EPT
TvZ Bio + Hellbat
Overview
In HotS, Blizzard’s changes seem to be aiming to make mech a more viable option than in WoL, as is reflected by the multiple Terran mech strategy posts and discussions. That said, bio has been a mainstay of TvZ for most of WoL’s lifetime, and in HotS it’s actually better than it was in WoL – in other words, the new units / changes make bio stronger than what they contribute to Zerg’s ability to stop it.
With some recent discussion on the forum revolving around Mech/Tanks, I thought I'd write up what I've been doing instead of mech (obviously because I think this is a better way to play
).Blueprint
Essentially the idea is to build towards getting a maxed army consisting of 3/3 Marines/Marauders, supported by Caduceus Medivacs and (if he goes a strategy other than Hydra/Roach) +Weapon blue flame Hellbats. Standard Zerg compositions aren’t able to trade efficiently against this if it’s controlled even slightly competently, so the idea is to play as greedily as possible while still being safe. In essence, you'll bludgeon your opponent to death by virtue of being as close to him macro-wise as possible, while killing significantly more cost-wise.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/lXZV3.png)
The idea of the build – win with groudn units
Fortunately, the Widow Mine provides a convenient tool to achieve the “safe” desire while being cheap enough that you’re still being very greedy, the Hellbat solves the damage tanking problem, and Caduceus Reactor makes it so that your units are the real Immortals instead of those Protoss fakers.
Game Flow
I’m not really a fan of precise build orders (I generally prefer to know “I want to do this” and then go from there
), but in the interest of providing one, here’s a general guide for it. I don’t explicitly mention making SCVs, but you never stop making SCVs throughout the opening phase (basically until you have your bases saturated). + Show Spoiler +
- 10 Depot
- 12 Barracks
- 16 Supply ==> Barracks finishes, make Marine + start Orbital. The last SCV that comes out of the main CC can be rallied to the natural minerals to make the CC there (note: it may be necessary to mine a mineral while you’re waiting, depending upon the distance between main/nat)
- 17 Refinery
- 18 Depot (don’t make any more Marines until this completes – use all supply for SCVs until so you don’t get supply blocked; obviously if he’s doing some early Ling shenanigans, feel free to make more Marines as necessary and even pull a few SCVs if needed. The economic cost of him doing that instead of normal powering will mean you’re doing fine even if you lose a bit of mining time)
- 19 Refinery
- Once the depot finishes, make 2 more Marines for 3 total
- Once the natural CC finishes, morph it to an Orbital right away. Its completion should coincide with having 50 energy on your main Orbital also, so send that Mule to the natural in order to better balance your mineral exhaustion between bases
- Factory + Reactor on Barracks – depending upon the map obviously, this is around when you want to send 2 marines back into your base in order to catch the scouting Overlord; ideally you’ll stop him from seeing anything, not because you’re actually up to anything particularly tricky, but that’ll force him to overreact and play a bit paranoidly
- An additional depot
- Once Factory/Reactor finish, swap them (and make a Tech Lab on Barracks + start Stim) and make 2 Widow Mines. With the first two Widow Mines plus the 3 Marines, push out and harass a bit. Don’t actually lose them, but you can control creep spread (or force him to make a Spore) and often can get an Overlord if he’s not careful. After the annoying-of-the-Zerg, try to put the Widow Mines somewhere where he’ll have to go later on, maybe behind minerals at 3rd or 4th if you can get away with it.
- During this time, you want to pump out ~6 Widow Mines. As soon as you have 400 minerals, throw down another CC. You can make it in your natural or your main, but ultimately you want to float this to your 3rd as soon as possible.
- Add two Ebays in a safe location to get dual ups (note that “safe location” means it’ll be difficult to snipe either by Mutalisks / Drops, and also by him managing to do some form of runby)
- Add additional Raxes and a Starport (swap it to the reactor that was on the Factory), and get Combat Shields + Medivacs. As soon as it seems safe, move your Widow Mines to the 3rd (or split them if it’s a map where the 3rd is not well connected with the main; ideally you should thumbs down these maps as they are inconvenient for this playstyle, but it may be necessary to make a few more Widow Mines in that case if he’s showing signs of aggression) and float the Orbital over there
- Add an Armory when your dual Ups are halfway done, in order to be able to continue constant upgrades. Falling behind on upgrades is absolutely killer when using bio, and being ahead on ups is crushingly good
- Around this time you need to determine what he’s likely to be doing for the long game – is he going to do some form of Hydra/Roach-based play, or is he going to do some other style of play? If the former, you don’t need to bother with Hellbats, whereas if he’s not then you should get Hellbats. If going Hellbats, add two Factories, make a Tech Lab with one and research Blue Flame, and make Reactors on the other two.
- Together with taking your 3rd, and regardless of whether he’s going Hydra/Roach or not, add a Fusion Core. Swap your Starport to a Tech Lab (use one of the Barracks ones) and research Caduceus asap at that point. Once complete, swap back to a Reactor; if he’s being annoying about burrowed things / creep spread all over, you can get a Raven, but I don’t usually find it necessary, and the actual Raven abilities other than constant mobile detection aren’t useful for this (plus Ravens are slow :/)
- Around ~150-170 supply start making another CC – when you hit 200 you want to do a large push with tons of bio, Caduceus Medivacs, and (if you’re getting them) Hellbats, and behind that you want to take your 4th.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/FqByg.png)
A Zerg reacts
Zerg Compositions
This section describes the unit compositions that Zerg will use, and what to emphasize in your composition based upon what he makes. Don’t get caught by surprise – “wasting” a scan or two is well-worth it, as you’ll have at least 3 Orbitals, and tailoring your composition to what he has will provide far more cost-benefit than an extra 270 minerals of the wrong unit.
+ Show Spoiler +
Pre-Hive
Note that if you don’t do a major push until you hit 200 supply, then he’ll have some time to get up some level of Hive tech (although he won’t be in late game mode where everything is all hive tech). The main compositions you’re likely to face pre-hive are going to be:
- Infestor/Ling
- Hydra/Roach (possibly +Viper or +Infestor)
- Muta/Ling/Bane
Generally speaking, you don’t want to engage before getting up Caduceus Reactor if possible unless he’s playing “too greedy” – keep an eye on him and take advantage of it if you can, but always keep in the back of your mind the fact that he’s not going to be able to effectively counter your “ideal composition”, so don’t take unnecessary risks.
In all cases you should tailor your composition towards what the opponent has. Against (1) Infestor/Ling, you want almost pure Marine/Hellbat (if he’s really hardcore about this, you can even add additional factories, but generally 3 Reactored Factories should be fine as he’s not likely to stay on this long-term but will instead probably transition into Ultra/Infestor/Ling/Baneling and Hellbats aren’t very useful at actually killing Ultras).
Against (2) Hydra/Roach you need a good number of Marauders together with your Marines. I haven’t played a lot of players who stuck with this composition too well, but in my experience roughly 2.5-3 Marines for each Marauder works pretty well. I really don’t think this Zerg composition is effective at all once you get Caduceus Reactor as long as the Zerg isn’t ahead on upgrades, so I think it will die out anyway.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Ld2N2.png)
Eeek! The terrans are coming, run away!
Against (3) Muta/Ling/Baneling, you need lots of Hellbats together with Marines. Marines are what actually kill Mutalisks, and they kill Lings/Banelings effectively too, so the objective of the Hellbats really is to kill Lings, but mostly to block Banelings. Yes, Banelings do extra damage to Hellbats, but they’re not really that effective at killing them because of how much life Hellbats have (and they don’t even cost gas!), and the Hellbats completely roast Lings which removes the protection the Banelings/Mutas have.
Hive
By far the most common composition I see these days is Ultralisk/Baneling/Ling/Infestor, with people sometimes swapping Infestor out for Viper (I don’t think that’s a very effective swap though ). In the midgame you want to be heavy on Marines because they’re pretty good vs everything and have insane DPS. As it gets to the late game, assuming he’s going Ultralisks, you want to be heavier and heavier on Ultralisks – Marauders are incredibly good at killing Ultralisks, and nothing in his composition (other than the Ultralisks which die too badly to the Marauders to be effective) is good at killing them (Lings might be, but for the fact that you have Caduceus Reactor + Hellbats roast them so awfully). Essentially, your late game composition becomes Hellbat/Marauder, with only enough Marines to do a bit of support + stop an air switch.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2L09f.png)
An example late-game Terran composition against someone trying Hydra/Ultra/Viper/Roach
I have yet to play against someone who commits hardcore to Infestor/Brood Lord in HotS as their main hive-level strat (I’ve only played against it as an “oh shit, this Ultralisk/Baneling/Ling/Infestor composition is not working at all what can I do!?!” switch), but basically from talking with some friends and my own experiences against people who swap into it, I believe you can basically just keep up the Hellbat/Marine heavy composition. With good splitting, together with Caduceus reactor and abusing the mobility of your composition (Medivacs no longer slow you down so much due to boost!) you should be able to get a favorable engagement, and as long as you engage in a way that Infestors cannot permanently lock you down with Fungal while Brood Lords shell you from out of range, your composition crushes his.
How To Lose
The biggest danger I’ve found is just engaging extremely poorly – if you get all your units clumped up and fungaled, and then a bunch of banelings come in, you can lose your entire first army. You need to trade reasonably with the Zerg in order to be able to win; having the entire first army get smashed ineffectually is essentially game over. Other than that, mis-reacting to the composition is the other major danger. Often if you mis-read it you can load into the Medivacs and boost out of there and re-adjust, but sometimes it’s too late. Other than that, however, I haven’t run into a Zerg yet who has a really good & solid counter such that I say “shit, these units are just not going to work against that, what do I do?”; it really just comes down to if he outplays you (does damage with harass, breaks you, severely outmacros, etc.).
Brood / Bane / Infestor compositions seem the most challenging to me.
Potpourri
- Balance your workers – you don’t want to have more than 16 on minerals per base until all your bases have 16 on minerals per base!
- The idle worker button in HotS is really hard to notice. That said, it’s still there, so try to pay attention to it, as it can help you a lot with keeping up on supply. Basically, have a dedicated “supply SCV” that builds a supply depot and then doesn’t do anything. When it goes idle (because it finishes building that depot), you know it’s about time to build another one. This is obviously a midgame thing, not an early game thing where your supply depots should be more specifically planned
- Balance your Mules – try to avoid calling down Mules multiple times on the same mineral field when there are other fields that haven’t been eaten at all by them. You want to keep your mineral fields as balanced consumption-wise as feasible
- Fungal does not move the health bars on your bio after you have Caduceus Reactor(!). Don’t go out of your way to get Fungaled obviously, and combined with other units it’ll help him kill your units more effectively, but it’s no longer a death sentence.
- When using Widow Mines defensively to stop all-ins, try to keep your infantry a bit ahead of the minefield until he commits his main forces, and then pull back so the mines decimate him. You want to avoid letting him waste your mine shots with a series of 4 individual lings sent in.
- I’m a hypocrite because I don’t think I did this in any of the games I’m posting, but hotkeying your Marines separately from your Hellbats/Marauders is a very good idea, especially if he has Banelings, as you need to be able to protect them by running them away from the Banes while the others are in between them.
Replays
I’m not an awful player, although doubtlessly there are many better Terrans out there who can do this, but here are a selection of my replays doing this. Note that my play has been working out how I want to play it as I go, thus not all replays may exactly follow the above, although generally I didn't deviate too much. Apologies to those featured in the replays - these are all games from the HotS ladder
- Roach/Bane ==> Ultra + various stuff vs Blade
- Hydra/Roach/Infestor/Viper vs CatZ
- Hydra/Ling/Infestor ==> Hydra/Roach vs Snitchables
- Ling/Infestor/Bane vs preCurser
- Hydra/Ling/Bane vs VeiL in fairness to his comments, I didn’t play particularly well that game I suppose :p
- Just added: Bane/Ultra/Infestor/Ling into mass Brood Lords vs Hephaistas
