How to (Always) Beat Zerg (As Terran)

It’s been quite some time since I”ve made a post and that’s largely in part to my last post, I’ve been playing a lot.  IT seems blizzard deployed some hot fix because two days ago I logged in and after a game in each bracket I was promoted four times to diamond league.  I’ve been playing excessively like 40-50 games a day and have been doing extremely well maintaining my 75% win ratio.  So as I write this article I realize it’s going to be  stupidly long so I”ll probably be splitting this off into a few posts.  If this is part 1 of an article on beating zerg this part will deal with the psychology of a zerg player that you are beating.  I play terran exclusively in 1v1 but have jumped into zerg and protoss for 2v2.  I should say I play protoss at a diamond level but my zerg is probably closer to a mid-platinum player.

As an introduction to this topic if you are a bronze level player you are probably steamrolling zerg players with nothing but marauders and marines.  Day9 refers to this as the “boring standard terran bullshit.”  It is exactly why so many zerg players consider terran to be stupidly overpowered.  Of course the bronze level zerg player at this point hasn’t quite realized that the problem isn’t the race but how he is playing.  So bronze players will continue to steam roll zerg players with the same old stuff.

Bronze level players fail to bio-ball so hard because either they don’t use banelings because they think they’re stupid or when they actually make them they don’t understand how to use them.  In silver banelings might get used but they get used to very poor effect actually costing the zerg player more than he hurts his opponent, he is essentially suiciding his own economy.  Once you start getting into gold up though you start seeing some changes.  Zerg players are beginning to use banelings and the baneling bust is coming.

For a Terran player who is pumping out nothing but marines and marauders and is sitting idly at his front with two supply depots and a rax protecting him the baneling bust is going to seem stupidly overpowered as it not only takes out your supply depot (OH KNOWS) but also wipes out huge chunks of your bioball and the ling army cleans up shop.  The Terran player may cry zomg Zerg OP and never fix the problem.

Okay so if you’re reading this you’re probably at stage 2 of the problem, acceptance.  You’re accepting that you made some fundamentally poor decisions, largely in tech but also in game play.

Step #1: Zerg Psychology

So why do zerg go ling/baneling openers, why does it always end up being mutalisks?

Let’s presume that you are a terran player going bio-ball.  A good Zerg player is actually not going to bust you, that’s a waste of banelings.  Instead what a GOOD Zerg is going to do is have 2 zerglings sitting near your ramp (but not in your sight) so that as soon as you move out he can prepare an attack.  A GOOD zerg player is just sitting there building exclusively drones.  When your attack comes he instantly hatches the army he needs to beat you and puts up some spines to help defend.  If he has a banelings nest down he will morph some of those lings into banelings to wipe out your ball.  The Zerg player at this point is actually AHEAD of you economically so all he needs to do is defend your bioball and he’ll have so many resources to throw at you.  So your bio-ball fails…. shit.  Banelings or zerglings with two queens and some spine crawlers have wiped you out.

The Zerg player is sitting well with his superior economy and is getting LAIR TECH.  Lair tech is important because it unlocks so many more tech options for them including rolly banelings, tier-2 ling upgrades, mutalisks, fast moving roaches, burrow movements, burrow, infestors and hydralisks.  For the small investment of 150 minerals 100 gas a Zerg player is going to unlock all the tools he needs to beat you.

So here you are doing one of two things, both may doom you.  The first thing is expanding to your natural and transferring SCVs.  Your army is now moved to protect your natural with some bunker placements.  You may even have an engineering bay down to get some tier-1   Of course a good Zerg has some lings outside of your base to see that you’re building an expansion so he is aware of it.  The Zerg player picks up mutalisks to harass your main.  You start spamming down missile turrets at a rate of 100 minerals per turret.  You’re also lining your expansion with them.  The Zerg player is going to use his mutalisks to do damage wherever he can until your entire base is covered in missile turrets.  You will spend 1-2 command centers in minerals (or think of it as 8-16 marines) in lining your base with missile turrets.

So you’re doing 1 of 2 things here.  The first possibility is that you are getting out vikings to try and deal with mutalisks.  You are an ‘unskilled Terran’ after all you already have that starport down.  Additionally you may try to get out some medivacs to heal up your stimmed marines.  The Zerg player now has MAP CONTROL.  He is expanding where he can and continuing to drone up.  Keep in mind his actual army count will always stay slightly lower than yours.  This is a sort of Zerg trap.  If you scan him and go OMG HIS ARMY IS TINY he can insta-hatch a very large army to wipe out your force.  So for now you are stuck back turtling.

What is the Zerg player doing in the mean time?  He is getting some infestors and he is getting Hive tech.  Incoming ultralisks.  Once the wave of ultralisks, zerglings, banelings, infestors and mutalisks arrive at your door you are dead… that’s presuming you’ve survived this long.

So what’s the key to grab from all of this?  The Zerg player is DRONING while no pressure is put on and ARMYING when you lay it on.  So what this means is you need some tactic that can harass him and force him to turn some larvae into units.

Step #2: Harassment – Reapers vs. Hellions

A Zerg that is free to drone up and expand is increasingly deadly as the longer you allow a Zerg to drone the faster he’ll be able to produce armies and the scarier his pushes will look.  The early game key to beating a Zerg player is going to be harassment.

Terrans have two early anti-Zerg harassment paths, each leads to a different outcome.  First reapers since they’re so popular.

The “all-in” reaper play that was so popular involved making 5-rax all producing reapers and just getting a crital mass of reapers that can 1-shot any unit.  It was extremely effective early on and if it worked it worked well.  If it failed it transitioned into 5-rax marauder which only worked if the Zerg couldn’t get Lair tech and get some mutalisks out.

A lot of reaper play now focuses around 1-rax expansion.  The idea here is you use the reapers to harass the zerg and force him to get some lings or roaches.  All the while your command center is being built and you’ll be able to beat him economically pretty early on.  As well commonly the pros will built a bunker at the natural expansion of the Zerg player to delay 2-base player even further (salvaging it as it’s getting attacked so no mineral loss).  This strategy allows you to build more stuff for preference into a later game.

So what’s the problem with this strat?  It’s extremely vulnerable to early aggression Zerg players which are more common in gold-platinum levels.    It is a strat based on the meta game of pro gamers where Zerg will prefer to deal with harassment with a second expansion rather than play 1-base Zerg.

For a ladder player reapers will seem like a horribly option because it’ll leave them so extremely vulnerable to muta-ling build.  It essentially falls into the same trap that a bio-ball does.

So what about Hellions?

Hellions are faster than reapers but obviously can’t cliff jump.  Similar to reapers though they will do high damage against light units (zerglings/drones).  Hellion harass is also used in protoss play because of how stupidly high the DPS of blue-flame hellions is.

Hellions require a lot more micro-management.  You need to hit drones in a line.  If you can splash 2-3 of them that’s awesome.  If you have more hellions you start one-shotting drones.  The four-blue flame hellion drop is EXTREMELY potent specifically because as soon as you drop all four they will kill 8 harvesters.  If the player doesn’t move his line fast enough he’ll lose it all in literally seconds.

The hellions offers you something interesting, a factory.  Having a factory opens you up to so many options.  You can now make a starport for drop ships, vikings, banshees and ravens.  You can get siege tech and get some tanks out.  You can throw down an armory.  The only tech option you don’t get from a hellion opener is battlecruisers.

You can see why this is so extremely powerful because it will give you the tools to deal with anything the zerg player has.

Like I said, hellions are very micro intensive.  So if you’re a little bit weak on APM you’ll want to do a small stint of attacks and then go back to your base and queue up a bunch of SCVs, lay down more supply depots and get any tech you may want.

Big thing about hellions to remember is that they out-run speedlings off creep but not off.  So if you see his zerglings making a move you have to pull your hellions out and start kiting them.  That means attacking every 2.5 seconds and not allowing zerglings to get a surround.  For a 0-cost you should be able to wipe out some lings.

Hellions is also going to control his tech patterns.  He will need either mutalisks or roaches to deal with your hellions.

The Tech Trap

A tech trap  is a psychological play.  The idea is using a unit or two that are not a part of your main army body to  convince the player to invest heavily in ‘counters’ to that unit.  A common psychological trap is the 3-gate/starport shenanigans that a lot of protoss do.

The tactic involves charging a void ray off a proxy pylon and just sending them in to die.  They will take out some SCVs and wipe out all your marines.  The void rays just continue coming in constantly dying.  What is being controlled here is your bio-ball.  They are making it so that you are producing exclusively marines so that you can deal with this fully charged void ray.  Turrets can’t do it because they’ll get 2-shot by a void ray.  And when the main battle comes he shows up with a stupid amount of zealots and stalkers which marines cannot deal with effectively.

A tech trap works extremely well on people who do not scout…. and can do alright against people who do scout.  Zerg have to sacrifice overlords to scout your main base so tech traps work extremely well on zerg players.

If you are maintaining map control with your hellion the zerg player will not know when pushes are coming (except for overlord vision) and won’t know your tech  (unless overlords are being sacrificed in your base).  So all he will see from you is hellions.  All he can do right now is guess.

This means what your zerg will do will be based entirely on your choice.

Zerg have three strong anti-terran tech patterns:

(1) Banelings: As stated already banelings do extremely well against biological units like marines and marauders.

(2) Roach: This is an anti-infantry armored unit that does extremely well against hellions, reapers and marines.

(3) Mutalisks: Harassment air units that do extremely poor against any AA do excessively well in very high numbers.

So a zerg player has to deploy one or two of these to guess counter what you’re doing.

Here’s the joke, you’re going to deploy counter measures for all of these.

Your trap is with the hellions.  If he’s smart he won’t get banelings.  If he does you already have him beat.  If he builds roaches you will have armored units to deal with this.  If he gets mutalisks you’ll have the AA for this.

The grouping for this is: Hellions (anti-ling), Marauders (everything else ground), and Thors (mutalisks/everything ground).

They work in a ball.  You have your marauders out front to soak any baneling/roach damage.  You have your thor in the back to pick off mutalisks.  Then you have your blue-flame hellions between the marauders and thors to pick off lings.

As well when the game goes on long you get some medivacs to heal your marauders.

What will beat this is ultralisks.  However if you contain him to just one base he can’t afford too many ultralisks… so your marauders will just wreck them too.

Build Order Time

Build order is pretty important in this build.  It’s not like you can start with bio-ball and transition into this build.  The thing is it operates under a small timing window.  You only have 8 minutes to harass with the hellions and establish map control.

So your opener has to involve an obscenely fast factory.

In this build you are CONSTANTLY making SCVs.  At no point do you cut SCVs to try and get some early game cheese.  You’re a high level player now, you don’t cheese anymore.

To start queue up your 9 food SCV to where you want your first depot to go and queue another SCV after it.  Your SCV will arrive at the wall-off point just as you have 100 minerals for it.  Okay at 10 food you need to send a scout so take one off of your mineral line and go scout.  Check out his main.  If he is 6pooling (depend on the map size) you’ll see zerglings.

Your SCVs and his match up at this point.  If he is getting a spawning pool at 13-15 food you are safe.  When you are at 13 food move your SCV out of his base to his natural expansion.  Just keep it chilling there to see when he is expanding.  If you spot a drone coming to the natural use your SCV to kill it.  If it’s later like 16-18 supply he’ll probably have a spawning pool out.  Delaying this hatchery as much as you can is HUGE because his minerals will be sky-rocketing but he’ll have nothing to spend it on.

So if you do scout a 6-pool you cancel your gas and wall off asap.  Keep your rax going and pump out a marine pretty early.  You can go back to the build after you’ve dealt with this 6pool.  So the 6pool fails and he’s probably dedicating to some crazy all-in by getting gas up, more drones and maybe some banelings.  You can probably eliminate any early muta play because of how many drones he had to cut.

Moving on.  Say he’s standard 15-pool into expansion playing, that’s great.

You are getting your gas BEFORE your barracks.  The purpose of this is so that you will have 100 gas as soon as your barracks is finished.  Once again you never cut SCVs.

So your rax goes down and boom instantly build a factory.  After 10 more seconds you can afford a reactor so you can get two instant hellions.  You send them out and try and pick off some zerglings/drones.  Try your best to not lose these hellions.  If they take any health damage you should return home and repair them.  You should get another 2 hellions and use your barracks to create a tech lab.  If the zerg is very unaggressive only make four hellions and start teching.  Get yourself an armory down as soon as you can afford it.

With the barracks you had sitting around get a tech lab up as soon as possible.  If you can afford it get up a second factory (you should be able to).  You don’t need to make a thor but you need one to be available.

When I have 4 4-6 hellions and 3-4 marauders I’ll get out a thor as soon as possible.  If I don’t have a second rax or second factory I’ll just do a tech lab/reactor swap and just pump out some marines with the thor.  Before you go lay down some supply depots and queue up another thor.  Maybe even lay down some new unit producing structures (more factories and barracks) and just make sure every structure is queueing a unit.

This is NOT an all-in push.  You can bring some SCVs with you for repairs but like I said, you’re not all-inning here.

What you’re doing is moving up and doing a poke… a very strong poke.  If you go in there and you lose all of one unit type (OMG ALL YOUR MARAUDERS GONE) you should pull back.  Take the time to expand and fortify your bases.

Conclusion

This strategy has 100% success rate for me against diamond level Zerg players.  The key features of this strategy is constant production of units/SCVs, flexibility in tech options and having your tech structures ready to deal with anything.

Good hunting terrans.