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I play Terran and my biggest problem is when I am up against Zerg and they have mutalisks. I just can't seem to find a good way to kill them.
Marines are too weak and susceptible to other units, Vikings get wrecked by mutas, and Thors, while good with splash damage, seem to always get out maneuvered by them and like the marines are susceptible to other units as well.
So, any advice on how to counter mutalisks? Honestly the only way I can win against Zerg at this point is to wreck them before they get mutas, and then afterwards it's a stalemate for like 40 minutes.
Thanks for any help. I don't really need any advanced strategies yet - I'm in high Bronze league, so generally "get a lot of mutalisks and attack with them!" is pretty much the extent of the strategy I'm up against.
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Replay please, but generally, turrets, marines, thors, are good. If your macro is good enough and all the zerg does is go mutas, just go kill him with your army. Mutas are quite expensive.
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As a bronze and youre REALLY having trouving with mutas, just make a turret for every 7ish mutas he has @ ur mineral lines, and u can just repair them with ur scvs.
If your army is in an aggressive stance, and you cant just go kill him, make some turrets to stop building harrass too, as a bronze player id say go ahead and spam turrets, but dont forget, turrets are always worse than army because they lack moblility 
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I'll try and upload a replay as soon as possible.
On August 14 2011 16:59 TrueZerG wrote:As a bronze and youre REALLY having trouving with mutas, just make a turret for every 7ish mutas he has @ ur mineral lines, and u can just repair them with ur scvs. If your army is in an aggressive stance, and you cant just go kill him, make some turrets to stop building harrass too, as a bronze player id say go ahead and spam turrets, but dont forget, turrets are always worse than army because they lack moblility
Well turrets are only good for defense, and if I have a Zerg that's just covering his base with mutalisks, how do i attack? I really don't have a problem with defense. The turrets only fail when you're like 40 minutes into a match and the guy just builds up a billion mutalisks to go overwhelm you. But if I can find a good offensive counter then I don't have to worry about his turtle force there.
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You're doing something wrong when you let him get mutalisks THAT easily. Make timing pushes and harass him in any way possible. He'll break eventually and go nuts. But yea upload a replay.
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Whut. In equal number, I'd probably put my vote for the mutalisks vs marines battle in favour of the marines! Marines are mobile enough to contest the mobility, have tons and tons of upgrades (stim, combat shield, armour/attack and medevacs) that should all help them beat the crap out of the expensive mutalisks your enemy has floating around. Mutalisks should NOT be able to stand up against any decent number of marines, and if they -can- then either you're not making enough marines or are missing upgrades on your rise to the top.
As a Diamond Zerg, I can safely say that I steer my mutas well clear of marines sooner than I steer them clear of anything else. One stim and one second of me not paying attention could easily equal the death of half, if not more, of my flock.
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If the guy's covering his base in mutalisks, go expand and outmacro him. If he's harassing a lot, you can hit his main while his forces are broken up and do some serious damage. He can't be everywhere at once. As for a counter, stimmed marines with +weapons tear mutas apart, and a couple thors can splash a lot of mutas down fairly quickly
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Get lots and lots of marines. Marines eat mutas for breakfast. If they have stim and upgrades.
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First of all, be quick and edit a replay into your OP before a mod finds you and closes this thread!
As to beating Mutalisks, upgraded Marines work and 2-3 Thors as support can beat down any number of Mutalisks.
What's important is that you want Siege Tanks and Medivacs with those Marines. Marines trade very favorably against Mutalisks, what you need to do is keep the Banelings away from them. Do not move out until you have 4+ Siege Tanks, and after you hit the edge of his creep, start leapfrogging the Tanks towards your objective (usually his 3rd). Keep the Marines in between your two leapfrog locations so the Tanks and Marines protect each other mutually, and do not ever unsiege all your Tanks unless: 1. he just threw his army at you and you're now trying to maximize damage before his next wave shows up, or 2. you did what you wanted (ie. killed his expansions), are off creep, and want to back off to regroup. As the game goes on, make each push with more and more Tanks. ~40 Marines and 2 Thors can take as many Mutalisks as he can possibly produce, but they can pop easily to large Baneling numbers, unless you have 4-6 Tanks.
I recommend throwing in 2 Thors if your micro is not very good- keep them ahead of the Marines so they can tank Baneling damage.
During an engagement, run your Marines behind your Tanks. If at the end of the fight you only have Marine/Medivac and he only has Zergling/Mutalisk, you'll likely win the follow-up fight and have the time to go kill a base or two.
Also, macro-wise: after your 2nd base is saturated, make sure you have 2 tech lab'd factories, 1 reactor'd starport and 3+ reactor'd barracks. Another good habit is to hotkey all your upgrade buildings so you have higher upgrades than him. You want to hit 3/3 with Bio ASAP, for Mech, you want 1 attack first and then 3 armor: the 1 attack is so your Tanks 1-shot lings, the armor is to let your Thors tank.
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Low-mid diamond zerg here who loves to go mutas against terran. A big ball of marines with good upgrades + stim + medivac support will rip through mutalisks like butter.
If you see banelings or a large number of roaches along with them, get siege tanks to protect your marines, and use your marines to protect your tanks as you slowly push forward with them (try to engage off creep whenever possible).
If his support army is pure zergling, than make sure to keep your marines balled up to avoid surrounds (this also increases the amount of damage your marines are dishing out), going pure marine with medivacs deals with this composition (ling/muta) very well. If he has infestors AND mutas then you're doing something wrong because you shouldn't let him be getting that much gas. If that's the case maybe try doing a blue-flame hellion drop (search around i'm sure you'll find a good build on here, they've become rather popular lately) which usually hits right around spire completion time and can kill tons of drones devastating his economy making mutas much easier to deal with.
Thors are great vs. mutalisks, though you're right they are very immobile but are good at protecting bases and will punish any mistakes your opponent makes with his muta micro very quickly. And once you get a decent number of Thors (6-10 i'd say) to go with the rest of your army, in lower leagues you can pretty much just attack-move the zergs base (pull a few scvs to auto-repair them) and wait for the victory screen (as a former bronze zerg I can attest to this happening more times than I'd like to admit).
The building armor upgrade at the engineering bay although not recommended by most players will help protect vulnerable buildings like supply depots and tech labs, its also not a bad habit to build a few (or even spam a ton of) missile turrets around your base and expansion(s). If you suspect he's massing mutalisks, the Hi-Sec Auto Tracking upgrade (+1 range to missile turrets) is also useful.
TL;DR make sure to keep up with upgrades on your marines, try to do as much damage before spire completes (in all honesty this is probably the best way to deal with this, but obviously not always possible), MISSILE TURRETS MISSILE TURRETS MISSILE TURRETS, and most of all, just be patient and play it cool in your decision making. If he went straight for mutas the rest of his army is probably pretty weak, and mutalisks are more useful as harrassment units, ie. they tend to be rather lousy in straight up fights. The best advice I could give to a terran player who's having trouble vs. muta zergs are the words of the immortal Day9: "Just go @$#*%ing kill him!"
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Mutas are only strong because of their mobility. If you cut off their wings and make them attack in big battles, they lose their usefuless. That being said, the key concept is to either make sure their mobility cannot be abused too much or try to limit their mobility. The first way is simply to just play defensive and then do a push which ultimately means that the mutas' mobility do not do a lot of damage. The second way is to control the mutas' mobility with drops, multi-pronged atks, etc like what MMA does.
First way is easy and everyone does it. I find it terribly ineffective after a while if the zerg is good at finding holes and knows how to counter attack once you move out. Also, by the time he has a large muta ball, it forces you to get thors and even then, you will have trouble moving out of your base.
On the other hand, doing what MMA does, which is to be extremely aggressive while attacking at different locations, keeps the mutas on bay and makes sure that those mutas do not have an opportunity to abuse their mobility. This is very APM intensive and takes hundreds if not thousands of games worth of practice to use properly
Once again, there aren't any real ways to counter mutas. Just remember that their strongest strength is their mobility and if you can somehow eliminate that, you are basically winning.
I really suggest you watch GOM and their games and see how terrans deal with zerg. I don't kno how many times have I seen the terran lose because the zerg's mobility got them, or how much times the terran won because the zerg's mobility got shut down. I am a Masters Terran.
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On August 14 2011 16:59 TrueZerG wrote:As a bronze and youre REALLY having trouving with mutas, just make a turret for every 7ish mutas he has @ ur mineral lines, and u can just repair them with ur scvs. If your army is in an aggressive stance, and you cant just go kill him, make some turrets to stop building harrass too, as a bronze player id say go ahead and spam turrets, but dont forget, turrets are always worse than army because they lack moblility
im sorry but i dont agree with this and think its shitty advice. Spamming turrets will put you behind. Where do you get the number of 1 turrets for 7 mutalisks? At bronze level they dont treat turrets like pros do. 7 mutas will rape 1 turret and the scvs trying to repair it.
Build a few turrets, fine. Too many and not only will you be behind, if he spams ground units what then? The easiest cost effective way to deal with them is to have your army spread out with easy access to your main and natural. Marines and thors work wonders but the most important thing is not to run after them with your whole army. Nothing you have will catch them. They will run circles around you. Try to anticipate where he will move then move to intercept. It takes practice to get right but in my experience its the most effective way.
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On August 14 2011 17:41 eu.exodus wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2011 16:59 TrueZerG wrote:As a bronze and youre REALLY having trouving with mutas, just make a turret for every 7ish mutas he has @ ur mineral lines, and u can just repair them with ur scvs. If your army is in an aggressive stance, and you cant just go kill him, make some turrets to stop building harrass too, as a bronze player id say go ahead and spam turrets, but dont forget, turrets are always worse than army because they lack moblility im sorry but i dont agree with this and think its shitty advice. Spamming turrets will put you behind. Where do you get the number of 1 turrets for 7 mutalisks? At bronze level they dont treat turrets like pros do. 7 mutas will rape 1 turret and the scvs trying to repair it. Build a few turrets, fine. Too many and not only will you be behind, if he spams ground units what then? The easiest cost effective way to deal with them is to have your army spread out with easy access to your main and natural. Marines and thors work wonders but the most important thing is not to run after them with your whole army. Nothing you have will catch them. They will run circles around you. Try to anticipate where he will move then move to intercept. It takes practice to get right but in my experience its the most effective way.
I think in Bronze extra Turrets is perfectly reasonable, where people do not have their eyes glued to the minimap, and hands on the hotkeys. A Turret is 100 minerals, if it kills 1 Mutalisk before it dies, you've made a profit. If it stalls the Mutalisks for long enough that you save 2 SCVs, you break even. If he makes a mistake and attacks into 2-3 overlapping Turrets, he's going to get mauled. ~2-3 per mineral line is not too much of a blow when macro isn't perfect to begin with, and I'd rather tie up 100 minerals than to lose my Reactors later on.
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okay fair enough.
Which is better. Having extra turrets for in case he sends mutas to your base to kill 1 or 2 and possibly still lose all your scvs?
Or positioning your army better, saving minz on turrets, and with an ever improving micro and game sense, kill a shit load of mutas and put him far more behind than you ever could with turrets?
Spamming turrets in not offensive. Its defensive and thats not what the op is looking for. It tells me that he has gone the defensive route and it hasnt been successful. Geuss we wont know unless we see a replay.
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lol if you are high bronze just pratice your macro you can get all the way to plat with mass marines and a good macro (+harras and split vs banes)
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You shouldn't rely on just marines or just thors to handle the mutas. Mix the marines with 1 or 2 thors and you'll have much more success with head on engagements where mutas are mixed with banes / lings / etc.
If he's attacking you with mutas as you leave the base, leave just a few marines (or a thor) with a couple of missile turrets. You don't want to overcommit to static defenses as they are useless until they're attacked.
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2 things that helped me quite a bit:
1. Mutas usually dont come out until 9 minutes so scan his main at 9 minutes to see if spire is building or finished and then you know if you need to make turrets.
2. thors are great vs muta especially if you are attacking his base with tanks and thors and helions
TLO does a build where he reactor helion expands and with all his gasses taken he makes 4 factories. you make loads of helions, like 4 tanks and enough thors to kill the mutas - so long as you are ready for muta around 9 mins then you will be fine.
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Personally i am realy starting to like to mix in 1-3 vikings with my marines and tanks and maybe thor (wich also helps against the inevitable broodlords if you manage to survive long enough)
They make the mutalisk alot less mobile since they have to stay clear of the 9 range of the viking (asuming viking covered by marines) and they can also chase the mutas away a bit furter even as long as they dont move away to far from the marines so they can fall back
1 viking should definatly get enough shots in to make it worth its cost
A thor should in theory also be able to do this but it just seems a bit to imobile in practise and vikings work suprisingly well,
maybe in combination with 1-2 thor wich prevent muta from stacking and good focus fire
Vikings can also spot for your tanks btw, 13 vs 11 range is quiet an atvantage against infestors and incoming ling/baneling,
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you are bronze.
sorry to break it to you, but it isn't mutas that are killing you it's your own self. defending mutas is the least of your problems.
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EPT
