EPT[D] TvZ, better to get +1 armor first? - Page 3
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TERRANLOL
United States626 Posts
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awakenx
United States341 Posts
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SheffiTB
Canada223 Posts
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Qntc.YuMe
United States792 Posts
The +1 attack isnt just for fighting lings.... but also fighting other units such as mutas. When fighting mutas, +1 attack makes a very very big difference. If u also use stim with +1 attack, it scales better as well. | ||
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saritenite
Singapore1680 Posts
in TvP though, +1 armor is huge if you're doing an all-in. SCVs take 4 zealot shots and marines with combat shield take 7 stalker hits if you don't stim. That's 1 hit more per unit. Combine that with 1-2 ghosts, it makes for a sick all-in timing. | ||
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Genome852
United States979 Posts
On September 24 2011 08:49 Staboteur wrote: About stutter step vs zerglings : Unless you're stutter stepping your units closer to a wall or choke or some other positional advantage, what could it earn you? I mean, essentially by stutter stepping you'd be artificially increasing the range of your marines by (the distance stutter stepping marines can move backward while firing) temporarily, but you'd only be doing that for a small number of marines, and once the zerglings get into range the effective cap of how many zerglings can hit how many marines would start to diminish the returns of stutter step micro anyhow, as the speed difference between speedlings and marines would mean the zerglings would make up the ground lost by the marines while firing anyhow, and neither side would have gaps between attacks. I could be wrong, but in any case it would not surprise me in the least to learn that against speedlings, any marine stutter step performed at any level less than perfection would not cause a net gain. If you stutter step perfectly you don't lose DPS time, and it decreases the DPS you take from lings because not only can they not get a surround off, only a few of them will be attacking at a time while all your marines are firing. | ||
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SheffiTB
Canada223 Posts
On September 28 2011 16:20 saritenite wrote: I'd still get the +1 attack because of mutalisks and siege tank splash. Attack just lets you clean up injured stuff faster. in TvP though, +1 armor is huge if you're doing an all-in. SCVs take 4 zealot shots and marines with combat shield take 7 stalker hits if you don't stim. That's 1 hit more per unit. Combine that with 1-2 ghosts, it makes for a sick all-in timing. Against mutas (once again, i tested this) it doesn't matter whether you get +1 armor or +1 weapons. +1 weapons is better with large terran armies because a smaller percentage of the army is getting hit by zerglings and muta splash, but in large armies you will probably already have +3 armor if you prioritize armor upgrades, which nullifies muta splash. Also, you do know infantry +1 upgrades don't increase siege tank damage, right? | ||
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CatNzHat
United States1599 Posts
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hmmBacon
Germany16 Posts
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Nibbler89
884 Posts
On September 28 2011 17:37 CatNzHat wrote: You're just being retarded, you don't get armor for lings vs marines, you get armor for lings vs tanks and blings vs tanks.. there comes a point in TvZ where if you're getting 1 shot by tanks, you're lings are gonna be pretty useless. Speaking of retarded he's talking about marine upgrades not ling upgrades? btw +1 mech weapon one shot ling regardless of ling armor. | ||
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Vindicare605
United States16121 Posts
Otherwise I'd say +1 Weapons first is still better overall. | ||
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Vindicare605
United States16121 Posts
On September 28 2011 17:37 CatNzHat wrote: You're just being retarded, you don't get armor for lings vs marines, you get armor for lings vs tanks and blings vs tanks.. there comes a point in TvZ where if you're getting 1 shot by tanks, you're lings are gonna be pretty useless. I'd carefully read a post before calling it retarded because he wasn't talking about Zerg upgrades at all. Now don't we feel foolish? | ||
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Hattori_Hanzo
Singapore1229 Posts
On September 28 2011 16:04 DreamRaider wrote: +1 attack is better because it scales better once you get more and more marines. In low marine counts, its pretty obvious +1 armor would be better. The +1 attack isnt just for fighting lings.... but also fighting other units such as mutas. When fighting mutas, +1 attack makes a very very big difference. If u also use stim with +1 attack, it scales better as well. Dead marines can't shoot. Being alive for the 1.5246s for Muta and .5s for zerglings does mean the difference between a dead bio-ball and a dead muta/ling ball. +1 attack is good when you plan to deploy your marines where they won't get shot at much. Such as mineral line drops, stutter stepping against melee units (ling, zealot, etc) or in mass marine builds. | ||
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CatNzHat
United States1599 Posts
On September 28 2011 18:01 Vindicare605 wrote: I'd carefully read a post before calling it retarded because he wasn't talking about Zerg upgrades at all. Now don't we feel foolish? not at all, the OP is extremely poorly worded, no way to tell what unit the upgrades are referring to without looking at the title :D | ||
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Nibbler89
884 Posts
On September 28 2011 18:24 CatNzHat wrote: not at all, the OP is extremely poorly worded, no way to tell what unit the upgrades are referring to without looking at the title :D Nice instead of admitting your mistake and saying oops I got confused when you are the only one in the thread who made this mistake you try and blame the OP saying he has poor wording. "However, the marine survives against the 2 zerglings with 2 hp left when he is given +1 armor instead." Pretty clear to me. If you're gonna do something stupid again by asking me why it's clear it's because if he was referring to the lings it would be "however the marine survives against the 2 zerglings when they are given +1 armor" "Against Mutalisks it gets a bit trickier, because most mutas aren't going to engage marines unless they are very small in number" That part of the OP must have really confused you! "hmm why is he talking about muta vs marine if hes talking about ling armor/ weapons". If you actually read the post there are many ways you can logically figure out he was talking about marines without him explicitly saying "is +1 armor on marines better". | ||
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Fairwell
Austria195 Posts
On September 23 2011 15:03 the p00n wrote: I have tested 32 speedlings with no other upgrades against 16 combat shield/stimpack marines, with +1 armor or with +1 weapons. Unfortunately no single post here so far actually saw the huge flaw your testing brings along. Tests like these can be useful if you exactly know how to interpret the results which I firmly believe you are not doing. Even without testing it's pretty obvious that getting +1 armor over +1 attack for your marines in a marine vs zergling only battle without any micro apart from a-move is going to benefit you way way more. +1 attack provides your marines with 1/6 (16.66%) more dps vs zerlings while +1 armor reduces each attack from a zergling from 5 to 4 dmg resulting in 1/4 (25%) increased surviveability (yes you need to calculate +25% surviveability here instead of -20% received dmg because that's how you compare these values for this purpose ... i studied maths). However, if you invest the same amount of supply and ressources into your marine-only-army and the zerg player does the very same you will end up losing in smaller numbers by a-moving and winning once the ball gets big enough. I absolutely recommend also checking out this link here first before you proceed reading: Please note that this video is about "hardcountering" in Starcraft 2 using marines vs zerglings as examples but the very important thing shown in this video which is very relevant to your test is that you forgot to test in different unit numbers and also including chokes etc. For example even stalkers can win vs pure speedlings if they have a very big ball or are standing in a choke or are couple with some ff or good simcity building placement which all reduce the surface and therefore attacking area of speedlings while normally in an open area or smaller numbers speedlings would just wreck stalkers. So why did I write above that I firmly believe you are totally missinterpreting it and why are pro's almost always (like 99%+ of the time) going for +1 attack first? Well if you watched a good amount of pro replays or play at a decent rank (like masters etc) yourself, you will see realise that first of all this calculation is only useful when all zerglings or most of them are actually able to hit your marines (that means you have just a small group of marines vs his small group of lings thereby allowing all or most of his lings to attack your marines simultaneously). If this is not the case only the marines taking damage from the speedlings will benefit from the armor upgrade and all other marines not getting hit yet (because they are standing in a choke or on the inside of a big marines ball etc) don't benefit from the armor upgrade so far, but they benefit from the attack upgrade already all the time, killing the lings quicker and thereby once the marines on the outside are dying, there are simply less lings left. So +1 attack benefits you here 100% of the time, while +1 armor doesn't. Now just some things that come immediatelly into my mind when +1 attack does benefit you more: - You drop marines in a medivac and try to snipe drones/tech etc and load marines up before they die and leave. - You actually don't just a-move your marines into his lings and actually use stim kiting (see most of his lings won't be attacking most of the time because of your stim kiting). - You abuse building simcity/chokes etc. - You use marines in bunkers/behind walls for defence. - You use a bigger marine ball vs his bigger zerlings count ... the bigger the number the better for you. Now some even way more important ones: - Do you know any high level tvz macro game where the terran relies on marinse only? You simply can't be neglecting the usage of siege tanks etc otherwise the zerg player will just counter you with better unit compositions like banelings. So you stim forward pick some units of or lure them back into your siege tank fire. Or you simply stim kite + snipe banelings before they connect etc etc. - Your maines need to fight vs other zerg units as well. What if the zergs adds banelings/roaches/spines etc? There are probably so many more reasons, but the important point here is that yes your very specific test in very specific circumstances (you tested with a certain amount of units in a 100% open area with only a-move in unit tester ... these are 3 huge facts you used for this test which can and will be very different in normal games, you never ever will fight in such a marine counter in open fields without any other unit support by only a-moving ever if you don't have to). Your disregarded all the other situations/facts. These are the reasons why even David Kim himself said in an interview (i think it was autumn last year) that you need to be very careful testing stuff in unit tester because of the constraints which can be very different from a real game. They even made mistakes like these themselves in the beta, testing 1supply roaches with 2 armor vs immortals and concluding it's fine while actually in reality it takes forever to match the immortal count vs a roach count when gateway units are so weak vs 2 armored units because a robotics facility is needed and immortals take quite long to build. However, in some situations armor upgrades are indeed better than getting attack first, like you stated in small open and especially mostly unmicroed engagements with marines vs lings only or in marine vs muta only battles because of the bounce damage. The majority of situations calls for +1 attack though, that's the reason pro's opt for it. I'm not trying to bash your post or anything, just trying to point out why your testing is absolutely flawed. There had been numerous threads like these already since release and most people posting only test something in very specific circumstances and deduct therefore that it has to be always like this. A very good example of this is a thread which had been closed a long time ago where someone claimed broodlords being too weak because marines in equal cost can kill them easily and since broodlords take longer to make and are higher tech are way too weak. What the guy did was going into the unit test map, making one broodlord and marines for the same ressources with stim and then attacking the broodlord with the marines ... the marines won. But when you actually go into a game and fight broodlords, you can snipe them with marines if they happen to be out of position and their number is kinda low or you killed his supporting ground army already but otherwise with their range 9.5 vs range5 and with support like inestors with fg, banes, lots of speedlings streaming in and blocking your way etc etc your marines won't even make it in range. | ||
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Scare_Crow
217 Posts
On September 23 2011 15:35 BioTech wrote: Gents, look at the maths. Ling attack damage is 5. 1 armor drops that by 20% to 4. A zergling takes 11 strikes to kill a 55HP marine with no armor, but 14 against a marine with 1 armor. The marine is 27.3% tougher vs a standard ling. Marine attack is 6. +1 weapons upgrade increases that by 16%. This experiment, while solid knowledge for Marine vs Zergling in the early, early game, cannot really be applied to anything larger than that (such as the entire TvZ early game). The post above me explained it in very good detail, but I'd just like to provide an example to illustrate why you cannot say +1 Armor is better to get first for the matchup, just based on the greater percentage of "improvement" in Marine vs Ling in a controlled environment. Same deal against Roaches: +1 Weapons: reduces shots required to kill an unupgraded Roach from 30 to 25. (20%!) +1 Armor: reduces shots required to kill a non-Combat Shield Marine from 3 to 3. (0%!) +1 Armor must suck! Well, what if we add Combat Shield? Then +1 Armor requires a Roach to take 5 shots instead of 4 to kill that Marine (20% more!). Now its even! But what if we look at the amount of extra shots a Roach can get off inbetween the 5 extra shots required to take him out? It takes 4.15 seconds for a Marine to fire 5 times. That's 2 extra shots! +1 Armor has given us -16% over +1 Attack! But Roach attack speed is 2, what if 3 Marines are firing at the same time? Then the Roach dies in before getting to fire those extra shots, so does +1 Armor suddenly = +1 Attack, except with extra 20% survivability? Statistics can be represented to suit one's hypothesis quite easily, I'd just like to advise caution about a test with so few samples (ie. army sizes, terrain differences). On the other hand, 0/1 Marines do perform statistically better than 1/0 Marines against 0/0, 0/1 and 1/0 Lings (especially early game, when he has Speed and you don't have Stim AND Medivac support). Stutter step is all fine and dandy, until you get trapped by a Ling flank midway to his base, because early on there's no way for Terran to scout Zerg unit numbers unless you really want to waste MULEs. | ||
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poboxy
Canada48 Posts
On September 23 2011 15:07 jjhchsc2 wrote: wow that is a huge difference. then why would pros get plus one first Maybe because they can micro very well. | ||
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thobel
United States37 Posts
It lets you start sending in waves of marines that will trade cost-efficiently versus lings, before you even have medivacs out, and before zerg is done droning on two bases. You can keep creep all the way back in his base with just a bio force. A must for a more bio-heavy style. | ||
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thobel
United States37 Posts
If +1 weapons made marines take one fewer shot reliably, then fine -- there would be an argument to be made. But it's completely ineffectual against 0/0 lings. | ||
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