TvP – A Terran’s view - Page 36
Forum Index > StarCraft 2 Strategy |
Kazeyonoma
United States2912 Posts
| ||
Somnolence
Lithuania127 Posts
| ||
dlax
United States37 Posts
As a Toss player, QXC seems to have one of the most frustrating styles to deal with. There is just no way for toss to match a dropship's worth of mm until charge and feedback. Harassing a P not only freezes the army, it allows T to gauge where P is in their tech progression. The combination of harass with exploitation of the storm and thermal lance upgrades is really the best way to work TvP. (Well placed EMP's can literally subdue a massive P poosh) | ||
Mindflow
Korea (South)320 Posts
| ||
Doz
United States145 Posts
On January 07 2011 22:58 Lurk wrote: Of course we have to invest in tech switches. First off all, one production building is often not enough to produce sufficient units, even when using reactors - so you have to add production buildings. Next there is upgrades. Bio, mech and air all have completely different damage/armor upgrades so you'll have to start from scratch. And that is not to mention things like energy upgrades, cloak etc. I'm not saying terran has a harder time tech switching than other races, but we don't have an easier time either. And saying we already have the counter to everything readily available is pretty stupid. If we have barracks, factory, starport, ghost academy and armory of course we can make everything (barring bcs). Just like a toss who has a stargate, warpgates, robo and templar archives. Just because we get it anyway does not mean that it is any easier to get. For the record, EMP is NOT instant but is a projectile that CAN miss if the enemy moves out quickly. And it does NOT have "like infinite range" but rather slightly more (+1) range than feedback and storm. Protoss can't do effective drops ? Just because many protoss don't recognize how awesome warp prisms are does not mean that they are useless. You should watch some games of whitera for example. He uses a lot of warp prisms lately and does really nice stuff with them. Those "paperplanes" as you call them have only 10 hp less than a medivac at equal speed. So how are they any more fragile than the medivac ? Oh and did i mention they don't cost gas ? This one made me laugh. I'd actually like to see thors used to stomp down forcefields by anyone and still win the fight. By the time your slow ass thor walks over the forcefields, they have disappeared anyway. It's not like you have to move near a ff to crush it, you have to walk on top of it. Of and of course your 300/200 unit does a whooping 0 damage while it trying to stomp ffs. Yes, that is why we add medivacs, vikings and ghosts to the mix. As a diamond T player, I've always felt that tech switches could be quite troublesome. Not necessarily any more or less than any other race, but uniquely so. Think of this: A T player on 3 bases needs at least 10-13 barracks (some reactor, some tech) to be able to constantly produce MM without having to queue in order to be able to replenish their army in a reasonable amount of time. If we got to this point and P switches to HT tech, and a T player wants to switch to mech play to stand a better chance against storms, they would have to make 5-6 factories w/ tech labs and another 1-2 with reactors, if they want to be able to replace their army in a reasonable amount of time. Or they could put down 6 starports to support BC production, but even that would take a long time to replace an army. All these structures take up a huge amount of real-estate, and a tech switch of this magnitude costs a huge amount of resources and time for the necessary production facilities to come online. It might take 4-5 minutes of play to make an effective transition army, all the while P can continue pumping units that decimate MMM out of the same 10-12 warpgates and 1-2 robo's. My point is this: When faced with the decision of continuing MMM pushes/harrass and hoping for P to make a mistake, or gambling that you won't get overrun in a lengthy tech switch process that might not work, most will opt to hope the P makes a mistake. The pressure a good 3 base P player is able to put out can just be too much to handle for most players, so we hope for the best with our MMM/VG. For the average diamond T such as myself, it is my humble opinion the matchup is getting boring simply because at my skill level it feels a viable tech switch is out of reach. For the pro's on the other hand, well they're just demi-gods and I envy their l33t skills. | ||
0c3LoT
Canada162 Posts
| ||
0c3LoT
Canada162 Posts
On January 08 2011 06:45 Doz wrote: As a diamond T player, I've always felt that tech switches could be quite troublesome. Not necessarily any more or less than any other race, but uniquely so. Think of this: A T player on 3 bases needs at least 10-13 barracks (some reactor, some tech) to be able to constantly produce MM without having to queue in order to be able to replenish their army in a reasonable amount of time. If we got to this point and P switches to HT tech, and a T player wants to switch to mech play to stand a better chance against storms, they would have to make 5-6 factories w/ tech labs and another 1-2 with reactors, if they want to be able to replace their army in a reasonable amount of time. Or they could put down 6 starports to support BC production, but even that would take a long time to replace an army. All these structures take up a huge amount of real-estate, and a tech switch of this magnitude costs a huge amount of resources and time for the necessary production facilities to come online. It might take 4-5 minutes of play to make an effective transition army, all the while P can continue pumping units that decimate MMM out of the same 10-12 warpgates and 1-2 robo's. My point is this: When faced with the decision of continuing MMM pushes/harrass and hoping for P to make a mistake, or gambling that you won't get overrun in a lengthy tech switch process that might not work, most will opt to hope the P makes a mistake. The pressure a good 3 base P player is able to put out can just be too much to handle for most players, so we hope for the best with our MMM/VG. For the average diamond T such as myself, it is my humble opinion the matchup is getting boring simply because at my skill level it feels a viable tech switch is out of reach. For the pro's on the other hand, well they're just demi-gods and I envy their l33t skills. That's why you either need to: a) Thug it out and bare the storms with your bio army. While it is pretty lame that all P have to do is spam warp HT/storm, you can still defeat a P opponent with MMMG if he's going HT. (Just requires a lot of micro and attacking multiple points at once, map permitting, so you can do some production/economy damage in the trade) b) Assume the player will go HT eventually if he sees you massing bio and preemptively start the tech switch. c) Make a gradual tech switch, reinforcing your bioball with mech until the bioball dies off & you're ready to go all mech. I do agree with the real estate part tho. I often find myself building towards the center of the map. The plus side to this is less travel time. The negative is that its easy for the opponent to counter and take a sizable amount of your production out. | ||
gillon
Sweden1578 Posts
On January 08 2011 02:36 superstartran wrote: Terran players are worse at macro then Z and P players for a reason, because all of the strats that they have built around have been very all innish. Everyone knew T players would be bad at macro games once they were brought into line (Siege Tank nerf, Reaper Nerf, Medivac speed nerf, numerous buffs to both races) because they simply hadn't practiced them enough, while P and Z players have been constantly playing long macro games since the beginning of retail. Every single popular T strat to date has been extremely all innish 1) 1-1-1 Blue Helion drop, if this fails, you are set way behind 2) 3 Rax Reaper Rush, all innish (but OP obviously) 3) Marine/Tank/Raven push off a 1-1-1 build (predominantly 1 base play strat vs P) 4) Bio drops off 1 base into mass stim timing 80+ food attack 5) 3-1-2 Marine/Banshee/Raven 10 minute push etc. Virtually every single T strat that has developed has revolved around strong 1 base play that is suppose to outright kill or cripple your opponent. Not many Ts have ever developed strong macro style of play except STC and Jinro, and STC no longer plays anymore. Even during the beta T strats revolved around extremely strong early game that put them far ahead of the other races. I'd suggest getting a clue before generalizing like this. Don't you think there is a reason as to why allins and 2 base plays are so prevalent? In TvP, atleast, you're simply disadvantaged from the get go after the 17 minute mark. So statistically, if you want to win, do it fast. I've been trying to play macro games since release in TvP but it just ends up relying on the P player to screw up badly. I can be ahead, I can be the better player (mechanically), but if my units aren't killing stuff at a reasonable rate I'm not going to win. | ||
julius33
Estonia79 Posts
| ||
Liquid`Jinro
Sweden33719 Posts
On January 24 2011 17:44 julius33 wrote: I just dont get it why terrans say that and i quote "Mech is immobile". Last time i checked, unsieged tanks move as fast (or maybe abit slower) then your bioball, Hellions are one of the fastest units in the game and, since most terrans go bioball with medivac early game, i dont see the harm in lifting your Thors until you need to engage. Most of the terrans i play against never really seem to abuse their mobility as even a drop in my main (mineral lines, or just killing pylons) with stimrauders will cause so much damage... Terrans really need to get better with macro, since its either 1base all-ins or just plain 2basing. Mech is incredibly immobile - siege tanks arent nearly as fast as stimmed bio, and you know what else they dont have? They dont have concussive shells. Also gotta SIEGE, which takes forever. I like mech but of course its immobile, in fact its extremely immobile. | ||
dark fury
Sweden426 Posts
What annoys me as a Protoss player is that its so hard to actually punish a terran player for making mistakes. Even if you kill most of his army without losing to much of your own stuff, you still wont be able to engage his planetary fortress with seiged tanks behind it, while a bunch of stimmed marauders will raze down a protoss expansion in a matter of seconds. Its so easy for terran to counter attack and abuse drops in your main/natural, while we are stuck with our immobile ball :/ | ||
Praxis1452
41 Posts
With the mass marine pressure, I've added ghosts as more of an all-in if you believe it's viable at that point to win, and also just expanding with some early pressure. Once you take your 2nd though, you transition to mech. The toss will generally go colossi to deal with your marine ball. At this point you can switch the reactor from 1 rax to a starport, and put down 2 factories with which to make thors. Take the 3rd rax that was originally there and go marauders. So basically marauder, thor, viking against some colossi ball. If he's going HT's both marauders and thors do much better than marines. I still do mix in marines though from 1 reactored rax. I've tried and thought about tanks, but I find it hard to get a "critical number" or atleast enough to deal with the amount of zealots he's gonna throw my way. At this point you should have a couple medevacs or vikings and I've been thinking about trying to micro your thors with the medevacs so that they can strike cannon the colossi. At the same time that I am trying to use mech, it's really a 2 base kind of build, because it's about beating that colossi combo and just plain rolling over your opponent. Overall, I think that P has a huge advantage late game because late game the combat area is larger, and you need to mobility to harass and try and take out P's expansions. At the same time, mech play is simply not well suited to doing this. Either the tanks/mech kinda stops them from expanding, or they roll the person, or they lose. But it's not really possible to harass so much as stop the person in their tracks before toss can get a 3rd up. Not to mention, it's really very difficult to have a situation in which T wins in a straight up fight. All these add up to bio's dominance. | ||
sleepingdog
Austria6145 Posts
At least for me, this makes playing PvT pretty frustrating. In PvZ I always have the feeling that some games are on a razor's edge with many battles really close. In PvT, even against equally skilled opponents, I either stomp or get stomped - the game is in 90% of the cases decided by one battle, and one battle only if it involves playing against MMM. | ||
Mehukannu
Finland421 Posts
On January 24 2011 17:44 julius33 wrote: I just dont get it why terrans say that and i quote "Mech is immobile". Last time i checked, unsieged tanks move as fast (or maybe abit slower) then your bioball, Hellions are one of the fastest units in the game and, since most terrans go bioball with medivac early game, i dont see the harm in lifting your Thors until you need to engage. Most of the terrans i play against never really seem to abuse their mobility as even a drop in my main (mineral lines, or just killing pylons) with stimrauders will cause so much damage... Terrans really need to get better with macro, since its either 1base all-ins or just plain 2basing. You are saying that terrans should learn to macro which then would hurt your medivac/thor (+rest of your army) micro and if you keep microing your units your macro starts to suffer. I also have to say that it might still work with 1 or 3 thors, but if you start to get more it won't be worth to do it anymore and to make it even less viable is that those phoenix openings are getting more popular, so I don't see protoss not to try shoot down medivacs with or without thors inside. Also, it is not the problem that tanks doesn't move fast enough, it is that you have to put them in siege mode for them to be effective, which then of course slows you down, because you don't want to move out most of the time without your tanks. | ||
Thrombozyt
Germany1269 Posts
On January 24 2011 20:27 Mehukannu wrote: Also, it is not the problem that tanks doesn't move fast enough, it is that you have to put them in siege mode for them to be effective, which then of course slows you down, because you don't want to move out most of the time without your tanks. It's even worse than that in my experience. Tanks in TvP only work properly in a contain (see Naama vs Mana) or while defending your own base, because in those situations you have bunkers protecting your meatshield from the splash. If tanks are sieged, your infantry can't maneuver properly because a) your tanks are in the way and b) you don't want to abandon your tanks. Zealot efficiency increases a lot because you cannot run as well, the tanks deal only little damage to them and on top the tanks splash hurts your troops just as much as his. This leads to the conclusion, that you need bunkers or other buildings in conjuctions with tanks to shield the tanks, and there is little that is less mobile than a bunker. I heard even hydras off creep are faster. | ||
branflakes14
2082 Posts
| ||
Lurk
Germany359 Posts
On January 24 2011 21:35 branflakes14 wrote: I still find it ridiculous that Terran players forget they have a unit that can cloak, EMP and/or Snipe High Templar. We do not forget that and most of us actually use ghosts. However, their high cost and very micro intensive skills makes mastering them virtually impossible. Snipe is a good example of this: apart from workers, unupgrades marines and zerglings you need to actually click several times to kill a single unit. While this might work well in small skirmishes, it's impossible to achieve in bigger engagements. Imagine, in order to kill 4 zealots, you need to click snipe 16 times. Now try to do that in the 1-2 seconds window you have to actually have to do this. Maybe it would be better if snipe would deal 2 damage per energy and consume as much energy as possible. So if you had 75 energy and sniped a zealot, it would consume all energy and one-shot the zealot. Or at least some auto-cast option. But as of right now, snipe is probably the most apm-intensive skill in the game if you want to use it properly. Ghosts are a very powerful unit, probably the most powerful terran unit in the TvP matchup. However, they are also quite fragile and expensive. Also remember that not every toss is nice enough to just leave all their army unattended and clumped together so you can just walk up to them and emp them. Quite often, i had my ghost killed by feedback while trying to sneak up to the main templar force because i missed an observer and he saw me coming. I think the biggest problem with microing ghosts is that managing a bioball (kiting zealots, dodging storms) and doing multiple drops at once is already so micro intensive that there is little attention span left to do sneaky little ghost "ops". Maybe it's easier to do that while playing mech which takes less micro to maintain, but then you will have trouble finding the gas for ghosts. | ||
Artanias
Denmark40 Posts
On January 07 2011 23:39 Lurk wrote: Don't read too much into my post i was just trying to correct some things that you stated. Obviously i misunderstood your post too if i wasn't a rant about how op terran is. You're a protoss player and obviously have a biased perspective of things, just like i have as a terran player. That's why we should help each other understand the misconceptions we have about the other's race. Like me telling you emp has not infinite but 10 range and is not instant (although it actually rarely happens that you miss). You free to and i would actually appreciate you telling me about misconceptions about toss as well. This would help my understanding of the matchup and improve my play. The message of the thread is not that it's favored one way or the other but rather a discussion to improve or diversify terran lategame tactics vs protoss. As most terrans don't fell the matchup is well-balanced but rather that we have an advantage in the early game but a disadvantage in the late game (leading to about 50% win rate and giving the impression of a balanced matchup). | ||
Thrombozyt
Germany1269 Posts
On January 24 2011 22:03 Lurk wrote: We do not forget that and most of us actually use ghosts. However, their high cost and very micro intensive skills makes mastering them virtually impossible. Snipe is a good example of this: apart from workers, unupgrades marines and zerglings you need to actually click several times to kill a single unit. While this might work well in small skirmishes, it's impossible to achieve in bigger engagements. Imagine, in order to kill 4 zealots, you need to click snipe 16 times. Now try to do that in the 1-2 seconds window you have to actually have to do this. Maybe it would be better if snipe would deal 2 damage per energy and consume as much energy as possible. So if you had 75 energy and sniped a zealot, it would consume all energy and one-shot the zealot. Or at least some auto-cast option. But as of right now, snipe is probably the most apm-intensive skill in the game if you want to use it properly. Ghosts are a very powerful unit, probably the most powerful terran unit in the TvP matchup. However, they are also quite fragile and expensive. Also remember that not every toss is nice enough to just leave all their army unattended and clumped together so you can just walk up to them and emp them. Quite often, i had my ghost killed by feedback while trying to sneak up to the main templar force because i missed an observer and he saw me coming. I think the biggest problem with microing ghosts is that managing a bioball (kiting zealots, dodging storms) and doing multiple drops at once is already so micro intensive that there is little attention span left to do sneaky little ghost "ops". Maybe it's easier to do that while playing mech which takes less micro to maintain, but then you will have trouble finding the gas for ghosts. Apart from the micro requirement, ghosts don't have enough energy. Cloak is needed to increase chances to get that money EMP to reasonable levels and EMP is 75 energy. Most of the time ghosts will run dry very soon after that one EMP when cloaked. Also the damage/energy ration of a sniper round is worse than most spells and on top of it it has a very awkward casting animation. I experimented with ghosts protecting marine balls from banelings using the snipe ability, but the casting point of snipe is so late, that the hard task to targeting every baneling becomes nearly impossible as you have to target every baneling half a second before he gets in splash range. I might consider using it, if it would add a 2 second stun to the targeted bio unit or a larger range (like a 12+ range) so that you could use it to pick out prime targets in an attacking zerg horde. | ||
gejfsyd
Poland156 Posts
Its a little like the oposite of tvp in brood war. In BW late game terran army was unbeatable in direct asoult without some high tech units(arbiter, templar, carrier), so protosses eighter have to tech and put some nice stasis or recal and abuse imobility of terran siegetanks | ||
| ||