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Hi there, I have been struggling against terran for a long time and I have concluded that my biggest problem is that I have terrible engagements. I try to play a ling/bane/muta style and then transition into tier 3, and if I can survive long enough to get tier 3 I'm usually fine. But I find myself dying a lot to big pushes that are usually marine tank medivac. I really need some advice about how to control these engagements.
Hotkeys: should I have lings on one hotkey, banes on another, mutas on a third? Should I use attack move or never use attack move? Or use it with zerglings but micro the banelings? I understand that execution may be hard as well but I simply don't even know what I'm trying to do, so I don't know how I can get better until I understand what I'm going for.
Not sure if I'm articulating this very well but if anyone understands what I asking any help is appreciated.
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Ah, yes. It's difficult and a lot more micro-intensive than certain players who don't play Zerg seem to suggest. I'm sure there are tons of threads explaining how to use this composition correctly, but in the meantime:
1) You can't just A-move your lings, because they are only effective when they surround the enemy. You'll want to click-move them behind / around your enemy before A-clicking. Or, to be much more effective and a generally better player, split your ling bling into 2 groups (each group has lings and blings) that come in from opposite sides prior to the engagement, wrapping around the enemy. If you can make this happen it'll make things a lot prettier. Of course, if one flanking group hits the enemy before the other, the first group will melt, then the second will melt after that. Have them hit at the same time.
2) Because lings move faster than blings, a seperate group for blings is not necessary, though you can if you wish. Just be sure when the engagement happens to box-select your blings and move them away from tanks and towards marines. If you can't kill most of the marines you're done. Box-selecting smaller groups of blings in the ball and moving them toward the splitting marines is the zerg equivalent of marine splitting.
3) Pick off stray tanks with mutas as much as possible prior to the engagement. This will slow his push and allow you time to reinforce / position. Do not engage marines with your muta ball without lings on the ground to absorb their fire. If he has a thor, you'll need to click-move then press 'S' to stop, thus magic-boxing.
4) Your creep should be decently far out into the map by the time his push comes, and you should scout his push with a ling at his front. Start harrassing tanks with muta immediately as he moves out, not when he's at your front door. This will buy you time to mass lings and morph blings. While he's on his way, use your muta to pick off reinforcing marines and tanks. If you can get your units into position before he sieges up on your creep, you should take this chance to rush in and dominate.
5) If at all possible, fight on creep.
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The way I do it (and I'm sure there are better methods) is that I first keep all of my lings and banes on the same hotkey. My mutas are on 3. My banes are on 2.
I will move-command my bling group with a right click on the other side of the army, then I select my mutas and wait for marines to retreat. As soon as their marines start to move back, I shift-click a few tanks, go back to my ling/bane ctrl group, ctrl+click a ling in the unit selection, and issue an attack-move as my lings are usually mixed throughout the terran army by this point.
As soon as my mutas are targetting some tanks, and my lings are in attack-move, I control my banes and try to target large groups of marines. If I have multiple groups to choose, I target marines near my mutalisks.
As soon as I lose my banelings, I select my mutalisks again and retreat if I need to, or clean-up as required.
If I can't clean up the entire opposing army, my number one goal is to kill as many tanks as possible, and conserve my mutalisks.
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Pick off stray tanks with mutas as much as possible prior to the engagement. This will slow his push and allow you time to reinforce / position. Do not engage marines with your muta ball without lings on the ground to absorb their fire. If he has a thor, you'll need to click-move then press 'S' to stop, thus magic-boxing.
to expand on this,
burrow pairs of banelings at the locations where you would harass the Terran's tanks with your mutas, When he tries to stim a pack of marines to push your mutas back, Kite him over the banelings.
Here is a link to a guide with pics
this will force 2 to 3 scans per push out for a Terran to move across the map. which is around 900 minerals lost in mauls.
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My preferred method is 2 ctrl groups of mixed ling bane (and maybe some roaches) and a third for mutas. You want the two groups coming from different angles, hopefully 180 degrees. You move in with lings to get surround, quickly ctrl click banes and move them towards marines, splitting them if necesary. Mutas usually don't fight in large engagements, maybe after most marines are dead, or before picking off tanks.
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Your goal in this situation is to have your zerglings envelop your enemy as quickly as possible, your banelings to explode in the heart of his infantry, and your mutalisks to do effective damage while sustaining minimal losses. Let's look at how we might do that...
FLANK: I can't emphasise enough how important this is - it hugely improves how effective your engagements are. This is probably the most important tip here. You should always be attempting to attack from multiple angles simultaneously with your ling + bling (or almost any army). Ideally you should have units charging in behind as others charge in at the front. I'd suggest simply splitting your ling/bling army into two hotkeys of 50% units each, with your mutas on a third hotkey.
LINGS: It's sometimes useful to move your lings "past" his army (so that passive zerglings envelop his units), then attack moving as soon as his army appears surrounded. However, this is absolutely secondary to flanking.
BLINGS: you want to move command them into the heart of the terran infantry to do maximum damage (I typically send my army in and then ctrl+click on the banelings). Once you're happy they are immersed in squishy terran units don't wait to let the terran kill them gradually - change them back to attack move! The only reason blings need micro is to ensure they hit multiple targets. It's also good to spread them out a little before you engage to avoid them being annhilated by a terran focus firing his tanks.
MUTALISKS: are very useful in the big engagement as they do lots of damage but they MUST be sent in AFTER your ground army. This is crucial. If you send in your ground army first his marines will be shooting zerglings. If your mutalisks arrive first - even if only by a moment - his marines will be shooting your mutalisks. And you don't want that.
TARGET PRIORITY: A revelation I had after watching pro games (and wondering why my engagements never seemed to go so well) is that you should NOT prioritise killing tanks with your ground army. Marines are the backbone of the terran army - if you want to break the terran's back you have to annhilate his marines, not his tanks. Let zerglings attack tanks naturally, yes, but DON'T prioritise them. Marines surrounded by zerglings actually take huge friendly fire from his tanks.
It IS good, however, for your mutalisks to target tanks in the battle where possible, but be careful to keep the previous point in mind - be sure that any marines they are near are already fighting your zerglings! Mutalisks should definitely take part in the main battle as they do big damage. Be wary of "over-micro" - don't stress about tanks too much as you likely will be gimping your own mutalisks' effectiveness. It's fine to have them just kill marines too!
Another little tactic to employ - unrelated to the big battle micro - is to try and have a little group of just ~5 zerglings between his base and his army. When a terran begin pushing they will often rally all production buildings to their army; rallied units are NOT on attack move. This simple tactic requires no effort from you, can potentially kill a whole bunch of units for free, and distracts the terran from his main army and push.
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Also be sure you really have enough units. If your typical engagement starts with you still having 1000/500 banked, you could have had a lot more units.
If your droning too long, you could tell yourself things like "when i get 2 base saturated, ill make 20 zerglings, and then take my third". While this may not be the most efficient play, it might let you win more games
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Here comes real micro tip: If you have blings and lings in same hotkey, you can ctrl+click banelings in your unit bar. It selects all blings you have.
Also do not keep blings in one big group when engaging. Have them split all over the place. Otherwise enemy can focusshot whole freaking baneling blob down.
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![[image loading]](http://i54.tinypic.com/2rr6ntw.jpg)
What you want is to: 1) Spread out your units some before engagement so that tanks don't just instakill all your units. 2) Have your units actually engage, not be overmicroed and therefore not doing any damage. 3) The right units attacking the right stuff.
Me personally, I like to do what I've illustrated in the (bad) image ... I move command all my units in a line along the enemy units so that they are spread out (outside of tank range), and then I just attack move behind the army, before I manually take control of the banelings and split them after marines splitting to avoid them 
I find that just microing the banelings and splitting them is the best way to deal with a marine heavy terran. I just let the zerglings and mutas do whatever damage they can. I am not fast enough to control everything properly, so I just focus on the banelings.
Others may have better methods.
I find it important for this reason however to have my main army outside my base, so I don't have to go down a sieged choke.
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I don't know enough to write a good guide, but one small trick that makes baneling control a bit easier is having your banelings in a different group and right-clicking a single marine at the back of the marine ball. This requires just one click and leaves you free to control the rest of your army. This is only good, though, if his marines are balled up and not preemptively split.
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On October 18 2011 20:52 Sbrubbles wrote: I don't know enough to write a good guide, but one small trick that makes baneling control a bit easier is having your banelings in a different group and right-clicking a single marine at the back of the marine ball. This requires just one click and leaves you free to control the rest of your army. This is only good, though, if his marines are balled up and not preemptively split. If he preemptively split, just use your muta ball to engage small clumps of marines. You can kill a lot of marines if he isn't sure how to deal with it ... then when he clumps, retreat your mutas, and engage with your army.
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ok so hotkey your different units for sure, i use 1 and 2 for lings and banelings, i try to have some lings and banes in each, will generally have 1 heavier in banelings, these are your hammer and anvil. split them up and pincer attack, try cupping his ball with the mostly ling force(they tend to elongate out as they run around can use that to help and then ram into that cup with your mostly baneling force, either where it is more open and you can get a full surround ideally. Mutas again separate hotkey, keep these guys flying around picking at the corners of the T ball and picking off tanks when ever you get a chance(i think is fine to trade a muta or 2 for a tank if he's seige'd next to your base, otherwise don't engage anything other than a few marines at a time) and blocking reinforcements.
Generally when i actually full on engage a T position i will try to sweep around with the mutas away from my lings and blings and try to pick at a tank. This often forces re-positioning of his marines, while hes doing that i try to attack from as many directions as i can with my lings and blings and just try to get the best bling connects i can.
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Thanks for all the help. I'm looking forward to my next ZvT so I can try to use all these tips.
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A good trick is to queue attack Mutas on all the tanks, then attack with your army (spread out) and focus all your energy on microing banelings to hit marines. The most important aspect of this style is timing it so that your army gets in at the same time as mutas.
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On October 18 2011 20:05 weikor wrote:Also be sure you really have enough units. If your typical engagement starts with you still having 1000/500 banked, you could have had a lot more units. If your droning too long, you could tell yourself things like "when i get 2 base saturated, ill make 20 zerglings, and then take my third". While this may not be the most efficient play, it might let you win more games 
lol I thought some other thread established that "macro better" in response to a specific question not about macro was a banable offense =)
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On October 18 2011 22:12 Sprite_ wrote: A good trick is to queue attack Mutas on all the tanks, then attack with your army (spread out) and focus all your energy on microing banelings to hit marines. The most important aspect of this style is timing it so that your army gets in at the same time as mutas.
Once the marines have been split, the tanks are usually free kills for mutas. Just park your mutas outside of firing distance of the marines and target fire the tanks once the battle begins. You should be using your mutas before the fight to slow down the push by picking off stray tanks/medivacs/small groups of marines/reinforcements, so they should be nearby anyway. You can time it so that your mutas start hitting the tanks right after your ling/bling army starts to engage, and the marines begin to run away. You can preemptively assume that they will start splitting marines (if not, they'll die anyway), so you don't have to wait.
Be sure to incorporate army harassment into your overall muta harassment!
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Listen to what they say^^ and your first 2 engagements when going this build is basically key to success. First thing is to engage them in the middle of the map ( if you can) be abuse it's Ez surround and not seiged. If u can't wait and get as many units as u possibly can before engaging. You have to crush his army or your done. Try to attack from multie angles at once and send u lings I front of your pack of lings so the tank ai shot kills those thus allowing your lings to get close.
Lings on tanks bling to rines muta try to pick off tanks. Never lose your mutas
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The simplest way of doing it I feel is essentially a 3 step process so long as no thors are out (against traditional marine, tank medivac): 1. 1A your ling+bling at the army preferably as he is moving his tanks/ if they are unseiged from a far 2. Instantly hotkey to your mutalisk group and cue up shift command on each tank 3. Hotkey back to your ling bling army control select your banelings and control just the banelings to chase the marine group (assuming ling bling are on one group)
This is usually done for the midgame push, I feel if its one of the early 3 tank pushs (pre muta) if you have a macro hatch you can literally just 1 A a whole bunch of lings and a few banes and do the same of just microing the banes)
If its late game where there are thors out and u have yet to reach tier 3 (say ur hive is morphing), if the terran is doing a very safe slow push of slightly leapfrogging, do not engage and simply poke and prod with mutas until you can engage with tier 3. However, if there is a time where he unseiged majority if not all of the tanks to move forward treat it like the previously described engagement but you must magic box even at the expense of some bad baneling hits (although I suppose its a judgement call proportionate to the time. Having a HUGE ground army of lings simply to by time to do this set up is necessary pending on your skill.
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