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banelings
protoss doesn't have anything that can kill banelings before they can get into splash range.
cracklings
protoss will have few forcefields, and any forcefields would be more detrimental to the zealots than any zerg unit. avoid getting bottlenecked and storm isn't a hard counter to lings due to mobility, storm is not as cost efficient as colossus.
neural parasite
the protoss dps will not be high enough to overcome neural parasite on the archons, especially if the zerg has a blockade of mass zergling mixed in with baneling.
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Build seems very solid. Was wondering if anyone has tried to just go 6-7 infestor vs it? It seems like fungal would rip through it since you have no ranged units.
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On May 27 2011 19:10 shizna wrote:
banelings
protoss doesn't have anything that can kill banelings before they can get into splash range.
cracklings
protoss will have few forcefields, and any forcefields would be more detrimental to the zealots than any zerg unit. avoid getting bottlenecked and storm isn't a hard counter to lings due to mobility, storm is not as cost efficient as colossus.
neural parasite
the protoss dps will not be high enough to overcome neural parasite on the archons, especially if the zerg has a blockade of mass zergling mixed in with baneling.
Banelings: Kills the zealots, not the archon i.e. kill em meat shields while keeping the main damage dealer alive. Toss could just retreat the archons and tada! They're as good as new again in the next battle (350 shields 10 hp). With 10 gates ready to restock the zealots with ease, aren't you trading high resource units with just a mineral sink? Decent but not enough. Need to find a good partner unit.
Cracklings: You do realize that archons one shot lings right? Not to mention chargelots kill these critters easily and can you really go high up the tech tree that fast with this army barreling down your front door? Also from my experience, I barely even need FF with this composition. This style shines best in the wide open spaces. The use of force fields, I find only hampers the show the chargelots do.
Infestor: The only good point here but as Ive said, nothing a few spare templars with feedback can handle. At least blizzard gave the Templars feedback capability at warp in.
PS: Do expect to have at least 4-5 executor rank archons with this build with 25-40 kills each with this build LOL
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What I do is dt expand -> Immortal, Stalker, Archon.
I mainly get a squad of around 10 stalkers to blink behind the Zerg army to kill infestors. If he goes ling/bling my ~5-8 archons kill that with stalker support, while my 10 stalkers blink on top (maybe it's just me, but they never seem to fungal me if you 'surprise' them) and snipe np infestors and chase em 
~700 diamond here though.
Once, I lost my army except my 6 archons, he went ling/bling and overtime he would send all his lings to kill my archons, they will dieeeeee. Had archons with executor ranks (each had 50~)
Like the guy above me said, this completely owns ling:bling from my experience, even with some fungals
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It's Stork vs GGPlay on Andromeda in 2008 (I believe in a Proleague as well).
Just wondering, Which upgrade do you prefer more: armor or shields?
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I'm intensely curious how this would match up against a mass upgraded roach build, especially when you consider the lack of detection you may have, or better yet the old bread and butter of zerg, roach/hydra.
In the past I've been able to deal with fast HT's with mass roach, and the most annoying part of this is that mass roach is much easier to manage than HT/zlot/archon, or as this post is describing, mass zlot/archon.
Have you encountered a mass roach style against this army composition? say something along the lines of what FXOsheth does (covered in day9 daily 300).
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Look at my replay above if you want to see roach/hydra vs zealot/archon ^
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@ DarKcS
Just finished watching the rep. Few notes here.
1.The toss didn't even bother to research charge and weapons early game and just foolishly massed zealots and archons. No matter what type of composition you do, without the proper accompanying tech and transition, it will definitely be weaker.
2. Very poor macro by toss. Remained at max 6 gates the whole time and was floating at least 1k in money! Thats like 10 additional chargelots! The key to doing this build is to mass a lot of gates. Get 15 or more at 3 bases and not just sit at 6. Treat making gates like banking a lot of larvae as zerg. Also the zealot replenishment was just awful. In order to increase the efficiency of the combo, you have to make a lot of zealots constantly since these guys get the brunt of the damage and get killed easily. Maintain a at least a 1:8-10 ratio of zealots. Treat archons like colossus with a support army of gateway units.
I think that in the rep, you just plainly outplayed the Protoss. His loss was not due to the weakness of the composition but rather his incapability to macro properly. 4 gate to mass archon-zealots just wont cut it. If you don't establish a proper set-up of tech, early defense, upgrades and macro, no matter how good the composition is, it wont matter. I just also found out that a 12 min timing with quick charge + 2 and 3-4 archons can quickly decimate a roach hydra army so i would definitely disagree with the statement that the composition is only good at 120+ supply. Very small groups with just 1-2 archons really do well in picking up reinforcements.
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I watched the first game against VTmrbitter, there was no reason at all for him to throw in those hydras, he would have been fine with mass roach and attacking around the 150 mark, he spreads himself wayyy to thin on tech threes going infestor, baneling, roach, hydra, getting speed, range, and pathogen glands. If he simply focused on mass roach with good micro, or hell, even roach/infestor, it would have been a very different story.
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On May 14 2011 13:27 proxY_ wrote:
If you try to roll a ton of banelings into this (like 50+) what are the results? I think you would probably need 15 or so banes to kill one archon but if they're splashing everything there's a tipping point. The toss is going to be low on forcefields but the archons should one shot the banelings and the banelings don't do any bonus damage to them obviously. I'm not sure how big the baneling splash radius is. If you think about it 12 banes is 300 gas which is around the same gas cost as one archon so that's not as unreasonable as it sounds.
The Funny thing is that archons are maybe the best unit against banelings it takes about 20 banelings to kill an archon, if you patrol away (like you can do with marines) then they are maybe the most cost efficent thing to kill banelings
and if you double click the zealots and pull them back... they won't get hurt cause archons form a great wall
mutalisks should be no problem, they are a big investion, if you see them... go kill him!
they can't really help defend but the zerg will need to pull them back and die anyways
also note that if you drop an archon, he oneshots drones with 2 attack ups
btw, archons deal 47 dmg vs bio at 3 attack ups
--> oneshots lings
--> twoshots hydras
--> 3 shots mutas
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I only had time to read up to page 6 because I dont have time at the moment... but I was wondering how this would go with a DT/pheonix build. I've been using this in PvZ lately, its still under development, but basically its a 3 gate dt expand (doing as much damage as you can and denying his third for as long as possible) into forge cannon double stargate pheonix when you expand (to pick off as many overlords and harass if you can and deny his third even longer.. its suprisingly hard for a zerg to take a third if he's relying on spore crawlers to defend the pheonix and dt harass if you're active about keeping your dts alive and sniping overseers with your pheonix). You'll also be building up gates, zealots and maybe defensive cannons (not sure where its best for the minerals to go yet) with your mins
From here I'm not really sure where to go, I was thinking the weakness' are obviously infestors, or hydras (with overseer support, too many to snipe before your pheonix die) but in both cases HT's seem the way to go considering you've already got a twilight council. At this point, I'm not sure of the ordering on the following things but you can easily
get hts to deal with hydras and infestors
get charge for your zealots
take a third
if you see t3, you have 2 starports for voids
so if the zealot/archon/pheonix (+ dt warp in potential if he doesnt have enough overseers to survive your pheonix) is enough to brute force your way to a third reasonably safely, so you can get your third before HT's, I can see this build being an incredibly strong way to have great harass that can potentially win you the game, but not rely on it too much as you can still go into the 3 base deathball style (chargelot archon HT immortal + maybe voids or blink stalkers depending whats going on- which in my opinion is alot stronger than sentry stalker collosus void). I think this would be very cool. Opinions?
Edit- Yeah and no idea on upgrade timings I guess I just go +attack once I got my forge up until +3 is done but I havent really thought it out... shields might be way better later anyway considering you have HTs... but probably not because i can see +weapons adding heaps of value to your dts as well
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Does anyone think a sentry expand (iNcontrol style - Search it up if you've not seen it alredy) is viable? I know the OP said that Hallucinations may not be a good strategy, but if you sentry expand you can have infinite force fields and left over energy for hallucinations. The incontrol sentry expand makes procuring a third increasingly easy, and means that a zerg simply cannot kill you before hive tech units.
If you miss out the collossus, and go straight for DT harass, I imagine this would work? - Theory crafting.
If you power units out after your third and attack at 200/200 with decent FF placement and hallucinations of any units... Maybe even collossus earlier to trick your opponent into Corruptors ^^.
Has anyone tried this more spellcasting/micro style? And if so, does it work as well, or is it not as effective?
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I know some others have mentioned this but what if after +2 you got plus 1 shield while grabbing your third? It would be cool to see how it works out.
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From what I've gathered, Archon's are mainly meant as a recycle unit, I've faced mass archon a few times and it feels like it's really weak against some sort of roach/infestor or roach/hydra build
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No range means this build loses STRAIGHT up to infestor bling zling. alot of infestors for fungal + NP...
i tried this long time ago when the patch first started , and got raped by that combo.
Master toss (700 pt)
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On May 31 2011 03:38 Veritassong wrote:
No range means this build loses STRAIGHT up to infestor bling zling. alot of infestors for fungal + NP...
i tried this long time ago when the patch first started , and got raped by that combo.
Master toss (700 pt)
Then you obviously had bad unit control. Mass gateway with archon/HT is the best way to go against bling/ling/infestor u don't even need storm. Of course u need pretty good macro and unit ratio. And for sure u can't let zerg to macro up too much or you will be overwhelmed. The natural counter to this are roaches of course, u can't trade cost effective with style against them.
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On May 31 2011 03:05 Arcanefrost wrote:Found some mondragon replays vs archon/zealot MondragonMondragon2
I watched the reps. They were very nice. Just exactly what I think the toss should play it. Transition between stalkers-zealots when needed, treating archons like colossi, letting the zerg drone up and getting the traditional army he likes, getting mass gates and charge all the while and just ripping him apart in the end (macro wise and army wise). From the looks of it, this might shift the metagame lol.
I'm just so sick and tired of the colossus based play and its ugliness. Whoever the toss was, bravo! Hat off to you. The only thing I didnt like was the DT method of getting archons. Too resource intensive IMO. I mean, trading, 25 gas with 75 minerals? Ill take the gas since the rest of the army is so mineral intensive. 75 mineral adds up while the 25 gas isn't too costly in this case. LOL where else would I spend my gas in this case other than a few research and upgrades. Also the dark shrine takes too long! That's a 50 second difference between the two. Not to mention,being a more resource intensive route and if you face an infestor style you will need the high templars anyway.
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Bumping this because I found a replay of Naniwa doing this strategy:
http://www.sc2rep.com/replays/download?id=9682
His interpretation seems to take the comments in here into account. He gets a robo for detection and later adds in immortal, researches storm, and gets charge earlier so he can take map control and secure a third base.
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EPT
