[G] Roach Hydra in ZvT - Page 7

On December 28 2012 13:30 Emzeeshady wrote:

Wouldn't marines be better then rauders vs hydras?

The real solution is just to add more tanks imo

On December 28 2012 20:50 DKR wrote:


It depends on the ratio I guess, marines and hydras both do high dps and a hydra roach composition would be more deadly to pure marine than marine marauder. If it was just Hydra's I'd just build marines and a click to victory!

On December 29 2012 04:58 Jermstuddog wrote:


In my experience, there are two major things that shit on hydra/roach play from the Terran side.

1) Tanks. The obvious solution that nobody wants to build. They slaughter hydras and roaches with impunity, but their static nature does not allow for Terran to push out onto a creep-covered map all that quickly and thus allows Zerg plenty of time to transition over to a T3 army while under basically no pressure.

2) 2/2 bio. Once Terran infantry hits 2/2, the advantage given by the Zerg upgrades ceases to exist and Hydras, therefore, cease to be viable.

Simply making more marines doesn't cut it as 1) they are pretty bad vs roaches when behind on upgrades, and 2) if you don't have a lot of tanks, I can make like 6 banelings and throw the fight hugely in my favor regardless of ups.


The big point of this build is that Terran cannot comfortably secure their natural, make a 3rd OC to compete on econ, produce enough army to be a serious threat, rush upgrades to beat Zerg timings, AND attack all at the same time. So there is this natural window, both at the 1/1 and 2/2 timings, where Zerg has a sizable advantage in raw fighting power.

Unfortunately, I quit playing (about 95% less ladder now) before I finished smoothing out my transitions to T3, so that is still a rough spot for me when I was using the build.

On April 15 2013 22:57 Jermstuddog wrote:
So I just picked up HotS on Saturday and, while my mechanics are quite rusty from my extended break I took, this build still seems to work perfectly in general.

Some of the modern adjustments I've made so far:

If my opponent opens with a reaper rush, I will general counter with 5-7 roaches to his natural while defending his reaper harass with my queens. This heavily delays the taking of the Terran expansion until they get banshees, siege tanks, or a mass of bio big enough to root out the roaches.

The new mutalisk and ultralisk allow for much stronger transitions out of the roach/hydra style and seems to have fixed the issues I was having moving into mid/late game armies. I can switch to melee upgrades after +1 range is done as +2 range is mostly worthless in ZvT. This allows me to make a quite considerable ling/bling/muta army around the 15-20 min mark as needed. There still seems to be some rough spots, but it generally feels a lot better than it did in WoL.

Widow mines are surprisingly a non-issue, I much prefer them to siege tanks. The thing about Siege tanks is they do consistent damage through the course of a fight, generally turning any engagement vs a terran army with tanks into a losing battle. Widow mines are a 1-shot type deal, and almost always target my roaches. Considering my roaches are mostly bullet-sponges anyway, this is fine. Also, they are much shorter range than siege tanks and I can often target a good number of them down before they activate.


So far, it seems that using this style and adjusting for the new mechanics of HotS, ZvT has easily become my best MU. Once I have a little more than 2-days of experience playing with it in HotS, I will write a new guide updating this style.