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On December 11 2012 13:41 LeafMeAlone wrote:
Sorry i'm just starting to play HotS but how do you go mech vs the viper when they can do the green cloud to render tanks useless? If i unsiege then they still die.
It's simple, because of vipers, positional play is far more important now. This means clumping tanks in a small square formation will mean the death of probably the bulk of your damage. To mitigate the effectiveness of cloud, all you need to do is siege tanks in a line facing your intended area of attack, with some amount of spacing between each tank. That way, zerg requires significantly more clouds to limit the effectiveness of your tank doom push, and this requires vipers to move forward (into the siege line) to cast it's spells, which exposes it to more damage (assuming 1-2 vikings or thors are in the mix). Mix helbats into the composition to prevent ling surrounds on range 1 tanks since helbats are still extremely effective.
This can be micro intensive and requires ALOT of set up time, which means you will most likely need a small group of scouting hellions that will help you scout at least 1 screen size forward to give sufficient time to siege them unclumped. Try this, and you'll be surprised that a typical timing push at 13-14 (with strong early eco) is extremely strong until the zerg starts fielding ultras and flank you from 3 sides.
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@Yoshi Kirishima
+ Show Spoiler +Thors are NOT the equivalent of Goliaths from BW. Vikings are, mostly. Good anti air, mediocre anti ground==it is not a core unit but a counter/ support unit. Thors are, or at least can be, a core unit REPLACING THE ROLES OF TANKS (in TvP and the TvZ games you gave as examples), something the Goliath never did. Mech in BW never had an all round "can do everything" unit like the Thor. We don't understand the same thing by "mech style", it' ok  The thing is, this tank based mech is unique to starcraft, and it would be a great shame to loose it. So by all means, lets have 10 versions of mech with small and big and medium sized robots, but lets also make sure we keep the "original" at least because it's so unique.
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On December 11 2012 13:41 LeafMeAlone wrote:
Sorry i'm just starting to play HotS but how do you go mech vs the viper when they can do the green cloud to render tanks useless? If i unsiege then they still die.
The AOE is pretty small, so you can try to counter it by spreading your stuff as much as possible. Since zergs rarely go infestors any more, it can be a good idea to build a bunch of vikings and try to snipe vipers before an engagement.
Ravens and BCs are a viable tech switch now too, so if pushing out against vipers is too hard you have that option.
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i feel that is not viable. maybe im wrong but this is what i think:
Widows mines: i dont find this unit the solutions for meching in TvP, it can make some cute moves and some nice defence but thats it. if i try to use the mines ahead of my main army, stalkers or any ranged units will make me to unburrow and move back, if i place them near my army, the splash damage would hurt me more than my opponent. if i place them anywhere else is dead supply.
early game: is really hard to survive, i think a lot of people thinks tha same, i have read some coments here i think so i wont talk about that
The main problems imo are:
Inmortals: the shield and damage are insane.
chargelots
archons: damage and shields
sky toss: this was a problem with the tempest, maybe it still is but i havent played vs a toss who makes tempests with the new patch, i dont have an opinion right now but before the patch tempests were awful to deal if you dont have enough vikings to defend and when you took the tempest down, the toss would warp tons of zealots and T.T
Even when i get some ghost and EMP the toss army i feel its not enough.
those are the reasons that make me go bio in TvP, some times getting BH but 90% of the games ill play like WoL.
p.s. im just an average player, but i wanted to say what i think
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My experience with mech in HOTS is that the widow mine and the hellion are now great reasons to get factories, but they work best as an army supplement to bio, not as your main army.
Hellions are a strong unit in a heads up fight now, and are an excellent reason to build factories instead of using your mandatory tech-factory just to scout. The unit could be more interesting, but it is functional as is, and is good at its job.
The widow mine is a decent unit provided you use only a few of them, and micromanage them so you get multiple kills on each one. Situationally, they are also useful to use in clutches of about 6 to set a trap for small squads or bigger units that don't have detection. Once again, not useful to make in huge numbers, but a fun addition nonetheless. Widow mines are the closest thing this game has to lurkers at the moment, and they work somewhat similarly, although they do burst with a long cooldown instead of continuously attacking.
Thors in TvP are a reasonable choice now that they do not have energy, but you are always going to need marines and marauders at all points in the game. You simply cannot go all factory unless you have such a ridiculous economic advantage that you can make mass thor out of 8+ factories while simultaneously being immune to just getting killed by a protoss army. And besides, the Thor is just a fat marine, and if that is the direction that "mech" is going, I want no part of it.
Siege Tanks are the core of mech, and they are bloody useless against protoss. It has been said countless times, but the unit quite simply needs a buff. Everything that can be tried has been tried. It just doesn't do enough damage to be worth its cost compared to marines and marauders, or now battle hellions and thors. The tank is exceptionally expensive per supply, and quite simply not that strong. Nothing short of a significant buff will make the tank viable as a core of mech play.
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Hmm what if they made the immortal attack a projectile? You could employ PDDs then to help you fight immortals with mech.
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On December 12 2012 04:33 Roman666 wrote:
Hmm what if they made the immortal attack a projectile? You could employ PDDs then to help you fight immortals with mech.
That would work
but the harden shields still are insane.
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Give TvP mech in current balance state 1 year and see how good it is. Some builds are needed to be figured out, but I'm sure the combination of mines, hellbat, thor without energy, shared upgrades is more than enough to make mech at least viable option for Terran players.
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On December 10 2012 05:01 Sissors wrote:You can drop with them, but why not just do BFH drops, or 3 BFHs and one widow mine. Honestly the only reason of doing widow mine drops instead of BFH is to irritate him that he has to kill your mine, so needs detection. But if he has a few cannons around expansions that is also gone. The only use of them against toss I have seen is either playing burrowed zergling, anti-oracle, oh-my-god he is playing aggressive and hellions are useless against stalkers, and it can be reasonable to burrow them between your tanks if he blinks on top of them. Honestly the number 1 error i feel I make against toss is making widow mines. Every single time they dissapoint me again. Show nested quote +Really? not Viable, weird thing is I play mech on WoL in TvP and works perfectly to be honest, its just a very different style,,positional and tactical game, maybe you should watch and learn from BW this type of play , also you are trying to fix a problem just with widow mines, have you tried less hellbats mor siege tanks?, a much more spread siege line?, or maybe using seeker missels in the mix with a couple of banshees for extra damage?, honestly I find mech the strings composition on the game, even if they mass immortals From your post I get the idea you dont have HotS. HotS is not the same as WoL, it also isnt the same as BW. So it might be better to look at HotS for figuring out how to mech. A widely spread siege line against toss just doesnt work, if you play mech in WoL you should know that. Against zerg you can do it since their main units are melee, so even with a spread out line he gets in range of most tanks when he attacks one. Against terran you can do it since tanks are just good against bio. Toss has quite mobile units with good range and very strong: They will just kill you one tank at a time. Anyway your post shows pretty much the problem, it isnt hard to find counters, it is hard to find gas for them. Ravens should do very nicely to augment a mech army against toss. Of course you also need vikings, banshees apparently (honestly they just die horribly against enemy main army), and ghosts are also always nice. And then you are at my number 2 reason for dying: not enough tanks, too much crap to support the tanks. Finally a second time: WoL != HotS. In WoL I was quite succesfull in mech vs toss (relative to my other matchups obviously). But while mech got a few additions, toss also got some changes which really help them. Their much better air which rapes mech quite badly, their mcore which really hurts mech openings, etc. Most importantly, they now see terrans meching. In WoL all terrans nicely follow the BOs of the pros, and for them bio is the way to go. Which makes sure the toss dont have a clue what to do against mech. In HotS thats not the case, and I cant get mech really to work for me. Now it is just waiting on the moment when toss realise that when they add a few carriers to their tempest balls PDDs become useless.
I do have HoTS, and I play mech ass well,honestly mech is just underused and "hard" to understand if you are used to play a Mobile style of army, mech is the strongest composition in the game, Search for Day9 vods where he explains how Liquid.Sea opens into a mech composition, and how you can transition into a really really storng army composition. If you can watch GSL and study some positional and tatcial game I suggest you start followin Ax_Ryung. This terran is amazingly good at position and paitience.
Also EG.Demuslim isnt doing bad with mech TvP in HoTS, and the good part he streams all day!!!, really try something different in your play, maybe faster expos, different openings allowing better gas management, research more about this
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i've given up on this long ago. it will never work because for some reason blizzard keeps giving protoss tons of shit and treating terran like a fucking joke. it never worked in WoL, terrans qq-ed about it for years. then finally blizzard adds a unit that can deal with immortals, protoss qqs about it for a month => unit gets removed. you can theorycraft all you want about ghosts and mines, but if you're not fucking gosu to use them almost perfectly, immortals and hts will always rape you. mostly immortals tho, but feedback (targeted insta-casting nuke, compare that to emp) is no joke either. the fuck am i supposed to do? constantly emp my own thors, banshees and bcs? Terran is able to mech vs protoss, but it requires infinitely more skill from the T player. Like i can see a masters guy beating a low diamond with mech, but if he tries it vs someone his own level, he'll get demolished 8 out 10 times. that's just the way it is, terran is more complex and offers more variety, but it's much harder to play. it's the same with bio, you always need to sit on protoss' or zerg's ass, make sure they don't snowball and deathball you. T needs to harass and drop and attack while z and p just have to stay alive and macro, then a-move at 200/00.
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On December 12 2012 06:27 A.Alm wrote:
mech rapes protoss now
Mech does fairly well against Protoss a-move ground army... Tempest/High Templar Deathball is a whole other story though.
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
On December 12 2012 06:33 Prog455 wrote:Mech does fairly well against Protoss a-move ground army... Tempest/High Templar Deathball is a whole other story though.
Ravens with PDD are the answer to Tempests I've found, but you need a lot of vikings as well.
it will never work because for some reason blizzard keeps giving protoss tons of shit and treating terran like a fucking joke. it never worked in WoL, terrans qq-ed about it for years. then finally blizzard adds a unit that can deal with immortals, protoss qqs about it for a month => unit gets removed.
The warhound didn't just deal with immortals, it ruined TvT as well as destroyed everything protoss had on the ground. It was a boring unit by design and I'm glad they scrapped it (this is from someone who mechs in all amtchups).
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On December 12 2012 05:50 never_Nal wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2012 05:01 Sissors wrote:You can drop with them, but why not just do BFH drops, or 3 BFHs and one widow mine. Honestly the only reason of doing widow mine drops instead of BFH is to irritate him that he has to kill your mine, so needs detection. But if he has a few cannons around expansions that is also gone. The only use of them against toss I have seen is either playing burrowed zergling, anti-oracle, oh-my-god he is playing aggressive and hellions are useless against stalkers, and it can be reasonable to burrow them between your tanks if he blinks on top of them. Honestly the number 1 error i feel I make against toss is making widow mines. Every single time they dissapoint me again. Really? not Viable, weird thing is I play mech on WoL in TvP and works perfectly to be honest, its just a very different style,,positional and tactical game, maybe you should watch and learn from BW this type of play , also you are trying to fix a problem just with widow mines, have you tried less hellbats mor siege tanks?, a much more spread siege line?, or maybe using seeker missels in the mix with a couple of banshees for extra damage?, honestly I find mech the strings composition on the game, even if they mass immortals From your post I get the idea you dont have HotS. HotS is not the same as WoL, it also isnt the same as BW. So it might be better to look at HotS for figuring out how to mech. A widely spread siege line against toss just doesnt work, if you play mech in WoL you should know that. Against zerg you can do it since their main units are melee, so even with a spread out line he gets in range of most tanks when he attacks one. Against terran you can do it since tanks are just good against bio. Toss has quite mobile units with good range and very strong: They will just kill you one tank at a time. Anyway your post shows pretty much the problem, it isnt hard to find counters, it is hard to find gas for them. Ravens should do very nicely to augment a mech army against toss. Of course you also need vikings, banshees apparently (honestly they just die horribly against enemy main army), and ghosts are also always nice. And then you are at my number 2 reason for dying: not enough tanks, too much crap to support the tanks. Finally a second time: WoL != HotS. In WoL I was quite succesfull in mech vs toss (relative to my other matchups obviously). But while mech got a few additions, toss also got some changes which really help them. Their much better air which rapes mech quite badly, their mcore which really hurts mech openings, etc. Most importantly, they now see terrans meching. In WoL all terrans nicely follow the BOs of the pros, and for them bio is the way to go. Which makes sure the toss dont have a clue what to do against mech. In HotS thats not the case, and I cant get mech really to work for me. Now it is just waiting on the moment when toss realise that when they add a few carriers to their tempest balls PDDs become useless. I do have HoTS, and I play mech ass well,honestly mech is just underused and "hard" to understand if you are used to play a Mobile style of army, mech is the strongest composition in the game, Search for Day9 vods where he explains how Liquid.Sea opens into a mech composition, and how you can transition into a really really storng army composition. If you can watch GSL and study some positional and tatcial game I suggest you start followin Ax_Ryung. This terran is amazingly good at position and paitience. Also EG.Demuslim isnt doing bad with mech TvP in HoTS, and the good part he streams all day!!!, really try something different in your play, maybe faster expos, different openings allowing better gas management, research more about this
This is not viable at all. I'm master Terran and this is exactly what I have been doing in HOTS, and this is not good openings at all because of new things protoss can do such as mothership core + blink stalkers. also if protoss comes with one base oracle + stargate units to harass your productions when you have just handful of marines it is devastating (mineral lines harrassment is scary too) To counter oracle harrass i like to go widow mines and they are descent against sky units, but you cant cover all your base with turrets + widow mines, even if you do protoss would see that you are going mech and do more expansions
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On December 12 2012 04:45 Zergrusher wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2012 04:33 Roman666 wrote:
Hmm what if they made the immortal attack a projectile? You could employ PDDs then to help you fight immortals with mech. That would work but the harden shields still are insane.
At least with a projectile immortals will over kill. This punishes 1a movement. They could use a dragoon attack animation ^_^.
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On December 12 2012 06:27 A.Alm wrote:
mech rapes protoss now
That only can happen if the protoss a-moves his army into a choke where the mech army is placed. On open terrain the mech might win, but it definately is not raping.
When toss finally start to realise that the mobility advantage they have over mech makes bio's mobility advantage look negligible by comparison, they should have no problems vs mech unless the mech player can literally keep the toss constantly defending. Mech has no answer whatsoever against blink stalkers and other strategies using their mobility.
I do define mech here as positional play using tanks. BFH + thors, or only supplementing bio armies with factory units is something else. But I really see that many toss are still getting used to dealing with mech. Bit ago a GM player here posted some replays, so I assume his opponents were also at least high masters. When I then see that the toss as counter to something like 8 BFHs raiding, warps in 10-15 zealots, I cry a little. 1000-1500 minerals down the drain for no gain. (And yes he had plenty of gas for stalkers, he was mineral limitted).
Or on dragons stream, toss who attack his sieged up army which is turtled behind buildings frontal. And I can't blame them that much since it still works sometimes (yes they probably then got a larger army, but it should just be a really bad idea). While they also could have just walked around the army and sacked an expansion. Then he has to unsiege.
Btw regarding PDDs vs tempest. They are very effective. However when they are used alot you can quite easily mix in a few carriers, which drain PDDs pretty much instantly. Did anyone also theorycraft if PDDs or seeker missiles against tempests are better?
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Because Bio still gets raped by coloss / storm / archon / (standard deathball ... i hate it) I tried out mech in tvp for quite some games. I got 1 win where protoss just played too bad (masters in hots)
It feels like this:
When I push at around 160 supply I get just raped by voidray / zelot / immortal (maybe some archons in there). My army dies and I can never secure a 4th for a decent amount of time.
Next fight I lose cause of 10 tempests + ht's feedbacking + storming all my ravens / bc's / vikings -> gg
Or it goes like:
I can never attack. It is like protoss is always one step ahead. I want to push with tanks, then he got immortals so I need ghosts. When I got ghosts I see he got archons with colossus so I need to add vikings and start adding starports. When I got my vikings he gets tempests or carriers while harassing all my expos with dt's and warpprism into my main. Then I finally attack, it maybe turns out equal and then the warpin crushes the rest of my army, he counter pushes and its gg.
Harassment with hellions is not effective cause he gets cannons everywhere and blocks nice with pylons. Widow mines to get some mapcontrol get picked out by patrolling stalkers with an observer following them. Then it comes to one big fight, my army get crushed he remaxed with stalkers to pick down my air or goes for mass zelot / archon and destroys my mining bases -> gg.
If I lose the one big battle just equal, i'm dead. Its not viable in my opinion. When my army dies I can build vikings and mass hellions or mines. Protoss knows this and blink stalker will deal with all of it and when i get my tanks or thors out he got his immortal / colossus / carriers with chronoboost in much higher numbers in shorter time.
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On December 12 2012 07:30 Sissors wrote:That only can happen if the protoss a-moves his army into a choke where the mech army is placed. On open terrain the mech might win, but it definately is not raping. When toss finally start to realise that the mobility advantage they have over mech makes bio's mobility advantage look negligible by comparison, they should have no problems vs mech unless the mech player can literally keep the toss constantly defending. Mech has no answer whatsoever against blink stalkers and other strategies using their mobility. I do define mech here as positional play using tanks. BFH + thors, or only supplementing bio armies with factory units is something else. But I really see that many toss are still getting used to dealing with mech. Bit ago a GM player here posted some replays, so I assume his opponents were also at least high masters. When I then see that the toss as counter to something like 8 BFHs raiding, warps in 10-15 zealots, I cry a little. 1000-1500 minerals down the drain for no gain. (And yes he had plenty of gas for stalkers, he was mineral limitted). Or on dragons stream, toss who attack his sieged up army which is turtled behind buildings frontal. And I can't blame them that much since it still works sometimes (yes they probably then got a larger army, but it should just be a really bad idea). While they also could have just walked around the army and sacked an expansion. Then he has to unsiege. Btw regarding PDDs vs tempest. They are very effective. However when they are used alot you can quite easily mix in a few carriers, which drain PDDs pretty much instantly. Did anyone also theorycraft if PDDs or seeker missiles against tempests are better?
PDD imo vs. HSM.
PDD lets your vikings close in. While HSM take to much energy and supply to b efective. Also you run the risk that the tempestsnipe the ravens. At least with pdd you get 2. And vikings that are 3/3 are decent foder.
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On December 12 2012 07:29 GinDo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 12 2012 04:45 Zergrusher wrote:On December 12 2012 04:33 Roman666 wrote:
Hmm what if they made the immortal attack a projectile? You could employ PDDs then to help you fight immortals with mech. That would work but the harden shields still are insane. At least with a projectile immortals will over kill. This punishes 1a movement. They could use a dragoon attack animation ^_^.
thats such a good idea Dustin browder will never allow it because that would hurt one of his precious unit designs lol
but searously that is a great idea!
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Even as a terran player I think PDD blocking immortal shots would be way overpowered.
I like the projectile idea though, if they could make it somehow sensibly without making PDD affect it.
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EPT
