How do you all handle "those" terrans? You know the ones. They have one heavily practiced build, usually a 2 base all-in that's different than any other similar terran's 2 base all in, and they do it every single game. It either works or it doesn't, and the majority of their wins come from their opponent just not having seen it before and if it's held off they lose 90% of the time because they don't know how to transition at all.
I just faced a terran who did a 2 base mass marine, hellbat, mine all-in with two tanks and a random thor(?). I did a stargate opening and just scouted it as being normal mech opening (they kinda hid the barracks). Having seen it, it'd be easy to hold off with storm/immortal/archon. I just got blind-sided by it.
I don't put a lot of thought into these losses usually because it's ladder, there's no way to know it's coming, and I'm never gonna see this again, but it can be frustrating.
Nothing to do about it really. It's frustrating as fck, but you can't really rely on the one and only "correct" response to that, because as you said, there is infinite amout of that terran bullshit, you just can't tell what's coming your way. My answer is: never drastically adjust your BO on the fly if you suspect that stuff. In my case i just have a rule: 2+ factories->start immortal production with some archon/chargelot in mind for the mid/late game (given im a stalker/colosi player), that's it. And an early sentry helps a lot these days.
p.s. 2base allins are not THAT annoying tbh, it's much more confusing when they start that proxy reaper(marauder? marines?)+factory (in the main? on the map?) with (late) natural (?) into macro (?) (proxy starport?) into mech (?) into battlecruisers (?) stuff.
I don't want to sound like a whiner here, but whatching even serral look like a bronze player while trying to defend inno's proxy barracks (twice) makes me wonder... may be cheeses (from all races) are a bit (just a bit) overtuned. You know, Has runs... sOs vs Maru.., etc etc. From a viewers perspective its definitely a good thing though (i guess).
On January 14 2019 12:09 Ben... wrote: How do you all handle "those" terrans? You know the ones. They have one heavily practiced build, usually a 2 base all-in that's different than any other similar terran's 2 base all in, and they do it every single game. It either works or it doesn't, and the majority of their wins come from their opponent just not having seen it before and if it's held off they lose 90% of the time because they don't know how to transition at all.
I just faced a terran who did a 2 base mass marine, hellbat, mine all-in with two tanks and a random thor(?). I did a stargate opening and just scouted it as being normal mech opening (they kinda hid the barracks). Having seen it, it'd be easy to hold off with storm/immortal/archon. I just got blind-sided by it.
I don't put a lot of thought into these losses usually because it's ladder, there's no way to know it's coming, and I'm never gonna see this again, but it can be frustrating.
At the moment, the most common 2 base builds are the marine tank banshee push (sometimes with bunkers) that usually hits around 6 minutes, and proxy 1-1-1. I would recommend fine-tuning your defense of these 2 builds as they are the most common, and generally most 2 base all-ins will be variants of those, so it will need little adjusting.
The thing is, most of these builds are designed to punish a toss going for a fast third. If you scout tech lab on the starport and factory and reactor on the barracks, it will 99% be this build. You can:
A) cancel the third, chrono immortals/obs and place down shield batteries.
B) start researching charge before blink (not sure if this is actually good, because if the terran goes for drops instead youre at a severe disadvantage, and nobody likes coinflifps) and get really good at defending banshees with stalkers.
C) Open stargate which is a bit harder than robo openers in general, but if youre good at it will help you hold easier and places more pressure on the terran to micro correctly in order for the push to work.
This video is very long, but the only parts you need to watch are the first 2 matches. Its showtime vs Demuslim and it showcases his response to the two mentioned builds. Plot twist: he loses one of the matches, and the one he wins relies on godly warp prism micro and game sense. On the plus side, your terran opponent is also likely to not be as good as demuslim.
I watched the games, and i'd say that knowing that my opponent is not demuslim won't help me, because he showed nothing exeptional. While me not being showtime would definitely hurt. Because his awareness, unit control and (that is most important) descision making was perfect (at least in the first game). And SG choice didn't impress me at all. What unit exactly do we need to defend that? Oracles insta die to cyclones. Phoenixes melt to marines...
I dunno. I'm convinced it's not supposed to work like that. Terran has way too many units with insane early game agressive capabilities. Combined with bunkers and turrets on small maps... Meh. I know they felt the same about Void rushes back in the days but i'm not supporting that either. My guess is that bringing back tank upgrade won't hurt at all. Or just fcking delete cyclone.
Yeah, I was more talking about weird one-off gimmick builds than the standard 2 base all-ins (I open Stargate these days going for an oracle into phoenix and charge, which usually can comfortably handle most of the marine/tank related all-ins). It's not like most of these builds are even good, it's more that I'm just not prepared for it because I've never seen it before.
well i cant really do it myself yet but i think the keys are 1) keep oracle alive. its better to have it up still than killing 4 scvs and let it die. revelation and stasis are too good. 2) you can go up to 3 phoenixes, use them to scout and keep them to defend your base from dropships at your main. if he dosent drop, use phoenix to lift tanks. make sure you come from another angle than your mainarmy.
keep in mind. those ladder all-in builds are do or die.
On January 16 2019 15:24 insitelol wrote: I watched the games, and i'd say that knowing that my opponent is not demuslim won't help me, because he showed nothing exeptional. While me not being showtime would definitely hurt. Because his awareness, unit control and (that is most important) descision making was perfect (at least in the first game). And SG choice didn't impress me at all. What unit exactly do we need to defend that? Oracles insta die to cyclones. Phoenixes melt to marines...
I dunno. I'm convinced it's not supposed to work like that. Terran has way too many units with insane early game agressive capabilities. Combined with bunkers and turrets on small maps... Meh. I know they felt the same about Void rushes back in the days but i'm not supporting that either. My guess is that bringing back tank upgrade won't hurt at all. Or just fcking delete cyclone.
I think most of the time to defend this with SG, you rely more on the gateway units to pick off a few of the enemy units before throwing your SG units in there, unless its tanks then I think the correct move is to immediately lift while engaging. But don't throw the oracle in there right away until you've picked off a few of the marines, etc. Also, a nifty thing (I struggle to do it reliably) that some people do is if theres widow mines, they'll sac a phoenix or oracle to draw the widow mine target, then fly over enemy marines to kill them with the splash damage. It just requires crazy good amount of unit control that I lack, so I rely on robo openers. It took me like 10 practice games before I felt comfortable enough to hold these types of aggressive pushes more than 50 percent of the time.
Something one of my T practice partners pointed out, is that super often when the T sieges his tanks outside the natural, they aren't quite yet in a fantastic position to target anything important, but Toss players(myself included at first) will rush out to fight them immediately and throw away army. He pointed out that the extra time to let Shield batteries finish, chrono out another immortal, or get another warp in while only losing like a pylon or so and be better prepared will help a lot by the time the tanks are able to actually deal decent DPS to a nexus or something. Just something to try, it helped me a lot.
On January 17 2019 03:26 Ben... wrote: Yeah, I was more talking about weird one-off gimmick builds than the standard 2 base all-ins (I open Stargate these days going for an oracle into phoenix and charge, which usually can comfortably handle most of the marine/tank related all-ins). It's not like most of these builds are even good, it's more that I'm just not prepared for it because I've never seen it before.
Gotcha, my bad. In all honesty, I don't know if its worth worrying about if you only see them a few times ever. Its like worrying about how to defend a proxy thor (which I did for a little bit) when literally nobody except for 1 person in diamond 2 does that build lol. You probably already look at it like this though.
Can you name top lvl aggressive protoss players? By aggressive, I mean those who play the first number, impose their game, as it plays from themselves. If he sees the opportunity to finish the game here and now, he does it, and not like most toss players who try to go out into the macro and win there. As I understand, in Korea her0 can be attributed to those, who else? If you take out of Korea, then we have 2 high lvl protoss players - ShowTime and Neeb. The first one is exactly passive, he plays from an opponent, but what about an American? Sorry for my English =\
On February 06 2019 07:10 StaNi wrote: Can you name top lvl aggressive protoss players? By aggressive, I mean those who play the first number, impose their game, as it plays from themselves. If he sees the opportunity to finish the game here and now, he does it, and not like most toss players who try to go out into the macro and win there. As I understand, in Korea her0 can be attributed to those, who else? If you take out of Korea, then we have 2 high lvl protoss players - ShowTime and Neeb. The first one is exactly passive, he plays from an opponent, but what about an American? Sorry for my English =\
Parting is the only one who comes to mind (in Korea). The thing about korea overall is that the scene there is basically dead. No freshblood since 2012. Neeb is just a very solid player overall. He mixes macro games with some agressive plays (allins, proxies, constant prism harass) every now and then.
What is the correct response to those bizarre ravager/queen rushes where they literally walk 6ish queens across the map with some ravagers? We saw it in GSL I wanna say. I've faced it a couple times. It's really strong if they don't mess up transfuses.
edit: And I found what I find to be one of the funnier "do this build or die" terrans. There's a terran I've played several times that does this identical build every time and it's so bad but it's hilarious in its' specificity. It's a 2 base 6-8 tank mech push at like 9-10 minutes with hellbats and double reactored vikings (I mean A TON of vikings). My guess is the gimmick is he gains air control and then just slowly kills the protoss with the 6 tanks and hellbats since it's so hard to kill that composition on the ground. The first time I saw it I just figured it was mech but then accidentally built a couple carriers instead of tempests and happened to hold it off thanks to the carriers (and him attacking into shield batteries) and then he was just dead for 10 minutes until he left. The rest of the games I've just gone double stargate phoenix with early upgrades into carriers (after double expanding because he never does harrass so I can take 6 gases immediately). Every game he does this and then when I kill his push with carriers and tempests he balance whines.
This was what I meant above when I was talking about "those" terrans. The one trick pony terrans. They're hilarious!
Ah, I had opened stargate and my robo was just finishing when I saw it coming so I promptly died. That makes more sense. Stargate units seemed useless against it.
Even if you open SG your robos should be in time. SG units are pretty useful, with stasis and oracles dealing with ravagers if there are no queens, or they are too slow.
On February 11 2019 11:48 Ben... wrote: Ah, I had opened stargate and my robo was just finishing when I saw it coming so I promptly died. That makes more sense. Stargate units seemed useless against it.
Thanks!
Often times Bly and SOMETIMES namshar will do this build against showtime on stream. Showtime will usually be playing double stargate into double robo which has a fairly low gateway count I think. He (obviously) has really good unit control, but I would recommend watching a few of those games if you get the chance to see how he approaches the defense of it.
On February 06 2019 07:10 StaNi wrote: Can you name top lvl aggressive protoss players? By aggressive, I mean those who play the first number, impose their game, as it plays from themselves. If he sees the opportunity to finish the game here and now, he does it, and not like most toss players who try to go out into the macro and win there. As I understand, in Korea her0 can be attributed to those, who else? If you take out of Korea, then we have 2 high lvl protoss players - ShowTime and Neeb. The first one is exactly passive, he plays from an opponent, but what about an American? Sorry for my English =\
Has is a well known early game aggressive protoss player. He will usually cheese or do all in's at a very high level. Check out his 2018 WCS Valencia games on Youtube!
On February 15 2019 04:04 ssregitoss wrote: best response to tank marine 2 base all ins still colossis play.
I invite you to post a replay where you pull that off, cause I wholeheartedly disagree lol
Yup. If there's banshees, colossus might work, but if it's a raven with the marine/tank, then colossus is useless since it'll just get disabled. I'm watching Stats' stream, and this exact thing literally just happened to him. He got hit with a slightly slower marine/tank/raven attack and the raven disabled 3 colossi and he basically got walked over from there.
On February 15 2019 04:04 ssregitoss wrote: best response to tank marine 2 base all ins still colossis play.
I invite you to post a replay where you pull that off, cause I wholeheartedly disagree lol
Yup. If there's banshees, colossus might work, but if it's a raven with the marine/tank, then colossus is useless since it'll just get disabled. I'm watching Stats' stream, and this exact thing literally just happened to him. He got hit with a slightly slower marine/tank/raven attack and the raven disabled 3 colossi and he basically got walked over from there.
Exactly. Most of the 2 base timings/all ins hit around 6 minutes, and the colossus count at that point CAN be high enough but its pretty hard to pull off. Im finding pretty good success with sentry as second unit for hallucination scout, and if I scout the build I cancel blink and chrono charge. it works marvelously, as the hallucination scout usually confirms build right as or right after the twilight finishes. Going twilight before robo tho.
I saw an interesting iteration of Stats' defence against the marine/tank raven push on his stream today. He went colossus, but also went archives for one high templar in a warp prism to feedback the raven. With it, he held the push easily.