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On May 03 2012 01:33 Br3ezy wrote:
Tanks have never been "submerged" and for that matter can neither be back in fashion or re-emerge. They are used in one of the main styles of TvP and appear occasionally, although not frequently enough throughout the gsl,
You also have to be more specific with the term "mech". Are you coining that term because of siege tanks being added into a mainly bio army? Or is he getting hellions and thors as well.
Having a marine-heavy army and relying on siege tanks will never let you get anywhere aggressive wise. You need mauraders to be able to pick off templar and be able to withstand colsi dps. Colsi will SHIT all over a marine/tank army.
The usage of siege tanks is primarily used as a defensive opening to stop any early-mid game aggression and to be able to take a third base safely to be able to hit a three base timing attack.
Do you have troll blood or are you just annoying? For the sake of you, let me say the poster meant to say "The re-emerging of tanks in STANDARD TvP", although i really shouldnt have to because 111 is NOT a "Main TvP Style", its an All In. Tanks are certainly not a part of standard TvP, and havent been for quite some time except as you say for an occasional defensive opening (which ironically is probably pretty much exactly the kinds of games the OP is asking about). And im pretty sure when he mentioned Mech he meant Mech, i dont know how much clearer you want him to be but when he is talking about BioMech and then mentions that ALSO people have been using Mech to some degree of success it kind of gives you the impression he isnt just talking about Marines with Tanks. Also, if you actually wanted to know if he was talking about true mech you could have just checked out the games he referenced, its obvious you watch frequently and probably have whatever pass is required. Then you could have maybe given some insight into his question instead of just blathering out a load of regurgitated crap.
Also, the word Submerge has nothing to do with the word Emerge. I know they sound similar buddy, but the Antonym for Emerge is "Dissapear".
There are plenty of good posts in this thread answering the question however, and thats great. I know some pro's were experimenting with getting 4 - 5 tanks early (doubling as early-midgame defence) for later use in controlling space around their Bio Ball. This was theoretically supposed to give them more room to micro effectively. Generally tanks are reduced to supporting roles in small numbers in TvP due to the large number of units/abilities protoss have that can mess with a siege tank formation. A large number of siege tanks is just waiting to fall prey to Chargelots, Phoenix, Blink Stalkers, Immortals, Mothership or even Zealots.. My favourite is Phoenix.. Nothing quite like having your tanks floating in mid air doing sweet eff all.
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also alot of people have found out what a few know for some time now, unsieged tanks are pretty good in some situations. But getting tanks early against the toss makes you pretty save like many have said. And since tanks are mostly a gas unit, you can go super greedy on the eco.
My current early game is full of reapers (in case of canon expand free wins on some maps) and siege tanks and orbitals.
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For like a month I'm using tanks in TvP again (I'm just Silver, so don't rate this too high), because I had so many problems with Protoss deathballs, and I gotta say it works better than expected.
First some numbers. Only gas-wise you can build 3 tanks instead of 5 vikings (because gas is mostly the limiting factor, atleast for me). You usually get the suggestion to have 7 vikings per Colossus. You could build about 4 tanks for the same gas.
Why would you?
- Tanks don't get useless, when all Colossi are down and tanks do a load more damage because of the splash.
- You can actually use them to snipe Colossi, too, due to the superior range.
- You have to micro Vikings to make them effective, so you can also micro the tanks instead by focus-fireing on something farther away to keep them from firing at the Zealots that stand right next to your bio (my micro is bad, so i don't do it, but still do fine)
Counters are Chargelots and Immos, right?
Position the tanks at cliffs, rocks or whatever to make the Chargelots run a longer way to get to them -> more tankshots will get off. Also have a load of Marines stand in front of the tanks and the Chargelots will never get to the tanks. Focusfire something else (Stalkers, Colossi, etc.) and you don't have too much of a problem with that friendly fire. Even if, you probably have some Medivacs to heal that. Immos just die to Marines very quickly. Even Blinkstalkers will have a problem, if you guard the tanks with marines. You can partly bait the Protoss to run into tankrange. They are so self-confident with their deathball now that they run everything in and then are baffled where everything went (note: this is heavily due to low league).
Oh yeah, my favorite point... tanks are immobile? ...they're actually as fast as bio (unstimmed, but you don't use stim for normal army movement, do you?).
Usually you need to drop the Protoss all over the place to split his army, because if he can keep everything together, he can roll right over a MMMVG ball. Don't drop and let him try that into a bunch of sieged tanks.
I think tanks aren't actually that bad in TvP, if you position them right, micro them a little and guard them decently.
(Higher leagues adding Ghosts shouldn't be a problem aswell.)
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This is an interesting topic. Based on what I’ve read here, heard from other people’s experiences, and seen on pro streams, tanks are very strong early on. By “strong” I mean they not only melt Protoss gateway armies but also help set up for a solid late game with strong upgrades and a fourth expansion.
The two big concerns, however, seem to be 1) the immobility of tanks compared to gateway armies (for example, someone mentioned blink stalker harass) and 2) a transition out of tank centric play (I refrain from using the term “mech” because there are several styles I’ve seen that combine tanks with marines). I believe lastshadow has found the answer to both of these problems.
Now, before I launch into my analysis of tanks in TvP, I’d like to add the caveat that almost all my knowledge on this topic comes from watching lastshadow’s stream. Despite the many preconceived notions people have about him, I believe him to be an excellent player and reference point for this kind of discussion. He has used tanks against countless top level Koreans (and won). Now, I personally still open MMM in TvP and I’m actually only a Diamond leaguer on the NA server so I’m not trying to claim I’ve found the answer to everything.
Anyways, based on what I’ve seen lastshadow do, he answers problem #1 with early aggression. I’ve seen him do various forms of hellion and banshee harass, but since this is a thread about tanks I’ll stick with the topic at hand.
Basically what he does is plop a large number of tanks and marines in bunkers right outside the Protoss base. He also pulls a few SCVs for repair, but it’s important to note this is not an “all in” because there is a clear macro trend in his play. He then starts to “turtle push” his way forward until the Protoss is either forced to engage or just strait up looses due to indecision. This move effectively negates the problem of Protoss mobility since the Terran army is right in the Protoss’s face, leaving little to no room for clever maneuvering.
The potential for harass is also essentially nill because if the Protoss decides to devote a large portion of army to harass (like blink stalker), lastshadow just un-sieges and A-moves. Granted, something like warp-prisms is viable, but the obvious answer here is to just keep a few marines at home to deal with it.
Lastshadow actually wins the large majority of his games with this push. If, however, the Protoss holds, the next problem is transitioning. While tanks are good, it’s true that they really have no place in the late game. For this reason, I’m only going to touch on the transition since we’re mainly talking about tanks here.
So, in answer to problem #2, lastshadow seems to transition into Thor based play with ghosts in the reserve (I think there are also hellions in the mix, but those are more for late game worker harass).
But wait! I thought High Templar laugh at Thors…
Well, yes and no. High Templar are very good against four or five Thors, but when your army becomes Thor based (and by that I mean numbers with double digits) it’s actually okay.
I’ve seen lastshadow totally whiff all his EMPs and proceed to get Feed Backed into oblivion, and yet he still manages to totally crush the Protoss army in a head on engagement. I'm not exactly sure why this is, actually. My only explanation is that while Feed Back does do significant damage to a Thor, it doesn’t kill the mechanized warrior. In addition, after using up all its energy, the High Templar just becomes “dead weight” (supply that isn’t doing damage in the engagement and is actually hindering the production of units that need to be present for the “killing blow”).
It’s probably also important to note that, at this point in the game; lastshadow has sacrificed the majority of his SCVs and is instead using MULES for mineral income. This gives his army a larger supply count since the Protoss still has to devote a large amount of space to Probes.
While I didn’t answer all the questions people seem to have about tank centric play in TvP, I hope this analysis provided some useful insight.
TLDR: Watch lastshadow’s stream.
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As a former brood war player: Tanks were always used in TvP, this made Terran a rather inmobile race, but with great defence and a fearsome pushing ability when they leapfrogged their tanks with proper back-up (read vulture).
Why couldn't tanks be standard once again in TvP?
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On May 15 2012 04:43 Gene(S)is wrote:
As a former brood war player: Tanks were always used in TvP, this made Terran a rather inmobile race, but with great defence and a fearsome pushing ability when they leapfrogged their tanks with proper back-up (read vulture).
Why couldn't tanks be standard once again in TvP?
The games are too different. The lack of mines alone makes mech insanely much weaker.
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Anyone have any ideas/have been experimenting with midgame pushes with no-seige tanks? The dps and range isn't too bad, I guess the problem is that tanks are so gas intensive. Most builds these days are super fine tuned to allow for tech upgrades and medis, with a decent force, but to include tanks seems kind of hard to manage resource wise.
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Despite what a lot of people think, mech is viable in TvP. Banshees keep a Protoss pinned back rather easily, and they also force Stalkers over Chargelots. BFH, also despite popular belief, absolutely MURDER Zealots, charge or not. The only reason that they would not kill Zealots is if you're not positioning them correctly. If you have tanks in the back, Thors in the front and Hellions in the middle, then the Zealots struggle getting past the Thors. The Tanks do massive AoE damage to everything (Esp. vs Colossus, where they hit the colossus and everything underneath with a direct hit). Thors are just generally amazing tanks.
While you 1-a your mech army, control your Ghosts to snipe HT/Carpet bomb everything with EMP. Raven's PDD makes stalkers 100% useless.
Really, the main issue with mech is being able to build up a maxed army quickly enough so that the Protoss doesn't ninja and wear you down before you can push. 1-1-1 is probably the best choice. It gets cloaked banshees out fast enough to keep a protoss pinned back. Meanwhile, you can expo and build up tanks/Hellions.
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On May 15 2012 07:52 ForwardUntoDawn wrote:
Despite what a lot of people think, mech is viable in TvP. Banshees keep a Protoss pinned back rather easily, and they also force Stalkers over Chargelots. BFH, also despite popular belief, absolutely MURDER Zealots, charge or not. The only reason that they would not kill Zealots is if you're not positioning them correctly. If you have tanks in the back, Thors in the front and Hellions in the middle, then the Zealots struggle getting past the Thors. The Tanks do massive AoE damage to everything (Esp. vs Colossus, where they hit the colossus and everything underneath with a direct hit). Thors are just generally amazing tanks.
While you 1-a your mech army, control your Ghosts to snipe HT/Carpet bomb everything with EMP. Raven's PDD makes stalkers 100% useless.
Really, the main issue with mech is being able to build up a maxed army quickly enough so that the Protoss doesn't ninja and wear you down before you can push. 1-1-1 is probably the best choice. It gets cloaked banshees out fast enough to keep a protoss pinned back. Meanwhile, you can expo and build up tanks/Hellions.
Thing is that, even with a maxed out mech army, you aren't guaranteed to win a fight and you cannot afford to lose a fight. If you ever lose a fight, you lost the game. I mech occasionally (highmaster) with mixed results. I think it's a decent build to whip out but you win a lot because of protoss inexperience dealing with it. A good protoss who utilizes that your army is basically immovable will crush you. Warp prism on one location, blinkstalkers into the main and dts/the main army hitting an undefended base and you will crumble and fall. There is no way to prevent blink ins into your main on most maps, which is a BIG deal. Your army ONLY beats the toss army if its gathered in its full force and you get to emp properly.
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I never understood why terran players don't add a few tanks as cover fire for ghosts in late game TvP. They're not going to stop an incoming army of chargelot/immortal/colossus but tank/viking can give a nice buffer zone for ghosts to fire emp/snipe
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On May 15 2012 03:31 KLooLESS wrote:
The two big concerns, however, seem to be 1) the immobility of tanks compared to gateway armies (for example, someone mentioned blink stalker harass) and 2) a transition out of tank centric play (I refrain from using the term “mech” because there are several styles I’ve seen that combine tanks with marines).
I don't think you need to transition out of tanks, because they're not bad even in lategame as long as you keep positioning them well and guarding them with marines (mainly against chargelots). Lategame you can add Ghosts that as already was mentioned have a nice buffer zone from the tanks.
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The main problem I think is that tanks needs their own upgrades with the bioball's one. Besides most of gas goes either to medivacs, upgrades then vikings/ghost depending of P tech route. However the fact siege is only 100/100 allows for early to midgame use, like MVP showed today in GSL final, then you're free to get rid of tanks.
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On May 15 2012 07:35 phiinix wrote:
Anyone have any ideas/have been experimenting with midgame pushes with no-seige tanks? The dps and range isn't too bad, I guess the problem is that tanks are so gas intensive. Most builds these days are super fine tuned to allow for tech upgrades and medis, with a decent force, but to include tanks seems kind of hard to manage resource wise.
The main problem is, as you mention, their cost. Out of siege they are a less gas effective marauder, and their lack of stim makes it hard to stutterstep without losing them.
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I was watching DeMuslium's stream once and a question was asked that included the fact that Raven's Seeker missile rips away Immortal Shields and would that help Mech. He said with that information it probably could, so I decided to experiment with Hellion/Tank/Raven with Banshee support as a main composition and had some mild success. The syngery between Raven and Tank is actually super good for various reasons, but first I'll talk about Tank Mode vs Siege Mode. I'll state this is a Platnium player's thoughts, but I think my input can stir some experimentation in the community if viable.
I'll start on when to use Siege Mode:
-When Protoss upgrades are very minimal and unit numbers are low. Siege Mode's splash is much more viable, and combined with bunkers make a powerful defense. This is mostly in the early game.
-When holding an advantageous position, due to defender's advantage. An Advantageous position is something like sieging at the natural and holding heavy contains. These usually aren't killing blow tactics and more so to give a heavy advantage in the macro game.
-On the high ground. Similar to an advantageous position, but emphasized because Siege mode will always be godly on the high ground because Chargelots are useless on the low ground.
If you thought about my points, you'd notice that you can generalize that Siege mode should only be used when you have an advantageous defensive position. This is because when you're going aggressive, you will rarely be able to have a strong defender's advantage due to Chargelots. The job of Siege Mode is to threaten them to melt away their army. Chargelots don't care about this because they're fast, massable, and have high HP/Shields.
When to use Tank Mode:
-vs Immortals. Clearly, Shield mode is outright useless against Immortals. The DPS from Tank mode far outweighs the benefits of Siege mode, even when taking Stalkers into account.
-vs Chargelots. The reasons why have been hammered into the ground in countless threads including this one. Siege Mode's damage is so minimal vs Chargelots that it's actually disadvantageous to your units. Tank Mode also allows you to kite pretty decently.
-When you need to be mobile: Since Siege mode plants you to the ground, it's obvious you need Tank Mode to be mobile, but I don't think players realize just how great of an advantage staying in Tank Mode in your base is to this. Warp Prism harass is one of the main contributors to defeating mech compositions, despite Tank Mode having the same speed as unstimmed MM. You really only need about 25% of your tanks sieged at all times for defense. The rest of your tanks need to be mobile so they can get into position. Lyyna and Lastshadow makes this quite clear whenever I watch their play, even in Mech TvZ.
-When you're in wide areas: It may sound weird, but mobility is really important when you don't have the benefit of forcing your opponent to attack in one area. You need to be able to minimize an Protoss' arc by kiting back to force their units to clump together. Chargelots are also far more dangerous vs Siege mode in wide areas (obv.).
With that established I'll move on to the Raven/Tank syngery.
There are several reasons why this syngery is great vs Protoss. I'll start with the firstly stated.
-Seeker Missle are powerful vs Immortals and even Chargelots. They deal 100 damage to the main target, 50 to close units, then 25 to surrounding units. The splash doesn't sound much, but it's actually better than Siege Mode's damage as it's only 35 vs Chargelots and a measly 10 vs Immortals' shields. The problem with Seeker Missile is of course the energy cost. It's 125 per missle, which means you need 1 Raven per Seeker Missile for this to be viable. This is why Tank Mode is largely perferred as the Ravens won't be able to melt away everything in one go. Essentially, Ravens takes the role of Siege Mode while Tanks take the role of MM.
-Raven's Auto Turret grouped with Siege Mode. Combined with advantageous positioning, Auto Turret + Siege Mode creates a powerful defensive position. Auto Turrets are Armored structures, which means they benefit from E-bay's building armor upgrade. Coupled with their 150 HP, This makes them extremely good vs Chargelots as meatshields vs Tanks, and using a row of them would force Chargelots to waste their charge, allowing Siege mode to deal higher effective damage. It should be noted Auto-Turrets also make perfect wall offs.
-Siege Mode + Seeker Missle = MASSIVE burst damage. Self-Explanatory.
Last but surely not least is the tech path and upgrades. Ravens are the hardest unit to fully upgrade in the game. Durable Materials(+Duration), Corvid Reactor(+Start Energy), Hi Sec Auto-Tracking(+1 Range), Building Armor(+2 Armor), and most importantly Seeker Missle. Getting Tanks (or mech in general) allows the E-Bay to be free to get those upgrades.
I've practice with this composition and I can easily say this shits all over Immortal/Stalker/Chargelot and upgraded Gateway units in head-on confrontations. Ironically, I've yet to deal with the usual Protoss Deathball.
Of course, a build like this is gas intensive and getting upgrades will require figuring out the priorities.
EDIT: Ironically, today on the NASL Thorzain just showed off the synergy with Tanks and Ravens.
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EPT
