EPTSpawning Tool: http://lotv.spawningtool.com/build/45833/
The Rule of 1-gas ZvT is a build that uses the bare minimum of gas to power up the huge production that Zerg need to mass muta-ling-bane in numbers that can rival the endless Terran bio-mine pushes. You will use a mineral-only defence of mass queens and lings to defend all early aggression and begin covering the map in creep. Meanwhile you use just a single gas geyser to get basics like upgrades started whilst all of your focus is on minerals. Since you focus so much on minerals you can afford to overwhelm aggression whilst massing drones and then suddenly explode into extra gas mining only once all 3 bases are fully saturated on 16+ drones on minerals.
This style jumps straight to the macro game where you have a big income and need to spend well. It will push you to organise your macro cycle and improve your spending. Creep spread is integral to the effectiveness of this style so you will need to focus a lot more on creep than you ever have before! Within a few games with this style you’ll find yourself with hordes of ling-bane swarming your opponent and relentlessly rolling over the top of their pushes… even when floating thousands of unspent minerals! As you get more experience you’ll improve your micro vs mines, learn when and how to use deadly counterattacks and to use any lull in pressure to grow your creep exponentially.
Build Order
- 17 hatch 18 gas 17 pool
- Pull off gas at 100 for ling speed
- 3rd queen ASAP
- 3:30 3rd hatchery + back on gas
- Then start nonstop queen production and put back on gas
- Drone super hard
- 4:45-5:00 2xevo
- Fast bane nest at 5:10 this game - being very safe vs a potential hellbat followup
- @3-base saturation - take 5 gases
- 6:00 (your next 100 gas after 1-1 and bane nest) - Lair (very late this game because snute made 4 safety banelings because he wasn’t scouting, he was worried about a big hellbat-marine-medivac attack.
- 10-12 total queen count, 3 injecting, the rest as your defence/creep squad
- 4th base + macro hatch (double macro hatch until you get better at spending money) as soon as you have extra money. Should be around 5:00 in most games
Notes, strategy, details
- 2-2 is a bit late in this game because of late lair and an engagement distracting snute
- Maximum 15 mutas: Huge focus on ling-bane
- You can go corruptors or infestors → Ultras instead of mutas and this is still an ideal build for those styles. However mutas is the more common approach
- In rare situations you can mass mutas very high off this opening and do big counterattacks with them’
- Taking the gas: Many players struggle with the mechanics of quickly taking so many gas at once whilst keeping up micro. My favourite method involves bouncing between each base and resetting its drone rally to the minerals whilst dropping the geysers. This way your new drones popping will naturally spread across all 3 bases rather than all running to the 3rd and then having to send them back to your main and natural gas geysers.
- Double Macro hatch: When you’re first getting used to the style you will need 2 macro hatcheries and a 4th base all much earlier than you would with other builds. It’s important to get these early because once you hit 66 drones you’ll have an endless hunger for larva to mass out your ling-bane armies
Dumping Queen energy
As soon as your macro hatches and 4th base finish you should que up your queens to “dump” a huge amount of injects all at once. This will turn these extra hatcheries into nonstop producing “larva-machines” without you having to learn an APM-inefficient inject cycle where you try to hit all 6 hatches.
Creep-spread
Don’t mass tumors - just 2-3 tumors in any one direction is more than enough - focus on spreading active tumors rather than throwing down masses of new tumors. This way you can get into a rhythm and do it regularly and APM-efficiently
Creep-queen hotkey and positioning
It’s vital you have a dedicated hotkey to your creep queens.
You need to manually target them onto medivacs in the earlygame
You need to be able to easily tell them to re-spread creep throughout the entire game
After you spread creep always use shift to que them to walk back to a safe area - if you leave your queens exposed on the edge of creep they can easily be sniped by stimmed bio when you’re not watching
Don’t let him pull you around
You need to stop them disrupting your macro so you can focus on your build and spending your income constantly
Jump under the medivacs with lings whenever you force them to pickup so they can’t just unload off the edge of creep and poke back in again.
Even small ling counterattacks that you don’t micro heavily can pull your opponents attention away, buying you precious moments to get your macro in order
Clicking small squads of ling-bane into a push edging onto creep is a great way to force a lot of APM and attention away from your opponent - as well as being an efficient way to set off widow mines before the main engagement
Counterattacks
From 150 supply+ direct engagements can become problematic as the marauder wall thickens and the explosive damage of the mines and marines becomes harder to overwhelm. At this point you want to use your mobility to gain advantage rather than attacking in a huge blob into a pre-spread terran army off creep.
Huge ling counterattacks of 50-100 lings have great explosive power. You usually want to hit the natural and try to get some lings into the main on top of the production whilst the rest overwhelm any units at the rally point and clear the natural mineral line. Even the best players will usually react too slowly to raise their depots in time.
You can add banelings in and roll banes into mineral lines however as it hits slower and takes more time to set up it’s harder to master these counterattacks
Stages of Learning:
Stage 1 - Refining the Opening
- When you’re first learning you will struggle with building such a fast economy whilst defending pressure
Focus just on constant spending of larva and not getting supply blocked whilst spreading creep and defending
Drop evos, lair, bane nest, all around the same time when you have the spare APM and money - don’t stress over these being “late” once the economy building is natural you can work on getting these just right
Stage 2 - Rhythm
- Stop at 66 drones each game - never go up to the ideal potential worker count of 75-80 drones. Only transfer drones to 4th base onwards as your bases mine out
Stay on muta-ling-bane and Lair tech all game. Never go Hive.
This will force you to focus on your earlygame buildup and simplify the mid to lategame
Allowing you to focus on your creep + production + engagement rhythm and your handling of mutalingbane.
Common Questions:
Isn’t your gas too slow? How will you get enough banelings or mutas to survive?
- Lings actually more important
mutas/banes can help you defend the first few waves but you’ll be behind on production economy and won’t be able to keep up unless they mess up their spreads vs banes
I can’t spend my money - is this build too advanced for me?
- Even GM players can’t spend their money when they first start learning this style - it just takes a bit of practice!
I regularly have gold-diamond players first learning this build floating vast amounts of minerals, but still crushing their opponents. Even though your spending won’t be perfect, following this build will push you into strong macro play and teach you to improve drastically at it
Old Guide spoilered under here for posterity's sake:
+ Show Spoiler +
Edit 20th September 2016: A few small tweaks to the order, but the fundamentals are the same. Sick build, super powerful and something pros have steadily gravitated towards more and more. The efficiency of this style has allowed it to stand the test of time. You also can go mass muta with this as long as you keep trading/finding damage and reducing the liberator count. They only get hard-countered once there's 6+ liberators all together.
Hi TL,
A lot of players have been struggling with ling-bane muta. Players have been saying that it's too weak now because of the larva change and liberators countering mutas. I've been watching a lot of ZvT where players try to play it at both amateur and pro level, and their's been a lot of inefficiencies that don't fit the new economy or strategy of lotv.
Here's a decent macro game of me doing the style. Note it's not perfect execution and following the build order over any replays or vods is usually ideal. (twitch VoD for people in Germany: http://www.twitch.tv/x5_pig/v/29893365)
Here's a game vs ForGG's 2-base marine-tank timing. Useful for showing the reliance on heavy zergling counts to keep us safe and defend off a low gas count. Also shows how strong those extra queens are for focusing down medivacs and tanking vs early pushes (twitch VoD for people in Germany: http://www.twitch.tv/x5_pig/v/29891564)
People don't seem to have adapted to the LOTV economy and are simply teching too fast, defending hellbat timings poorly and building too many mutas allowing them to be overwhelmed by Terran. So I've decided to post my current build showing an incredibly solid and well rounded opening where you defend absolutely any early pressure just with queens and a spine, and then control the midgame with mass ling-bane to get insane creep spread. We add mutas (or corrupters) to help control drops whilst teching to a fast hive and ultra-infestor. We use huge counter-attacks to buy time and take small trades rather than engaging right into a huge Terran pre-spread.
Safe Opening:
From there:
Scouting
Gas spending order
Note: Swap evos and lair if any chance of aggression (Current meta this is most games so it's usually the best)
Often you just get everything around the same time anyway but mo
Learning the Build
When you first learn the build just delay your tech and gas spending for ages and put ALL your focus on getting the hatcheries and drones out on time. Only add tech and upgrades ONCE you've saturated all 3-bases AND taken all your gases, + have a 4th base and macro hatch down. It's very late tech but your insane econ will allow you to thrive.
Once you learn how to do the build fluidly you will find that the best way to play the build is to go for nice fast double evo around 3:40 to get those upgrades started and head forwards in the gas spending order outlined above.
Regular Style:
I hope this guide helps the lovers of muta-lingbane out there find a a way to play this style out and most importnatly give players an understanding of just how important your mineral economy is if you want to play ling-bane-muta vs bio.
Please post questions below so I can elaborate on areas you're not sure of
Hi TL,
A lot of players have been struggling with ling-bane muta. Players have been saying that it's too weak now because of the larva change and liberators countering mutas. I've been watching a lot of ZvT where players try to play it at both amateur and pro level, and their's been a lot of inefficiencies that don't fit the new economy or strategy of lotv.
Here's a decent macro game of me doing the style. Note it's not perfect execution and following the build order over any replays or vods is usually ideal. (twitch VoD for people in Germany: http://www.twitch.tv/x5_pig/v/29893365)
Here's a game vs ForGG's 2-base marine-tank timing. Useful for showing the reliance on heavy zergling counts to keep us safe and defend off a low gas count. Also shows how strong those extra queens are for focusing down medivacs and tanking vs early pushes (twitch VoD for people in Germany: http://www.twitch.tv/x5_pig/v/29891564)
People don't seem to have adapted to the LOTV economy and are simply teching too fast, defending hellbat timings poorly and building too many mutas allowing them to be overwhelmed by Terran. So I've decided to post my current build showing an incredibly solid and well rounded opening where you defend absolutely any early pressure just with queens and a spine, and then control the midgame with mass ling-bane to get insane creep spread. We add mutas (or corrupters) to help control drops whilst teching to a fast hive and ultra-infestor. We use huge counter-attacks to buy time and take small trades rather than engaging right into a huge Terran pre-spread.
Safe Opening:
- 17 hatch, 18 gas, 17 pool
- 6 lings
- 32 3rd base+3rd queen (sneak drone around reaper if you have to, otherwise bully it away with lings)
- 33 overlord
From there:
- Pull off gas @100
- Back on gas 3:00 (if you struggle with such a tight build, you can delay this to 3:30 and delay evos until closer to 5:00)
- 45/4:00 3xqueens
- 4:00 spine (only if you struggle vs hellbats, not needed for high level players since the queen range) + go to 6-7 queens if you haven’t already.
- 4:15 2xevo
- Only put down 2-3 tumors at first, save the rest of your energy for transfuse when dealing with hellbat or other 5:00 pushes (first queen at natural should drop her 2nd lot of energy as creep to make sure you get it started asap)
- Fast 4th base whenever you have the minerals
- @oversaturation go to 6 gases THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE BUILD. It means once your 3 mineral lines are OVERSATURATED only then do you take all 5 extra gases at once
- @Lair spire and bane speed
- 4th injecting queen on 4th base AND when macro finishes dump excess creep queen energy into them. Preferably que up 4-5 injects on each hatchery for endless midgame larva.
- 2xmacro hatcheries whenever you have the cash
- No more than 15 muta, if they already have more than 2 liberators just go straight to corruptors.
- @75%spire drop infestation pit -->Hive --> 3 vipers, ultras and corrupters. Obviously the vipers/corrupters are only needed vs liberators ... so you'll need them every single game!
- Only go Hive once you have your 4th base saturated - otherwise you can't afford 3-3, ultras and vipers etc
- Sick creep spread
- If you want, you can add in lurkers spread over the map and to defend/control space while your counters rekt his bases
Scouting
- 3:30 - Is there a starport or is there a 3rd CC?
- 4:30 Spores vs starport - (try to delay your spores when possible)
- 5:00 - Mech or bio?
Gas spending order
- ling speed
- evos
- lair
- Bane nest
- 2-2
- Bane speed
- Spire
Note: Swap evos and lair if any chance of aggression (Current meta this is most games so it's usually the best)
Often you just get everything around the same time anyway but mo
Learning the Build
When you first learn the build just delay your tech and gas spending for ages and put ALL your focus on getting the hatcheries and drones out on time. Only add tech and upgrades ONCE you've saturated all 3-bases AND taken all your gases, + have a 4th base and macro hatch down. It's very late tech but your insane econ will allow you to thrive.
Once you learn how to do the build fluidly you will find that the best way to play the build is to go for nice fast double evo around 3:40 to get those upgrades started and head forwards in the gas spending order outlined above.
Regular Style:
- Once we hit 66 drones we just mass lingbane nonstop. We only drone our 4th after we crush a pressure and have map dominance, allowing us to spread creep everywhere and buying us lots of time.
- Never go past 14 mutalisks, if they’re building more than initial harassment liberators early then just go corruptors (you can use the piss squad to snipe bases very well if they’re very defensive - 10 corruptors to piss down a CC in ~8 seconds. They can usually repair and save it in time but sometimes you’ll get it, and either way you’ll waste a lot of their cash)
- Go straight for Hive is the big focus.
- A big drop-defence squad on our 3rd army hotkey if they’re drop-heavy
- Once you get to 150supply+ and still don't have ultras you only want to take direct engagements if you have a good surround. Instead it's easier to set up a lot of counterattacks and buy time by countering with 80 lings into their natural/main as they get halfway across the map.
- Once Ultras and a few infestors are out you can usually roll over the Terran.
- Make sure you're leaving burrowed lings/pooping overlords to deny expansions
- Add 5 broodlords and some queens to your composition to break entrenched defensive locations, and to outrange ghosts.
I hope this guide helps the lovers of muta-lingbane out there find a a way to play this style out and most importnatly give players an understanding of just how important your mineral economy is if you want to play ling-bane-muta vs bio.
Please post questions below so I can elaborate on areas you're not sure of
