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Im at work at the moment, but I will definately watch the replay when I get home.
However I have read all of your post. Depending on what composition he has I fell these are your options;
- If he pirmarily has roaches/blings, I think the stalkers are the right way to go..... but it seems like you need a higher sentry count. I feel a blink stalker + sentry combo could sort this out. You would just need to be on the ball with your forcefields. Keep in mind he dosen't really have air control, you can abuse this with warp prism harass, whilst your main army is taking out expos (with your stalkers abusing cliffs ect.) When you do eventually get that collossi up. I feel this is when it will start to get scary for your zerg counter part.
- I would even try just squeezing out a couple of pheonix, just to deny his overlord spread and as a means to scout. (this is just an idea). The way I think is, the less ovies he has, the less he will be willing to sacrifice.
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On November 01 2011 12:07 ZorBa.G wrote:
Im at work at the moment, but I will definately watch the replay when I get home.
you're replying to a op made by a mod with "im at work".................................... really?
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I'm awestruck by Plexa's mercy for all these posting violations! <3
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my banerain always struggles and does not do as much damage as i want to when they split their stalkers down the middle left and right. It makes the player chose, most likely hesitate allowing you to kill more overlords prevent more damage from happening.
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Game 1: Your opening zealots slowed your tech a little, but you forced a lot of lings so I think you were about even after that. If you are going to open blink stalkers, you need to pressure. The style you tried to play was the sit-back-macro-death ball style, and if you want to play like that you need to incorporate colossus, void rays, or templar. Having immortal/stalker that late in the game is death. The Zerg player had 5 bases at 16 minutes. This is a no-no. You need to deny expansions and hit many different places at once, ESPECIALLY if you opened blink. You can pop in and out of the main and snipe key buildings with minimal losses. Also you need to scout. You only built 1 observer this game, so you had no idea of when he was going to attack, which expansions he took, and what his army comp was. You need to know all these things and react accordingly. The warp prism harass was good, you sniped good tech buildings. Try to take expansions faster also.
Game 2: Almost flawless opening. You killed a lot of shit with your zealots so you were ahead. You play way too passively though, lol. At the time you took your gold, you could have pushed and won the game. This game like the last, you didn't make the higher tech units fast enough. You should have started archon/void rays/ colossus production way earlier. As well, you need to be proactive if you don't see infestors on the field. Good warp prism harass to kill his 4th/5th. Maybe a fast dt shrine? DTs are good unit.
Game 3: Many of the engagements in this game were bad. You need to make observers to see when he is coming, so that you can prepare a pre-engagament concave. You also need to make observers to see expansions. This way you can deny them the instant they are built. Engagement at 25:45 : You only used 1 of your 4+ possible storms. If templar are about to die, just spam storms. Storm is a good spell. Good tech switch, but you ran out of money in the end.
Overall, I think you need to be more aggressive in your play and engage better. When fighting that ball of roach/bane drops, you need to split the roaches from the overlords, and micro for your life. Split units as best you can and snipe overlords. This will take practice, so find a Zerg practice partner and run engagements through the unit tester over and over again.
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On November 01 2011 17:47 mR.bONG789 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2011 12:07 ZorBa.G wrote:
Im at work at the moment, but I will definately watch the replay when I get home.
you're replying to a op made by a mod with "im at work".................................... really?
What's wrong with posting while at work?
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On November 13 2011 15:30 Keilah wrote:
What's wrong with posting while at work?
Because you can't watch replays at work and therefore contribute nothing but blind theorycraft to a thread asking for help. Also just posting saying "I'm at work, can't watch reps" in and of itself is a useless comment.
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Insight from the other side, as I play ZvP like this.
Baneling drops cost a lot of money, and so delay the zerg's tech, if you see it coming you should not try to engage since baneling drops are very cost efficient, if you turtle the zerg is stuck on lair tech units and will have to push or try dropping your mineral lines to force an engagement. Defend until the deathball and if he fails to properly transition you have a big advantage. It's a very powerfull midgame comp but it relies on a lot of roaches, the zerg will have to engage or try to get rid of some roaches with runbys and drops when he tries to transition into broodlords.
You have a great timing to exploit right before them.
If you do engage, the zerg will remax on roach-ling, take that information to your advantage. There is also the possibility of severly supply blocking him since he is using his supply depot to drop you.
When you engage, you need sentries to hold the roaches back while your stalkers kite the overlords, but keep your sentries as far back as possible, the zerg will try to drop on them over anything else. As always try to fight at chokes. Splitting your units is fine ONLY if you are sure the roaches and lings are properly cut off from your army, or it's death.
The way I lose engagements is when the protoss pushes my roaches back with forcefields and kites the overlords, if I pull my army back the protoss takes pot shots at the roaches with the colossi and snipes even more overlords. In game one you should have had that composition to fight when going for a macro game. Going templars as you did in game 3 works as well, but you need to abuse forcefields even more when doing that because they are so slow.
To summarize work on your engagements since you do not seem to be sure about how to engage such an army, cut off the roaches from the overlords, if he still tries to engage, great for you, kite the overlords. If he pulls back try to hit as many stuff as possible but be careful he doesn't suddenly turn back. And stall as long as you can, as this composition gets weaker as you get later into the game.
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Bainrain takes an extremely long time to set up, requires perfect micro and engagements (imo most micro intensive army), and it doesn't matter how you do, you will lose everything (either very small roach army due to 200/200 limit or just pure lings getting eaten by aoe as it's a mid-late game composition).
That said, it's the only composition I can think of that really trades evenly (it does well when your fighting 3 gate sentry expands on maps you cant take a fast third on).
For me, the hardest problems when I use baneling rain is lots of colossi, deathball play. VR/Colossi is okay, but I can usually be aggressive with baneling rain on your probes or straight into your base (ignores ffs  ), but stalker/colossi with double robo colossi is just impossible to deal with. You have to get that 'critical number' of colossi where infestors get messed up, and secondly baneling rain is amazing on small numbers of colossi. Once you get 5+, baneling rain isn't very useful.
Watching the replays now, will edit:
Game1:
If there's no overlord at the natural, just cannon rush. Why didnt you just cannon rush the guy? He would've lost.
If he did a roach/ling all-in nestea style (35 supply warren) you would've straight up died. Your 3 zealot pressure was super risky, and metalopolis is not the best map to FFE on. I'm surprised he didn't roach/ling all-in you when you did that on metal and only made 2 cannons.
Why didnt you just go for a third at the 10:00 mark? You saw with your zealots (that did zero damage) that he wasn't droned up yet (this guy isn't macroing well at all), you were pretty safe to with 6 gateways coming online.
You got to stop throwing units away. All the zealots you lost by now, was enough to secure your third. Now, you can't take it safely. Dont throw units away without support. I get it's hard to tell when zerg has units or not, but you should've known that throwing away a handful of zealots into someone you saw mass a bunch of lings would've died.
You need to time your build a bit more. You got that twilight archives, you need to do a push. I know pushing with say, 4 units, feels really risky, but when zerg goes fast third, they won't have any units until 8:00 at the earliest. 6 blink stalkers with 5 zealots is a shitton of pressure when it comes at the 10:00 mark, with 6 more being warped in. You need to pressure more. You seem to do these moves that force zerg to overmake units, and then you half commit right away afterwards to the units he overmade.
If the zerg was macro'ing correctly, he would've denied that third. Just keep in mind not to throw units away, those could've been sentries that would've held his pushes. If you are going to attack, you need to commit more. You prod with your army, and step back, you aren't trying to kill him. Just do a bit of damage, but just throwing away a group of units which is half of your army, is weird.
Yea those immortal balls don't work well against banes. zealot/immortal/ht and similar comps (like stalker/immortal) get hit pretty hard by baneling rain. You just had the wrong composition, and he countered yours very hard. You should've scouted what he was doing, that's all it realyl comes to.
Like I said, the better composition is stalker/colossi. You engaged in a pretty bad spot too, you don't want to be surrounded and stuck in a ball with it. You want room to retreat, and a simple avenue to ff to keep his ground units away while you kite the overlords.
Your push though, totally blind, on creep, without even knowing what composition he is going for, was really foolhardy. I know protoss units are good, but it's not like you can just make a composition and just beat anything zerg has. Certain protoss compositions are better than others for dealing with certain things. While immortals 'tank' banes okay, immortal based armies are horrible against baneling rain. They are slow, don't shoot up, and their range isn't that high.
Your macro kind of fell apart too. You should have been able to muster up a large enough army to have survived him, made colossi instead, and have stayed in the game. (look see how much beter you did with colossi).
G2.
Engaging at the bottom of the ramp, you lost wayyy too much. That should've won you the game if you engaged better there. Just walk around.
Yea missing that storm against his first bane attack... that was bad. You stay on t1 too long. Stalker, immortals, your on 4 bases with a gold, taking a 5th. You should be having void rays, mommaships, colossi, mass archons, high templar. Baneling rain/roach/infestor just rolls through this sort of mass gateway stuff.
Putting zerglings into banes into overlord, then setting up the hotkeys, takes a long time. 99% of the time, a baneling rain player will remax on roaches (he could also remax on lings). You should prepare for the mass roaches. It's never too late to get more sentries either.
Funny game though. I think his whole muta thing didn't work too well, but not bad enough to really tip the game too far either way. His bane switch just worked really wella gainst your low tier composition.
G3.
Just didn't really have robotech out. HT are just owned by baneling rain, you really need colossi. If you want to go HT or mass stalker style, then you'll need very good micro and use sentries.
Check out JulyZerg vs MC on XNC in the GSL (i believe season 4 finals?). July does banelingrain, and MC just outmicros it by putting down forcefields in the 'alley' of XNC (kind of like the streets of metal), and then blink-kiting and splitting. Every time he does that, he picks off a few overlords and roaches, and loses nothing. But you really need either sentries or colossi.
And note that baneling rain does very well against midgame sentry based armies. What I mean is that your huge stalker army will do well with sentries added in to the 200/200 army, whereas ~100 supply armies of just gateway units that is mostly sentry based gets pretty owned by baneling rain.
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Even though i didnt check the replays i have watched many times liquidTLO doing this when he plays ZvP and tried to find a solution to it .
I am pretty sure that having some archons infront taking damage is a huge plus , also id like a wide range of strom followed by blink stalkers in different sides . I know thats a bit micro heavy but its also for the zerg micro heavy
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On November 13 2011 14:06 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:
I'm awestruck by Plexa's mercy for all these posting violations! <3
But it wasn't necessary to bump the thread ^^
I'll just say that Doko's point of trying to force my way in, along with rsvp's points were excellent
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^ There plexa, edited for you.
also id like a wide range of strom followed by blink stalkers in different sides . I know thats a bit micro heavy but its also for the zerg micro heavy
Storm is raped by banenling rain. The whole point of stuffing banes into overlords is because storm 1 shots banes on the ground. Storm can work well against overlords, since they sort of clump up, but zerg will just disengage and buys you time rather than kills zerg, since he will get it and stop flying through 10 storms.
I agree with rsvp though, he had good points. And the guy below me too.
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As a zerg player I will try to explain why I stopped going baneling drops, and what I felt really countered it well.
I am ranked 8th in my master division at 490 points, for reference and validity level.
Baneling drops have a very specific purpose in ZvP. As a zerg player I used to get them when I went muta-ling. They are intended to kill the protoss army ONCE. I know it's insansely obvious but the BEST situation in a fight with banelings for a zerg player is that both armies die. The worst is that just the banelings die. This is different than when you win another kind of army where it is leftover after and can go attack a base.
So basically this is what beat me when I used to go baneling:
- Many cannons at bases
I would win a fight in the middle of the map with roach baneling drops, get to the protoss base with what roaches were leftover, and not have enough to take on the cannons + re-inforcements. The protss remakes army, while teching and attacks, I remake my bad army and repeat until I lose.
- Mass gateway Warp in re-inforce. I know its only 20sec + ling time, but banelings take a while to remake in the heat of a fight. Many zerg players are tempted to just fight with the lings as they spawn. I didnt have time to get everything setup again for a nice bane drop when a huge blink army appeared all at once.
- Much forcfield, and then running away. If all the banelings drop and there are still most of the units left, even in the red, its REALLY bad for zerg. Shields will regen, and all the units will still be hitting. I have lost many games like this. The game where you blunk forwards...thats just how it was. You had to see it coming. Try to take the baneling hits and then come back to fight the standing army later. Don't engage the standing army while taking the bane hits if possible.
- MANY MANY COLLOSUS. I like baneling drops against a stalker army with a few collosus, but I feel like it's not answer to an army with like 6+ collosi. I know that is not an easy number of collosi to get, but untis with lots of shield that can regen are great as they won't actually die to the bane rain.
Also baneling drops even in the late-midgame hurt teching options. Often, a zerg who gets bane-drops is expecting an attack from protoss, and has maxed out with the banelings as part of it. It's kind of like a counter-allin. What I found is that i would wipe this attack and then (maybe in error) get the same army again, roach baneling, but this time the protss would come with more collosus, or more high gas units, or something, and I could never really break bases. The protoss army eventually became too strong.
hope that helps!
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On October 31 2011 20:09 coL.rsvp wrote:+ Show Spoiler +
Watched all 3 reps. The banerain wasn't really your problem. You would have lost all 3 battles even if there were no banelings. 2 major issues:
1. You're bad at deathballing lol
2. You either panic or get too excited during the battles. Maybe the banelings are causing you to panic or something. But either way, you need to improve your late game army control.
So what do I mean by you're bad at deathballing? First of all, you're not attacking with a 200/200 army, so your army is already unnecessarily weaker than it should be from the start of the engagement. Game 1 you attacked with 180 supply, game 2 you attacked with 170 supply (random zealots + colossus elsewhere). I understand that sending some zealots at an expo while you attack with your main army is a good strat, but you can't afford to spend 20-30 supply doing so. Second of all, your composition is just... lacking. Game 1 you had basically just stalker/immortal. Why no HTs? Game 2 you had mostly stalker with only 1 colossus and 2 HT (wtf?), which got caught out of position and died pretty quickly anyway. Game 3 was a bit better, although you probably could have used some robo units in there. Anyway the point is you need a better 200/200 army composition. More robo units. More HTs. Adding in air would be good too.
Microing during the big engagements: you're too trigger happy with blinking all your stalkers at once. During big engagements, there's probably only 2 scenarios where you'll ever want to blink all your stalkers at once - 1) chasing after a retreating army or 2) you have a lot of zealots in your army and they're all trapped behind your stalkers. Game 1 the blink forward automatically killed you. You don't need to blink all stalkers to try to kill some infestors. Just take a few. Game 2 you blinked everything back which caused the rest of your army (especially your power units - ht/colossus/immortal) to get picked off easily. Just blink a few stalkers back at a time. Preferably the ones that are getting hit. This also helps a lot against banelings since then you can spread your army out via blinking as well.
Your spell usage is lacking in these big engagements. Again I think you panic too much. Many times you have sentries but either don't use GS at all or wait until the battle is halfway over before remembering to throw up a GS. Then like in game 3, you had 5 HTs but only get 1 storm off before walking your HTs into the opposing army and forgetting about them. Really the only thing you have to worry about in these big battles is 1) is my army positioned ok (i.e. no zealots/archons trapped behind stalkers) 2) use spells like gs, ff, storm, and feedback and 3) blink stalkers backwards, a few at a time. It doesn't take 400 apm to do it, just don't be scared when you see overlords coming your way.
Also as a side comment I don't like your opening build. While it didn't put you behind in those 3 games (all 3 games you were either even with the zerg or ahead going into mid game after your zealot pressure even though it didn't seem like it did anything), I think it hits way too late. If you go FE > 2 gate you should aim to hit by 7:30-8:00 at the latest, otherwise why not go for warpgate timing instead? If I get a proxy pylon up I can get +1 zeal in the zerg's base by 7:45-8:00, if no proxy pylon then still 8:30. Yours were hitting at like 9 minutes into the game or something.
Definitely the best post in here.
Generally I like to open FFE into stargate, then move to HTs on 3 base. So I will generally get voids and storms against bane rain. This doesn't answer your question about what you should do, but it might give you something different to try. Always get blink on two bases, upon seeing overlords flying in I will FF the army and issue a flee command. Then I choose all my stalkers and scoot and shoot. This forces a decision on the zerg to either go for it or try to save the banes for another drop. If they go for it, the only thing to do is blink into small groups to try to minimize the damage. Then try to snipe ovies and use blink and FF to try to stall the engagement to recover shields. If I have storm, then usually FF and storm will deter the ovies.
My analysis of the games:
1) You started mining from your second gas after 24 minutes and your first gas dried up shortly after. This had a major effect on the engagement you're interested in because your army was much weaker than his and not very well upgraded. As people have said, I think the main problem with this engagement was control. But you also didn't see the the infestors until they destroyed your drop around 17:30 which was when your attack moved out. You have no information about what army you're heading into and you don't know about the banes. If you have made another observer you would have known not to engage this. I would have turned right back home when I saw the infestors and put down a templar archives for feedback. If you did this, you would have had storms in the engagement and wouldn't need to blink on the infestors because you can feedback instead.
2) I would say the main thing in this one was that you had very poor HT control and low HT counts. I think it's too bad you got the robo bay when your opponent went muta, you could have used the gas spent on that on the colossus to get more HTs. I know you wanted archons to deal with the mutas, but having 6 HTs in the engagements would have really helped.
Anyways, I don't know why you included this replay because your army was shooting rocks while getting destroyed. You stormed your own army to kill the lings once before you lost both of your HTs, then the army came and killed you. There just happened to be some bane rain involved, and you accidentally blinked onto a platform where you couldn't micro against the ovies. Then you lost your observers and you couldn't come back.
3) You scouted the wrong way, but the ovie came into your vision for a split second =P Again, I think the bad engagements lost you the game. Your zealot attack did some damage, and your second got the gold but I don't know how strong the trades were. As for the bane rain, I think you should have kicked out some void rays before you got maxed. Between voids and better blink micro, you might have been able to handle the bane rain. But without FF or storm I still think that was just an unwinnable situation. I wouldn't say the voids are mandatory, but they are always useful against zerg if you can keep them alive. I do think you should figure out how to incorporate HTs though.
In all of your games, whatever that FFE 2 gate thing you're doing is it hits too late and I think you're vulnerable to roach bust. Your attack comes at 9 minutes with 6 zealots and no reinforcements. I bet it either wins you the game instantly or gets surrounded by lings and doesn't do anything in most games. If you prefer gateway transitions after the FFE (which it looks like you do), try the 7 gate. It's not an all in, it typically takes out Z's third while securing your own. I can't find a very good guide for it other than in Artosis' blog (they're near the bottom). I don't do this attack because I prefer stargates on maps which allow for safe FFE so I don't know the ins and outs of this build. I gave it a shot and I was able to warp the gateways in around 9 minutes, and arrive at the enemy's base with 9 sentries, 7 stalkers and an observer.
Lastly, since a moderator posted this [H] thread maybe a moderator should be a little stricter on the posters. You said something about issuing warnings to people who didn't watch the replay - I think you should. It says in this stickied thread to always view the replay and in this stickied thread stickied thread, "Only reply to a help thread if you are an experienced SC2 player, and if you have watched the replay. Otherwise, these threads are simply no place for you to post." So watch the replay and watch the replay.
Good luck Plexa! If this fails there's always your awesome mothership/blink stalker build
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