[G][D] MC vs Kas 2 base Carrier allin PvT - Page 3

3) How to best counter this as terran?

On September 01 2012 15:40 Whatson wrote:

LOL whats the point of ladder if not to have fun?
SC2 is a GAME, its meant for ENTERTAINMENT, and this strat is funny and interesting

On September 02 2012 22:35 Crow! wrote:
I don't like the idea of proxying the stargates. One of the big advantages of hiding Carriers is that you get to crush drops if any arrive at your base at a normal time - kill an unsuspecting dropship or two or three right before your timing attack and you've basically won the game. Proxying the Stargates means all that money just doesn't help you at all when the Terran tries to pick you apart with standard pressure.

I still feel like Phoenixes accomplish so much more than what the Carriers do, and for a much smaller initial investment.

On September 03 2012 23:42 SC2John wrote:


I'm talking about the risk of like 2 minutes before carriers start popping out. During that time, protoss is on 3 gateways with no detection. Any type of heavy aggression will shred the protoss up at that time. If you want an example, it would be EXACTLY the build that Kas did with fast CS/stim on 3 barracks, delayed medivacs. He just didn't attack because he didn't scout the stargates.

On August 28 2012 13:46 ineversmile wrote:
There are some more fine details to this attack.

The first thing to realize is that you're running 2 fully saturated bases and you have all 4 gases by the time you push out, so you should be able to use more than just 6 gateways with that level of income. Usually one fully saturated base can handle 4 gateways with cut probe production and no other units being produced. The reason why 6 gates work here is that your interceptors are being rebuilt, which is a mineral sink. Notice that MC doesn't remake Zealots; he makes stalkers and interceptors and keeps everything ranged for the attack. This means you can forcefield as you would with Stalker/Sentry/Colossus, splitting armies in half and not allowing the bio behind your FFs to have range onto anything (as opposed to Zealots, which they would shoot at right over the FFs).

Having more stalkers also means that you have a lot of anti-viking units. If you were to go for this same push with 4 Colossi instead of Carriers, obviously the Colossi are going to be good, but the difference with Carriers is that the Carriers can fight back, and at similar range to Vikings. If you hit and run with Carriers and the Vikings fly over your ground army, you can focus them with stalkers. In a late game situation and your opponent already had 2 Starports and a full count of Medivacs already, Carriers are a lot easier to focus down with Vikings. However, in a 2base all-in at this timing, you're looking at the opponent being forced to cut Medivac production a bit early and not having enough Vikings up to trump the Carriers straight-out. Normally, they can have enough Vikings to deal with Colossi at this timing (well, it's a slightly earlier timing due to Colossi build time and move speed both being faster, but it's still pretty similar for the stage of the midgame), but that's also because Colossi don't shoot back at the Vikings to punish small numbers of them kiting as you move towards the Terran's base. Also, often there are Marauders helping to do damage to the Colossi, and since Carriers don't give a shit about Marauders, they're going to last longer. Between that, their higher HP and base armor, and the support from Stalkers, the Vikings at that stage of the game are not the biggest issue for your Carriers; it's keeping the Marines from shooting directly at the Carriers because you want to be trading Interceptors for Marines, not Carriers for Marines.

Something else to think about is that you can shoot down Medivacs with Carriers in engagements, making stim actually cost something. This is a pretty big deal. The more Medivacs you kill while you force more Viking production, the weaker the Bio army is and consequently the stronger all of your ground units are.

My next point is that people don't think a lot about the Inteceptors themselves. They actually have 80 total HP because they're 40 HP+40 Shields, so they have more HP than Marines and they each do fairly similar DPS 1-0 marines (their main nemesis during the timing window in which engagements should start). According to Liquipedia, Marines do 10.5+1.7 DPS while stimmed (1.7 accounting for +1 weapons)=12.2 DPS. Interceptors do 5 DPSx2 shots=10 DPS. Considering that Marines have lower HP (45 when stimmed plus Medivac healing shouldn't equal an average of 80 HP for 1 minute engagements with only 4-6 medivacs), you're going to trade minerals pretty well with the Terran. Marines cost double what interceptors cost, so if your carriers stay alive and keep producing (think of them like a mobile Barracks), you're going to replenish your units at a favorable rate to the Terran's production. Interceptors produce in 8 seconds. You can figure 2 of them are the same cost as a marine and produce in 16 seconds from a carrier. A reactored barracks produces 2 marines in 25 seconds, which adjusts to 1 marine per 12.5 seconds. The marines produce slightly faster than pairs of interceptors, however the interceptors also show up right at the battlefield inside carriers, just like warp gate units.

And this brings me to my next point: that Carriers and warp gates work very well together. Why? Because they both allow reinforcements to show up right there on the battlefield. If you think of your army as Interceptors, Stalkers, and Sentries, it's a lot more synergistic than thinking about Carriers with gateway units. We know carriers are slow and take a long time to rebuild, but if you think of them more like flying production buildings, that completely changes the equation. And this is what's so exciting about this build, to me. There is reason behind the function of carriers in this composition: they produce mineral units right there on the battlefield. No, they don't shoot AoE, but that's not the point of them. You wouldn't expect a Barracks to shoot AoE, either, right? How about a flying barracks that follows your army around while remaking units to a specific cap? That's the carrier.