EPT[D] SC2 History of TvZ - Page 6
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Kergy
Peru2011 Posts
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Denzil
United Kingdom4193 Posts
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Oboeman
Canada3980 Posts
On December 25 2012 09:52 Big J wrote: Roach+ling busts date back to the days when zergs started to use this former ZvZ build against Protoss' 3gate expands. At those times the first ZvT roach+ling busts were experimented with as well. But yeah, I'd say DRG is the first highly successful player that was doing roach based early game busts in TvZ. (MLG Winter(?) finals vs MKP from early 2012 comes to mind, where he did like 3 roach/bling busts) When they first started being experimented with isn't the important point, but when they became a standard choice for zerg. At one point, ZvT openings got so stale when zerg were contained on 2 base by 4 hellions and had no information. 90% of the time, zerg did one of two builds: 4 queen no gas into 2 base lair (at this point it was usually infestors, but sometimes muta), or roach all-in. Basically the idea was that 4 queen no gas was the only two base way to keep up economically with a 3OC terran, it wasn't even worth investing any gas trying to get a 3rd base or feign aggression because it put you further behind than you would be if you didn't mine gas. But if you don't take gas there is zero possibility of aggression, so terran doesn't need to make any units apart from the first marine and 4 hellions, so he could go 3 OCC + double e-bay while teching to medivacs, and then make 6 reactors at once before making units, and there's nothing stopping him from making a 4th OC if he wanted. The roach all-ins were mixed in as a greed check - is terran being ridiculous this game or is he playing safe? Very occasionally you saw speedling opening, where'd you'd make a wave of about 24 lings with the first injects and fight the first hellions for map control. You wouldn't beat the hellions, but you'd know if he stopped at 4 or kept making them. Annyeong, leenock, and life all did this a fair bit. This is the main reason why terrans started being more cautious about their first bunker, placing it behind minerals or up against the cliff, instead of in the open. Smart bunker placement more or less neutered this build, but it added some spice while it lasted. People love talking about how exciting old zvt was, but it was getting pretty stagnant for the zerg at this point, because those 4 hellions were so limiting. boom queen buff, boom zerg now has 3 base builds. I feel like the "roach all-in or 4 queen" era deserves acknowledgement. | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On December 26 2012 01:09 Oboeman wrote: When they first started being experimented with isn't the important point, but when they became a standard choice for zerg. At one point, ZvT openings got so stale when zerg were contained on 2 base by 4 hellions and had no information. 90% of the time, zerg did one of two builds: 4 queen no gas into 2 base lair (at this point it was usually infestors, but sometimes muta), or roach all-in. Basically the idea was that 4 queen no gas was the only two base way to keep up economically with a 3OC terran, it wasn't even worth investing any gas trying to get a 3rd base or feign aggression because it put you further behind than you would be if you didn't mine gas. But if you don't take gas there is zero possibility of aggression, so terran doesn't need to make any units apart from the first marine and 4 hellions, so he could go 3 OCC + double e-bay while teching to medivacs, and then make 6 reactors at once before making units, and there's nothing stopping him from making a 4th OC if he wanted. The roach all-ins were mixed in as a greed check - is terran being ridiculous this game or is he playing safe? Very occasionally you saw speedling opening, where'd you'd make a wave of about 24 lings with the first injects and fight the first hellions for map control. You wouldn't beat the hellions, but you'd know if he stopped at 4 or kept making them. Annyeong, leenock, and life all did this a fair bit. This is the main reason why terrans started being more cautious about their first bunker, placing it behind minerals or up against the cliff, instead of in the open. Smart bunker placement more or less neutered this build, but it added some spice while it lasted. People love talking about how exciting old zvt was, but it was getting pretty stagnant for the zerg at this point, because those 4 hellions were so limiting. boom queen buff, boom zerg now has 3 base builds. I feel like the "roach all-in or 4 queen" era deserves acknowledgement. I think, especially towards the end of that era, a lot of Terrans went back to sacrificing hellions on drones and many zergs did actually go back to 3queen+speed openings and just have like 8speedlings for defense for the occasion that the 4-6hellions ran past the crawler. But it was generally the same setup. 2base+double upgrades or lair or roach allin. But well, this write up is extremely incomplete and filled with misinformation, as I already wrote. + Show Spoiler + A lot of mistakes (from what I remember): 1.) -) roaches were 3range (not 2) -) Fruitdealer won because he was a heavy gambler, mixing allins with 60drone builds. This basically had nothing to do with "marine control". He was just simply one step ahead, metagaming opponents instead of going for "blind builds". 2.), 3.) -) didn't MKP use 1rax FE quite heavily? And if not MKP, I think Boxer and Nada were probably way more influencial than Mvp for using FE builds; as far as I remember, Mvp was "just" the best T player at that time. Especially in TvT. -) Maka (MakaRax) needs to be mentioned somewhere here; These builds had quite a huge impact on how T was being played 4.) This was due to the way how BroodWar was played. Zergs were pressured to have one more expansion than the Terran, but this often led them to crumble before taking the wanted 6 gases. This was when Nestea showed a new way to play. Rather than prematurely going for another expansion, he prepared himself to defend Terran's push Every Zerg was doing that. I can't remember any good Z players that went 3base at that time. Kyrix was famous for 2basing, July was famous 2basing. There was really noone who played fast 3bases at all. Nestea was "just" better at not getting faked out, better at droning, better at spreading creep. He developed a lot of great defensive mechanisms (pushing creep with a spine crawler) and - similarily to Fruitdealer - was quite good at metagaming his opponents with a variety of banling busts and heavy droning. 7.) This timing push was like the oldest build ever, when Mvp played it. 50% of all TvZs on the ladder in Masters league was the 3Tank push, from early to late 2011. Everybody was doing it and Mvp was one of the first players to stop doing it. But he always mixed some forms of it into his play. Ghosts were being used before that. Everybody had started using them at that time. Demuslim made a comment along the lines of "I didn't know how to handle Zerg lategame. Greg told me to stop building Vikings and build ghosts instead. They are amazing." I think Thorzain was well known for them as well. Select ditto. Basically everybody minus MMA was going for Ghosts in TvZ at that point. Mvp didn't get Ghosts nerfed. Ghosts were nerfed because Terrans found ways to mass them and in the old form they countered every Zerg unit, once massed. 8.) David Kim claimed to balance ZvP by buffing queen range and overlord movement speed. However, this patch gave much greater of an impact to TvZ. With the new queen buff, early hellions were easily fended off by queens Simply no. The queen patch was made, because of hellions. The official comments were something like "hellions can contain Zerg too easily for two long". 10.), 11.) 2base Mutas have always been around and have never hindered Terran from going Mech. | ||
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Vanadiel
France961 Posts
On December 26 2012 01:09 Oboeman wrote: When they first started being experimented with isn't the important point, but when they became a standard choice for zerg. At one point, ZvT openings got so stale when zerg were contained on 2 base by 4 hellions and had no information. 90% of the time, zerg did one of two builds: 4 queen no gas into 2 base lair (at this point it was usually infestors, but sometimes muta), or roach all-in. Basically the idea was that 4 queen no gas was the only two base way to keep up economically with a 3OC terran, it wasn't even worth investing any gas trying to get a 3rd base or feign aggression because it put you further behind than you would be if you didn't mine gas. But if you don't take gas there is zero possibility of aggression, so terran doesn't need to make any units apart from the first marine and 4 hellions, so he could go 3 OCC + double e-bay while teching to medivacs, and then make 6 reactors at once before making units, and there's nothing stopping him from making a 4th OC if he wanted. The roach all-ins were mixed in as a greed check - is terran being ridiculous this game or is he playing safe? Very occasionally you saw speedling opening, where'd you'd make a wave of about 24 lings with the first injects and fight the first hellions for map control. You wouldn't beat the hellions, but you'd know if he stopped at 4 or kept making them. Annyeong, leenock, and life all did this a fair bit. This is the main reason why terrans started being more cautious about their first bunker, placing it behind minerals or up against the cliff, instead of in the open. Smart bunker placement more or less neutered this build, but it added some spice while it lasted. People love talking about how exciting old zvt was, but it was getting pretty stagnant for the zerg at this point, because those 4 hellions were so limiting. boom queen buff, boom zerg now has 3 base builds. I feel like the "roach all-in or 4 queen" era deserves acknowledgement. That is so true, actually. The Queen buff may not have been the best decision, but I agreed about the fact that something needed to be done at the time, I really don't see it as the golden era of ZvT, it was a lot of random coinflip vs random overgreedy from terran, it might have been kinda even, but it was too random for a strategy game. | ||
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HungShark
United States134 Posts
On December 22 2012 10:10 MeaNySC2 wrote: 9. Queen patch, Overlord patch, death of hellion triple, entrance of 6 queens (mid 2012) David Kim claimed to balance ZvP by buffing queen range and overlord movement speed. However, this patch gave much greater of an impact to TvZ. With the new queen buff, early hellions were easily fended off by queens. Therefore, Terrans have decided to go for an expansion first before taking double gas into factory. In other words, because Terrans could not stop zerg from droning hard in the early game, they have decided to go for an early expansion themselves. Until this patch, Zergs had to take gas before going third to fend off hellions Citations are definitely needed for this statement. According to this source, queens were buffed for the sole purpose of better early-game creep spread, and to better combat against early game all-ins and hellions; it made no mention of balancing solely ZvP. | ||
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Defenestrator
400 Posts
On December 26 2012 01:09 Oboeman wrote: When they first started being experimented with isn't the important point, but when they became a standard choice for zerg. At one point, ZvT openings got so stale when zerg were contained on 2 base by 4 hellions and had no information. 90% of the time, zerg did one of two builds: 4 queen no gas into 2 base lair (at this point it was usually infestors, but sometimes muta), or roach all-in. Basically the idea was that 4 queen no gas was the only two base way to keep up economically with a 3OC terran, it wasn't even worth investing any gas trying to get a 3rd base or feign aggression because it put you further behind than you would be if you didn't mine gas. But if you don't take gas there is zero possibility of aggression, so terran doesn't need to make any units apart from the first marine and 4 hellions, so he could go 3 OCC + double e-bay while teching to medivacs, and then make 6 reactors at once before making units, and there's nothing stopping him from making a 4th OC if he wanted. The roach all-ins were mixed in as a greed check - is terran being ridiculous this game or is he playing safe? Very occasionally you saw speedling opening, where'd you'd make a wave of about 24 lings with the first injects and fight the first hellions for map control. You wouldn't beat the hellions, but you'd know if he stopped at 4 or kept making them. Annyeong, leenock, and life all did this a fair bit. This is the main reason why terrans started being more cautious about their first bunker, placing it behind minerals or up against the cliff, instead of in the open. Smart bunker placement more or less neutered this build, but it added some spice while it lasted. People love talking about how exciting old zvt was, but it was getting pretty stagnant for the zerg at this point, because those 4 hellions were so limiting. boom queen buff, boom zerg now has 3 base builds. I feel like the "roach all-in or 4 queen" era deserves acknowledgement. Was it really that bad? For me at least, the hellions just forced out some roaches sometimes. I would (and I thought pros did this too) just get 3 roaches to clear out the hellions and reclaim map control. This meant that I couldn't be super-greedy, but in the past few months we've seen what a greedy Z can do, and it's arguably imbalanced. Also, some of the problems you refer to are based on a lack of information by the Z player; this issue is significantly mitigated by the OL speed buff, making it feasible for some OL's to actually cross the map without getting shot down by marines. If you saw a 3CC opener you could go allin, if not you could secure map control with roaches and macro. Back in those days I had no problem watching or playing TvZ and I thought the matchup was exciting and balanced. | ||
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Pursuit_
United States1330 Posts
On December 22 2012 11:09 LgNKami wrote: Im mad that in #9, ForGG got no type of credit for his Hellion Banshee build that everyone stole. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but Hellion Banshee builds had been in use since late 2011. I remember game 1 of the MMA vs DRG series (which remains to this day the best SC2 TvZ series of all time imo) MMA did a variation of this against DRG's Roach Bling Ling timing attack. It looked like DRG would outright kill MMA, but failed or forgot to make an evo chamber / spores back at home and the counter harass with cloaked Banshees swung things into MMA's favor. Of course ForGG (and Supernova iirc) were the first to use refined Hellion Banshee builds as their standard openings after the queen patch in May. Edit: Overall, I'm fairly impressed with the quality of this write-up. While there are a few inaccuracies, it generally covers the overall flow of how TvZ has looked thus far in SC2. | ||
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scoMalfregor
Poland52 Posts
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neptunusfisk
2286 Posts
On December 25 2012 02:06 zmansman17 wrote: I found Ver's analysis to be mostly true with some sensational parts added for humor. That's a description of good satire. Everybody will laugh, but deep down they will know it is true. | ||
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Zarahtra
Iceland4053 Posts
On December 22 2012 10:10 MeaNySC2 wrote: 7. King MVP's Strategy and nerf (late 2011~ early 2012) 2011 August Code S ro4 MVP vs July game 2 Metalopolis. MVP comes with a new strategy. He went for hellion expansion into 3 tank timing push into triple without being greedy. July seemed advantageous with better early game economy. However, fantastic tank positions and unit movement allowed MVP the gold expansion and split the map into half. This is when a new unit appears: ghost. When the map is split into half, July could only go for hive units to go against MVP. Here, MVP comes with more than 16 cloaked ghosts and snipes all of broodlords and ultralisks. This was astonishing. At the time snipe dealt 45 damage, meaning that 10 shots and 8shots would kill an ultralisk and broodlord respectively. Compared to how much zerg has invested on these units, this strategy was far more efficient. Unfortunately, MVP has forced Blizzard to nerf snipe. It took 6/12 snipes per bl/ultra. Also the only real reason it worked so well against july was because he went hyper aggressive at the start and then later got caught offguard and lost a ton of units for free. That game was a terrible game to think of balancing snipe. Thankfully though, the nerf didn't quite go that way, not straight after that game that everyone remembers as the reason snipe got nerfed. | ||
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HeyImFinn
United States250 Posts
On December 25 2012 00:04 Micket wrote: What about the Slayers' Blue flame hellion massacre of MLG Anaheim 2011? That was mostly a TvT style. | ||
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Zarahtra
Iceland4053 Posts
No that was a zerg massacre, where they elevatored hellions and rines into the zerg base, killed slings with hellions and massacred everything else with rines. Was quite fun to watch, the micro they were pulling off... | ||
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Oboeman
Canada3980 Posts
On January 01 2013 10:35 Zarahtra wrote: No that was a zerg massacre, where they elevatored hellions and rines into the zerg base, killed slings with hellions and massacred everything else with rines. Was quite fun to watch, the micro they were pulling off... all match-ups. the marine/bfh elevator was a TvZ build, but suddenly everyone was doing non stop hellion drops in all match-ups and roasting worker lines on the 4th or 5th try. | ||
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shizaep
Canada2920 Posts
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