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On April 05 2015 09:19 Alchemik wrote:hey! I just played a pretty straight forward ZvT, where I got outplayed and lost in the end. here's the replay: http://drop.sc/395371now, what were my mistakes? the ones I see are: - a bit more drones would help, - too many engagments off of creep, not enough replacing of the creep, - sub-par micro in most of the engagments (like losing 43 lings to 2 widow mines and also could attack from a bigger concave), - some small ones (like not having vision of the 4th and 5th base with an overlord/no burrowed ling under expansion). any others?
This was a well-played game on both sides for a diamond game, I'm guessing you're pretty high diamond? Your analysis is pretty accurate, but here are some of my comments:
1. I like to play Life-style ZvT (and a lot of high-level players do this): instead of engaging with your whole army, use only small packs of ling/bane to attack his groups of marines. There's no need to rush, especially with your excellent creep spread. Keep trading with 3-4 banes and 5-6 lings at a time while making more lings and banes, expanding and teching, and getting your muta ball up.
2. You don't really counterattack in this game (at least for the first 25 minutes). His 4th is pretty exposed, and this is key to breaking a Terran. If you allow Terran to pressure you all game without any counter-pressure, it's much, much harder to win. Either use small packs of ling/bane, your muta ball, or both (preferably both). Even if you don't do damage, you at least force him to multitask more and possibly throw off his macro. You can see that once you start muta harassing, his pushes become a lot less threatening, and he starts to kind of fall apart. I don't really like to even engage directly with my mutas, preferring to use them only for harass/counterattacking and keeping him at bay with ling/bane.
If you do more counters, you will start destroying Terran. This is probably the single largest weakness in your play up through the 25 minute mark.
3. This is a common mistake I see: As your main is mining out, you want to have a 5th established so you can transfer. You stay on 4 bases for awhile, and this is just devastating to your income. If I forget to transfer in my games, I notice that all of a sudden I have no money.
4. You get 3/3, but especially vs someone going heavy marine/thor, throwing in 3-4 ultras at hive tech is a great boost to your army. In addition, I like to research adrenal if I have the gas.
5. You hardly ever seem to have overseers with your army to kill off mines. Sniping mines is really important, as otherwise they can just sit there and rack up kills indefinitely. This is a pretty big mistake, and something you should really watch out for in your games.
6. Infestors are pretty useless IMO in this matchup. LBM with some ultra support and good upgrades is enough. I don't think there's ever a reason to go infestor unless you're very confident in your infestor control.
7. By the time your main, nat, and 3rd are mined out you should be on 7-8 base on a map like this. More aggressive expansions lategame would be pretty helpful.
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What is the "standard" timing to start lair if I'm going spire in ZvZ? Also when do you take the additional gases then?
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A lot of the time in ZvZ it really depends on who gains the advantage in the early game which really determines who gets there spire up first, I don't think there really can be any specific time that you can get a spire, it almost always varies for me in ZvZ due to the dynamicness of the matchup.
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yeah one annoying situation for me is when my opponent is doing what i think is a huge ling/bane allin, i start tunnel visioning and suddenly i realize they had a lair behind it with a spire going up. kind of the zerg version of faking a blink allin while going DT 
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oh I know that very well, I was just asking since I needed a benchmark on starting the RW >:^)
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Anybody know the specifics to Life's 2 base Lair Roach play -> 3 base Roach Hydra Viper? Looking at the Swarmhost changes, it looks like we're going to have to end the game before the late game and I haven't felt like going for Mutas lately.
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So I believe we're now in the new swarm host era. As a player who doesn't get to grind many games in a row every day, can anyone give some initial thoughts on how to use them, what to watch out for, etc? TIA!
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On April 10 2015 09:20 MoosyDoosy wrote:
Anybody know the specifics to Life's 2 base Lair Roach play -> 3 base Roach Hydra Viper? Looking at the Swarmhost changes, it looks like we're going to have to end the game before the late game and I haven't felt like going for Mutas lately.
is the the multi prong zvp attack he does?
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On April 11 2015 06:24 Lethean wrote:Show nested quote +On April 10 2015 09:20 MoosyDoosy wrote:
Anybody know the specifics to Life's 2 base Lair Roach play -> 3 base Roach Hydra Viper? Looking at the Swarmhost changes, it looks like we're going to have to end the game before the late game and I haven't felt like going for Mutas lately. is the the multi prong zvp attack he does?
Yes. He tends to grab 2 base Lair- -> Roaches then gets a 3rd base and drones it up before making a transition to Roach Hydra Viper.
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Returning zerg player here, things have changed since I last played seriously (just before hots hit) so I have a few questions regarding protoss, I was reading that swarmhosts were a favourite in pvz but they recently changed them so I was wondering how effective they are?
I am also struggling with outright killing off protoss armies,and getting overrun when I cannot replenish fast enough.
For reference I am in silver and of course since returning my macro is not up to par at all, so while I work on that my unit composition I think is in need of an overhaul.
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On April 11 2015 20:36 c4bb0ose wrote:
Returning zerg player here, things have changed since I last played seriously (just before hots hit) so I have a few questions regarding protoss, I was reading that swarmhosts were a favourite in pvz but they recently changed them so I was wondering how effective they are?
I am also struggling with outright killing off protoss armies,and getting overrun when I cannot replenish fast enough.
For reference I am in silver and of course since returning my macro is not up to par at all, so while I work on that my unit composition I think is in need of an overhaul.
Nobody really knows how good new SH are since they've been out for 2 days
I think in Silver the best way to play ZvP would just be doing any kind of "normalized" opening into flooding a lot of roaches. Roaches outright kill any not good Protoss player if he tries to take a 3rd. If he doesn't, it's either an all-in and mass roaches are still very good or he's doing sth weird and you could just get lair tech units to beat him (hydras vs stargate and mutas vs robo).
Roach/hydra/viper is good vs anything Protoss can do as well.
A lot of the stuff on http://imbabuilds.com/hots-zerg/hots-zvp/ is a bit old, but still very relevant. Check out Hyun's roach/hydra/viper build if you need general benchmarks http://imbabuilds.com/hots-zerg/hots-zvp/zvp-hyuns-roach-hydra-viper-play/
All in all, at your level ZvP should just boil down to macroing well enough to make a lot of roaches and scouting for all kind of cheeses/aggressive plays that could kill you (DTs, oracles, mass void rays etc.)
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new SH are really strong, but you have to be careful with your gas exoenditure just like with any tech investment. it's similar to a mutalisk switch in that you have to have enough space to do it without just dying to a gateway or robo push, and in that it gives you a really scary harassment tool. because they cost 200 gas now whether to get flying locusts right away isn't a no brainer like enduring locusts. depending on map and where you want to hit you can just walk the locusts in
the main thing to realize is that swarm hosts are fucking fast now. you don't need creep everywhere and you don't need to do a slow mech push across the map. you can walk to the third, harass it, and just leave. while you wait for the locust cooldown you can run around and hit another base. 4-6 sets of locusts kill workers really fast now
i've experimented with them against terran and it can work but you sacrifice more because they wont defend drops and wont help with engagements during cooldown. generally i'm not too sure how good they are anymore in a straight fight - the long cooldown seems like it would make it hard to control the map with a locust dependent army. in large numbers they're probably better against an immobile army like mech, but just speculating.
anyway, just my opinions. obviously we don't have a lot of pro gamws to support our theorycraft 
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Hey, I would like to ask a question that may seem pretty dumb, but I am pretty sure that there was not a recent answer to this. Why did Broodlord/Infestor die out in ZvT late game? I know there were games in WoL that went from muta/ling/bane to Broodlord/Infestor late game, but what killed it in HoTS? Was it the fungal nerf, widow mines, hellbats, or something else entirely?
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Just to weigh in on the new SH a little bit.
4-6 of them seems to be a great number (what you need to kill a CC, Nexus or Lair with a single wave). Cost-wise it's almost exactly like a decent muta switch except I wouldn't recommend making these if you're not at least even with the opponent or he's turtling like mad—
Once the first wave comes into his base he is in trouble. I think terrans and zergs will be able to—and they must be proactive at defending ledges near their base where these things can come flying in from (you don't need vision or high ground btw to send them in). I think protoss will have more trouble with these since PO is really not going to do so much other than help your locust find their target faster. There’s no comfort in the slower spawn rate for the defender really, as it takes 1-2 waves to demolish production and economy, and the only thing to do is take your army over and find and kill them. Static defense, a thor, a couple archons or extra queens are not going to stop this the way they can mutas.
I love them for 3 reasons, and I suspect this is why they’ll be nerfed somehow:
1) They can fly really really far.
2) They serve a similar purpose vs protoss as the old ones, in that they can prevent him from turtling on 2-3 bases and making a ton of air. In fact I think these get the job done faster.
3) Since you manually cast, you can do fun things like send 1 set from 1 SH to a location to get an army out of position then send the rest somewhere else. If they don't respond to the first set just send in the rest.
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On April 13 2015 11:16 JamesT wrote:
Hey, I would like to ask a question that may seem pretty dumb, but I am pretty sure that there was not a recent answer to this. Why did Broodlord/Infestor die out in ZvT late game? I know there were games in WoL that went from muta/ling/bane to Broodlord/Infestor late game, but what killed it in HoTS? Was it the fungal nerf, widow mines, hellbats, or something else entirely?
I think it was a combination of two things: the infestor nerfs (fungal damage, projectile change, and infested terran nerf) and the medivac buff. Medivacs became a lot stronger in HotS due to speed, so mutas became a lot more important in drop defense (along with how bad infestors are now). They are also much better vs a BL comp since BL's are very slow, so Terran bio can abuse the shit out of the BL/infestor mobility much better than in WoL.
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in ZvT, there has been mainly two ways of playing the matchup:
1) fast 3rd at 6:00, get double upgrades + mass queens, then tech to lair.
2) tech to lair first at 6:00, get mutas out first, then get double evo
but Hydra, in the last WCS, opened with a fast 3rd and skipped additional queens to tech to lair, which let him start his lair around 6:10, which is basically identical to a 2base muta timing.
my question is, if you can get a fast 3rd and tech to lair at the same time, what advantage does the 2base muta have over the 3base fast muta?
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On April 13 2015 18:38 redloser wrote:
in ZvT, there has been mainly two ways of playing the matchup:
1) fast 3rd at 6:00, get double upgrades + mass queens, then tech to lair.
2) tech to lair first at 6:00, get mutas out first, then get double evo
but Hydra, in the last WCS, opened with a fast 3rd and skipped additional queens to tech to lair, which let him start his lair around 6:10, which is basically identical to a 2base muta timing.
my question is, if you can get a fast 3rd and tech to lair at the same time, what advantage does the 2base muta have over the 3base fast muta?
Which game was this? I thought he typically opened 2base, and defended hellbats with queens and a spine.
Also to answer your question, the advantage of 2base muta vs 3base muta is safety =P I'd have to rewatch the games to see how he defended, but I thought his opener was typically 2base in most games.
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On April 13 2015 23:39 Defenestrator wrote:Show nested quote +On April 13 2015 18:38 redloser wrote:
in ZvT, there has been mainly two ways of playing the matchup:
1) fast 3rd at 6:00, get double upgrades + mass queens, then tech to lair.
2) tech to lair first at 6:00, get mutas out first, then get double evo
but Hydra, in the last WCS, opened with a fast 3rd and skipped additional queens to tech to lair, which let him start his lair around 6:10, which is basically identical to a 2base muta timing.
my question is, if you can get a fast 3rd and tech to lair at the same time, what advantage does the 2base muta have over the 3base fast muta? Which game was this? I thought he typically opened 2base, and defended hellbats with queens and a spine. Also to answer your question, the advantage of 2base muta vs 3base muta is safety =P I'd have to rewatch the games to see how he defended, but I thought his opener was typically 2base in most games.
His build was
15 Pool
15 Hatch
14 Overlord
14 Queen
1 Sets of Lings
17 Gas
@100 Queen start another
23 Overlord
Queen at Natural
Speed at @100gas
Take one of gas
34 Overlord
41 Overlord
@100 Gas Lair and 1 back in gas
Queen at Natural
Spine at 44 supply
Start two gasses at 5% lair
@100 Lair Spire
Holds all hellbat aggression if you scout and bank energy on two queens and just make lings, you don't need a nest since anything later where you'd need a nest you should have muta. It's a strong safe build.
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Has anybody experienced any success stories with the new swarmhost by now?
I fiddled around with them in a few games and they just seem bad. The flying upgrade actually seem to make the unit worse. The locust fly so slow, so that you waste a lot of their lifespan by flying. And they are completly defenseless while flying. Small amount of well positioned static D and almost no locust make it to the ground. And they even try to land at melee range which makes no sense to me.
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EPT
