Another Neural Parasite Change. - Page 33

On September 10 2011 01:16 rdj107 wrote:
Ignoring the impulse rage at this, it does make sense. The ability to effectively take high cost units and make them your own mid battle is game breaking no matter how effective it is. My concern is that while yes, p and t can once again make those units without the crippling fear of having it flipped against them, zerg still doesn't have a truly effective way of taking down a high tier army with vastly out of proportion resource costs.

Specifically I'm talking about carriers/motherships and battlecruisers (bear with me). The massive ground units are an issue on their own, but their are units that work against them so I'll leave them out of this post.

Currently zerg has a total of 5 units that can hit air; spores, queens, mutas, hydras, and corrupters. Spores and queens have obvious practicality issues so I'll ignore those:

Mutas are a harass unit and a good one, but do not trade evenly with any unit that can hit them except stalkers/voids (?); this includes vikings and phoenixes, which honestly aren't that hard to get out along the techpaths of the high tier units mentioned. Due to this in a standard mix mutas are not a solution, as to have mutas be effective you need to invest in a lot of them which is going to cripple your ground army strength; this would only get worse if you tried infestor/muta/x due to high gas and (depending on x) supply cost.

Hydras are the most viable solution to air heavy late game comps, but results have already shown that hydra heavy mixes are fragile at best and hard countered at worse. And it does need to be a heavy mix to guarantee that the hydras do anything at all; a light smattering of them honestly isn't going to do anything unless the air units specifically don't focus them.

Finally corrupters...suck, which given that they are supposed to be what takes down the high tech air units is an issue. Very literally they suck huge amounts of supply for what they do, and are brought down by pretty much everything they aren't specifically supposed to counter. Voidrays, vikings, any air to ground, and indirectly even phoenixes work fine for just soaking shots while they slowly whittle down the corrupters trying to hunt down carriers that can retreat to extreme distances while still having interceptors fight. Also keep in mind that against battlecruisers, there's the danger of yamato instantly tipping the scales on corrupters trading cost effectively if the bc numbers are not constantly kept in line.

Beyond unit specific issues, they all have the common weakness of needing to be in very large numbers in order to have any sort of effect. When people bring up having a proper unit composition that just isn't the way zerg works. Its strength is pumping out massed pure unit armies for the situation and when you keep units in reserve to develop a proper composition this strength falters or outright disappears. For how ineffective all of these units are making them in advance isn't feasible.

Tl;dr: Neural parasite on certain units was gamebreaking, but without the threat of it against high tier air tech there will be little reason not to make them late game, bringing the issues zergs have dealing with air units into play harder than ever.