|
Hey fellow TL'ers, just played a game that kinda rocked my world
for a little backround I am decently high masters and had decided as soon as I saw close spots to go allin hydra off 2 base. That was my entire thought process.
My opponent shows a void ray and I think Ive got the game won, and mass up +1 attack and + range hydras with a few meat shield roachs when my opponent shows his "trump" card, 5-6 phoenix. "np" I am thinking, hydra are good vs phoenix right?
my allin gets close, but eventually I get smashed.
It seemed that my hydra were just not match for the phoenix, which made me wonder what else I could have done. Hydra seems like its Z's only good "early" AA unit, with very low manuverability but good DPS. On the other hand, phoenix are the most mobile unit in the game.
Now obviously I could have "not" opted for allin, but I find these positions very hard to play vs P & T.
Infestor would have done wonders vs phoenix, by they are easily sniped by phoenix, and would have taken too long to tech to. Same for corrupters.
I guess the only other option would have been mass queen, but this would have done horribly vs any other build, and I would have to start massing queens before lair, so I would not have any intel.
EDIT: replay (doh) http://topreplays.com/Replays/Details/6012/Crixus_vs_Wai
So does hydra allin simply not work vs mass phoenix? did I do something terribly wrong? Please watch the rep and let me know.
|
Hydras do not work vs phoenix, actually better to push with ling/roach I know it sounds weird but its true.
Phoenix do bonus damage to light and if the numbers are fairly close can lift half the hydras and just slaughter them. On the other hand, roach/ling 2 base timings are much sooner in the game and stargate builds especially mass phoenix can be crushed simply because roaches die to phoenix so slowly and can be massed easier. The lings are there because every phoenix lift is 50 energy max 200 energy and you simply cannot lift lings fast enough to stop entire probe lines from being destroyed.
You could also add in a nydus queen drop at the same time to deal with any straggling void rays. But for the most part I would stay away from mass hydra vs mass phoenix, either bust them with roach/ling or tech to corrupters. Mutas are also a horrible choice to counter phoenix even if you can out mass them as phoenix move faster, attack while moving and do bonus damage.
GL
|
I disagree with your choice to not all-in vs the forge FE in close positions but I digress.
half your hydra's spent the fight shooting various non-cannon buildings. In addition, you attacked into a well sim-citied defensive base. In my opinion, your timing for the allin was a little bit off. When you attacked, it was RIGHT after an inject popped and you had 8 hydra making right then. If you look at the replay even after you get slaughtered, you are still up on supply. Had you waited for the next round of hydra's to pop, then attacked while reinforcing speedlings, there's no doubt in my mind you would've done significantly better.
|
Correct me if I am wrong, but a 2 hatch hydra build is:
a) not all-in
b) involves practically no roaches
A good example of this is one of the IdrA vs HuK games in MLG on iCCup Testbug, where IdrA does a similar build without a roach warren, opens with heavier ling then ends up pushing to end the game with just Hydras, Zerglings and a creep highway of overlords rather than tumors.
Ultimately, I think you should have skipped the roaches, gotten more lings and attacked sooner using Overlord creep spread rather than relying on creep tumors.
|
Well after watching you were very late with getting a macro hatchery. You were banking 1k+ minerals for almost a whole 5 minutes of the game. those turned into lings for your first or 2nd attack could have done wonders. cute phoenix plays like that suffer alot more from flooding him with upgraded lings considering he doesnt have collo's roach+ling is plenty effective.. he can lift the roaches but they will take more time to kill and be far less effective.
|
On April 10 2011 09:54 Meldrath wrote:
Well after watching you were very late with getting a macro hatchery. You were banking 1k+ minerals for almost a whole 5 minutes of the game. those turned into lings for your first or 2nd attack could have done wonders. cute phoenix plays like that suffer alot more from flooding him with upgraded lings considering he doesnt have collo's roach+ling is plenty effective.. he can lift the roaches but they will take more time to kill and be far less effective.
Yeah I let my money get high, but I was gas starved
I agree that some of my hydras wernt attacking what they ahould have, they can be silly sometimes =s
I find ling/roach allin to pretty much fail to any good FF play
I guess the thing that just surpsised me the most was the hydra (with all my availible gas) to fail vs phoenix...
i could have played better though
|
I think you had a few missteps earlier that hurt you more than the hydra all-in thing. When you saw the initial pylon placement I would've immediately done a roach all-in, hes going to have a really hard time stopping it and hes going to end up slowing himself down by throwing down way more cannons than he wants.
You also had the opportunity to do the hatch cancel evo trick on his expansion. Build a hatchery, cancel it, and then make an evo chamber. This is pretty crippling to his build because hes going to have to massively delay the nexus going up and he doesn't even have a gateway at this point in the game. Usually when I do it given similar scouting info I get a +1 gateway all-in which is pretty easy to scout and stop since it's going to come pretty late.
The hydra attack would've been alright if you'd been in a position to take a third (you were floating about 1k minerals at points in that game) but due to the spots you weren't and you were slow to get a macro hatch down. If you're on equal bases with the protoss and the protoss has matched your worker count you should know that you're in trouble.
I always do the 3 roach speedling all-in close spots and it typically works pretty well, it's debatable how well it would've done here given the forge first, I probably would've opted for more roaches and gone really speedling light.
|
First two posters are completely incorrect, hydra all-in should most definitely counter a phoenix opening, but he went forge first so he's bound to have cannons with a stargate opening.
|
Yeah hydras dont do too great vs phoenixes in small numbers. If you're playing passively, you want to sit back with your queens and maybe a spore at each base until you get enough hydras.
More appropriate in this case, however, if you want to hydra all-in, you cant half-ass it like you did. Idra did a hydra all-in vs Choa in the Ro64 of gsl season 3 but you would need a season ticket to watch it. Here's the gist of it:
He leaves his base at 10 minutes with about 10 hydras and 4 spines (with a small handful of lings), Typically with this kind of rush, as in the case with the Idra game, you're relying on overlords with speed to make your creep highway. Then you want to be just spamming hydras as hard as you can and going for the kill. Also, I cant get a count on in from the vod of the Idra game, but I'm pretty sure he had less drones.
You hit his base with 10 hydras, 7 lings, and 7 roaches (with +1 missile attack) at 11:30 and were up against 4 zealots, 5 senties, a void ray, a stalker, 2 cannons, and 7 phoenixes that were missing but would show up about 10 seconds later. Instead, you could have hit with 10 hydras and 4 spine crawlers at closer to 10:30 when he had 4 sentries, 3 zealots, a void ray and only 3 phoenixes. Further, you would have had better creep spread, right up to his main. Four spine crawlers would help a ton since phoenix cant mess with them at all. Certainly you could argue that the phoenix would make it harder for a overlord creep highway to function but he would have had half the phoenix count if you had indeed hit one minute earlier.
In summation, either relax and passively defend/macro (which you could have, you were in fine shape economically) or commit more to your all-in to make it more effective.
|
I think you would have won that game if you were better on your Larva inject. You had quite a bit of energy near the end and quite a bit of minerals. I think the +1 attack has more synergy with ling/hydra than roach/hydra. I feel like the 150 on roach warren could have been done without. But even then that isn't what lost it for you, it was poor macro imo.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
