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

On August 27 2012 23:11 craaaaack wrote:
Assuming this had to be unscouted to be successful: how is it any better than having the exact same amount of gateway units but instead of the carriers you get colossus with range upgrade?

On August 27 2012 23:11 craaaaack wrote:
Assuming this had to be unscouted to be successful: how is it any better than having the exact same amount of gateway units but instead of the carriers you get colossus with range upgrade?

On August 27 2012 23:22 isrtor2 wrote:
Carriers also have great dps as well(im not sure how to compare their dps to colosus dps because although carriers have more dps than colossus, they dont deal splash damage).

On August 28 2012 15:49 EngrishTeacher wrote:
I just faced against this in UMS against a GM smurf who executed the push and it hit at exactly 12:10. I scanned after my medivac push at around 11:30 and saw a ton of gateways and some gateways units, so I naturally thought it was going to be a 2-base heavily upgraded 6 or 7 gate into expansion. Then when the carriers came... even though I made mostly marines for the gateway units and my 3rd was up, I had NO chance. The DPS of the carriers backed up by FFs and zealot meat shields just tore through my bio like a joke.

We rematched, and this time I went for a 2-rax marauder opening with 3 marauders and 1 marine at his ramp @ 5:30, with 2 reinforcing marauders. He FF'ed 1 marauder but I picked off the stalker, and with 4 marauders + 1 marine I did way too much economic damage scoring the free zealot/sentry kill, a second sentry kill, and 4-5 probes while getting my expansion up.

Overall, good build, but against marauder heavy (2 tech-labs) 2 rax the terran should come out ahead, especially when the 2nd rax is hidden or proxied somewhere so not enough chrono was spent on WG research.

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.

On August 28 2012 13:46 ineversmile wrote:
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.

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.

On August 28 2012 13:46 ineversmile wrote:
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.

On August 28 2012 23:36 Treehead wrote:
I'm willing to try this out - I've been wanting to try stargate in PvT for a while now and this probably has promise.

One question, though. I feel like I ask this often of MC's builds - why is this structured as an allin? Can't you build up to 55 probes, and plant a third once your push has started moving across the map (maybe cutting a gateway and a couple units)? From 55 probes during the timing push, you're in quick striking distance of 65 workers on 3 bases, which is a fine setup for a lategame economy. You might not need this economy - but assuming a well-played Terran can defend this push (which we probably should, since PvT Carrier pushes are still in their infancy). Is the margin of victory on this push so slim that we cannot remove a couple units from it and hedge our bets?

It'd be one thing if more workers limited Carrier production - but gas and production time are really the only factors in how fast you can build up carriers.

Also, if you somehow find your carriers interceptor-less, if you have a lategame infrastructure prepared - you can always pull back, remake interceptors, and then repush immediately. I feel like the window of time where you'd have less units for building from 45 to 55 or 60 probes is relatively small, yes?

On August 28 2012 21:22 Adonminus wrote:
Thanks for the guide Tor, I've always been liking carriers in any match. MC is a true president of protoss that showed us how imba carriers are. You didn't have to put my name near MC's, I'm too modest for that. I just gave you a replay and some tips for the guide.

Since this is a discussion, here's some of my thoughts:

-Discussion of getting air weapons
MC doesn't get +1 weapon, the advantages of this is being able to get some additional gateway units like a zealot and a sentry, or get faster the 3 additional gates. This also allows you to delay the 3th and 4th gas for 10-20 seconds. On the other hand getting +1 weapon or even eventually +2 allows carriers to really serve their purpose of DPS dealers in the fight if the terran has gone for fast upgrades. Usually he'll have +1 armor done, or he went for fast double upgrades then even +2 armor. +2 armor on marines is really deadly if you have +0 carriers and I think just spending the extra 100/100 on air weapons doesn't really hurt you and is a cost effective investment.

-Discussion of build weaknesses
The scout after gateway, the late nexus at 30 supply, and getting zealot-stalker-sentry early game make this build really secure. You can always transition into something more safe if you scout a gas opening, (if you don't like standard, you can do those phoenix openers that counter stuff like 111). Then it's safe from any early push the terran can execute from a 1 rax FE since you get 3 gateways and lots of sentries. It is important to have a unit at his watchtower to see if he pushes and be ready to forcefield. The only danger are those 10-11 min medievac pushes, not because you can't stop them but because they are so strong that it forces you to reveal the carriers in order to defend. However that doesn't hard counter it, even if you reveal your carriers, if you push fast enough you can still go and kill him, especially after killing his push.

The other major weakness of the build is scan. If he scans you at 8 min, and sees double stargate carrier. He has at least 4 minutes to prepare marines and vikings. Marines and vikings together really hard hard hard counter this (remember in standard you don't go pure marines with vikings, since you go marauder heavy vs colossi so they can't instantly burn them and marauders can also snipe colossi). This means pure marine viking is non standard and will never happen unless he does a lucky scan to see it. This means the core key to winning with this build is not getting your stargate scanned. This explains why you build it in the corner of your base.

-Discussion of how many carriers you need
The power of carriers increase as their number grows. However if you want a large number of carriers, you'll also have to delay your extra 3 gates (4th, 5th and 6th gate). The advantages of more carriers are obvious however it can get worst if you get scouted meaning more time for him to prepare. The solution to this is to attack with 4 carriers if you get scouted, or wait for like 6 carriers if you go unscouted and terran is unprepared.

On August 28 2012 23:44 Adonminus wrote:

This is all in because it has no transition. The only good transition are high templars but they're too gas heavy and too slow to tech making it impossible to get it in time. You have to kill him before he can hard counter your carriers.

On August 29 2012 00:24 Treehead wrote:


I've read a lot of your guides, and you're really good at setting up timing pushes, so I trust that this one is no different.

However, have you tried out possible transitions? What about adding range 6 phoenixes? They trade pretty well with Vikings, outrange marines and make drops difficult. What about a Mothership to vortex the vikings or marines (I'd imagine they tend to be split apart)? What about abandoning Carriers and moving towards Phoenix Colossus (if you can't scout gasless expand, so that you have the robo already)?

I'm 100% theorycrafting here, so I'm probably wrong, but it seems like somewhere in there, there's probably a way to delay a high viking count long enough to get something new up and running before his forces can bowl you over. I mean 12 Vikings (your lower limit on when they start to "counter") take 3:12 to build (4:36 for 16 vikings) from a reactored starport, and assuming you can take his small number of vikings during the push, you should have at least a few minutes to come up with something new, right?

On August 29 2012 03:46 ThomasjServo wrote:

Maybe just proxy the Beacon? It is an expensive proxy regardless, just figure 300 300 is better to lose than what would amount to a huge amount of your ability to produce units.

On September 01 2012 04:20 uh-oh wrote:
[I hesitate to create a guide on this cuz I don't have any replays yet, for some reasons my replays on the unit tester map are gone.]

not sure if many people know this but I just found a little micro trick while using carriers:

normally when your carrier is moving and shooting, after it's target dies the interceptors go home and the carrier is now essentially a giant slow moving space ship that cannot attack without having to stop and release interceptors, which is obviously not good as units can catch up with the carrier and take it out while the interceptors are released one by one. Even with graviton catapult it still takes a bit of time.

There is a way to prevent the interceptors from entering the carrier hanger when a target dies and maintaining its speed at the same time: right when the target dies and as the interceptors are flying back to the carrier you a-move the carrier or right click the enemy unit you want to kill next then immediately issues a move cmd afterwards. This way the interceptors that are flying back to the carrier will immediately fly towards the target and engage, the carrier will decelerate a slight bit when you are issuing the attack cmd but if you issue the move cmd fast enough after that the carrier won't lose much speed. This doesn't work for any interceptors that have gone back into the carrier hanger, those in the hanger will stay there until you override the carrier's move cmd with a stop/attack cmd, at which point they will be released.

Obviously this takes quite a lot of apm, but I can imagine this boosting the effectiveness of carrier by quite a lot, especially in this all in build where every unit counts. I hope some more dedicated users with better technical skills that I do will write a more thorough guide on this.

On September 01 2012 05:43 ineversmile wrote:


Does this mean you can spam a-click on the ground near the fight to keep attack-moving, to increase the damage output of a fair-sized group of carriers?

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.