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On October 03 2011 11:01 Ironsights wrote:
A roach rush against a terran seems to me (a plat terran player) somewhat risky. That is not to say it is without its uses. As you say, roaches cripple hellion openings, set you up to handle mech, and can provide you with a decent early game contain.
Here's the problems as I see it: You cripple hellion openings and can outright win against FE builds, but against a 2-3 rax bio opener, you are done. You are well equiped to handle mech via a roach opener, but less able to harass a defended terran and less able to handle upgraded bio. Your roach opening gives you a contain, but at the cost of your tech.
This is what I would be most concerned about as a zerg, but at the same time, I rarely see bio play anymore, so I think it's a fairly calculated risk. Especially given the number of hellion openers that terran have been using of late.
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So the DRG and korean versions of this pressure typically involve like 10-14 lings with the 6-7 roaches. This is good against any gas helion opening. It's also good against FE as long as there is just one bunker.
The key things that have to happen in the attack are:
- keep your strategy hidden as long as possible. kill scouting scvs, take a less precarious path if possible and hide your lings till the last second.
- lings surround the bunker first (if FE) and then use the roaches
- have to do econ damage if it's an FE. best case shut the natural down completely. worst case you need to kill 8+ scvs.
- drone, build evo, and take 3rd behind this. note, this isn't good on maps that have rocks where 3rd bases will be. Having the map to take this early third is really the strength of this attack. If your attack isn't great, you may be even in drone/scvs or maybe a little down but having the 3rd will keep you in it.
Unless the player is bad, you should not win the game there, but you'll be in good or even position entering mid game which is what most zergs want.
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The biggest problem with droning like the pro's is that it make a meta game trend where all zergs are playing passively. If you keep doing this like Idra you'll find players will begin to cut corners that you wont necessarily see between scouting. If players don't realize these corners are being cut they end up losing and bitching about 3 base terrans and what not.
I think this roach build is great against any factory hellion play, and depending on your control possibly capable of delaying natural expansions. However if they go 3 rax ( which is out of fashion atm) you'll die.
Timing attacks are a pretty important part of the game. To many zergs sub masters talk about the macro game that they play as superior to timing attacks of terran and toss. But actually these zergs are just terrible in not realizing that timing attacks are part of a healthy macro game as much as passive play.
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I think a lot of guys are misunderstanding the purpose of the build.
It's not something you do blindly.
It's something you do in response to 1 gas, factory.
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this is kinda like the roach/ling semi-all-in in ZvP but also works in ZvT with just roaches. Nestea also did this to MMA in AOL or was it Code S? It was recent and it worked quite well except in that game nestea over committed. In reality, you use the pressure to drone and get a 3rd earlier while on hatch tech and the pressure leaves your terran opponent in his base for awhile.
yeah mr.bitter just said it perfectly, you only do this when you scout he has a gas. Usually I drone scout on 10/10 and can get inside on most maps except taldarim but that map is VERY obvious what your enemy does. If there is anything but 2 rax outside the natural then it's 1 gas factory.
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the roaches are also useful to counter attack in case T goes banshee. usually T chooses to defend using his banshee, giving you time to prepare. if he does commit to air harrass, he'll also will suffer losses, because there will be not enough defense in his base
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I do something similar, but not the same way.
Way I do it is:
15 hatch
15 gas
15 pool
Drone scout
@ lair, 2 queens, ling speed, lings to combat 2 rax
@ lair, 1 queen, roach warren, ling speed, 4 lings (2 eggs), then drones, to combat scouted gas, or factory, or reactor addon on barrack (any indication gas is taken).
Make 5-7 roaches, send to opponents base, make 2 more queens at home and make more lings to rally after the roaches (ling speed is done).
If you can't break wall, focus SCV's and retreat keeping half at least of your roaches and the lings alive and drone behind.
It seems to work very very well against any non-tank opening.
But it is weak against someone who goes straight for marine tank siege mode, intending to pressure straight up with marine tank. Because you delay your tech and drones for a long time.
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yeah,schnullerbacke, i see this often on zerg streams if they do the roach pressure and the terran is going banshees, he has to defend with these banshee(s), so you have plenty of time to prepare for them,
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The benefits of this include:
a) you get to put pressure on your opponent, and induce him to make mistakes early in the game
b) roaches shut down hellion harrass (and you can sometimes get a free win against someone going double factory, blue flame, and skipping on defense)
c) your presence at your opponent's front gives you scouting information (better than running zerglings up and down, since players can hide units when there's no pressure - defending a push means you will get to see all of your opponents units)
d) the roaches give you a safe window to drone up and maybe take a third
e) in emergencies when you're larva starved, roaches are an easy way to dump resources when you need an army quickly
a) yes true. unfortunately it doesn't exactly take a sophisticated response for the terran to hold this with minimal damage. keep their orbital in base, build a bunker and pull scvs to repair while you build a marauder or a tank.
b) is generally true. however, if you pressure with your 6 roaches, and make additional roaches for defense, he doesn't need to kill any drones. Normally you'll see zergs push with the roaches to say "STOP MAKING HELLIONS" and the terran obliges, even if the zerg doesn't make any roaches after that. Once the terran makes a marauder or a tank and cleans out those roaches, he could immediately go back to hellions if he wants, and he can still do damage.
c) is true, and is probably the most important thing about this kind of pressure
d) yes they do. Unfortunately you already cut drones to get your roaches out, so you are just catching up to where you should have been. I actually think you are still behind even if you drone up. 6 roaches is a lot of money, and a lot of time spent mining gas when you could be mining minerals. You still want to get zergling speed, so you're not really saving any money, so the roaches (and overlords to get supply for them) really cut into drones. If you don't get the roaches, you build a spine crawler (cheaper than the roach warren) and a 3rd queen, and a lot of drones (and some lings a little bit later down the road).
I've tried it out and it has its merits, but I don't like it. You occasionally win a game because the opponent went 1 rax double expand or reactor hellion double expand, but usually you kill his hellions and 3-4 SCVs while being 10 drones behind where you should be.
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I didn't check drg's exact build order, so this is what i do.
15 hatch
15 pool
16 gas
100 gas - ling speed
pull off 1 drone in gas
at around 60% inject, plant roach warren
roach warren will complete at the same time as 2nd wave of inject
Have 1 queen to drop tumor instead of 2nd inject, since you will have too much larva
while roaches are travelling pump down 1-2 waves of lings.
This build is supposed to be a reaction to fact build. Notice how DRG only start to drone scout recently, when he started using this build. You need to scout early because you will need to leave drones in gas.
The beauty of this build is that first you are not pinned back by hellions. You will have a group of lings in your base when roaches are moving out. You send your lings out later to meet with your roaches at the terran base . Second, this will hit at the timing terran is supposed to expand. Usually terran won't have that many marines at this timing. So even if theres a bunker you can focus down some of the scvs.
Of course this build works only for rush distances of blizzard size maps (most of season 3 maps >.>). It's too difficult to play macro against hellion expand into 2 base marine tank follow up for such rush distances. You always find yourself just lacking 1-2 wave of production to engage, and terran will start choking you to death if they manage to set up their attacks at your ramp. That's where this build comes into play. Long rush distances where roaches are not that effective but you can deal with timing pushes easier, you can just switch back into normal macro playstyle.
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I think you should be able to see whether Terran has gone for a Hellion build before the Roach Warren finishes. Even if you can't, he'll have to show his army, and if it's 3 Rax, you should be safe by pulling back with your Roaches and just massing Lings; the only upgrade I could imagine a 3Rax MM Terran having at this timing is Concussive Shells.
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It's an OK build against rax fact. You can't use it as a "standard".
I personally stopped doing it because I had trouble dealing with ca. 4 hellion counterattacking when you move out. I am still not sure what you should do against that, although maybe with the new patch you could block the ramp and evacuate the natural.
Against gasless FE it's a gimmick, you may win games but terran should be able to take no losses and get ahead.
Against reaper expand don't do it. They get easy marauders and possibly a very early stim timing that is very hard to hold.
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Personally Ive been doing this build for ages right after Sheth showed it once(5-6 months ago)
Now its finally starting to catch on between more passive-aggressive pro zergs
This opening is very versatile as it can defend just about anything terran can throw at you(only when u see terran going gas first and no tech lab on his first rax until your drone leaves his base)
One of the most important thing about this build is that the roach pressure will let you scout what the terran is doing most likely
Any tech heavy play will have to take some dmg from roaches
You have to remember though to throw down an evo chamber as ur pushing out
early third + even a macro hatch can be added after you cut gas mining for a while
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I build of mine that's very successful against terren is to 3 Roach Expand, by having 3 roaches up you can pressure a terren easily and prevent him from doing any sort of aggression to you while you drone hard behind it, and from there you can take the game anyway you like
Its very successful against all terren openings with proper micro you can keep all the roaches alive while picking off units and buildings at the front of their base.
Even if they do bunker up you will still have a nice contain so they can't pressure and will have 2 bases fully saturated very quickly.
The build I use currently is 13 pool or 12 DET pool either works drone to 17 make extractor when pool finishes put up RW and make queen then make either an extra drone or ling depending on the map and then you save 3 larva take drones off gas at 76 then once the RW finishes you make 3 roaches and take your expo and from there you can do what ever.
If anyone has any queries and would like to know more send us PM
glhb
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DRG does this build when he scouts hellion expand. Normally he does it against reactor hellion, but he's done it with success against MMA's blue flame hellion expand.
If they do a reaper expand they'll have marauders or lots of bio, if they do a siege tank expand, siege tanks. Bunkers in general shut it down, and so does bio, but it's a great way to exploit hellion expands.
The problem with this build is that if he doesn't do a hellion expand, or worse, you do zero damage, you will be so far behind that you'll basically autolose to rine/tank timing pushes. 7 roaches just kills Zergs economy, and your lair will be super late as well.
So that's why it only works against hellion expands. Bio destroys it, bunkers destroy it, siege tanks destroy it, so something like 1 rax expand or reaper expand or CC first actually owns this build since they will have bio/bunkers to defend, and the subsequent timing push comes so fast from a FE build that you'll basically autolose due to shitting on your economy.
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I'm a Gold league random player, and upon seeing this build I remembered a game I played a couple of weeks ago where I did something similar. I just watched the replay and without knowing the build order, i just happened to do exactly this build vs a 1 barracks expanding terran. I just won the game right then and there.
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This build is supposed to be a reaction to fact build. Notice how DRG only start to drone scout recently, when he started using this build. You need to scout early because you will need to leave drones in gas.
The weird thing is that he doesn't get any info with his scouting drone. He always pokes up the ramp and immediately goes home. Basically the scout gives him the location, and tells him if there is one or two barracks at the top of the ramp (and I don't think he checks for hidden rax either). he never looks for gas.
so if the decision has to be made at that point, he doesn't have much information yet.
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EPT
