12.30.12 - Update #1: Added liquidSea vs Genius game 1 of EGMC, and a german guide to VODs section 12.30.12 - Update #2: Added Spoilers to pictures 1.19.13 - Update #3: Added Mech Transition Replays!!
Introduction:
This is one of the newer 1 base all ins in the TvP matchup. It uses a gas first into 1-1-1 into obviously, hellions, banshees, marines, and scvs pulled. This build works in all leagues, has been used by pros(liquidSea) to great effect, and is not as well known as it should.
Minimum league required: Silver Most challenging aspect: Multi tasking 2 banshees and your main attack force.
Bunker: Optional as factory is building Benchmark: + Show Spoiler +
The build is designed to hard counter 1 gate FE, and if the protoss decides to do anything else, it allows you to secure an economic gas lead, and transitions into Mech almost seemlessly, with the possibility of being ahead with helion/banshee harass. It is safe from almost all Protoss openings. (except blind gas first Void Rays)
This is the cookie cutter protoss opener that this build is designed to beat
Build Manifesto: The nature of hellions and banshees splits the protoss forces between his natural and his main. You utilize this fog of war advantage by consistently harassing probes at odd angles, while maintaining minimum damage on your banshees. He cannot position all his stalkers to deny all your harassment without losing probes at one front or the other. + Show Spoiler +
Phase1: Notice the banshee attack in minimap
While he is in a defensive posture, you surprise him with a large force of marines, SCVs and hellions at the front. While he is busy micro'ing that army. Group your banshees and strike at the main and kill his stalkers there, then focus down the probes. Retreat with your main army to save army size. + Show Spoiler +
Phase2: Group banshees together, overwhelm stalkers, profit from probe deaths
Notice the fact that since he has lost so many probes, he cannot have all his production running at maximum capacity. + Show Spoiler +
Also note that he MUST make stalkers to deal with the banshees (don't lose any! repair before any attack). This means that your scvs are excellent buffers to soak up stalker fire, and marines and helions and banshees do full damage to immortals. Since you pull SCVs, he must pull probes for an even fight. The nature of the helion splash pushes the advantage to your favor (as well as mules for recovery) allowing you to secure your win with this timing attack. + Show Spoiler +
This can only be done on maps with wide naturals (Daybreak, Antiga, Entombed Valley)
Harass with banshee in the back, Helions run in to natural to roast probes. Keep 1 banshee at back, to keep Protoss forces split.
When second banshee pops, Pull all but 5 SCVs, pull all off gas. Use SCV’s as meatshield to absorb stalker fire. Keep a few to repair banshee, hellions, try to keep marines alive and focus fire when possible. Attempt to block off ramp with hellions to kill half the army at the bottom of the ramp. If high zealot count, focus down stalker, ignore zealots and kill all probes.
This attack is only meant to distract protoss, if you win good job, but if you don't you will still attack soon. Keep banshees and since he messed up his grouping, attempt to kill some more probes, you should have grouped them up (at least 3) and focused down stalkers in the main. Pull rest of SCVs (save maybe 1 or 2 depending on bank)10 seconds after first SCV wave, and repair all injured banshees. Group all units together, and charge up the ramp. Focus down stalkers first. Once only zealots are left, run weak ground army and use banshees to kill any warping in stalkers, and whittle down the protoss forces for your ground army to finish and mop up.
Vs 1g FE on Cloud kingdom. He does the fast 2 base blink build that's supposedly stomps mech players. I hold it off with a combination of frantic micro and him getting apprehensive because he can't lose the observer, so he thinks I have more defenses in my natural than whats actually there.
This replay really shows the power of doing a double expand from a gas first opening. Even though I lose so many SCVS, I actually float over 1000 minerals during the bulk of the harass! And again, to any people who say mech is too harassable, just watch as I stabilize. He keeps trying to harass me, and I send my hellions right into his bases. I repeat this cycle and eventually weasel my way back into the game. He does a miscalculation (very common for people who don't face mech very often) and loses his entire army with me having 4 tanks left and some hellions. I deny his fourth, kill some more probes, then I'm able to finish the game. Insane game where both of us are at 200 APM for the whole game.
Vs 1g FE on Daybreak. He does the standard 3g into robo followup from an expand. I harass him with hellions and banshees. Also note that he kept a lot of his probes inside his main until he had enough stalkers. But I still do quite a bit of economic damage with this build, and I am able to get away with a double expand BECAUSE I saw how defensive he was getting. He was even keeping multiple obs with his units even though I didn't have cloak. I still trust my gut and don't reveal my expansion until I have a large enough army size + siege mode. He tries to feign an attack, but I simply run my hellions in from the third when my watchtower hellion sees his army moving out. That move solidified my win, I hold off various attacks and end the game with tank mode a-move lol.
This seems promising, but wouldn't a protoss who scouted would be able to tell you're doing something funky? That would lead to say a 3 gate expo or something or even a 2 gate robo expo to be super safe. This does seem promising though, I'll have to try it out, maybe make a few tweaks myself
Thanks for sharing, been wanting to learn this build for a while now.
On December 31 2012 11:25 LiLSighKoh wrote: This seems promising, but wouldn't a protoss who scouted would be able to tell you're doing something funky? That would lead to say a 3 gate expo or something or even a 2 gate robo expo to be super safe. This does seem promising though, I'll have to try it out, maybe make a few tweaks myself
If you see he doesn't have an expansion you could just switch the reactor back to the barracks and bunker up.
Regarding void rays, again you could easily switch the reactor to the barracks, and get siege tanks + vikings + marines right?
I watched the replays. I am a mech player that uses gas first helion opener; however, I feel this is too "all-inish" for any transition if you fail. Your relplays even show you taking all your scvs off the line to attack. I can see that this is designed to kill a 1-base expand, but if it is held, you are dead. My preference is to do the same opener (without the starport) but make mauraders and helions simultaneously. Then take 4-5 scvs to repair the helions. I'd say I have a 90+ % ratio of taking out the Protoss expansions without exposing myself to an all-in. If I fail (which is not often) then i have some opportunity to recover with the turtly mech style of play. You also neglect to mention the hard counters to this build (aside from voidray). In my experience, 3 gate blink is a autowin against this and FE into 4 gate can also hold this if they chrono out stalkers. But thanks for the contribution.
On December 31 2012 11:25 LiLSighKoh wrote: This seems promising, but wouldn't a protoss who scouted would be able to tell you're doing something funky? That would lead to say a 3 gate expo or something or even a 2 gate robo expo to be super safe. This does seem promising though, I'll have to try it out, maybe make a few tweaks myself
If you see he doesn't have an expansion you could just switch the reactor back to the barracks and bunker up.
Regarding void rays, again you could easily switch the reactor to the barracks, and get siege tanks + vikings + marines right?
No i mean, as a toss, and you're poking with a stalker and you see no expo !
I remember Polt doing this build a while before Sea, in GSTL. Worth a look. It's a very interesting build and I've seen Minigun hold it while claiming "you have to sacrifice your natural against this, but you can hold." Super strong all-in.
this build has a fundamental flaw, as you will not be making any marines early on and want to instead go for insta reactor, a competent protoss should notice (even if he did not go in all the way with his probe) that you played gas first and thus chronoboost out some units early on, or just prevent your factory from landing at its reactor by building a pylon there. gas first is gimmicky at best and should always be an autoloss against someone who knows what he is doing.
but lets say you manage to get up hellion production untouched, this just becomes a very early 111 all in. very potent at straightup killing your opponent. i would advise against this build tho and have you go for a standart 13 gas 111 because of the aforementioned flaw.
On December 31 2012 11:41 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: Thanks for sharing, been wanting to learn this build for a while now.
On December 31 2012 11:25 LiLSighKoh wrote: This seems promising, but wouldn't a protoss who scouted would be able to tell you're doing something funky? That would lead to say a 3 gate expo or something or even a 2 gate robo expo to be super safe. This does seem promising though, I'll have to try it out, maybe make a few tweaks myself
If you see he doesn't have an expansion you could just switch the reactor back to the barracks and bunker up.
Regarding void rays, again you could easily switch the reactor to the barracks, and get siege tanks + vikings + marines right?
No i mean, as a toss, and you're poking with a stalker and you see no expo !
Wow fail by me sorry, I read "3 gate" as in 1 base pressure and don't even remember the second part ;;
Hmm, doesn't anything but 1 gate robo expo and 1 gate expo weak to marine tank banshee all in? I remember that was what most were saying (even pros) back then, but maybe it's defendable with other builds now. (Well there's some 1 base tech builds but they are made to block specifically 1-1-1 but suck if he's not going 1-1-1, but i'm talking about other viable expo builds)
Also, maybe the Terran could be playing mindgames and is actually going 1 rax expo.
On December 31 2012 12:29 alpenrahm wrote: this build has a fundamental flaw, as you will not be making any marines early on and want to instead go for insta reactor, a competent protoss should notice (even if he did not go in all the way with his probe) that you played gas first and thus chronoboost out some units early on, or just prevent your factory from landing at its reactor by building a pylon there. gas first is gimmicky at best and should always be an autoloss against someone who knows what he is doing.
but lets say you manage to get up hellion production untouched, this just becomes a very early 111 all in. very potent at straightup killing your opponent. i would advise against this build tho and have you go for a standart 13 gas 111 because of the aforementioned flaw.
On the contrary, since you walled (with 2 depots and the suggested bunker), I would actually encourage zealot + stalker early aggression. This is because once you have 4 hellions, you can kite around the zealots, and focus down the stalker. You get a free stalker kill, since the second one won't be at your base yet. If he chrono'ed out 2 zealots, you will get 2 free zealot kills as well, losing 0 to 1 hellion. If you have any questions, please include a replay showing us you losing to some sort of early aggression...
with the early aggression risk factored removed, this build is basically exactly what you presumed, an early 1-1-1. It has a harass period just like a standard 1-1-1, but hellions are even better at harassing the front than marines because they can run away from anything, and also if they lack proper building placement, you can dive in and just tank the sentry + stalker damage and kill probes if he has too few stalkers in front. This cannot happen with a standard 1-1-1.
On December 31 2012 12:54 Sweetfrost wrote: I'm dying to try this build out! I hope I'll be able to play some games before new years celebration. Thanks for sharing the build!
This is definitely an all-in unless you do significant damage. I've used it on ladder loads of time ever since Polt used it against Creator in GSTL and there's only been 1 time I can remember that no damage was done and I still won.
Usually if you do damage it's easy to double expand.
On December 31 2012 13:49 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: wait got a question, what if they simply make 4 gates instead of 3 gates 1 robo?
your call, depends on how much damage you did with the first 2 phase of harass (i think you should still pull 1 round of scvs). But the point of this is to damage. If you simply run up the ramp, and massacre all the probes, hes stuck on 4 gates, has to get a robo as well (since you can get cloak after ur first attack), and then he's in an awkward spot, and you transition to mech with a little mineral deficit, which is definitely okay.
If you are looking for more examples of this, you can check out LiquidSea during his run at IPL5 against Naniwa.
In game 1 on Cloud Kingdom he did the exact same build
But on game 2 on Ohana he went 1 rax FE into reactor hellion banshee, Sea instead went for a raven and a viking first before producing banshees in order to kill the obs and eventually transitioned into mech. But you can still go for the heavy harrass with cloak banshees
On December 31 2012 15:45 NoZyneighbor wrote: If you are looking for more examples of this, you can check out LiquidSea during his run at IPL5 against Naniwa.
In game 1 on Cloud Kingdom he did the exact same build
But on game 2 on Ohana he went 1 rax FE into reactor hellion banshee, Sea instead went for a raven and a viking first before producing banshees in order to kill the obs and eventually transitioned into mech. But you can still go for the heavy harrass with cloak banshees
That's pretty much an entirely different build, just also mech. It's not uncommon for mech to utilize hellion and banshee harass, and lately mech builds have been centered around hellion openers with or without banshees to follow (the very few times it's ever used in pro games)
I had time for 7 games today and I didn't get to face a Protoss at all.... Well since everyone else seem to be content with the build I'm sure it works very well. Thanks for posting the replays, I have had the pleasure of watching it at least.
This style is EXTREMELY annoying for a protoss player. He knows that you're on one base, but he still can't have enough stalkers to shut down your harass when it hits, off of 1 gate FE. And he has to go 1 gate FE because he can't be sure whether there's a 2nd command center in your base or not. You can go all in but you can also just expand safely if he plays very defensively (which is a further damage to his economy and/or tech).
I just tried that build on ladder ( dia ) works pretty nice. Usually i play 1 Rax Fe and have a lot of problems with late game vs. toss. It's quite funny to play this way sometimes :D
The Sea vs Genius game only barely worked on daybreak (Sea only had like 6units remaining after killing everything). If it's scouted, I imagine it'd be even harder to break through on a map with a natural ramp since the protoss could easily gateway wall the ramp or even just FF the ramp.
I've faced this style before a few times on the ladder, and I do remember losing to it a couple times. But in general, I'd say this is pretty all-in, as if protoss keeps his expansion then you're kind of screwed since you one base for so long. (And in the replay, you actually pull ALL your scvs because you know that after the first attack, you can't really catch up in macro even though your banshees did a good amount of damage)
The main thing against this is still scouting I think, if the protoss had gotten an observer in your base, he would've seen one gas, meaning no cloak for the banshees (and tech lab not researching), he would see the factory with a reactor, telling him no tanks, so immortals are useless (Chobbits made 2-3 immortals in the replay I think, that could've been 4-6 more stalkers).
Most protoss will see the hellion banshee, and just assume it's going to be a 1/1/1, make immortals to prepare for tanks, etc. but if a protoss can actually know for certain that you are just making hellion banshee, I think if he makes pure stalker off the 1 gate FE he can hold it (with some sentries to obviously). It is kind of cool build though, as if I was going against 1/1/1 I wouldn't really want a lot of stalkers since they get owned by the tanks, I'd want like 2 for each banshee he has, but no more if I can help it.
Chobbits could've held your push I think if he had: a) built 2 observers right away and sent one to your base. b) not waste money on immortals, which vs hellion banshee is just a really expensive zealot with more health c) sim city, since he knows you're making only hellions from the factory, he can assume that walling will be good, he had 5 gateways, even if he builds the initial 3 in base (since he can't really know it's not a regular 1/1/1 while building them), the extra 2 and even the twilight council could've been used to create a pvz style wall-off. d) better FFs, he doesn't use any FFs til the last engagement, and even then he doesn't actually cut the army off, if I saw an attack like that coming, i would wait for the scvs to get on the ramp, force field the hellions out, kill the scvs, then deal with the hellions. Of course the banshees are the real annoying part of your army, so killing the banshees is the most important part, but it also means that the terran player needs to have good banshee control, as sitting around with the banshees or losing even one banshee is not an option. e) I know he took economic damage from the banshees, but I still feel like he could've gotten blink by 10 minutes to hold your push, the main punch of your army is the banshees, so if he has blink your banshees become a lot more vulnerable.
That being said I think this style would probably get you a good amount of ladder wins just because people will expect a regular 1/1/1, and they might be too scared of cloaked banshees to send out an early observer to your base (but I mean....if I saw banshees I wouldn't be afraid to build even 3 observers before an immortal, because the immortal is only useful against tanks in the final push, and observers build so fast anyways) I'm only dia though, so I don't know how accurate my analysis is
Have been doing this quite alot and ive also seen MKP using this a couple of times i think, its a really strong opening and i really recommend it to players who want to be more aggressive
What do you do if the protoss suspects hellions and just doesn't mine from his natural? Yeah, he's a little behind where he'd want to be from not mining and he might lose it, but holding your all-in attack isn't that hard from one base against hellion/banshee without tanks with siege mode. Defending harass on your probe line while you're only mining from one base is fairly trivial.
On January 05 2013 03:27 Whitewing wrote: What do you do if the protoss suspects hellions and just doesn't mine from his natural? Yeah, he's a little behind where he'd want to be from not mining and he might lose it, but holding your all-in attack isn't that hard from one base against hellion/banshee without tanks with siege mode. Defending harass on your probe line while you're only mining from one base is fairly trivial.
You don't need to follow every step of my build. Its a possible all in but by no means are you forced to do that. You can transition into double expand -> mech pretty smoothly as long as you kill at least 4 probes or so. I do this build so much that I can tell when protoss knows that he's vulnerable to an all in, and takes the necc. precautions. They are in a more defensive mood so I will use that to my advantage by just pullling ahead in economy. Othertimes, the protoss hasn't seen this build before and doesn't realize the all in timing that he can just lose at. When I see that, I pull my scvs and just go for the kill. As for them keeping probes inside their main.
A. You know that they are being defensive now, which means they may become quite aggressive later. B. You know you can't do as much damage, so don't lose any hellions or banshees unnecessarily, and maybe build 1 or 2 extra bunkers, or get cloak to scare him in the mid game so he doesn't hit you with an gateway-immortal timing.
On January 05 2013 03:09 framtidenskrig wrote: Have been doing this quite alot and ive also seen MKP using this a couple of times i think, its a really strong opening and i really recommend it to players who want to be more aggressive
I agree, this build really helps terran players understand the concept of map control. Basically when a person has more map control, they are more likely to predict and adapt to what their opponent is about to do. With that being said, if one has map control, one's vulnerability is minimized, and a person should take more risks in such an instance.
easy example:
protoss sees a lot of hellions, and cloaked banshees, their gut instinct is to thwart your harass completely, IE be in a defensive posture. Terran player realizes this pattern, and double expands, or ninja expands, or goes double armory slightly earlier than he should.
Another example: In MVP's TVT, he often skips marines in the early game in favour of an earlier command center when its 1/1/1 vs 1/1/1 and he knows what the opponent is doing. Another illustration of my point.
Vs 1g FE on Cloud kingdom. He does the fast 2 base blink build that's supposedly stomps mech players. I hold it off with a combination of frantic micro and him getting apprehensive because he can't lose the observer, so he thinks I have more defenses in my natural than whats actually there.
This replay really shows the power of doing a double expand from a gas first opening. Even though I lose so many SCVS, I actually float over 1000 minerals during the bulk of the harass! And again, to any people who say mech is too harassable, just watch as I stabilize. He keeps trying to harass me, and I send my hellions right into his bases. I repeat this cycle and eventually weasel my way back into the game. He does a miscalculation (very common for people who don't face mech very often) and loses his entire army with me having 4 tanks left and some hellions. I deny his fourth, kill some more probes, then I'm able to finish the game. Insane game where both of us are at 200 APM for the whole game.
Vs 1g FE on Daybreak. He does the standard 3g into robo followup from an expand. I harass him with hellions and banshees. Also note that he kept a lot of his probes inside his main until he had enough stalkers. But I still do quite a bit of economic damage with this build, and I am able to get away with a double expand BECAUSE I saw how defensive he was getting. He was even keeping multiple obs with his units even though I didn't have cloak. I still trust my gut and don't reveal my expansion until I have a large enough army size + siege mode. He tries to feign an attack, but I simply run my hellions in from the third when my watchtower hellion sees his army moving out. That move solidified my win, I hold off various attacks and end the game with tank mode a-move lol.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/iPXiO.jpg)
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my pleasure
