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On May 14 2011 15:32 Keilah wrote:
and yah broodlords are real good vs archon/zealot, the archons just have no way to get through the broodlings and hit the broodlords
Also obv mutas melt to archons, but archons aren't mobile enough to stop muta harass. The answer as toss is to just go attack and kill the zerg, but if some clever Z can figure out a way to both muta harass and survive the attack, that might be useful.
I had an opponent last night (I'm garbage, but this is consistent with others' experiences) who backed up muta harass with a huge number of lings/banes and a few spines at home. You have so many lots (all the gas is in archons) that the banes can just melt them ridiculously and maybe take out a couple archons as well. At this point the mutas have been tearing at your base for a while (maybe being chased around by a couple comically slow archons, cue Bennie Hill music). You can go do some damage with your remaining archons but he's probably done more and is reproducing as we speak!
I think that as you start to see mid-late game muta/bling or roach hydra compositions you need to transitions to diversify your army beyond archon/lot or it will get out of control. Not sure what the best transitions are, but I'd definitely start by buying psystorm.
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You get your nexus slower for a hatch first than you do for a pool first? wha?
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It seems natural that a small contingent of Phoenixes would be useful support, much as a small contingent of Corsairs were in BW. They greatly aid scouting, limit Mutalisk play, restrict overlord movement, force some manner of in-base anti-air, and can snipe banelings or lift Infestors in combat. Of course, Phoenix don't come cheap.
I imagine the DT opening variant fits well with a Stargate opening variant, much as it did in Broodwar.
Side note, Warp Prism(s) could be very valuable to prevent the opponent from focusing down your archons, as well as for Zealot/DT warp-attacks. (Which are particularly scary due to your ground upgrades and Charge.)
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Hallucinations actually work quite well, but this build uses too much gas. XD
It's strange how you banked so many resources while having a huge archon ball.
Hehe I am drooling over what might happen if you used all those resources. This is a cool build. :D Didn't know archons do SOOOOO well vs roaches.
I will practice this build. Do you think it can become standard like colossi ball?
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Hmmm I really like this, I'm going to try it out and see how it goes!! Thanks for sharing
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Very good points in here, mainly about the mass mutas with banes strat. On some maps turtling, while massing archons is a very vulnerable build to mass muta harass. Sometimes you won't be able to get a good number of stalkers, due to high cost of having zealots and archons. If he goes, ling/bane/infestor, then yeah it's a nice mix, plus storms are a must have in this situation, but as already pointed out, if broodlords start popping out, you'll need a starport to handle them. Not to mention if he goes for broodlord/ultra combo, like spanishiwa, which is unstoppable if you went archons/zealots first. I say it depends on what your zerg opponent is doing, but always going for this strat seems like a coin flip.
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Yay glad to see people thinking more about Archons now, the splash is just too good to miss out.
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Just want to point out that in the replay that in the replay that you win vs Mr.Bitter your army value is 6775 minerals and 3225 gas and his is 4700/2100. Essentially you have 1½ times his army making it hard to determine the strength of the ball since he is outnumbered. Don't have time to watch the other replays at the moment, but this seems strong against pretty much everything except brood lords.
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On May 15 2011 01:26 Bergys wrote:
Just want to point out that in the replay that in the replay that you win vs Mr.Bitter your army value is 6775 minerals and 3225 gas and his is 4700/2100. Essentially you have 1½ times his army making it hard to determine the strength of the ball since he is outnumbered. Don't have time to watch the other replays at the moment, but this seems strong against pretty much everything except brood lords.
In one replay he plays against late-game broodlords. He just stutter-steps towards the broodlords, and once he gets under the broodlords (archons are quite fast and broodlords are quite slow) he uses hold or stop, I think, and the broodlords just explodes. :D
Of course this is after he destroys the support units (roaches), but this build gets a HUGE economy that lets you replenish your army really, really fast.
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Wouldn't a standard roach/hydra tear this apart? it seemed like with the usual protoss deathball (colossus/zealot/stalker/sentry) you couldn't go roach/hydra due to colossus and to some extent forcefields - you all know the QQ - but if you take those 2 out of the equation, the standard big army of the zerg player SHOULD suddenly become 'viable' again
for what it's worth, I'd prefer if this zealot/archon style became the standard (less boring to watch, seems like a 'normal' army which you can beat with good positioning and micro, unlike a certain other composition *cough*)
thoughts on this?
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LOL, i was obs in all of ur replay =)))
the main problem i saw through out all of those games was roaches speed is good enough to kite zealot til death.
the only reason archon deal that much damage is bc they got a good concave and good upgrades overall. If you think about the gas ratio cost of archon, u could see that leaving them as HT for storm with minerals goes into cannons is much more effective than zealot archon in general.
my conclusion is that we should think about archon as a late game transition plan more than a mid-game ideal composition. with the range increase we might see lots more archon toilet as well as archon vs ultra but thats it :-/
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i think shields would be better than armor/weapons in this build
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Archons were pretty butch against zerg pre patch now they are damn hench. Tried this build a few times now and it works pretty well. I've made a few alterations such as researching shield upgrades for archons and getting a robo for obs and warp prisms. An archon and 2 zealots make short work of a mineral line im telling you. Muta can be pretty frustrating to deal with since archons are slow. I've found that i've got quite a few spare minerals though so cannoning works alright and big counter attack is very effective as archons just dont die.
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On May 15 2011 01:36 Meancookie wrote:
Wouldn't a standard roach/hydra tear this apart? it seemed like with the usual protoss deathball (colossus/zealot/stalker/sentry) you couldn't go roach/hydra due to colossus and to some extent forcefields - you all know the QQ - but if you take those 2 out of the equation, the standard big army of the zerg player SHOULD suddenly become 'viable' again
for what it's worth, I'd prefer if this zealot/archon style became the standard (less boring to watch, seems like a 'normal' army which you can beat with good positioning and micro, unlike a certain other composition *cough*)
thoughts on this?
Did you not watch the replays!?!?
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On May 14 2011 13:05 MrBitter wrote:Show nested quote +On May 14 2011 13:01 Stropheum wrote:
Honestly this does sound really potent, especially with the new archon change. The only straight up answer I can think of off the top of my head is just delaying until you can get a good number of ultralisks out Ultras deal zero bonus damage to archons. Ultras deal zero bonus damage to zealots. Ultra pathing rivals BW goon pathing. Archons deal massive bonus damage to ultras. Zealots shred ultras and further complicate their clunky pathing. Zealot charge gives free auto-surrounds on big, slow, Zerg units. The only reason anyone ever wants ultras in ZvP is to deal with big, clumped up groups of armored units like stalkers. A zealot / archon army features absolutely zero clumped, armored units...
Lets take a step back and have a look at the numbers before exaggerating.
- Archons have the same unit size as an Ultralisk
- Archons do 18.244~ DPS to Ultralisks with Chitinous Plating
- Ultralisks do 17.4~ DPS to Archons
The range is the big swing for Archons, it really helps, makes it so you can actually deal damage 
I tried Archon/Zealot a long time ago before Fungal and the Archon buffs. Neural Parasite really complicates the issue, you need some Templar/Colossus to neutralize the infestors or things get messy really fast.
As Archons have the same unit size as Ultras, if they get fungaled then they create a road block for your Zealots and Archons that aren't fungaled. But when I was trying this out the Infestor had 8second fungals so go figure, but a few fungals can drop the DPS of your army sharply depending on the terrain.
By that stage of the game you should be switching out of Zealot/Archon. I'm sure there is also some timing window where you can just go kill a Zerg who is on just Lings banking gas for early infestors too.
Also, you have to be fairly pro-active with your infrastructure, well more so then usual. I think a good rule of thumb is, if you are efficiently spending your resources and warpgate cooldowns before a fight, then you need more warpgates. Just stop building Zealots and drop 3-5 more gateways.
It might seem like a waste of money at the time but at points in the game you are going to be warp-ing in like 8-9 DT's/HT's at once--and I will guarantee you this will happen multiple times through out the game--then your minerals or gas (or both) will explode as you spam your Zealot hotkey waiting for your warpgates to finish coolingdown, you don't really notice how long DT/HT cooldowns are until you start losing a fight but you don't have the gateway cooldowns to reinforce despite building a trust fund.
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Standard ling/bane with your leftover gas in pretty much anything is strong against heavy archon/zealot. Banelings clean up the light zealots (and even DTs) extremely efficiently, and then all you're left with is archons. If you try to forcefield, archons break the forcefields and your lings surround everything. ling/bane will leave you with extra gas left over so spending that gas on pretty much anything will give you units very capable of handling the archons. Oftentimes, the extra gas will be put into mutalisks and you will not be able to defend efficiently from harass if all you have are slow and bulky archons.
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archons destroy ling bling
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good fungals with anything involving a roach or hydra rips this apart. range 3 and 1 locked in place vs higher range zerg units is gg
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On May 15 2011 00:08 RedChaos wrote:
So while this is extremely strong, its only weakness is if the zerg forgets roaches and hydras, and instead simply masses banelings. As stupid as this may sound, the idea for the zerg (who will be on many more bases than you) is to simply trade armies, which roaches and hydras cant accomplish here. While banes might not seem great against archons, they evaporate the zlots, and in enough numbers will easily eliminate the archons too, thereby winning the game. (This is the only way my relatively high masters zerg friend has beaten this, but he won easily with it).
i can confirm that, Banelings (drops) rape this pretty hard, archons without some meatshields that buy time for them to deal their splash damage die horribly fast.
and neural parasite is hard to deal with due to range issues.
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lately because archons are getting popular now i noticed that a lot of people seem to forget that you can also morph DTs to archons
you might ask wtf why should i care they are the same as HT archons?!
well DTs actually cost only 125 gas compared to the 150 of the HT...and with a gas intesive build like that (-50gas for an archon kekekek) it's pretty sick
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EPT
