[G] Sim City versus Hellion

So today I’m going to talk a little about Sim City. And I thought this was important because the iEchoic build is talked about a lot on the strategy forum, and when ever anyone makes a suggestion you just get hellion drop, hellion drop, hellion drop. Every day some guy will mention some ill thought out strategy like "can't you just thor rush?", and its important that people start to think beyond the scope of just a hard counter.

With the removal of Multiple Building Selection, and the disadvantages of walling the choke against protoss and terran, most players have often neglected to place their structures in a way that would serve more functions than the buildings themselves. People have forgotten that even in Starcraft 1, players also placed their buildings in such a way as to minimise losses, and maximise gains.

As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. It doesn't matter if the opponent decides not to go for hellion centric play, you don't stand to lose anything, your build order will never change, it is just the placements of the buildings. However you stand to lose a lot more if you decide to change your style of play simply because of the possibility of a hellion banshee build.

For the many that complain on the Strategy forums that they don't know what to do about the blue flame hellion drop upon moving out, rather than thinking about builds like Viking Marauder and Thor rush, you can continue with your standard opening and just sim city your main.

When you start the game its important to begin building your sim city immediately. Do not wait until you see a certain build and then react by building a sim city. Simply put, your very first supply depot and every building after that should go towards building your sim city, if you want to prevent hellion harass in your main.

You can create a Hellion Tight sim city on any map. Of course if you haven't Sim Citied on certain maps, its not hard to think of a way to place your buildings, the hard part will be thinking about it while doing what you normally do. When this situation arises, I decide on a build order immediately and decide where all my buildings will be placed before my first supply depot goes down. If you can't do that, the best thing to do is to start up a custom game against AI and figure out the best way to Sim City on each map.

Here are some examples of Hellion Tight Sim Cities. These were done in ladder matches on the fly, so there may be more efficient ways of placing buildings. The important thing is that you get your main Hellion tight by around the 7:30 mark (iEchoic drop happens at around 8:30).

The second time I went against the iEchoic build this happened.





As long as there is 1 matrix touching side by side no unit will be able to get through



Touching corners will still allow units to go through





Update


Not only Hellions
Sim citying your main can also be useful for blocking DT Harass, Zealot harass, Reapers, and Zerglings too.

What about marine/marauder drops?
This should still help, the medivacs have to move in closer to the base to get in an effective place to drop, otherwise you can just pull your scvs to the other side. This results in 2 things, medivacs get shot down by turrets, or it buys you enough time to defend. Of course its not as effective as defending against hellion drops.

You lost mining time in the first example?
You should also realise that the sim city allowed me to expand faster than my opponent because I didn't have to worry about defending my main from drops. Notice on the minimap how I already have 2 mining bases and a bunch of tanks defending my nat already.

What if the opponent drops behind your mineral line?
Exactly the same as if you don't sim city, you have two choices, mine and die, or run away and die. This shouldn't happen unless it happened like in the first example. Basically don't neglect turrets or sensor towers, or have vikings ready.

Credit to Bobucles who answered this better than I could



Think of it this way, if you have 10 turrets and you put it around the perimeter or you have 10 turrets and you put it around your command center, which is more effective?

Now add the time it takes for the medivac to get there (which is much slower than a hellion) and its really a much bigger task than it looks.

In the example I give, the opponent drops outside my base first, and then picks the hellions up and drops it behind my mineral line. By that time its already too late, half the hellions are gone and turrets went up and he simply had to evacuate. If I had 1 or 2 turrets up before the drop happened the hellions wouldn't even have made it over the wall.

As for the s-split, its just so slow. If most pros don't do this, how can you expect the average player to do this? You have to know very far ahead of time that the drop is going to happen. In which case you can drop your supply depots if you really want to and do the s-split. It makes no difference either way, your workers still get just as funneled by trying to go around the Command Center. I am a very big abuser of blue flame hellions, I have yet to play a game where I haven't destroyed half of the workers at a 3rd base even without the use of medivacs, I just run my hellions in.