PiG Daily Articles

Welcome to the first PiG Daily strategy article! The PiG Daily is a show by Jared "PiG" Krensel that focuses on StarCraft 2 strategy and becoming a better player. We've joined forces to create an article series that summarizes his dailies into short, digestible articles that provide insight on builds, tactics and game sense. By combining with Spawning Tool, this series will bring you the most comprehensive learning experience for build orders and strategies.

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We highly recommend using Spawning Tool in order to follow the basics of these builds. The PiG Daily and our strategy articles will serve as supplementary guides to understand the subtleties behind each decision.

This one features another Zerg build, this time in the form of a ZvT one gas style. The general idea behind this build is to stay on one gas for quite a while in the early game while droning up heavily to support the macro intensive mid game that Zerg can churn out. It utilises early queens, speedlings, and map vision to fend off early aggression while droning up heavily to full 3 base mineral saturation, and then transitions into 6 gas to tech up.

Link to the Spawning Tool Build

The Build

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 halt 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.

• 2-2 is a bit late in this game because of late lair and an engagement distracting Snute
  
• Lair was 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.
  
• 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’

Key Strategic Points

• Taking the gas: Many players struggle with the mechanics of quickly taking so many gas at once whilst keeping up macro. 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 queue 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 queue 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
  
• Allow yourself 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?
Zerglings are actually more important. Mutas and banelings 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. Staying on minerals early helps you ramp up your production as early as possible.

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.