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Fellow ladder companions, forum readers, and other people,
I present to you a semi-guide to a new TvP style, which involves using hellbats instead of marines in the composition. (I do not fully take any responsobility for inventing this style, since I don't know how many people actually use it, if any at all). Also, replays are at the bottom.
INTRODUCTION: The idea came from marine being a weak, trade heavy unit, which has low health points and in later stages is not that cost efficient. These are the negative sides of the marine that kinda pushed me into trying out this new style:
---- low health points, dies easily
---- dying easily makes it a heavy trade unit, which means that there is very high chance to lose at least a little amount of marines when fighting any force you face. Against mech, however, opponent has to invest more into killing a single unit, which is better for terran and provides more longevity to each unit. Here is a graph explanation.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/718kU.jpg)
---- Marines are not cost effective in late game. That is also a reason why terrans switch to marauder-ghost in the late game. Having marines by the late game can be bad, better to have hellbats instead, and when you want to get rid of them to make more room for ghosts, they are good at harassing too.
---- Marines receive more aoe damage from colossi and storm, than hellbat. A single colossus hits about four marines with a single shot, which sums up to 120 damage. ---- Against hellbats, a single shot hits only ~two units, which sums up to 60 damge. Same applies to storm.
---- Marine is not a tank unit, it actually itself needs a tank in front of it to be effective. If it takes cover behind marauders, then it can not fire. In hellbat-marauder composition, hellbat is the tank and both units can still fire while playing their specific role.
There are of course bad sides too of this compositions, but everything can be refined out eventually  . Here are the main problems I have faced with it so far:
---- Very little anti-air in the early game, suceptible to suprise oracle and mothership core attack. However, if there is only a mothercore alone, then it is not a problem. The replay number 6 demonstrates a harass from both mcore and oracle very well.
---- Vulnerable to 6-7 gate all ins, yet to test this out. There is a weak spot when getting add-ons, but after that a huge surge of your own units will come.
---- Less micro intensive, since hellbats are slow as snails and with very little range. This makes the composition a little bit less effective at comebacks and relies more on a-moving
---- Hellbats require whole different tech tree (vechicle weapons & armor) Would be awesome if blizzard made hellbat share its upgrades with bio, but then again, full mech compositions, which use hellbats, would suffer
The good sides are basically each of the points where marine lacks. The good sides of hellbat are:
---- Less trade-heavy
---- Less aoe damage from colossi and storm
---- useful at harassing when there are no medivacs around
---- tanks damage for marauders, deals well with zealots
---- terrans can finally use a factory in TvP
---- better healing capabilities, since medivac doesnt have to switch targets as often hellbats are dying. Marines die at faster rate, which forces medivacs to switch targets more rapidly and waste useful healing time
REPLAYS: Here are 6 replays. Sadly, none are with heavy early game all ins.... Also, this build has gone through a refinement of ~20 games, so dont judge it hard.
replay 1 - Very good example of playing against a ZAS composition (Zealot-Archon-Storm)
replay 2 - Game goes into late stages, where ghost transition is required.
replay 3 - Against fast colossi plays, vikings are not that important in HM compositions. it can easily withstand two colossi fire.
replay 4 - Against immortal heavy play. Hellbats are VERY good at tanking immortal shots. They are ideal for tanking in front of marauders.
replay 5 - Air harass from protoss.
replay 6 - This is even heavier air harass with mcore and oracle at once. BTW really sorry for the foul language here, I dislike fake namers, and i know that MC is in SK :D
Thank you for reading and cheers everyone!
If there will come the need for exact build order and full guide, then I will gladly make one if enough requests will arise .
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The over-use of caps in the title might get you in trouble.
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Germany25657 Posts
I renamed it 
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Havn't looked at the replays, just got to ask,
if you're up vs sky toss, how would you handle it?
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VS SKYTOSS:
You will start an armory when you start your reactor on the starport. So if you see skytoss, you go thor and if need comes, double viking, since you will have tech lab and reactored starpoort to do that
Btw, the copy paste did not work well, so it pasted it as all caps, sry
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United States8476 Posts
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On January 06 2013 04:52 FrozenImpact wrote:VS SKYTOSS: You will start an armory when you start your reactor on the starport. So if you see skytoss, you go thor and if need comes, double viking, since you will have tech lab and reactored starpoort to do that Btw, the copy paste did not work well, so it pasted it as all caps, sry
Problem is skytoss beats both thors and vikings. Marines are the only cost efficient counter.
Something else to take into account is that there is no retreating: MM can stim and run back, hellbats can't (their transformation takes too long).
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What I do is by the time I usually need to run back, I load the hellbats into medivacs and then boost the hell out of there Marauders can just stim. And sometimes u can just go drop with the lifted hellbats, because boost wont let the enemy catch you and you get to the mineral line very quickly. And talking about skytoss, i was talking about early game. At around ~9 min you can start your first thor and two vikings, if the need arises. Then you can indentify how heavily the skytoss is being played and you can go heavier starport-thor combinations and even marines. I didnt say you can't make marines
BTW keep the questions coming, will answer them gladly
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United States4883 Posts
I've been thinking about doing some form of this build in TvP, but I was unsure about how to go about doing it. How do you open generally? Is it possible to mix in a few reapers before you have the production for marauders?
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If its a two player map, and they send the MSC right away, don't you auto lose. Need some marines?..
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Ive screwed around with this build for quite awhile now. IMHO, you need to still open with some marines. Also, i found somehow i was abit weaker vs allins from toss, but maybe that's got to do with the BO not being efficient enough yet.
Also, you may die to air toss, but its not hard to put down another starport and pump 4 vikings at a time. Sure vikings are not "Awesome" vs sky toss, but if you get enough vikings you may be able to overwhelm it with numbers.
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I'm thinking many of these problems would be solved with a possibility: Go MMM off 2 bases, and when taking a third, throw down some facts and start adding Hellbats. Start phasing out the marines (drop with them to trade them off as much as possible) for a Marauder-Hellbat-Medivac composition. That way, you only commit to the composition once Toss has committed to a standard tech path, you still have marines in the period where they are strongest, you're safe from MSC pushes, and you get Marauder-Hellbat at the time you actually want it: When Toss is starting to go very AoE heavy. Maybe this needs tweaking so you don't die, but something like it could work. Maybe you only produce a handful of marines early on, and then go 2-base Marauder/Hellbat. Dunno.
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Just because marines are not great late game does not mean you can skip them early game.
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how long do u stay bio hhellion for... just early game? Caus I dun think u can afford both upgrades later ...... have to transition mech or plain bio
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On January 06 2013 15:17 FutureBreedMachine wrote:
how long do u stay bio hhellion for... just early game? Caus I dun think u can afford both upgrades later ...... have to transition mech or plain bio
i think the idea is that you can afford both sets of upgrades because your army is almost entirely gas free. Once your upgrades are rolling out you can start to expand your unit choice into more gas heavy options from both trees.
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this has less synergy than marine marauder. and it cant shoot up and youre not entirely correct about 'marines not being cost efficient in the late game'
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On January 06 2013 18:55 MateShade wrote:
this has less synergy than marine marauder. and it cant shoot up and youre not entirely correct about 'marines not being cost efficient in the late game'
Tbh while they are cost effective, they arent really supply effective.
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I noticed that hellbat drops are way more effective at fighting inside the enemy the mineral line. I will explain: Even tho the hellbat will engage the enemy units if left un micro'd, the hellbat has a big AoE arc. The hellbat has a good junk of HP, it doesn't die quickly so it can make use of its AoE for a pretty long time. While that is going on the big arc AoE will do a lot of damage towards light units like and what light units reside inside the mineral line? Thats right: workers.
So doing a hellbat drop without micro makes them cost-effective if your enemy decides to engage instead of retreat his workers.
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VS EARLY MOTHERSHIP CORE
Well basically you have ~4 marines and a bunker when the fastest mcore comes. Usually what the protoss will try to do is poke with a zealot, stalker and mcore at your mineral line. If it is your natural that they are going for with all the units, then send two marines from the bunker to deal with the mcore and micro them then back as they get wounded. The two marines left in the bunker should deal well with the zealot stalker, but micro carefully!
If, however, the protoss sends mcore to main and pokes with zealot stalker in the natural, then select three workers in the main and put them to auto repair, that will easily negate any damage done until you get three additional marines up there.
Note that I only get 7 marines in total, before going HM, 4 marines for bunker and 3 in main base for mcore.
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Can't shoot up. Doesn't sound like a great composition to me, and the upgrades won't synergize.
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EPT
