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I am a zerg player and after watching lots of ZvP I've seen interesting usage of hallucination to do things like soak damage and trick your opponent by masking your true tech route. As I see more and more people using it I feel like detection should be a must when you know that your opponent has hallucination, so that your units aren't attacking fake units. This then got me thinking on how the AI handles detected hallucinations. After doing some testing I found that, as expected, detected hallucinations just fall low on the targetting priority and your units will prefer attacking the real units. While this does sound good it does bring forward interesting tactical decisions from the protoss player.
In the later portion of the game, lets say the zerg has a couple of overseers with his army and he is attacking with zerglings/banelings (or even in certain situations roaches depending on the terrain and chokes). A protoss player can use hallucinations to block for their real units. What I mean by this is if you surround a group of sentries, for example, with hallucinated stalkers and put them on hold position zerglings that try to attack them will instead dance around the stalkers trying to get in to attack the sentries because they know that the stalkers aren't real. What this means is that the zerg player must target the hallucinated units or move away their detection. If they move away their detection then they will not be able to tell which units are real and which ones are fake. These sorts of tactics could also be useful for things like blocking ramps and other chokes.
I know that the first reaction that you may think is to just use forcefields, they do the same job but cost less mana. But, the interesting thing about this idea is that it puts the zerg player in a predicament about their detection. What if you have dts with your army? They need the overseers so can't move them away to un-detect hallucinations (which last 4 times longer than forcefields too). With this in mind the hallucination, if used correctly, can boast a much more devastating effect than 2 forcefields could since they last longer and put the zerg in a situation where they have difficult decisions to make.
I have some screenshots of testing that I did with this but I think it's fairly easy to understand what I'm talking about anyway.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/cU5IA.jpg)
40 zerglings vs 10 sentries with hallucinated stalkers, no detection. You can see that the zerglings rip through the hallucinations and get to the sentries. This also gets worse as upgrades increase because hallucinated units will always take twice the damage that the unit attacking it would do, regardless of armour/shield upgrades (ie 3/3 cracklings rip through them)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Vr1Yd.jpg)
40 zerglings vs 10 sentries with hallucinated stalkers, with detection. As you can see the zerglings are trying to run around and get to the sentries but they cannot, all the zerglings die and your sentries lose some energy. I even overdid it here by using all of the sentry energy since you only need enough to enclose the sentries with one layer.
I'm not sure how important this is really but I just feel that detection is a must vs hallucination when you're playing against a competant player since they can trick you so easily and this technique takes advantage of detection being used. At the very least I thought it was interesting enough to craft a post about it, hopefully some people at least share that opinion. Even if you think it's garbage in terms of usefulness it's still interesting to play with ideas, let me know what you think.
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United States7483 Posts
The protoss could achieve the same effect with forcefields and use less energy doing it, and have the effect be safer.
This is a non-issue. Bring the detection, you will almost never have a situation where there are that many hallucinations on the field, and there might be DT's in their army mix.
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But it doesn't need to be this many hallucinations, just having a few hallucinated zealots next to your important units lowers the surface area where they can be attacked. I do agree that in a lot of situations forcefields can achieve the same effect but I think in certain scenarios a cute move like this could really turn the tide of battle without the zerg noticing. What if you just have like a like of fake stalkers (5-10) in front of your real pack of stalkers. With detection you would reduce the surface area that the zerglings have to attack or, even better, if you're in a choke you could even block all of the zerglings off. This is better than forcefields (situationally) as they last 4 times as longer and can move
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Kinda reminds me scouting with halluci warpprism against terran - messes his mind so much.. and esseantialy he is afraid of nothing. Halluci will be having more and more use in the future i guess
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I was reminded by something called change-fields or changelingfields.
If you used enough changelings on hold position (around 15), you could use them to block a ramp while you attack the main. Due to the nature of changelings, even if the opponent knows they're fake, they still have to attack each one in order get through.
You could do the same trick with hallucinations if they had detection there, you'd want to use probes on hold position (the more units the more micro the opponent has to do targeting each one) on a ramp while your colossi, air units, warp prisms, blink stalks or w/e are attacking the main/whatever the ramp goes to.
People still drastically undervalue hallucination while EMP is finally being popularized like Fungal Growth. Pretty soon Hallucination will earn its OP threads once some big players start working magic.
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Ive bin using this for awhile,
hallu a archon and put him on hold pos on a ramp, longer lasting force field in the early game is hard to find =)
2sentries and 4 stalkers with a hallu archon is crazy strong =)
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If you hallucinate probes you get 4 per cast and the enemy AI will not try to target the probes even when they have no detection.
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On August 05 2011 06:43 Keilah wrote:
If you hallucinate probes you get 4 per cast and the enemy AI will not try to target the probes even when they have no detection.
I could see this being interesting to fake an all-in :O would provoke an over-the-top defense
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Yep, I think hallucination is one of those abilities that pro players have really only scratched the surface of. A big reason would have to be because Sentries have three great abilities, and hallucination is the least vital and most expensive of them.
I think as time goes on, players will see specific scenarios where they'll decide spending the energy on hallucination is more valuable than a force field or guardian shield.
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On August 05 2011 06:50 ZasZ. wrote:
Yep, I think hallucination is one of those abilities that pro players have really only scratched the surface of. A big reason would have to be because Sentries have three great abilities, and hallucination is the least vital and most expensive of them.
I think as time goes on, players will see specific scenarios where they'll decide spending the energy on hallucination is more valuable than a force field or guardian shield.
People have been saying that for a long time now. Reminds me of that old chestnut: "Brazil is the nation of the future -- and it always will be."
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In PvT, hallucinating some immortals and sending them first into a tank line can do wonders. 
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EPT
