before you can get enough infestors, though if you scout that build, then you can get 2 more queens per base and/or spore crawlers. You won't need that many lings after all => more larva for drones.
3350 master zerg here, some feedback from playing against aggressive terrans around 3500-3600 master level:
feels like this build is flawed because the main problem is that terran can get fast 3rd on any long ground distance map (ie metalopolis cross position), you cannot really punish him because he has a much smaller area he needs to defend than against mutaling. Then another problem is, once terran gets 3rd base, he can literally start dropping you everywhere on map and even though you may have static defense, that will drop down fast because of upgraded rines, not to mention he can snipe your hatcheries with just a handful of units. The drops become really unhandleable and it puts you to a defensive position until you get ultras and broodlords, and at that point terran may already have 3rd expo CC building as PF.
maybe it's just me doing something wrong, but this build seems like a paradise for hyperaggressive terrans, however it works very well against the passive ones. I'll try to implement defensive nyduses to be able to cover for drops since my army has to move back and forth otherwise.
have to say though, the style of play has an incredibly high skill ceiling and takes enormous amounts of practice to see those aggressive terran drops as second nature.
On March 10 2011 14:21 EonuS wrote: 3350 master zerg here, some feedback from playing against aggressive terrans around 3500-3600 master level:
feels like this build is flawed because the main problem is that terran can get fast 3rd on any long ground distance map (ie metalopolis cross position), you cannot really punish him because he has a much smaller area he needs to defend than against mutaling. Then another problem is, once terran gets 3rd base, he can literally start dropping you everywhere on map and even though you may have static defense, that will drop down fast because of upgraded rines, not to mention he can snipe your hatcheries with just a handful of units. The drops become really unhandleable and it puts you to a defensive position until you get ultras and broodlords, and at that point terran may already have 3rd expo CC building as PF.
maybe it's just me doing something wrong, but this build seems like a paradise for hyperaggressive terrans, however it works very well against the passive ones. I'll try to implement defensive nyduses to be able to cover for drops since my army has to move back and forth otherwise.
have to say though, the style of play has an incredibly high skill ceiling and takes enormous amounts of practice to see those aggressive terran drops as second nature.
I'm just a diamond noob, but i somehow don't see how that can happen.
1. Drops get completely shut down by Infestors. Fungal growth the medivac (if possible on a place where he can't drop the marines), if he drops the marines fungal everything again while 20 of your heavily upgraded speedlings run back. If he tries to run, drop infested terrans and shoot down the medivacs. As MrBitter says in some of his lessons, you have to be able to split your army very fast on the fly. No 1-hotkey syndrome allowed.
2. The terran can't get a third up very fast, because speedlings give a lot of mapcontrol and unless he has lots of tanks he can't defend his natural and third at the same time effectively. You need very good scouting for that and as soon as he tries to get his third up, attack it with ~10 Speedlings and deny it until he moves in his army, putting him on the backfoot. Then scout his natural and try to see if you can make a run-by.
3. Infestors allow you to harass very easily. For example: On Shattered Temple throw infested terrans up the cliff of his main (with overlord spotting) and start killing buildings. He has to send defenses to kill your energy-only units or he will lose buildings. On Xel'Naga Caverns throw infested terrans from the cliff on the low ground expansion or up into his main). Especially the lowground mineral line is vulnerable to infested terran harass and getting fungaled. Think of your infestors as slightly weaker, burrowed high templars that can spit out marines, much like the banshees are flying, ranged dark templars, except infestors are more awesome.
With this build you very much rely on good speedling control, good scouting and good reaction time/minimap awareness. It has an extremly high skill ceiling, but once you get a feeling for infestors and how effective speedlings actually are, it is actually extremly rewarding. Just don't make the mistake i always do and drone too much while thinking "my infestors can slow any push anyways, i'll just drone a little more"... while not having hive or ultralisks ready when his 2 base 8 thor push arrives.
I've been playing around with this style a lot recently too and find it really dam awesome for dealing with alot of 2 base timing attacks with tanks and marines. Thanks for doing all the work! :D
I'm just a diamond noob, but i somehow don't see how that can happen.
1. Drops get completely shut down by Infestors. Fungal growth the medivac (if possible on a place where he can't drop the marines), if he drops the marines fungal everything again while 20 of your heavily upgraded speedlings run back. If he tries to run, drop infested terrans and shoot down the medivacs. As MrBitter says in some of his lessons, you have to be able to split your army very fast on the fly. No 1-hotkey syndrome allowed.
They do get shut down by infestors if you expect the incoming attack, but without mutas, there will always be few vikings on the field to prevent any sort of sight from the zerg, I mean, he can easily make 2 vikings for harass since he has a reactored starport anyway. The main point of these drops is to delay you from being aggressive against him while he gets expansions up and running. It's a low risk-high reward choice since medivacs are both dropships and medics at once, even though it may seem like he's in disadvantage after losing all of those drops, it pays off once his expo starts running. Once he does that, the difficulty of keeping control as zerg increases exponentially.
The main problem with fungals is, most of the good terrans already know how to spread marines enough to avoid having all of them hit not to mention that because of the vikings keeping your overlord sight away, you have that much less time to react to a drop, especially if you are already fighting for position against his main army.
2. The terran can't get a third up very fast, because speedlings give a lot of mapcontrol and unless he has lots of tanks he can't defend his natural and third at the same time effectively. You need very good scouting for that and as soon as he tries to get his third up, attack it with ~10 Speedlings and deny it until he moves in his army, putting him on the backfoot. Then scout his natural and try to see if you can make a run-by.
First of all, denying the 3rd with just a handful of speedlings is not something that works against better players. Not only that most of them build the command center somewhere where it's safe from harass (ie outside their natural) but also, all you need to do is have a handful of spread marines (you scout infestation play with a scan anyway -- fast 2 evos which indicates heavy ground and no mutas?) and 2-3 tanks in order to defend against any sort of harass. let's take metalopolis cross position as prime example. Terran can defend both natural and expo with 3-4 sieged tanks and marines, and you do NOT want to hit a fortified position with a heavy ground army. It may work if you have perfectly placed infested terrans to soak the damage from tanks but the good players know what focus fire means. It's still a tough fight but all I am saying it, it is very much easier to get a faster 3rd down with this kind of play than with mutaling. Let's say, terran can start building the expo at 10th minute instead of the usual 12th-13th without any prior battling.
3. Infestors allow you to harass very easily. For example: On Shattered Temple throw infested terrans up the cliff of his main (with overlord spotting) and start killing buildings. He has to send defenses to kill your energy-only units or he will lose buildings. On Xel'Naga Caverns throw infested terrans from the cliff on the low ground expansion or up into his main). Especially the lowground mineral line is vulnerable to infested terran harass and getting fungaled. Think of your infestors as slightly weaker, burrowed high templars that can spit out marines, much like the banshees are flying, ranged dark templars, except infestors are more awesome.
I can agree to this, I use them aggressively in attempt to deny terran's 3rd myself this way.
With this build you very much rely on good speedling control, good scouting and good reaction time/minimap awareness. It has an extremly high skill ceiling, but once you get a feeling for infestors and how effective speedlings actually are, it is actually extremly rewarding. Just don't make the mistake i always do and drone too much while thinking "my infestors can slow any push anyways, i'll just drone a little more"... while not having hive or ultralisks ready when his 2 base 8 thor push arrives.
Can also agree with the high skill ceiling, however the only problem I feel is that it's very underused because mutaling does almost same good job as the infestor play does, and that is probabbly why most of the zergs don't use it yet, but now that every terran already blind counters mutaling play it's best to start thinking of new ways to evolve the metagame.
disclaimer -- everything I've said is based on my own opinion and experience
On February 27 2011 07:54 madzumo wrote: This new patch really screws up the Infetors. That projectile addition is the WORST. What's the point if you can so easily dodge it? Check it out:
Granted blink is fast but I don't see Stimed Marines being any different. Infestors will now just be useful to harrass at mineral lines and only if they don't have turrents/cannon/& nearby units.
OH MY GOD! That green goo ball is SOOOO slow!!
Here I was thinking it was going to be like a Viking missile or something. When I see ludicrous things such as Slag Pits or removing Kaydarin Amulet, I wonder if the people in charge have any idea what they’re doing.
Now marines will stim and be like "LOL infestors"! Seriously, if they stim and run straight forward past the missile they’ll kill the infestor without being hit.
Splendid...
The game is more balanced as it is right now. Sigh... This will make the Infestor an officially useless unit. Why????
interesting idea am only gold lvl player myself but this does not seem like a good idea to me I play teran myself and i find mutas extremely annoying. When i see an infestor however i think: "o hey an infestor, hmm that doesnt do annything, lets go forward"
my biggest concern would be that zerg has no air unit wich allows the terran/toss to completely skip air defence as well and go hardcore on tank hellion/ maybe marauder or zealot immortal Muta forces marine and although most zerg see the marine as extremely powerfull, it isnt the strongest unit terran has beside that i dont see how zerg could keep terran countained for a while because without mutas terran is basicly free to leave his base with a wall and 1 tank behind?
I've been playing more in this style on certain maps and certain positions (like close metal). Previously I said it seemed like it'd struggle against tank play, but I've been finding the opposite. Infested Terrans + ling/bling with a heavy ling % work wonders vs tank pushes. So long as you can get within 9? range of the tanks without being scanned you can just vomit out ITs to cover your engagement. If the T player has more than 1-2 tanks I find it to be much more effective to use ITs rather than FG.
On March 11 2011 01:31 Rassy wrote: interesting idea am only gold lvl player myself but this does not seem like a good idea to me I play teran myself and i find mutas extremely annoying. When i see an infestor however i think: "o hey an infestor, hmm that doesnt do annything, lets go forward"
my biggest concern would be that zerg has no air unit wich allows the terran/toss to completely skip air defence as well and go hardcore on tank hellion/ maybe marauder or zealot immortal Muta forces marine and although most zerg see the marine as extremely powerfull, it isnt the strongest unit terran has beside that i dont see how zerg could keep terran countained for a while because without mutas terran is basicly free to leave his base with a wall and 1 tank behind?
Not really. In Gold, your opponents don't know how to control Infestors and Zerglings correctly. At a higher level, if you leave your base to push, he will fungal your army along the way and hit your natural with speedlings and kill all your SCVs. And he will still have enough lings to crush your push. Sure he won’t kill your main, but he will do enough damage or force you to turtle up hard while he takes his fourth and fifth bases.
And marine IS the strongest unit terran has for cost.
How about adding defensive nydus worms? So as to connect bases and allow for an army retreat. Plus, it is one more thing for the terran player to worry about... they have to pay more attention to their base.
I have good win% with this style of play. Most terrans in high diamond/low masters can't break it. Usually i have to make 4/5 broodlords before the ultras, just to buy time. Plus it forces more marines/vikings.
Nydus worms work really nice with ultras... not so much with zerglings though, because of the bottleneck mechanic. Hit and run attacks are the way to go. Multiple nydus worms are a must. You can't expect to land single worms. It's best to do counterattacks with the nydus worms than to attack a turtling terran... that simply won't happen. Drops followed by worms work well also. Retreating once the defence arrives is imperative. In this scenario, adding some hydras for the dps helps me from time to time. Nydus also help to stall till the ultras arrive... it serves as a pin. Especially when heavy mech comes into play.
Too bad you don't see a lot of nydus play in top level games. Maybe some in zvp.
The health buff was just revoked in the re-opened PTR... Along with the missile cast! Instant cast is back, baby. Mr Bitter, think Infestors are still viable with this change?
On March 11 2011 06:54 GreatestThreat wrote: The health buff was just revoked in the re-opened PTR... Along with the missile cast! Instant cast is back, baby. Mr Bitter, think Infestors are still viable with this change?
Cautiously optimistic... Still not sure how drops are supposed to be dealt with, but after watching Losira's games I'm feeling like I can continue to practice this style without feeling like mutas are a must have in every single game.
You know, one thing I was actually apprehensive about with this style when I first started trying it out, was the fact that I never felt like I needed muta's again, and I was excited at a new way to play zerg but I didn't want to just see one standard style replaced by another. The more variation introduced into the game the better, in my opinion. But the other day I was watching ROOTSlush and SlayersCella on stream, and in their ZvT games they were both using a mix of ling/bling/roach/infestor/muta, techswitching back and forth as the games progressed. That looked to me like the future of zerg.
I don't want to have to make muta's every game either, but I don't want to feel like they're useless if I go with infestors instead. The new patch seems like an awesome compromise between the two.
i think if the terran is making a huge gas investment in many many drops. then you should be able to spend like 700 gas on spire + 5 mutas. Didnt try it myself, but it should complety deny drops, with FG + Mutas.
Marines should die so fast to 2 FG (the 4 seconds one), that medivacs shouldnt be able to heal them, marauderer can be keep busy with lings... meanwhile the mutas beign definding the "other" base will have time to come back and defend this one, and so on for each expansion.
I saw your replays (and idra's), pretty cool style. And you could spare the extra gas here and there on the mid game, it shouldnt be so big of a sacrifice
I honestly don't know if the change will be that big for ZvT
The standard for terran is tank/rine Tanks will still roast infestors before fungal gets off If the terran goes mech - fungal is useless - infestors will die before they get in range, and tanks are usually spread and thors have so much health 46 is barely a scratch Unless there is something I am not thinking of, I don't think the metagame will shift away from muta
The change really effects ZvZ I haven't really seen any interesting ZvP infestor use yet
On March 23 2011 16:29 Hambone636 wrote: I honestly don't know if the change will be that big for ZvT
The standard for terran is tank/rine Tanks will still roast infestors before fungal gets off If the terran goes mech - fungal is useless - infestors will die before they get in range, and tanks are usually spread and thors have so much health 46 is barely a scratch Unless there is something I am not thinking of, I don't think the metagame will shift away from muta
The change really effects ZvZ I haven't really seen any interesting ZvP infestor use yet
I keep hearing people say this but if you charge the siege line with all your lings and THEN fungal, the tanks are going to be firing at zerglings, not infestors. It's really not any different than using banelings, just make sure you get a good positioning and don't send the infestors in alone, they're a support unit for the lings, and the double DPS only makes them much, much better in that capacity.
Yeah infestors will without a doubt be the future of ZvT. People can stop complaining about marines 24/7 as 2 INSTANT cast fungal growths kill them and then some. Even without mutas(althought they are rarely a bad idea..) the Terran is forced to micro his army all across the map. And if you're getting burrow for infestors, you have burrowed banelings... This strategy/composition is and will be extremely strong in the metagame and that will not change any time soon.
Fungal and NP aren't the only useful spells when engaging the Terran ball. Upgraded lings take two shots to kill from a tank. If they upgrade tanks they start doing more splash to friendly units, and if they're going heavy tanks, popping a few infested terrans will cause lots of damage.
I feel that since patch 1.3 you hardly even need banelings to deal with marines anymore. You can rely on infestors almost totally and save your gas for something else.
I'd suggest that the other be a few mutas to deal with drops/banshees.
The new infestors are terribad vs drops and banshees.
I've been experimenting with Infestors a bit lately, opening with them in the midgame and using a heavy upgrade melee style works good and destroys marineballs, even with tank support, as with a Fungal or two, all marines die and 1+/1+ Zerglings are just very good against the small marine/tank balls of the midgame. Also, blue flame hellions are killable with a good fungal + surround, though it is not optimal vs. mech. If you see heavy tank + mech, I still advise Muta first (with Roaches).
In the late midgame, you need Mutas to stop drops, but 6-8 is all you need to defend, as long as you stick them on defensive duty (not that much baseharass). Spire also opens up my lategame transition: broodlords. Because of the ease of Viking production, Broodlords were supotimal siege busters in 1.2, but Infestors kill Viking blobs in 3 Fungals now! With some Corruptors or the leftover mutas as support, Broodlords are very hard to deal with now. And I love the melee upgrades for my Broodlings
On maps where your third is far away from your second/main, you might want to go Muta before Infestor, as stopping drops is a lot harder in those circumstances. I tried a broodwar-esque small amount of mutas (for map control, and to keep the terran at home for a bit) to buy time for infestor/broodlord (which function as lurker/guardian), everything supported by quick cracklings that can take on the terran straight up or backstab easily. Problem is that mutas or much worse in taking on early marine groups than in brood war. Stupid stacking marines
3500 master Zerg and this is by far my favorite build (it's GODLY against marine/tank)... though I would make a few points:
1) Stopping drops isn't that hard provided you have good overlord spread (and hell otherwise). I think it's going to become more important for Terrans in the future to use vikings to deny overlord spread. Maybe this will make having more queens and a better creep spread more important in order to be able to kill these vikings outside your base (perhaps this may prompt a small muta transition as well on maps with lots of open air). 2) Burrow (mainly for infestors) isn't simple to use, but is very good to initiate an engagement. If he has faltered in detection and you managed to get some infestors near the sieged tanks, throw 4-5 infested terrans near his marines and rush in immediatly with your lings. Then unburrow, FG and more infested terrans. 3) At least for me, this build allows enough gas for drops very early. Throw some 16 lings in his base the second he moves out for the lolz (put 8 of these lings near his barracks/factories and the rest at the mineral line). Also, infestor drops are awsome (two 150 energy infestors are almost guaranteed to kill at least 10 SCVs). 4) If he hasn't kept up in upgrades, you will win as soon as ultras with armor are out. Simple as that (heck, it doesn't even matter if he's turtling, since you can just doom drop his main).
I have a feeling Terrans are gonna want to transition OUT of pure marine/tank/medivac given how powerful infestor/ling is against it. The hardest thing, in my opinion, is maintaining your macro, since lings are so damn larva innefective! I've done games with 2-3 macro hatches and 1-2 bases more than I needed because of the crazy resource buildup (until, of course you reach ultras).
On a side note, I remember a custom map which was regular SC2 except with some small changes. One of them was a 150/150 lair upgrade that made lings twice as expensive, took 50% longer to build, but 4 popped out instead of 2. Meaning 4 lings would take only 1 larva to make (though they took 50% longer).
On March 23 2011 16:29 Hambone636 wrote: I honestly don't know if the change will be that big for ZvT
The standard for terran is tank/rine Tanks will still roast infestors before fungal gets off If the terran goes mech - fungal is useless - infestors will die before they get in range, and tanks are usually spread and thors have so much health 46 is barely a scratch Unless there is something I am not thinking of, I don't think the metagame will shift away from muta
The change really effects ZvZ I haven't really seen any interesting ZvP infestor use yet
I keep hearing people say this but if you charge the siege line with all your lings and THEN fungal, the tanks are going to be firing at zerglings, not infestors. It's really not any different than using banelings, just make sure you get a good positioning and don't send the infestors in alone, they're a support unit for the lings, and the double DPS only makes them much, much better in that capacity.
This. people keep talking about infestors being too fragile against siege lines. Well so are banelings, and they are a lot riskier since a successful attack involves losing them, whereas you get to keep your infestors in some cases. The fact that this build frees up so much gas for grabbing early upgrades is crucial, with armor and a good two pronged attack you can easily get to the middle of a siege line and completely open up the T for those deadly fungals (especially when you have creep spread to help).
I've been playing with the double ling upgrades but tend to rely on Mutas still.
The best part of this guide is the emphasis on double evo ups lings. as long as you're dumping enough gas to keep them relevant, lings are where's its in ZvT.
Another cool thing about this build I just remembered, you can try and fend off banshees with some extra queens(5-6), then use their energy later on for some beastly transfuse support on ultras.
Wait does fungal damage stack??? I havent used infestors yet but I see here and there people saying 2 instant casts and marines die. Does this mean you can cast fungal, and while rines are still fungaled cast again and the damage stacks? Im pretty sure Im wrong because that would be too damn cheap.
On March 29 2011 01:09 Chinesewonder wrote: Wait does fungal damage stack??? I havent used infestors yet but I see here and there people saying 2 instant casts and marines die. Does this mean you can cast fungal, and while rines are still fungaled cast again and the damage stacks? Im pretty sure Im wrong because that would be too damn cheap.
On March 29 2011 01:09 Chinesewonder wrote: Wait does fungal damage stack??? I havent used infestors yet but I see here and there people saying 2 instant casts and marines die. Does this mean you can cast fungal, and while rines are still fungaled cast again and the damage stacks? Im pretty sure Im wrong because that would be too damn cheap.
no no it means that you cast a fungal and it drops them all to like ~5hp then they can be fungaled right after. you can overlap them somewhere in the middle of the time and still kill them because of the huge overkill on the 2nd cast, anyhow
On March 29 2011 01:09 Chinesewonder wrote: Wait does fungal damage stack??? I havent used infestors yet but I see here and there people saying 2 instant casts and marines die. Does this mean you can cast fungal, and while rines are still fungaled cast again and the damage stacks? Im pretty sure Im wrong because that would be too damn cheap.
It doesn't matter, you only need 1.5 fungals to kill a marine (45 or 55hp with shield vs 36 damage all the time. 36 + 18 = 54 damage). You just need to cast around half way through (after ~2 seconds) and your 2 fungals kill everything, stack or not.
On March 29 2011 01:09 Chinesewonder wrote: Wait does fungal damage stack??? I havent used infestors yet but I see here and there people saying 2 instant casts and marines die. Does this mean you can cast fungal, and while rines are still fungaled cast again and the damage stacks? Im pretty sure Im wrong because that would be too damn cheap.
No the damage does not stack, when you cast a new fungal the previous one will be reset You do ~9 dps on light, ~ 12 dps on armored.
Ideal time to cast on a marine ball obviously is when they have just stimmed, leads to insta death after 4 seconds
On March 29 2011 01:09 Chinesewonder wrote: Wait does fungal damage stack??? I havent used infestors yet but I see here and there people saying 2 instant casts and marines die. Does this mean you can cast fungal, and while rines are still fungaled cast again and the damage stacks? Im pretty sure Im wrong because that would be too damn cheap.
no no it means that you cast a fungal and it drops them all to like ~5hp then they can be fungaled right after. you can overlap them somewhere in the middle of the time and still kill them because of the huge overkill on the 2nd cast, anyhow
So you can cast and while units are still fungaled, cast again and the damage resets? I.E u can cast, wait 1 second and cast again on marines and they instant die? sorry this is what i originally meant.
Terran stims a blob of marines, they run forwards, you fungal the left half of the blob, the right half of the blob, repeat as fast as you can just to seal the deal (you can't be too quick), and they all die.
On March 29 2011 02:23 vahgar.r24 wrote: This works only if terran goes Mech- Thor/Mass tanks? What abt a straight up bio ball..also if terran 4 rax pushes i doubt you can defend..
no you will still have banes. muta is not really going to help you a lot in the situations you describe .. probably a lot less than infestors would.
Haha, the Dimaga games were so epic, though I think MVP handled it really well the first game by just kiting those ultras with marine marauder stim+concuss, and teching to cattle bruisers, which are pretty much a hard counter to this build (since its somewhat weak vs air) and would have won if it wasn't for failnet 2.0. I think this strat might be the way to go against a heavy mech build, but for standard marine medic siege builds its ling muta all the way ( as game 2 showed )
I've been playing with Mass ling, Baneling, Infestor Mid-game, and one of the other things about using this, with the transition to Ultralisks, is that a "Safety Spire" is always a good idea.
First, you generally have resources left over around your transition to Hive tech to drop one down. This lines up with some Terran transition timings over to Banshees to deal with your massive Ground and Pound Army.
Second, Planetary Fortresses are a GIANT PAIN IN THE ASS. Transitioning briefly to Muta/Corruptor in the mix, or showing that transition and making Terran WAAYYY over compensate for Muta's can force more Marines for your Banelings to wipe out, and spend resources on Missle Turrets, taking away from his army. In so doing, you can get Brood Lords to deal with PF's and the turrets if you do a full on Muta transition.
Note by this time you should be on 5 base ANYWAY, or close too it, in my experience, and be rocking a massive resource advantage. Speedlings can definatly harass T as he tries to Expo, and you can take advantage of being able to hit a lot of spots quickly on the map, abusing mobility and speed.
EDIT: Will provide a relpay when I get home, Final Army was Ultra/Ling/Broodlord. Abandonded Infestors once I was able to take map control and kill expo's. All gas went to about 5 Brood Lords, Ultralisks, Mineral dumped 3/3 Cracklings.
Crackensan, on Planetary fortress's with this build, can you effectively take them out with infested terrans? I managed 1 game to destroy one with a few banes and about 7 well spaced eggs surrounding the PF. I don't know how economical it was because even though the PF was on it own by the time they countered I was still lacking in FGs.
The reason why I went brood lords in that game and not try IT+Bane tricks is because of the goddamned wall. Walled that PF right into his natural.
I figured since at that point I had complete domination of the map, I'd destroy/deny his otehr expo's and wait for a small group of BL's to come over and take it out, followed up with the rest of the army.
If i was pressed for time, IT+Banes would probably work out.
Nice, i really like how this sounds, I'm definitely going to experiment with this a lot now. but i have a few concerns, such as if the Terran goes early-mid vikings then you have pretty exposed overlords. Also if the Terran goes Mech with a lot of blue-falme Hellions and siege tanks, i think it would be very hard to engage and you are also very vulnerable to hellion harass as your only mobile unit are speedlings.
But i really like the way this sounds, i am curios to see Terran's most efficient response to this.
I, for one, really really like this build. Have you ever NP'd a Dropship and brought it in as foor for your Queens and Spore Crawler? Ever grabbed those 1-2 Colossus, brought em in, and let your army destroy them? So much fun, imo.
Variations of this build also work fantastically in team games, even in 4v4s.
On April 03 2011 22:40 NeonFox wrote: MrBitter do you have any new replays of this build, now that you are at a higher level and terrans tend to open hellion a lot more?
I think my favorite part about infestors vs. terran is sneaking up with burrow to a siege line, and then laying down a bunch of infested terrans around the tanks and marines, causing the tanks to do splash damage on one another, and kill some marines.
Sorrie if something similar has been posted already, but 19 pages seems a little too long to read to check.
This thread got me thinking of another strategy involving infestors. It focuses on using queens and infestors to get broodlords as your main army. I never tested this build (and I never will in the near future, my pc can't even handle Starcraft 2, and I don't own it), but from watching Day9's Dailys (I know, great thought went into this!), I think there's a way to make this strategy work.
Going off of TONS of assumptions, I think a good way of doing this build is to fast hatch and not go early speed. You're gonna be spending your money on queens, not lings, so it's just a waste of time and resources.
You want to rush to lair, and sometime while getting it, you NEED to plant all 4 geysers down, because Infestors and broodlords are expensive on gas (NO WAY!).
If you watch RootCatz in the Day9 Funday Monday involving Mass Queens, the way he gets queens seems pretty ideal from what I know. He doesn't spend much gas, and all the larvae can be spent on drones (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!). Also, the queens can be used in the early/mid game to spread creep, so map control can actually be considered an advantage of this strategy. When you get infestors, they can take out tanks, thors, Colossi, Immortals (I haven't really thought of which race this would be best against), and queens can annihilate air. When nearing battle, just make tons of zerglings if needed. One thing to note is that the Evo Chamber melee attack increases the attack on broodlings, so getting an Evo Chamber for the zerglings in the early/mid game is not at all wasted.
Rushing Hive seems ideal, and while doing so, going double spire (one for the broodlords, the other for upgrades). Once you get to broodlords, you can throw away your infestors (not literally, but keeping them alive should be the third priority. Queens should be first, for their transfusion, and broodlords should be kept alive by the queens.).
This build might just be in theory (I never saw a queen - queen/infestor - queen/broodlord), but I think it can be refined into a legitimate strategy. If anyone cares to try it, please do.
TL;DR: Going mass queens, rushing lair, getting infestors, rushing hive, getting broodlords. If you want to, test it.
Just a question of curiosity, would this idea of Infestor Ling go well with the Ice Fisher (Spanishiwa's) build? And how would it be implemented in such a build?
In that particular build, gas is late, but 4 queens and around 30+ drones are already up, plus some spine crawlers for defense?\
On April 10 2011 19:20 MuffinCookie wrote: Just a question of curiosity, would this idea of Infestor Ling go well with the Ice Fisher (Spanishiwa's build? And how would it be implemented in such a build?
In that particular build, gas is late, but 4 queens and around 30+ drones are already up, plus some spine crawlers for defense?\
I really like this build, vileSpanishiwa did a very similar strategy in his game versus (the now former) RootKitty on Shurkeurus Plateau and it worked very, very well. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD91shEd6eQ&feature=channel_video_title)
+3 extractors (with the 9 drones) immediate +1+1 and infestation pit sounds like you're opening a HUGE timing on yourself
also OP doesn't say anything about spine crawlers but dimaga got a lot of them and artosis in that cast said you're supposed to get a lot of them at your bases to stop drops.. have you messed around with that?
I've been doing this recently but I still prefer muta ling bling. I just dont like how vulnerable you are when your getting your 1-2 infestors out initially and you still need the pathogen glands upgrade.
I would think somewhere in between infestors and muta would be ideal. You need the map control of the muta but the defensive power of the infestor and the only dead weight is really the drone->tech structure costs.
They don't need to pop out with full energy. Like the defensive Roach Warren, you can can a few blings and a muta or two to pop 1-2 infestors out and let them sit. I mean, imagine catching a marine/tank army with fungal and having the muta to scream in and snipe the tanks.
On April 11 2011 05:57 Antisocialmunky wrote: I would think somewhere in between infestors and muta would be ideal. You need the map control of the muta but the defensive power of the infestor and the only dead weight is really the drone->tech structure costs.
They don't need to pop out with full energy. Like the defensive Roach Warren, you can can a few blings and a muta or two to pop 1-2 infestors out and let them sit. I mean, imagine catching a marine/tank army with fungal and having the muta to scream in and snipe the tanks.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
But then, the pros would outweigh the cons if you just chose one tech path to start with;
-If you chose to tech to Mutalisks, you would be able to assert ABSOLUTE map control, and force static defenses so they can deal with harassment -Mutalisks allow us to bridge the gap in ECONOMY; we kill workers, and if we can, we scout/shut down tech -Later you can get an Infestation Pit to tech up to Hive and have a stronger standing army
-If you chose to tech to Infestors first, you give up map control, but you would have a stronger standing army -Also, you can do some sneaky burrow harass with Infested Terrans and Fungal Growth to wipe out entire mineral lines. And it's fun to watch ;D -Infestors allow us to bridge the gap in ARMY; with the abilities of the Infestor (Spawn Infested Terran, Fungal Growth, Neural Parasite), we are given the leeway to engage our enemies head-on and cost-effectively trade armies -Later, you can get a Spire in order to transition into Mutalisks, because your opponent won't be expecting them OR you can get Brood Lords
If you do both at the same time, you will only have a little bit of both, which is bad, because not only do you NOT have as much map control, or NOT have a stronger standing army, you won't have the economy to support BOTH at the SAME TIME; it sets you back, and anyone can kill you.
Most of my info is from MrBitter's and Spanishiwa's analysis of Infestors/Mutalisks, but correct me if I'm wrong anywhere.
there you go mrbitter. nestea playing infestor/speedling into brut lords and crushing ensare in the gsl. maybe this strategy becomes more popular after that.
Experimented with this style a bit and thought I'd leave a comment:
It can certainly, 100% work, at all levels. But ...
Big BUT.
It is much harder to execute for players with low APM (<140) against opponents that know how to macro. And at higher levels, no matter how I win with this style, I'm left wondering if maybe I shouldn't have gone mutas instead for an easier win.
You CAN control drops with infestor play, but it's harder than using mutas. You CAN put pressure on with infestor play, but it's harder than with mutas. You CAN interfere with tank lines with infestors, but again, it's just not 'strictly better' than with muta play, and it's always always less mobile and versatile.
Just my opinion, it's a style a tournament player should be able to crack out in a series, but it's a toy build for most other circumstances.
Destiny does this exact style with upgrades coming after ling speed then lair with no mutas. Ling/infestor/brood lord. Im worried about your BO with an extremely late spawning pool which will prove hard to defend 2rax with.
On April 11 2011 01:07 SlapMySalami wrote: +3 extractors (with the 9 drones) immediate +1+1 and infestation pit sounds like you're opening a HUGE timing on yourself
You shouldn't assume he does this against all terran ranges.
On July 12 2011 18:37 baudusau wrote: there you go mrbitter. nestea playing infestor/speedling into brut lords and crushing ensare in the gsl. maybe this strategy becomes more popular after that.
To be fair, ensnare is hardly worthwhile opposition
On July 12 2011 18:37 baudusau wrote: there you go mrbitter. nestea playing infestor/speedling into brut lords and crushing ensare in the gsl. maybe this strategy becomes more popular after that.
Did he open infestors or just went after them in the late game?
I love to play opening infestors but its a pain in the ass when the map makes it easy to drop.
On July 12 2011 18:37 baudusau wrote: there you go mrbitter. nestea playing infestor/speedling into brut lords and crushing ensare in the gsl. maybe this strategy becomes more popular after that.
Did he open infestors or just went after them in the late game?
I love to play opening infestors but its a pain in the ass when the map makes it easy to drop.
He opened infestors. But nestea dealt with drops by spining his mineral lines and connecting his bases with creep so speedligns get back in time.
On July 12 2011 18:37 baudusau wrote: there you go mrbitter. nestea playing infestor/speedling into brut lords and crushing ensare in the gsl. maybe this strategy becomes more popular after that.
Did he open infestors or just went after them in the late game?
I love to play opening infestors but its a pain in the ass when the map makes it easy to drop.
it was close air! and ensare did some drops. nestea had one spine at his expos and one infestor. he fungaled alot of drop ships. he went fast lair und instant infestor pit. he didnt build one muta or one banling the whole game.
I have tried it always because I feel going both muta and infestors are way too much gas intensive. The problem with it is that there is a huge problem of lack of dealing with tanks positioned on high grounds (lifted by medivacs). I know you could deal with it by using overlord to gain sight and then pop some infested terran or just neural parasite it but not always would you have overlord around close enough
For anybody questioning the validity o this style, you need look no futher than the very first game of the GeForce Pro/Am where Destiny makes it work vs Bomber.
No insult to Destiny here, but he's just not in the same class as Bomber. Still, using his style, he can go toe-to-toe with one of the top terrans in the world.
That being said, in my personal experience, I still prefer mutas. Though I may try a late-game tech switch to mass infestors after watching that set.
Probably been said, but the bottle neck on the build is obviously gas if you go mass upgrades, mass infestors. I like the idea of heavy spine crawler use to secure 3rds securing more gas and allowing your fast units (zerglings) to be active on the map. Seems like a reasonable idea for buying time to get units back to a dropped base.
While this isn't the build in question, I wonder how opening ling/bling/muta for map control and securing the third into lots of infestors goes. The 12~ mutas wouldn't directly do 1200gas worth of damage, but it seems like mineral dumps in turrets and the pin effect would allow an opening for infestors. Mutas still remain useful, warding off drops... I feel I'm describing an exaggerated example of the current ZvT.
I find most problem with this style in first 10 minutes - bcoz u just go mass ling into upgrades i feel Teran can easily -demolish- u before u can get infestors.
Mass banshee - if u get roach-heavy opening and he open mass banshee u can usually counter-attack and do insane dmg - but without roaches u are dead (by mass banshee i mean move out with like 4-6).
Same thing will happen with mass helion - and again i dont mean moving out with 4 - showing them to u and giving u time to react - move out with 8-10. If u dont mass roach (not 3-4) u are also dead or at least half of ur mineral line is. And if u go heavy roach (more then 10) u wont have enough gas for heavy upgrades or fast infestors. Generally i feel like not getting 6+ roaches in early game vs teran who go rax + gas is pure gamble - if he go fast blue flame + dropship and drop 6 helions in ur main its a game if he can control them. Thats why i think Spanishiwa opening (just lings + blocking ramp with spines + queens) is pure gamble - mass helion drop kills it and mass banshee (6 or more) kills it too - queens cant handle more then 6 banshee.
I usually forgo mutas probably for the same reason here. I only read the first two sentences, so my educated guess is that marine balls are making muta tech worthless early on, while being only marginally useful vs banshee harass, as they simply transition to medivac marine stim squads near instantly and thus make your mutas worthless.. which is why FG infestors are useful all around, they decloak units, cause damage and keep them still for youur queens to finish them off. and then if they transition to medivac marine, you've got something to take out marines too.
this is just my guess as to what this thread is about, having played a thousand games in this season alone.
Ultras do get a bad rap, for non-upgraded units. They are probably the most dependent unit for upgrades. you NEED to have the upgrades out before you spawn them since they come out so late in the game they're usually fighting vs enemy UPs and good unit comp. They're also a little slow off creep for a melee unit, when it comes down to it. roaches are faster.
Have you ever tried Ultralisk drops on top of an army with roaches and lings attacking from the sides to draw fire? The pathing issues and huge unit size problems all go bye-bye. instadeath like a baneling drop, but you then have ultralisks left over, and many of your roaches and ling too.
FG speed and infestor speed were both nerfs, except that FG was nerfed in some places and buffed in others, while the speed is a pure nerf. a lot of people say that having them slower is a steal buff because they cant run out in front of your army, but they've never trying moving infestors on a slow pace setter unit, or just being good at micro. one might argue the FG is a stealth nerf for opposite reasons. the damage is quicker, yes, but the rooting time is less quick, meaning that low numbers of infestors dont give you the same positioning advantages. shifting units to front and back of the fight is as important as keeping them all together. slow FG time can deny both of these from a single inf for a while, while the fast FG means u need spam to keep these major benefits going. longer rooted time for marines vs banelings = easier time killing marines.
On July 12 2011 22:45 ReptarReptar wrote: Probably been said, but the bottle neck on the build is obviously gas if you go mass upgrades, mass infestors. I like the idea of heavy spine crawler use to secure 3rds securing more gas and allowing your fast units (zerglings) to be active on the map. Seems like a reasonable idea for buying time to get units back to a dropped base.
While this isn't the build in question, I wonder how opening ling/bling/muta for map control and securing the third into lots of infestors goes. The 12~ mutas wouldn't directly do 1200gas worth of damage, but it seems like mineral dumps in turrets and the pin effect would allow an opening for infestors. Mutas still remain useful, warding off drops... I feel I'm describing an exaggerated example of the current ZvT.
Please poke holes and tell me why I'm wrong :D
Julyzerg did something like that at nasl. He opened ling going muta. Made 9 muta than infestor broods
Man am I glad this thread is back! I was wondering about the viability, especially since MrBitter is using other styles on his stream now, so I thought it had been thoroughly countered. The Destiny Bomber game was awesome, and I'm glad to see it being used elsewhere. Mutas don't compliment my style very well, so time to practice this up!
On July 12 2011 22:56 Jarlax wrote: I find most problem with this style in first 10 minutes - bcoz u just go mass ling into upgrades i feel Teran can easily -demolish- u before u can get infestors.
Mass banshee - if u get roach-heavy opening and he open mass banshee u can usually counter-attack and do insane dmg - but without roaches u are dead (by mass banshee i mean move out with like 4-6).
Same thing will happen with mass helion - and again i dont mean moving out with 4 - showing them to u and giving u time to react - move out with 8-10. If u dont mass roach (not 3-4) u are also dead or at least half of ur mineral line is. And if u go heavy roach (more then 10) u wont have enough gas for heavy upgrades or fast infestors. Generally i feel like not getting 6+ roaches in early game vs teran who go rax + gas is pure gamble - if he go fast blue flame + dropship and drop 6 helions in ur main its a game if he can control them. Thats why i think Spanishiwa opening (just lings + blocking ramp with spines + queens) is pure gamble - mass helion drop kills it and mass banshee (6 or more) kills it too - queens cant handle more then 6 banshee.
well you obviously cannot just go mass lings without actually countering what the terran is doing. You can always poke the front or use overlord to spot all those 8-10 hellions From Destiny's stream, he normally would drop one or two more spines and defend with queens against hellions (or sometimes get some roaches, not sure what the condition is through) Haven't seen him dealing with blue flame hellions drop. He would get spore and more queens if he saw there are more air than he can deal with.
I think this style is very strong against all races, especially because it allows the Zerg to have lot's of Infestors early, which gather energy throughout the game and enable the Zerg to transition into a very strong mass-infestor+Broodlord-Combo in the Lategame.
Is it better than Mutas though?
I think both strats are viable, Mutas give you great opportunities to harrass, scout, gain Mapcontrol, be able to counterattack etc. whilst Infestor-based play has the above mentioned perks.
Personally, I just like playing Mutas, so I'll stick with them, at least in TvZ, but in PvZ and even ZvZ, I've really enjoyed playing mass-infestors with fast 3/4-base Hive-tech.
The weakness of that strategy is the lack of aggressive potential that infestors have. If i was a terran i would start making marine and blue flame helliod drops allover the map and the odds are that not only that you'll do no damage with the infesters, but rather I'm gonna do enough damage with the drops that you'll be rly behind.
You would actually get the broodlords slower than with the spire 1st strategy.
On July 14 2011 16:37 Hristiyan wrote: The weakness of that strategy is the lack of aggressive potential that infestors have. If i was a terran i would start making marine and blue flame helliod drops allover the map and the odds are that not only that you'll do no damage with the infesters, but rather I'm gonna do enough damage with the drops that you'll be rly behind.
You would actually get the broodlords slower than with the spire 1st strategy.
hmm all your points are invalid.
Infestors are so aggressive due to burrow movement. When you have 10-15 just drop a lot of infested terrans on PFs and they go down instantly.
As for drops 1 FG + spine shut down any kind of drops you can do. And the mobility of zerglings are easily reinforce with FG and spine buying time
The only counter i see to this strat is well placed EMPs but they are hard cus fungal range and emp range is samilar of fungal is larger (please correct me). And fungal can reveal ghosts
The key difference about using EMP vs HT and Infestors is this.
Terran need gas for Tanks and Mediacs as well as ghosts so it is hard to get a lot. Meanwhile Zerg just pour all their gas into infestors and minerals into lings so they have a lot of more infestors.
Protoss needs to pour gas into stalkers sentries and HTs so they will not have too many HTs.
HTs are smaller units so when they clump up 1 emp can destroy all of them while infestors are big so 1 emp hits like 4 max
NesTea showed us this build exactly - spine crawlers for defence against drops as well as an infestor at each base to fungal. Getting an early early Hive and getting broodlords out very fast. This will be the new 'standard' ZvT soon enough. I'm going to start learning it
On July 14 2011 13:22 ETisME wrote: lly countering what the terran is doing. You can always poke the front or use overlord to spot all those 8-10 hellions From Destiny's stream, he normally would drop one or two more spines and defend with queens against hellions (or sometimes get some roaches, not sure what the condition is through) Haven't seen him dealing with blue flame hellions drop. He would get spore and more queens if he saw there are more air than he can deal with.
Thing is i saw destiny playing against teran cheeser called Fuzer or smth like that and first game destiny got raped by 12 blue flame helions which roasted all his lings in 1 shot - it was also close air position. Second game he got owned by 3 port banshee.
Saying shit on forum is much easier then actually doing it in game - scout with overlord is lol vs someone who is trying to cheese at higher lvl - he will have marines everywhere around his base and poking front also wont tell u anything coz he will just hide helions in middle of base showing max 2.
Thats also what i said - going pure ling vs teran who go rax and gas is suicide and gamble for me. U can roll good and get lucky with surround + spine, but one mistake and its a game. It's also not directly about destiny play - coz he actually go roaches quite often - its more about ice fisher build (no gas) - which is quite fail as long as teran can identify it fast and hard counter.
Mr. Bitter, thank you for bringing this to attention, as it has helped me in my last few games against T, as well as provide an interesting transition to midgame and allow for upgrades. The only question I have is what is the point of the spire and NOT going to BL? There seem to be enough ways to deny dropping without having to kill the medivacs, and I am a noob, so I may be wrong, or the denying drops might be preventative, which may be what I'm misunderstanding. In my humble opinion, Brood Lords are one of the best units in the game if they are accompanied by say Corruptors and possibly infestors. I understand that Ultralisks benefit from the ling/bane upgrades, but so do the broodlings.
On July 18 2011 05:29 Falcon-sw wrote: How do you attach a tank/thor push with lings and infestors?
Neural parasite, infested terrans and lings. Ideally you want to throw in some IT first to tank a few shots, then move in and NP as much as possible as quickly as possible, while the lings swarm in. If there are hellions or marines, you want to fungal them.
On July 18 2011 05:29 Falcon-sw wrote: How do you attach a tank/thor push with lings and infestors?
Neural parasite, infested terrans and lings. Ideally you want to throw in some IT first to tank a few shots, then move in and NP as much as possible as quickly as possible, while the lings swarm in. If there are hellions or marines, you want to fungal them.
You wont have neural, what you want to do is have decent creep spread and good scouting information, try and force him to siege away from your natural, every time he pushes forward you fungal growth a group of marines, once enough marines have died you can surround with lings, the more angles you attack from the less damage you will take from tanks and the faster you will get surface area and dps going.
If the marines stim even a single time they get killed in a single fungal in 4 seconds, the early timing wont have combat shield, by the time combat shield is an issue you should be at 2/2 ups vs 1/1 or maybe 1/0 upgraded marines in most builds.
Lings on creep from multiple angles are surprisingly good even w/o infestor support, especially if you have any kind of upgrade advantage.
I used to play like this, early upgrades and infestors, but in the end of most battles I end up with a few infestors without energy and barely any lings, so I still trade my army it's just that I don't end up with a bunch of mutas I can use aggressivly. Also if a terran does a passive mech style you need to be really creative with burrow to do some damage or you die to thor blue flame helion.
I'm terran and I must say I hate this build!! I totally agree with lzgamer, it makes it a lot harder to play as terran as you have to abuse drops and such to win. Vs muta ling if you can get off some solid early pressure/damage so the zerg doesn't get to drone to much you can usually win the game with a well controlled tank push and some good turret placement. My style gets crushed by this build, especially as I tend to go more bio heavy with more marauder and medivac and less emphasis on tanks. I do this because I like to mainly build the units I'm getting upgrades for as possible as opposed to the unupgraded tanks. In most situations it works very well, you would be surprised to know many people try to kill marauders with banelings or they surround the marauders with lings that then get obliterated with a nice tank blast that the marauder easily survives. But builds like this with minimal banelings and instead use infestors to kill bio totally ruin my day especially when my own tank splash kills 10 immobile marines being attacked by 2 zerglings.
On July 14 2011 13:22 ETisME wrote: lly countering what the terran is doing. You can always poke the front or use overlord to spot all those 8-10 hellions From Destiny's stream, he normally would drop one or two more spines and defend with queens against hellions (or sometimes get some roaches, not sure what the condition is through) Haven't seen him dealing with blue flame hellions drop. He would get spore and more queens if he saw there are more air than he can deal with.
Thing is i saw destiny playing against teran cheeser called Fuzer or smth like that and first game destiny got raped by 12 blue flame helions which roasted all his lings in 1 shot - it was also close air position. Second game he got owned by 3 port banshee.
Saying shit on forum is much easier then actually doing it in game - scout with overlord is lol vs someone who is trying to cheese at higher lvl - he will have marines everywhere around his base and poking front also wont tell u anything coz he will just hide helions in middle of base showing max 2.
Thats also what i said - going pure ling vs teran who go rax and gas is suicide and gamble for me. U can roll good and get lucky with surround + spine, but one mistake and its a game. It's also not directly about destiny play - coz he actually go roaches quite often - its more about ice fisher build (no gas) - which is quite fail as long as teran can identify it fast and hard counter.
Oh please. If you are that stupid by now. Please get the F**k off already. First of all, I only played reactional play if you even know what that means? If i see that he is on 1base and has roach warren, yeah why not to punish him... Dear fellow, you have a lot to learn.
And yes, to the topic. I dont understand why should they skip the mutas for infestors? You can always make both. I mean you only need like 3 infestors and your stopper unit is ready. And with mutas you just keep terran at his base, so why to skip?
I think that infestors are great for coming back from a deficit, since a few good fungals can be so, so cost effective; whereas going mutas would probably do no damage and would be entirely dependent on keeping the terran in base. Good stuff.
I don't know how many people saw the game where Mr. Bitter demonstrated this style to IdrA in 12 weeks with the pros, but how do you guys think IdrA's use of infestor as more of a push delayer than a defender will work against a marine-tank-medivac push? For those who didn't see it, idra left a couple infestors in the Terran attack path, and each time he tried to leave his base, IdrA fungaled the army, making the terran move back, and therefor, delaying the push
On July 14 2011 13:22 ETisME wrote: lly countering what the terran is doing. You can always poke the front or use overlord to spot all those 8-10 hellions From Destiny's stream, he normally would drop one or two more spines and defend with queens against hellions (or sometimes get some roaches, not sure what the condition is through) Haven't seen him dealing with blue flame hellions drop. He would get spore and more queens if he saw there are more air than he can deal with.
Thing is i saw destiny playing against teran cheeser called Fuzer or smth like that and first game destiny got raped by 12 blue flame helions which roasted all his lings in 1 shot - it was also close air position. Second game he got owned by 3 port banshee.
Saying shit on forum is much easier then actually doing it in game - scout with overlord is lol vs someone who is trying to cheese at higher lvl - he will have marines everywhere around his base and poking front also wont tell u anything coz he will just hide helions in middle of base showing max 2.
Thats also what i said - going pure ling vs teran who go rax and gas is suicide and gamble for me. U can roll good and get lucky with surround + spine, but one mistake and its a game. It's also not directly about destiny play - coz he actually go roaches quite often - its more about ice fisher build (no gas) - which is quite fail as long as teran can identify it fast and hard counter.
Oh please. If you are that stupid by now. Please get the F**k off already. First of all, I only played reactional play if you even know what that means? If i see that he is on 1base and has roach warren, yeah why not to punish him... Dear fellow, you have a lot to learn.
And yes, to the topic. I dont understand why should they skip the mutas for infestors? You can always make both. I mean you only need like 3 infestors and your stopper unit is ready. And with mutas you just keep terran at his base, so why to skip?
Well i think the timing for the tech is going to be 2base, while the third is going up. It can be pretty tough to squeeze out muta/infestor tech simultaneously. I agree it's really a great idea to get BOTH, but I think you'd die trying to get both at the same time to a lot of different timings. Perhaps if the third is up and running very quickly for the 2 additional gas but again, that is very tough for a zerg facing a standard 2 base timing from T. I could be wrong, maybe it is viable to go for infestor/muta simultaneously but I haven't really ever seen it so i'm assuming it has glaring weaknesses
edit: can anyone clarify about teching both together? i really feel that it's best to stay on muta OR infestor till at least 3 base, but clarify if this thought is false
This build is weak to a timing from 2 port banshee. When should I add spores if Terran is still on 1 base?
Also, what stops a Terran from expanding like a Zerg against this? For example on metal, Terran can take a 3rd really quickly, wall in the top bit, or even put a planetary there. What stops a Planetary at the gold? I swear there is no aggressive potential without the threat of the mutas or banelings, and if we get either of those, we delay the Hive and the infestor/broodlord combo.
The style has potential, but I feel like Terrans aren't used to it yet. We will see in the future if it has staying power.
On July 19 2011 04:44 Micket wrote: This build is weak to a timing from 2 port banshee. When should I add spores if Terran is still on 1 base?
Also, what stops a Terran from expanding like a Zerg against this? For example on metal, Terran can take a 3rd really quickly, wall in the top bit, or even put a planetary there. What stops a Planetary at the gold? I swear there is no aggressive potential without the threat of the mutas or banelings, and if we get either of those, we delay the Hive and the infestor/broodlord combo.
The style has potential, but I feel like Terrans aren't used to it yet. We will see in the future if it has staying power.
If you ever scout double gas, you should be dropping your evo chambers immediately.
If Terran is going 2 port banshee, you should be able to scout his double gas unless your scout is late to his base and gets walled out.
Lings give more map control than you seem to realize, and if Terran insists on taking a quick 3rd, whats to stop you from taking a quick 4th and 5th?
EPT
it's pretty damn solid, I think most people knew TLO for using it tho? Infestor + zergling into mass ultra. It can be ridiculously good, I wanna watch reps 
lol.
Seriously though I've been devouring everything you stream on this style and playing it alot and not only does it work really well you forgot to mention the best pro of it... infestors are FUN!!! I love getting to play with a spellcaster. I used to think infestors were worthlesss but really it was just my troop positioning and control that was worthless. anyways thanks for the awesome build post and all the awesome streaming.
