1 Month later... Is Queen Range still too strong [TvZ]? -…

On June 25 2012 15:32 lorkac wrote:
Is a cloaked ghost too ineffective to attempt?

A cloaked banshee costs 500g (banshee+cloak+factory+starport)

2 cloaked ghosts costs 450g (ghost, ghost, academy, cloak)

Just theorycrafting because Im running out of ideas.

At my level (plat) the patch has no effect due to low level play on both sides. A Zerg player can usually expand at 6min at plat without the queen buff--but watching some recent tvz games, makes me wonder if anyone has tested that extensively and (more specifically) if they could share their findings here?

On June 25 2012 14:03 andropopp wrote:
i have a couple other ideas that im working on trying to see if that concept can work (applying the same amount of pressure as my 2gate while expanding) but the one i tried against the master zerg failed horribly

On June 25 2012 12:55 leo23 wrote:
zerg here:

2 raxing lost its effectiveness due to the queen buff, it can't be kited by marines and can also kill scvs building bunkers

On June 25 2012 15:59 redruMBunny wrote:


I don't think it can be done. Protoss units are protoss unit. Chunk of hit points, shields, high damage, limited front. For example, you park a few zealots between mineral patches, and they become very difficult to kill, and kill a bunch of zerglings. You park a few marines in the same spot, they're going to die pretty fast anyways.

(A look at the past)

The Terran equivalent of 2 gate pressure *was* hellions - decent durability, fast, aoe. (Even then I don't mean durable like a zealot - just durable enough considering their speed). But it doesn't work that way anymore.

Used to be you send 2 hellions, pump a few more. If the zerg was really greedy and/or bad or no spike crawler placement, you could whack out a few drones. If you weren't repelled pretty fast, you could run around and make trouble. On your way out, you might be pursued by zergling/speedling, but often you could toast out a bunch of zerglings and still get away.

Then you could join up with 2-4 more hellions, maybe repair, do the whole thing again.

Through this whole process, zerg really could not creep too well, because hellions were so good at kiting queens. If you were bad at controlling hellions and/or anticipating zerg movement, you'd get surrounded and crushed by speedling. But a good Hellion player would kite kite kite and toast up a bunch of zerg, plus creep tumors, if the zerg tried to push out. (Note - so the Zerg usually would NOT push out, and the Hellions wouldn't toast a lot of zerg. But mission accomplished Terran.) So Zerg would park near spike colonies and run around a bit for scouting &c. But all in all, it was a really good deal for Terran. Zerglings couldn't handle it well at all. Queens simply didn't have the range to deal with hellion kiting. Spikes were nice, but you couldn't park them too far away from your drones, besides which running spikes forward risked a chunk of marines suddenly showing up and saying "hiii". Anyways, Zerg had to pop down roach warren (big chunk of minerals), pop down extractor, pop out roaches - all a big economic drain, restricting Zerg to 2 base. Meanwhile, Terran investment was minimal. So they would race 3rd OCC sometimes even before Zerg could go 3rd base. (Or 3rd PF, or 4 OCC eco game). Or whatever. Lots of Terran options.

To elaborate on kiting queens - you could kite any number of queens with just 2 Hellions. The only thing you had to avoid was being greedy and not scouting. If you pressed your attack and didn't scout, you'd run a good chance of getting bushwhacked by zerglings from an unexpected direction. So long as you kept a mentality of "let me just kite a bit, knock off a few HP, run away, return and repeat", you were probably OK.

(A look at the future)

The big thing is you can't just kite queens with Hellions any more. You're going to be seeing something like 1 queen proximate to each hatchery, and 2-3 more spreading creep outside the natural. If you try to whack the queens near the natural, you'll get a couple zerglings and the queens from the hatcheries come out. The queens move decently fast on the creep, so you probably don't have time to kill the first queens before they bring out enough power to give your hellions trouble.

But this doesn't mean Hellions are useless. In fact, you still need them.

What are your early units? Maruaders, marines, hellions. It takes a little while to get to tanks and medivacs, so they can't be the foundation of your early push.

But if you go marine marauder there's no reason for the zerg not to go pure speedling/baneling. Bio has big problems with that. You can split your marines and marauders, but inevitably, you're looking at a pretty delicate situation especially after infestors hit. Even going into tanks and medivacs doesn't mess too much with speedling/baneling. You could try ghosts to snipe infestors, but, well - delicate, yes?

So what about hellions? Sure, you can't just dominate zerg like you could. But you're still going to make Zerg think twice about running speedling/baneling pure. If you're running even just 6 Hellions around (a significant investment but still only minerals), there's a good chance you're going to force the Zerg to tech to roaches. But in the meantime you yourself could go mostly bio, or tanks, or whatever, really. Roaches are pretty great, and do well against Hellions, but you can mix the Terran composition up.

--

It's not a question of using 2-4 Hellions to pull larvae/200 minerals for a roach warren early any more, nor of larvae/100 minerals for a functional extractor plus gas to fuel roaches, all restricting early Zerg development. Now it's a question of trying to pull the Zerg army apart like taffy - mix up its composition, keep it off balance.

IMO that's what Terran has to do. You have medivacs. You have built in transport ability. You can run around, poke your opponent here and there, use good micro and multiprong to inflict damage. I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying I think that's what you have to do. (Or what we have to do, as the case were.)

There was a poster somewhere on this thread that said something like "I tried constantly aggroing and I won more but I don't think I won those because I was better". I believe the opposite. I think constant aggro IS what sets better players apart, ESPECIALLY for Terran. (Of course, you can't lose too much when you aggro.) (I'm not saying it's fair Terran should have to multiprong most. But it's what I think.)

On June 25 2012 16:31 Sc2Null wrote:
Has this thread really gone anywhere? It seems people are just theorycrafting(failing at that) and not really looking for a discussion just getting off on raging about balance? The topic of the thread was about the queen range buff, but it seems to derailed into something completely different..(not sure how protoss units got involved). Looking at the GSL, where the top skill is in relation to sc2, 4 zergs are in the ro16..I can safely assume, the people that have lost ZvT/vP was not due to the queen range buff and the current ownage of zergs, who were owning before the queen buff, are simply continuing their display of skill.

On June 25 2012 15:32 lorkac wrote:
Is a cloaked ghost too ineffective to attempt?

A cloaked banshee costs 500g (banshee+cloak+factory+starport)

2 cloaked ghosts costs 450g (ghost, ghost, academy, cloak)

Just theorycrafting because Im running out of ideas.

At my level (plat) the patch has no effect due to low level play on both sides. A Zerg player can usually expand at 6min at plat without the queen buff--but watching some recent tvz games, makes me wonder if anyone has tested that extensively and (more specifically) if they could share their findings here?

On June 25 2012 16:31 Sc2Null wrote:
Has this thread really gone anywhere? It seems people are just theorycrafting(failing at that) and not really looking for a discussion just getting off on raging about balance? The topic of the thread was about the queen range buff, but it seems to derailed into something completely different..(not sure how protoss units got involved). Looking at the GSL, where the top skill is in relation to sc2, 4 zergs are in the ro16..I can safely assume, the people that have lost ZvT/vP was not due to the queen range buff and the current ownage of zergs, who were owning before the queen buff, are simply continuing their display of skill.

On June 25 2012 16:46 redruMBunny wrote:


Theorycrafting is good. But early ghosts will have infrequent success, I think.

Barracks, then

Ghost Academy 150 mineral 50 gas. 40 seconds.
Tech Lab 50 mineral 25 gas. 25 seconds. (Not a big deal you want this anyways)
Personal Cloaking 150 mineral 150 gas. 120 seconds.
Ghost 200 mineral 100 gas. 40 seconds. DPS 6.7

Cloak is 25 mana plus .9 per second. Ghost starts with 50. That's not a lot of time. But Moebius Reactor is 100 mineral 100 gas 80 seconds. Probably too long.

Snipe is 25 mana, does 25 or 50 to psionic. (Queen has 175 hit points)

Generally you won't want to use snipe if you want to rely on cloaking. If you don't cloak, you will get eaten by zerglings.

--

Now to this point, the zerg will almost certainly have an overlord floating around your base and natural (to check your gas if nothing else), and 2 zerglings running around. Usually a zergling parks at Xel'Naga tower or two if there is one on the map. Then you will have at least 1 more overlord running around someplace.

If Ghost Academy is spotted, the Zerg will likely start getting gas pretty fast for lair/overseer. You could also run into evolution chamber/spore colony. If either happens, ghosts won't be much use. (Overseers would be far worse for you, and I think more likely). This slows the Zerg third, but you're still looking at 300 gas between Academy, Tech, and a single Ghost. Getting even 1-2 more Ghost brings it to 400-500 gas. That's a lot for not a lot of DPS. Plus you're still running the risk of a serious 2 base speedling/baneling bust, without Hellions to discourage that kind of Zerg shenanigans.

--

If everything goes ideally, zerg have no clue you're going ghosts, and they go 3rd hatchery, 5-6 queens, couple scout zerglings. But if you're going against a pretty decent zerg player, even if you hide your ghost academy, they're going to know something is weird about the time the third hatchery goes up at the latest. You're building lots of refineries. You can't hide this.

Oh, you can HIDE things. But you can't alleviate zerg suspicion. If the zerg is looking around and doesn't see a chunk of units or SCVs or whatever, that in itself is suspicious. You're pulling in income, what are you doing with it? Hm. You can't sneak an entire ninja expansion off to hide more refinery income, that's way too heavy an investment that is itself noticeable. With so many operational refineries, what are you using all that gas for? So the zerg will scout for proxy structures because they know something's wrong. (They will certainly suspect proxy starport Banshee). But even if the Ghost Academy isn't scouted, the Zerg will be horribly suspicious that something is wrong. There's just too much stuff unaccounted for. Hiding the barracks/tech lab increases Zerg suspicion even more, there's just so much stuff missing! What is happening?! And if you don't hide barracks/tech lab, the overlord over your main/natural might spot a Ghost popping out and the jig is up.

--

You have a very small window during which Ghosts can effectively use their cloak, and your defenses are a bit weak. You could do something with Hellions and Ghosts, perhaps (keeping Zerg thinking about defenses so maybe not thinking about your refineries / hidden stuff), and contributing to the idea that you're going Banshee with the established Hellion/Banshee opening), but Zerg suspicion plus the low DPS of Ghosts means your attack window is very small and you won't be able to do a huge chunk of damage, especially if drones and queen just run away. Meanwhile, you're not too well in position to deal with a possible 2 base Zerg rush. (You can scout it of course, especially with your ghosts in position. But with so much pushed into low DPS units and tech, you may not be able to do too much about it.)

That isn't to say ghosts won't work at all. There is something there, perhaps. But limited mana for cloak, limited DPS, the fact zerglings can hit them (while zerglings can't hit Banshees - so they can fly away then come back again to keep poking). Even nuclear shouldn't have much impact, with so few areas to concentrate on, Zerg will just run away from the target area, then run back. (This is another reason I think overseer more likely - spores are less responsive to problems like nuke.)

On June 25 2012 17:06 freakhill wrote:
1 terran top8 NASL...
demuslim played very nice games though

On June 25 2012 17:14 Smigi wrote:
During the first stages of the game, Zerg was terribly underpowered.

It took blizzard about 6-8 months after release in a series of spread out patches to resolve this.

If you all can remember, this was the period all terrans were posting "Love drinking zerg tears" "here comes some more zerg qq" ect. and it was true, zerg were complaining and QQing endlessly. Also, yes it was true, zerg was very UP.

However, Blizzard did the correct thing. Instead of instantly patching anything that seemed to break the 50% mark, they sat and saw what the Zerg could figure out, then after it was all said it done, patched what truly needed to be fixed.

Terran's are now finding themselves in the exact circumstance. They need to push through this, and figure out what they can. In the end, Blizzard will fix what needs to be fixed.

End of discussion.

On June 25 2012 17:10 s3rp wrote:


Makes it very easy to not watch Starcraft these days. I tried watching the combined european WCS and man PvZ is such a crappy matchup to watch.