Home Forum Starcraft Tournaments

Welcome to the largest collection of Starcraft battle reports on the internet. Join the ranks of famous reporters by writing about your Starcraft games. We also gladly accept reports and tournaments of other types of games. Battle Reports  View Reports  Report Search  Hall of Fame  Top Reporters  File Upload Center  SUBMIT REPORTS Replays  View Replays  Top Replays  Most Recent  Replay Search  SUBMIT REPLAYS Other  Wiki  Downloads  Interviews  FAQ  Help Guides

"In the air I had floating an engineering bay, a barracks, a factory, and 5 command centers." -.Praetor Classic TvZ View or Add Comments (# of comments thus far: 35) Author: shockwave IP: exchangeXXXX Date: 01/07/00 01:01 Game Type: Starcraft Labels: Famous Reporter(1), Starcraft(1), Old Classic(1), Problem: Broken Images(1), Strategy Focused(1) Categorize this report Report Rating: 8.0, # of Ratings: 2, Max: 8, Min: 8 Lifetime Rating for shockwave: 8.9231 Classic TvZ Game Type Pub 1on1 Map Lost Temple Players Shockwave vs. random clan player (forgot his name/clan) Races T, Z (random/random) Starts T:12 (yuck), Z:6 Victor Shockwave Motivation I confess first of all that I really do need screenshots to make this report effective. However, since I don't have any on hand, I will do my best to explain in gory detail so that you can get as much out of it as possible without the benefit of pictures. I generally write battle reports for the purpose of sharing strats, not for simply reporting on interesting games. The goal of this particular BR is to explain some concepts behind TvZ land matchups, and hence there will be a lot of strategy and comments interlaced. If comments and explanations bore you, just ignore the small print and read through the narrative in the battle report, it should still be fairly coherent. Background As most of you know, I've been sticking to 2on2's lately to work on my team skills, mostly because I am sick of apologizing for being a lousy partner when I play competitive games with nwtr and nohunters folks. As a result, my 1on1 games have gone downhill, and one particular matchup I despise is TvZ. Despite knowing theory, I am horrible at execution and tend to get run over by even semi-competent Zerg players. Fortunately, this game was an exception and I actually went to bed happy as a result. Early Game I cursed my luck when I got the 12 o'clock Terran start (no CC add-on space at either my natural or my mins-only expansion). If this was ladder, I may have considered just turbo-conceding, but I figured I'd play it out since I always learn best from adversity. I did the usual 8th->depot, 10th->rax, and front-gated my ramp. I think next time I will 8th->rax, 9th->depot so I have marines out earlier. I sent my 9th SCV scouting and soon found my Zerg opponent at 6. _ I scout early with my SCV because you can do all sorts of fun stuff to opponents before they have military units. You can harass SCVs building structures, offensive gas them, kill peons since your SCVs have more hit points than other races' peons, etc. Most importantly, it gives you recon of your opponent's race, which will drastically affect your build orders and strategies. Finally, early scouting alerts you to 4-pools or other early ling attacks. If your opponent is 4-pooling, you will need to pull a few SCVs off your minerals and put them on your ramp to blockade so that your marines can fire safely from behind and your bunker can complete. Note also that 1 SCV beats 1 zergling, I believe. Scouting caught a drone right as it was coming out of his base to build a hatchery at his expansion; he was 10/9 hatching. I took pot shots at the drone to keep it from morphing, then just went straight to his main once he succeeded in getting his hatch started. _ Slime alert: stopping the early double hatch. There are a number of slimy things you can do when you see a Zerg trying to early hatch at his expansion. One is to attack the drone so it cannot morph. Another is to just build a structure at his expansion where his hatch should go. Pylons work, or you can also half-construct a supply depot and then cancel later once he sends out zergling to bust it. If you're Zerg and catch a 10/9 build or later build, you can just send your drone to his main and morph it into a creep colony. Your pool may not be done yet, but it should be by the time the creep colony is finished. You can then offensive sunken him if he doesn't react appropriately. Knowing that he was short on drones because he was 10/9 hatching, I went to drone harass with my SCV. I attacked a drone on the outskirts, and I immediately sent another SCV to build a bunker right beside his hatch. I would have just used the first to build my bunker, but my barraks was still completing since I had chosen to go for the 10th->rax build. My harassing SCV actually managed to kill a drone before it died.

_

When my peon is attacking an enemy peon, I keep alert so I can RIGHT-CLICK back to one of my mineral patches immediately when I get the "under attack" message that signifies that he's countering with his peons. Harvesting peons are allowed walk right through other units, so this usually ensures that my SCV gets away without being killed. In addition, if I'm Toss, I can just wait til my shields regenerate on my probe and then send it back in to harass again after a bit of time. Peon harassment is great: not only might you kill an enemy peon, but you may also be able to disrupt BO's and cause a general nuisance to prevent your opponent from managing his base effectively.

The Typical Offensive Bunker

I built my bunker flush on the north side of his morphing expansion hatchery. I also started rallying my marines to the building bunker. I'm not *sure* if the morphing hatch gives enough sight range for him to be able to see my bunker building next to the hatch; in any case, if he did see my bunker, there was nothing he could do about it since his pool was still building.

_

Offensive bunkering an early expansion is a great great tactic against Zerg. You should generally always try for offensive containment in TvZ. Generally strategies against Terran are in the form of: "When pool is finished, build 6 zerglings and go attack the offensive bunker that he should have built by now." If you're bunkering a hachery, it's also imperative that you put the bunker flush against the hatch so that it covers as much of his creep as possible. Otherwise, he can build a sunken out of range of your bunker and get rid of it safely. Note, though, that offensive bunkering will not work against 9-poolers or anything faster.

I held off loading my bunker until after the expansion hatch was finished. If he saw his hatch under attack by bunkered marines, he'd probably just cancel it and I would have lost the chance to kill the hatch. So I waited outside range, then loaded my 2 marines when his hatch morphed. He really didn't see my bunker at all, because 2 drones came to his hatch immediately, hoping to build creep colonies, and got blasted away. He's in deep trouble now. A handful of lings came to attack my bunker, but I'd repair it or run my SCV when they targetted it. It is probable that this is what really won me the game.

I next did a truly stupid thing after the hatch was dead and unloaded my marines (now up to 4 with 2 outside) to test his choke and recon his base. Obviously, there was another hatch at his ramp, and lings came out and tore my marines apart before they could get back into the bunker. Big mistake, there goes my offensive containment and chance at an easy win.

_

How do I take out that stupid bunker as Zerg if I let Terran set it up? You can forget about making any early cost-effective attacks against an offensive containment. If you're able to surround a bunker, though, it quickly falls. This is how you do it: Get a group of zergling, and MOVE them all toward the bunker. Move the first group past the bunker, as far out of range as possible, then coordinate both groups to attack the bunker from both sides. You'll lose some of the lings that run past; but then you surround the bunker easily and it'll fall. Once you have zergling speed, bunkers are no big deal. But if he has two bunkers set up, you might as well just wait until hydras or lurkers.

_

Nerd topic: Bunkers cannot focus fire. With most defensive structures, you can right-click on targets to focus fire. However, you cannot make your bunkers focus fire. In fact, they do not even seem to obey the AI that most other units have, which is to "naturally" focus fire on one target if it is in range of all the units. For example, if you take 5 stacked BCs and ATTACK-MOVE toward 5 stacked carriers, chances are that the 5 BCs will all focus fire on one of the carriers even though you didn't manually tell them to do so (i.e. by RIGHT-CLICKing on one of the carriers with your BCs). Bunkers tend to fire indiscriminately. If you're charging into a bunker with lings, the bunkers will tend to fire at the closest ling(s). However, once the bunker is surrounded, it'll just randomly fire at different units and thus be doing a lot of distributed damage. Use this to your advantage: it's always good anyway to try to get as many units as once to attack a unit simultaneously versus charging them in one by one; but in the case of anti-bunker, it's especially beneficial to do so.

The lings that destroyed my marines then proceeded toward my main base. He was fairly intelligent about his execution: 11 lings ignored my now-empty bunker and went toward my main, and 1 ling stayed behind to get rid of the bunker. Fortunately, I had some marines from my 2-rax at home behind my wall-in, as well as another bunker, so his resulting counter attack was ineffective.

During this time, I'd been teching too. As soon as I got my offensive bunker up way back then, I had started on gas and gotten a factory with add on, going siege tanks, and also built an academy to get meds and upgrades.

_

Staying ahead on tech is vitally important when playing TvZ. I usually tech as soon as I feel safe. I've lost many games because I execute a brilliant offensive bunker, then get run over by lurkers. Once you have tanks and med/marines, there is virtually nada a Zerg can do against you directly except maybe do cheese lurker drops into your mineral line. He can only contain with lurkers.

His Expansion Falls Again

My next attack force was 4 marines, 2 meds, and a tank with siege toward his expansion after I had repelled his ling attack. This came slightly after his failed ling attack. To give a sense of time frame, he had just rebuilt his natural hatch again. I sieged my tank, then sent in my marines to clobber the hatch. It fell despite some ling harassment, and no forces came afterward to oppose me. I predicated that this was because he must have been teching to lurkers.

I was correct. I comsatted his base and saw lair and hydra den. I immediately unsieged my tank and two lurkers came and burrowed while I turned tail and ran back to my base. The lurkers pursued, so I ordered 1 marine to attack each of the lurkers while my expensive stuff (meds, tank) ran back home. Of course, his lurkers burrowed and killed my marines, but it bought me time to setup my defenses.

Back at home, I lifted my rax at my wallin and replaced it with a turret. The wall-in really was only for emergency situations if I was caught without detection so that the lurkers would have to destroy the wallin before running straight into my base. I got some shots off on the lurkers but they then burrowed outside siege and detection range to play containment. One lurker burrowed at the east side of my natural to prevent me from expanding there, also out of tank and turret range.

_

Slime alert: Lurker cheese drops. Front door lurker rushes are not too difficult to counter. However, it's very important that you scout the edges of your base for any stray overlords. One of the more popular Zerg attacks these days is to hang an overlord at the edge of a Terran base, go fast lurkers and transport, and use the overlord as a slow elevator to get the lurkers into the Terran base by bypassing the choke. This can really be a killer: Even if Terran does have a tank/bunker in your mineral line, the lurkers can often burrow somewhere undetected and cause a ton of headache. So there are a few checklist things you should do in every game, including: 1. Take your first combat unit and attack-move it around the outskirts of your base to look for any hiding peons or cheese offensive cannon/rax attempts. 2. Patrol an expendable unit on the outskirts of your base to watch for elevator lurker drops.

Lurker Containment Hits

This is when the Terran player starts getting really annoyed. Lurker containment is pretty much a given in TvZ games, just as DT/dragoon containment against Terran is still the popular way to go. It really irked me that I couldn't land my command center at my natural. I briefly considered landing my CC at my mins-only expansion or floating it to an island, and building another CC to bring to my natural later, but I decided against it.

_

How do I get rid of those lurkers at my choke? There are many options to break lurker containment. You can tech straight to SVs and huddle in your base until you can break out, or you can build tons of tanks and push your way out with comsat (lurkers take three sieged tank shots to kill, and I believe comsat allows a single tank to fire twice), and I've even seen really interesting anti-lurker strats where you use marine/meds plus one firebat in conjunction with comsat if you don't have tanks. The latter is actually pretty cost effective: the lurker shoots at the firebats and requires 3 hits to kill it, meanwhile the marines get free shots. This works with isolated lurkers, but don't try it on stacked lurkers unless you're desperate. The best option, in my opinion, is to just ignore the lurker containment for now and work on other routes, such as with dropships, until you have science vessels. Whatever you do, don't build too many tanks, because you want to save that gas for more flexible units later on like marine/meds and SVs. The bulk of my forces is always marine/meds against Zerg, with enough tanks to combat lurkers and support against hydras.

I should mention that during the time he was setting up containment, I had built 2 valkyries and started on dual infantry upgrades (armor first if you have to choose, because it means marines can survive 2 hits from a lurker) as well as ship weapons upgrades for my valkyries. The ship ugrades are not immediately useful, but it will be vital later if I run up against muta/guard/dev combos.

_

As a matter of personal preference, I usually transition more toward air in mid game against Zerg since Zerg usually go lurkers to guardians. I thus only really build a few tanks through the whole game. Upgraded valks tear apart muta/guardian/devourers, and I will always start the +1 ship weapons upgrade immediately to make them even more effective. Zerg cannot usually keep up in upgrades since they need to spend time morphing their spire into greater spire, and dual spires are expensive at mid game stages. Equally viable is researching armor first, since that reduces devourer effectiveness and also counts a full +1 against each muta bounce.

I sent my valks to do a some overlord hunting. As a matter of preference, I like building valks in this stage over wraiths because I can keep them alive easier due to more hit points, they have better range and thus are better at OL hunting, particularly OLs in groups of course, and finally -- and most importantly -- they handle mutas really well. A comsat had revealed a spire, but I think my valks sufficiently discouraged him from attempting to build any mutas.

_

For you Zerg players, if your Terran opponent gets too aggressive with valks, remember that you can just build scourge to take them out. You can clone scourge to take out any number of valks if you do this correctly, because it takes considerable time for the valks to actually start firing and then for their missiles to hit the scourge by the time they see it. You can even use pure scourge against scouts since the same phenomenum is true with scout missiles, but nobody builds scouts in Brood War... This is a great way to punish valk users and establish air dominance.

I am very happy now: my choke was protected, my main base was protected, I'm getting SVs as soon as my sci facility finishes, and I have sufficient defenses to handle any lair-level attack. The only thing that still makes me mad is that lurker preventing my CC from landing at my natural.

While my sci facility is building, I make one dropship and load up a bunch of marine/meds. If he wants to contain me at my choke, he can be my guest; however, my dropship will give me the mobility I need and my valks will protect me from any muta threats. A quick comsat in his base shows a spore colony there and not much else. There are lots of lings and hydras, but that's no big deal for a bunch of marine/meds. I land at the backside of his base, stim up, and run in. This was probably the game-winning attack for me. He did eventually kill my force, but he lost a lot of drones, lings, and hydras in the process.

_

I find that many Zerg do not defend their main bases adequately, especially in late game. In early game, they build a couple of sunkens and that's enough to hold off any real attacks. In later game, though, those sunkens mean squat, and most Zerg I see focus on producing units at their expansions or rallying their units away from their main. I often win games just doing strikes against the poorly-defended Zerg main. In later game, you can just clone a bunch of science vessels to irradiate whatever defense is there, then send in marine/meds to clean up. So as Zerg, it's a good idea to have a lurker burrowed in your mineral line to protect against drops. One sunken cannot even take out a single marine/med because the damage output is not high enough, so lurkers are really your only option. However, nobody thinks to "waste" a lurker keeping it in their mineral line. Too bad for them :-).

During the successful attack, I started a naked expansion in the top left island. I was counting on my patrolling valks to spot any mass overlord drops, so I felt confident that my expansion and main didn't need other drop protection. I also noticed him starting an expansion at 9 with my valkyries. I sent another dropship with 6 marines, 2 meds to take that out, and there were no defenses there. My opponent was following a typical anti-Terran strategy: Contain, expand, then go for choke-busters such as guardians, or mass air control with mutas. Given that he had lost a few overlords and just lost his new expansion and drones, I knew he wouldn't have much left to combat me. I could have also turbo newbied his expansion, but this is not trivial since most Zerg will have overlords at their.

End Game

The game was pretty much over at this point, barring any super successful surprise attacks by Zerg. My science vessels finished, so I unsieged one tank and had it attack-move each lurker at my choke. Tanks outrange lurkers, so I took them out with no loss (he actually unburrowed one of the lurkers and ran it away). And I finally landed my CC and started on extra gas.

_

Nerd topic: Accel/decel issues with outranging units. Tanks have range 6 unsieged, lurkers have range 5. So you should just be able to attack-move a tank toward a lurker without micro, and the tank will shoot from out of range. However, sometimes the tank will actually stop in range of the lurker before firing, and will thus shoot at range 5 instead of 6. The reason is because of Blizzard's unit deceleration mechanics. Units such as guardians suffer particularly from this phenomenum because they have a tendency to drift into range of turrets if you don't micro them carefully. This happens because units don't start to decelerate until AFTER they have reached their range of the target. A guardian will move full speed toward a turret, then start shooting and decelerating after it's at range 8. But by the time it stops, it may have drifted into range 7. Analogously, suppose you want to park your car in your garage. Typically, you'd start decelerating as you approached your driveway. The Blizzard model would make you drive full speed into the garage and then decelerate once you got there. If you MOVE a unit to a location, it will slow down before the spot and usually hit it on the mark. But if you ATTACK-MOVE e.g. your speed-upgraded scout toward a wraith, it will most often end up nose to nose with the wraith and not fire from maximum distance. This also happens with spellcasters: SVs have massive range with irradiate; but you've all probably experienced the phenomenum where you go to irradiate a pack of mutas, and your SV charges right into the middle of them and then casts irradiate afterward. To get around this, hold down SHIFT and first MOVE toward a spot slightly outside your range of the target, then ATTACK-MOVE, or IRRADIATE, or what not. Your unit will stop at the first position, then attack, and this will allow you to maximize range.

You might be wondering how I could afford to build science vessels, armories, dual infantry upgrades, tanks, dropships, and valkyries all out of one gas. Actually, gas was quite limited during this time; but since I mostly produced marines and only had a few siege tanks during the whole game, I could save up gas for other units. This isn't to say that I had plentiful gas, but I had enough to get the tech I needed. One expansion with gas is really all I need to pump continuous science vessels and marine/meds, and I don't generally need much more than that to win a game against Zerg :-).

After securing my expansion, I proceeded with my 2 dropships of marine/meds and science vessels and dropped his main again, this time successfully wiping it out despite meeting very heavy resistance, primarily from lings/hydras. GG's were exchanged and I called it a night.

Conclusions

In closing, I will bring up a few points from the Zerg player's point of view. My opponent was competent, but made several mistakes that cost him the game. Those are easy to spot in my BR, and I am confident that a very astute Zerg player would have been able to counter some of my tactics. I am reporting this BR primarily because the tactics used by both sides in general adhere to the typical TvZ philosophy in this matchup.

1. My opponent needs to be more careful about expanding early against random. A 10/9 is safe against just about anything short of a 7 or pre-7 pool from another Zerg, but is ripe for offensive bunkering unless you are very astute at spotting it. I generally do a safe 9 pool when I random Zerg, especially since this give me good opportunity to ling harass -> lurker rush if I find my opponent is Terran.
2. Guarding your main or expansions is definitely necessary in mid game once dropships are available. You can use scourge to patrol for dropships, or burrow a couple of lurkers at each expansion. When I'm Toss, I generally will station one DT at each expansion against Terran, especially for island defense. Expanding naked or leaving your main open is only recommended if you are absolutely sure that your opponent will not drop on you.
3. Air mobility is still very important in mid-game Zerg versus Terran games. Although mutas cannot generally assault Terran bases directly, due to med/marines, they can certain help with containment. Having lurkers at front door, and mutas patrolling expansions, is a good way to achieve complete containment. Ceding air control because your opponent builds a couple of valkyries is a good way to lead to a loss. Scourge those valkyries, scourge those dropships, and get speed for overlord once you see wraiths to counteract cloaking.

S hckwave ___________XPOW