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Thanks man, this seems like the way to go. I'm assuming the higher marauder count will also make this build WAY better versus those silly blink all-ins And of course is very nice versus templars/collosi turtles because of high hp on all units One last thing: if you scout/are harassed by stargate play how do you deal? Just widow mines or also add in marine production?
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Just played a game vs a protoss doing a standard reaper expand with a build I put together in about 5 minutes and TvP is no longer retarded (although I have reservations about late late game)
Basically skip combat shields, swap the factory that made the reactor for the starport into the original reactor for marines. Get 1 e-bay and an early armory (skipping cs basically pays for this), upgrade +1 infantry weapons and +1 vehicle armor = sucess. Your front line is beefy, your ranged units deal lots of damage and once the zealot wall is down its only stalkers left.
Since colossus are the best way to deal with hellbats the armor bonus for vikings comes in handy since protoss will likely keep a high colossus count through the entire game it also helps with not having to wonder (to a degree) if he's remaxing on zealot archon or colossus stalker.
With some polishing I'm sure it would be easy to figure out what should be prioritized next as far as upgrades go or just go straight for ghost asap.
In any case, im convinced that making marines is just not worth it past the 7-8 minute mark. a hellbat will deal more damage than 2 marines in almost every battle since they actually live for more than 2 seconds and don't spent the remaining second for the battle running back from the mob of zealots chasing them ready to chop em to pieces.
Another great bonus of this style is the attention span required during engagements, less kiting reuired during small engagements allowing for easier macro or more control over emps / viking assisting.
edit: also makes transitioning into sky terrans easier as the high colossus count forces you into 2x starport and you'll have all the armor upgrades ready with +3 on the way.
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Yeah I played a game where I adapted demu's reaper expand build to this, and it worked out well. I like that BO since it gives you an early engy to defend against oracles / DTs. But I think I will go for marauder / hellbat past my initial marine count now.
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@ Tomska, you always always need marines off the start, just not after 7-8 minutes. This is how you deal with early stargate play. Make sure your opening has enough marines to deal with oracles. Once you see oracles, get an ebay up if you don't have one yet, and get a turret in each line, then continue your build. If you don't take decent damage, this will bode better for you than a standard 1 gate FE type of play.
Yes it's better vs Turtles for sure. If he turtles on 2 base, I recommend just camping hit natural in a nice concave. He will likely try some prism shenanigans, but don't give up your position. If he moves out, stim and mash. On 2 base he should not yet have mass storms, just a smaller amount, which you can handle.
@Doko, you gave me a nice idea with prioritizing hellbat armor over infantry armor. I like it and I will try it. In fact, I'll stay on 1 ebay maybe until I hit +1, then add the second.
NOTE: Just an FYI to the guys reading this thread, *mass* storms still decimate this army. Still can't fight those at all. I recommend aiming to keep him on 2 base or bust. I am going to be adding ghosts now, and I'm hoping that in the late game, I can emp most of his templars and be OK, unlike MMM where you needed to hit *every single templar.... TWICE*, in order to survive a battle. Since we can eat 3-4 storms with this, maybe we don't need to be pro level with our ghosts to get a decent trade.
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I think the main problem here is mobility. Hellbats are much slower than marines (with stimpack) and this way they slow down your army a lot. One of the strongest sides of bio play vs protoss is how quick your army can move through the map, snipe a base and pull back, you can't do stuff like that with hellbats. At this point you might as well as go full mech with hellbats, tanks and ghosts.
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On July 31 2013 07:30 KingAlphard wrote: I think the main problem here is mobility. Hellbats are much slower than marines (with stimpack) and this way they slow down your army a lot. One of the strongest sides of bio play vs protoss is how quick your army can move through the map, snipe a base and pull back, you can't do stuff like that with hellbats. At this point you might as well as go full mech with hellbats, tanks and ghosts.
How about loading the hellbats into the medivacs? When hellbats were more popular all the high level players were just carrying them around in medivacs anyway and dropping them where they were needed.
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On July 31 2013 06:43 Iron_ wrote: @ Tomska, you always always need marines off the start, just not after 7-8 minutes. This is how you deal with early stargate play. Make sure your opening has enough marines to deal with oracles. Once you see oracles, get an ebay up if you don't have one yet, and get a turret in each line, then continue your build. If you don't take decent damage, this will bode better for you than a standard 1 gate FE type of play.
Yes it's better vs Turtles for sure. If he turtles on 2 base, I recommend just camping hit natural in a nice concave. He will likely try some prism shenanigans, but don't give up your position. If he moves out, stim and mash. On 2 base he should not yet have mass storms, just a smaller amount, which you can handle.
@Doko, you gave me a nice idea with prioritizing hellbat armor over infantry armor. I like it and I will try it. In fact, I'll stay on 1 ebay maybe until I hit +1, then add the second.
NOTE: Just an FYI to the guys reading this thread, *mass* storms still decimate this army. Still can't fight those at all. I recommend aiming to keep him on 2 base or bust. I am going to be adding ghosts now, and I'm hoping that in the late game, I can emp most of his templars and be OK, unlike MMM where you needed to hit *every single templar.... TWICE*, in order to survive a battle. Since we can eat 3-4 storms with this, maybe we don't need to be pro level with our ghosts to get a decent trade.
mass storms will always decimate any terran non full-mech army without ghosts
I try and use drops to kind of get an idea of his templar timing. I find if its colossi first, which the majority of pvt seems to be today because the possibilities of widow mine drops really punish twilight before robo, then if its not 1 colossi no range then a mass scv pull without ghosts at about 170ish supply hits really hard and a good engagement and storm dodging the couple he has should win, however if he plays greedy and rushes to templar then have to incorporate ghosts.
not sure about timings to do against templar first, but i feel these builds rely on lots of zealots therefore if you put the viking money into ghost academy as taking third and have a few emps the bluebats will roll his army
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Its definately a very strong way to play. However you have to be careful - this build mainly counters those double upgrade heavy gateway plays.
Strong tech play - aka storm / colossus will still deal with this similarly well - though you might have a slightly better time against it. I'd say its around equal.
You are at a disadvantage becasue your slower (please don't go on about loading and dropping hellbats for standard army movement, that takes too much effort / apm). Also a lot less DPS from your army against everything but zealots. Your shorter range units will block each other and prevent them from getting into firing range.
Thats made up by having fatter units that take strongly reduced damage from storm / colossus - and a better strat against zealots.
I feel like going a lot of robo with immortal / colossus (2 stalker = 1 immortal price), or doing a heavy stargate build would counter this well
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TL;DR: Marines are a pretty good unit... but nothing compared to Hellbats, even after the nerf.
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The mix is quite good, you only need to add some Vikings and/or Ghosts but mostly remember the "Gas" problem, because you need many Factories, and you can't spam them early, while the Rax are pure Mineral, so there is a timing where you are not really able to produce a lot of Hellbats.
Also it can be hard to get enough Vikings if he for some reason mass some Voids or Oracles and you didn't scout propperly =/ I was using this build even before HotS, on WoL with BlueFlameHellions and worked fine
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Bumping up this old thread, as I was wondering if this style was viable with the new patch ? Anyone got replays ? I wanted to try it but various cheeses forced me into building many more marines than I wanted...
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ForGG goes for MMM + Hellbats vs Protoss. Check out his replays for example from Dreamhack Winter :-)
Good luck!
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I use this style often when playing Terran now, for all the reasons previously stated. I freaking adore it, as playing vs HT protoss in the late game was slaying me. The meaty hellbats are such a help.
However when I'm playing this from the Protoss perspective of the matchup I'm noticing lots of terrans having a hard time defending warp prism harass, especially if I ever secure my third. Without the marine anti-air dps in your reinforcements it's so easy to just retreat with your warp prism. I've also found dropping two immortals and warping in zealots nearly unkillable for the T without retreating his whole army. The only time this happened to me as Terran I got completely shit on, but my opponent was a class above me to begin with, so I don't know what to make of that.
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Bomber used this in his last tournmanet, should check his BO . Also ForGG has been doing this for a long time, nothing new TBH, but seems to be getting popular since its less micro intensive
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On December 14 2013 01:02 never_Nal wrote:Bomber used this in his last tournmanet, should check his BO  . Also ForGG has been doing this for a long time, nothing new TBH, but seems to be getting popular since its less micro intensive
where can I find the replay/ build order?
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On April 15 2013 04:29 Ozlo wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2013 03:00 Deepflow wrote: Ive been thinking about this and while it sounds like it might be stronger in a straight up fight you have a serious upgrade problem. Especially if you want to get ship famage also. To be constantly upping every relevant thing you also need 3 armories! Which is 450/300 you cant spend on units even without considering upgrade costs.
Im still gonna try this when i get home tomorrow though. hellbats are so good you dont really have to upgrade them. and they are beefy as fuck so they make good meatshields
Possibly silly question. But why do you need three armouries?
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Question here. When doing this style, how do you manage your resources when they all of a sudden go mass archon? Do you try to kill them before it gets to this point or do you make less hellbats and more ghosts?
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On April 15 2013 04:47 Genome852 wrote:Show nested quote +On April 14 2013 08:43 BoggieMan wrote: i had ok success with hellbat-marine in the hots beta. i don't think you need marauders unless he goes like pure stalker collusi. ghost and vikings are obviously needed... if you are gonna go marauder hellbat medivac ONLY then he can just make 6 collusi. A reason for hellbats replacing marines in late game is that they don't get gibbed by colossus and storm splash, while still being able to tank and kill zealots very effectively. One of the reasons why marines are used despite how quickly they drop to splash is because you needed them for zealots, which otherwise just chop up marauders. Hellbats can take over that role. Different upgrade paths is a pretty big deal though. And like marines, hellbats only cost minerals so it won't affect viking / ghost production (besides gas spent on factories etc.) Not sure why OP would go from hellbat marauder medivac midgame into MMM though, I would think it would be the other way around, starting MMM and slowly mixing hellbats in to replace marines. Hellbats are super good and I see them getting nerfed once they start being used more (like old blue flame).
They aren't microable like marines. That's the entire issue. Slows down your entire army movement/mobility, meaning you can't force a fight on your own terms, which is a typical Terran advantage. If you can't take a fight, you better be prepared to loss all your helbats. Marines aren't the same story. They synergize with marauders because they are the same speed.
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On December 14 2013 04:53 WiggyB wrote:Show nested quote +On April 15 2013 04:29 Ozlo wrote:On April 15 2013 03:00 Deepflow wrote: Ive been thinking about this and while it sounds like it might be stronger in a straight up fight you have a serious upgrade problem. Especially if you want to get ship famage also. To be constantly upping every relevant thing you also need 3 armories! Which is 450/300 you cant spend on units even without considering upgrade costs.
Im still gonna try this when i get home tomorrow though. hellbats are so good you dont really have to upgrade them. and they are beefy as fuck so they make good meatshields Possibly silly question. But why do you need three armouries?
Quite obvious he wasn't aware of the armory upgrade changes.
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even with the changes the problems of this build still apply
warp prism harass stargate play 4 upgrades needed drops are arguably stronger vs probes hellbats are much slower than marines
i think theres a reason this never got mainstream back in thr day. marines are arguably the most versatile unit in the game and theres a reason so many units need to hardcounter them.
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