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Hey TL!
I wanted to bring up a question relating to when/where to use specific micro techniques when combating Protoss with Terran micro. Specifically, when should Terrans use focus fire on gateway units vs kiting.
What originally got me thinking about this was the hydralisk vs zealot level of the sc masters custom game where the point was to shift click the zealots so your hydras quickly focused them down. This simple mechanic yielded far superior results to attempting tricky micro like running with zealot targeted units and kiting. While of course given hydras slow speed kiting should usually be out of the question, there are many situations as Terran where you find your bio army'a mobility compromised, I.e. ff behind your units, overstimmed units, landscape features hindering retreat paths. In these situations is it better to attempt to kite, or hunker down and focus fire, counting on insane dps to get as many kills as possible before your army is sliced up? For arguments sake I'm going to assume half decent micro skills, of course if you miss your shift click on a toss unit your army may catastrophically walk forward into zealots, but it's not like people don't botch kiting either. Of course kiting WHILE focus firing is probably the absolute best, but I'm trying to compare the two. So the assumption is sufficient skill to do one or the other well, but not necessarily to do both.
One clear situation where focus firing is necessary is when holding gateway pressure builds at your ramp. If you fail to do so what you'll find is your opponent finishes with a number of low health zealots and only a few dead, meanwhile your army ha been annihilated. This is part of the reason these attacks feel so OP, but if you focus your marines properly the zealots die quite quickly, and the relatively low unit counts of these attacks mean their dps is significantly reduced by each killed zealot. Since these attacks are pretty much a Toss dps vs Terran repair battle, if you can get past that threshold the battle will swing significantly in your favor. In this situation you're taking advantage of repair and bunker hp, while in the field you have neither, but is it as simple as bunkers = focus fire, field = kite, or is there some spectrum of situations, locations, compositions where either or a combination is optimal?
A main reason to kite is that it also helps avoid Toss heavy splash units. However, in the case of colossus vs MMMV armies, I find a major difficulty I have is when I kite my bio I leave my Vikings out to dry, and they can get focused by stalkers before doing sufficient damage to the colossus. Eventually it feels like I'm jus outmicroing myself by gift wrapping my Vikings while not really doing much damage to colossus, and then die to the inevitable follow up. I've lately gotten better results by standing and fighting, while spreading units and then focus firing. For reference I am a diamond Terran who still has issues fighting Toss death balls. I will try to link some replays if people are interested, but I feel like errors in my micro are more important than the fundamental question of when/where each technique is preferred, so will refrain at this time.
If you do focus fire, what's the best way to do so? I'd imagine focus firing mauraders may not be desirable, as their real strength comes from slowing units, and their attack could lead to overkill, which has a negative effect on total dps. So is the best way to leave mauraders in front while focusing marines in the back? Does anybody have special insight to advanced focus fire techniques and when to employ them?
I hope I've provided enough insight/questions to spark a discussion. If anybody has replays of situations where kiting or focus fire was well employed i believe it could be very helpful. I'm very excited for the new HoTS replay feature which will allow for better apples to apples comparison, but for the time I suppose anecdotal evidence will have to suffice.
By the way, happy election day to all the Americans here. Better get out and vote!
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You have to remember that zealots are just a buffer, and you really don't want to be losing your entire army just to take out all of the zealots, since they can be rebuilt very quickly and cheaply. The idea behind kiting is that you maintain your entire army while slowly chipping away at the deathball, which is much preferred to constantly trading vs warpgates (1 bad engagement and protoss will kill your base with a fresh warpin round). Also if you just stand there, psionic storm will absolutely crush everything, regardless of how much of a supply lead you have.
As for your comment about forcefields, any decent protoss player lays down forcefields in hopes of killing portions of your army for free (pulling back zealots and letting colossi roast up your stuff), so it's a much better idea to pull the stranded units back with medivacs and kite to stay at the edge of forcefields range. Standing and focus firing vs forcefields works only if the forcefields were botched or you simply have an overwhelming army advantage.
If you're having trouble managing your vikings, try engaging from a superior position and abuse the terrain to get some free volleys off on the colossi.
(I'm a toss player)
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of course if you miss your shift click on a toss unit your army may catastrophically walk forward into zealots
That's why I always use the attack command when focusfiring. The worst case is I miss a target and my army attack-moves. So not to much hurt.
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Use focus fire against sentry, high templar, colossus. Usually it's better to pick a group of units which are closer to a unit you want to FF.
But much more important playing against toss to use stim wisely, keep the destance with HT and sentries (not to let them use spells at your army) and kite well. So if you do this things well you may use FF, but not visa versa.
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On November 07 2012 02:23 Sjokola wrote:Show nested quote +of course if you miss your shift click on a toss unit your army may catastrophically walk forward into zealots That's why I always use the attack command when focusfiring. The worst case is I miss a target and my army attack-moves. So not to much hurt.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure pros do this too from what I've seen, would be very risky otherwise.
I don't think this match up is very much at all about focusfire.
Early game when you do your 2 medivac push or whatever it is you do, you want to kite away from the army so that you are doing free damage to zealots without receiving return fire from stalkers.
Then late game its all about getting rid of the splash damage causing units. This is more about hitting EMPs and Viking positioning.
The only time I can think of where I focus fire in TvP, is when he has 1 or 2 Archons and I don't have EMP out yet, then I will kite/focusfire and try and take out the Archons.
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On November 07 2012 02:23 Sjokola wrote:Show nested quote +of course if you miss your shift click on a toss unit your army may catastrophically walk forward into zealots That's why I always use the attack command when focusfiring. The worst case is I miss a target and my army attack-moves. So not to much hurt.
God I have got to start doing this T.T I've lost like 5 games this week alone trying to focus fire only to have my whole army just walk right into a perfect concave of stimmed bio (I'm protoss.)
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Focus firing is amazing vs those cheesy ass blink stalker all ins if you have enough marauders. You kill the stalker before it has a chance to blink back which will usually cause the toss to panic and just run.
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On November 07 2012 06:59 LgNKami wrote:
Focus firing is amazing vs those cheesy ass blink stalker all ins if you have enough marauders. You kill the stalker before it has a chance to blink back which will usually cause the toss to panic and just run.
This is a potential epic fail actually. You can blink back a Stalker with the shells on their way, so one Blink from one Stalker dodges an entire volley from your own army.
Marines and Siege Tanks cannot be dodged so with those it is safer to focus fire.
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Concussive and heal are a great factor why kiting is better. Add in speed Reapers, control them right while kiting and you only lose a few Marauders against an army of Zealots. Also Marauders do overkill, in close combat it is not that bad though. But you lose a ton of damage if you focus fire on range 6 for example.
It is really situation based though. And a Protoss player usually gives you some opportunities to just focus fire down their Zealots so their warpins will be to late to save the rest of their army.
The optimum of course is kiting and selecting the perfect amount of units to one shot an enemy unit. Especially Banshees and Vikings benefit from doing so, the other units aren't that bad. Broodlords solved this by creating an army. (Even if they overkill they still create Broodlords, making your own creep tumors perfect targets to create a buffer even before the engagement)
Carriers are a case on their own and you basically want every carrier to attack another target while you move your carriers back. If you just a move them and pull back, they tend to target the same unit and you lose multiple times of their damage potential.
At the end it is all very situational and related to the Unit. I was in shock when I saw a Battlecruiser fight in Broodwar, they had even numbers, but one Terran just dominated the other one. One was actually focus fireing like crazy and you thought the fight was over (BCs in BW hit really hard but slower then in SC2). But suddenly the tides turned and the one that looked like simple a-moving won with alot of BCs surviving. Later it became known that he did spread fire with his BCs, to minimize the overkill. In SC2 the overkill is off course not that bad for most units as their shots travel faster.
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On November 07 2012 07:28 meadbert wrote:Show nested quote +On November 07 2012 06:59 LgNKami wrote:
Focus firing is amazing vs those cheesy ass blink stalker all ins if you have enough marauders. You kill the stalker before it has a chance to blink back which will usually cause the toss to panic and just run. This is a potential epic fail actually. You can blink back a Stalker with the shells on their way, so one Blink from one Stalker dodges an entire volley from your own army. Marines and Siege Tanks cannot be dodged so with those it is safer to focus fire.
This assumes that the player has the APM and reaction time to blink back that 1 stalker that has been targetted after the volleys had been shot by the maruaders. Targetting is much more superior in the case of blink stalkers because you are killing asap as opposed to damaging slowing, which means its harder to blink micro.
Back on topic, kiting and targetting should be used in different scenarios:
Kiting - This should be used when the protoss is zealot/colossus heavy. This is to ensure that the least damage is taken as low as possible whilst still doing max damage.
Targetting - I believe, until you have godly micro, this should only be used in small army engagements to target high priority units (i.e. archons, immortals, templar, sentry + collosus)
Based on experience:
Small army engagements - i will only kite and target high priority units, dont need to fan out.
Large army engagements - I fan out and just fight, pulling back small groups of units for storms/chargelot damage. The most important parts about this engagement:
Fan out ALOT.
Have superior viking positioning
Pull back clumps of units where you think storm will hit (how i do this is, look @ army and think like the protoss)
Btw, Mid-High masters terran player on NA.
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As you say, it is ideal to do both. In a perfect scenario, your vikings will target fire collosus, while kiting away from stalkers and archons, your infantry will spread and kite away from zealots while targeting archons and having small groups split away to try to run around to focus collosus. Your ghosts will emp clumps of units while saving enough energy to deal with any high templar who happen to be coming in late to the party, but after they emp they should be moved to the back of the army. You need at least 3 hotkeys on your army to accomplish this properly.
If you can only do one or the other however, i would say in the early game you want to focus fire the stalkers first, then kite away from the remaining zealots. In the late game it is much better to kite than to focus fire, your army can not survive sitting in place and taking on the full brunt of zealots, storm and collosus fire, it will just melt. And at this point target firing your whole army on a certain target is overkill.
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EPT
