The Post Patch Zerg

So the patch has been out for roughly one week now and the biggest side effect to it is zerg has become a monster.

Before any patches came out Day9 stated that zerg was an “unrealized race.”  He related to the beginning of Starcraft and Brood Wars where zerg just overall sort of sucked and how once people started playing zerg people started figuring out how it worked and what worked.

Before any patching occurred this process was coming to a start.  A Fruit Dealer was able to win the GSL tournament using zerg.  His tactics were unorthodox but that’s just it, unorthodox play was what zerg needed.  Given he had very good control of his units able to juke reapers and smash medivacs but it was his understanding of the race that won the games for him.

The main problem before the patch was that people who played zerg were trying to play it like they played other races and it just didn’t work.

But after the patch came out something change in the meta game.  Two things actually.

First off in PvZ the old meta game has become stronger.  Basically all protoss players do the same lame build for every single match up, that is a lot of stalkers, some zealots, four sentries, and stupid amounts of colossus.  So every zerg player went roach/hydralisk because the roaches could soak so much damage and the hydralisks had such high DPS.

With range on roaches going up one-base play is far more attractive for zerg.  They’re able to put on insane amounts of pressure and don’t get hurt so bad by chokes.  OgSTop who was a final four from the previous season of GSL was eliminated from qualification this time around by a zerg player who did a 2-base roach push.  As it ends up roaches do more damage than stalkers, get produced faster, and have an equal range making them vastly superior.

In terran play there was a nerf that made it so terrans had to go supply depot before barracks.  Most terrans laughed at this indicating that they always go supply depot first.  That’s actually not the problem.

An easy way to explain this would be the protoss vs. terran match up.  In PvT every terran player will make sure to get out a marauder as soon as possible.  Every protoss player will try and get out a stalker as soon as possible.  The marauder is to deflect any super early stalker push.  The stalker is to deflect any super fast marine push.  If either of these manuevers wasn’t possible they wouldn’t need to invest the resources in that unit.

Similarly without the risk of rax-first builds zerg are free to fast expand with absolutely no risk.  When the patch first came out I was able to start constructing a bunker at a fast expand.  Unfortunately it was almost done and as soon as the hatch finished suddenly my secret bunker was discovered (hatcheries only have a 1-yard range meaning you can get a bunker down within pretty close distance).

So I get my bunker up and have a marine heading to it and BOOM there are the zerglings to clean it up.  Had I been able to go rax-first which gives you total two less SCVs the bunker would have been up and the marines in before the hatch even finished.

So now zerg are free to fast expand with no risk at all.  What’s the big impact here?  Gas.  Terrans are generally better at playing a 1-base play then zerg.  Having said that, having four gas instead of two means you can build more gas heavy units.  This means you can build early roaches and still get your tech and upgrades.  That is to say you can get roaches and mutalisks which as a combination are hard to deal with as terran.

Yeah it looks like blizzard has created a new monster.

Defending the Raven Build

The raven build is an anti-protoss build terrans use in diamond leagues to win games in under 12 minutes.  It has been seeping it’s way into lower leagues however to the point where many protoss players are calling it “raven cheese.”

What Is It?

I’ve described it pretty delicately in another article, specifically in how to do it.  But this will be far simpler.

The Raven build has no marauders and no ghosts.  That is none of the common units protoss complain about and build their army to deal with.  Instead it builds any unit from the factory and any unit from the starport to support a largely marine force.  This means you can be dealing with banshees, pre-igniter hellions, siege tanks, and/or medivacs with a raven.

The point of the raven is three fold.  First the raven nullifies any scouting you can do.  Observers go in and instantly die to marine fire.  Scary.  Second it nullifies any sort of fast DT builds you might try and do for some early harassment.  The third and most potent use of it is the point defense drone to nullify your stalkers.

What Won’t Work

Before talking about what works I’ll go through some common protoss strategies and why they DON”T WORK

1. 2-Gate Rush: The 2-gate rush involves making two gateways and just sending in streams of zealots.  This will fail specifically because the timing of your 2-gate will be after a full wall off is possible.
2. 4-Gate Rush: Oh see he’s walled off okay send in some stalkers, right?  The timing of the 4-gate rush is 6 minutes.  A bunker is put put up at the 5 minute point.  Once your 4-gate push comes he just spam repairs that bunker.  5 SCVs repairing a bunker is going to beat any number of stalkers you’ll fit into the narrow choke of the ramp.
3. 2 stalker 1 void ray: The purpose of this tactic is for the void ray to give sight to stalkers who will pick off marines who try to attack the void ray while the void ray picks apart at a supply depot.  This push comes at the 7 minute mark, that is as soon as you can get a void ray out.  This build counters this by building a siege tank to take out your stalkers while marines take out the void ray.
4. Dark templar warp ins: DT is a heavy investment and this strategy involves getting a warp prism and warping DTs into their base.  This’ll fail specifically because the raven will detect them.  Yeah DTs will do well against marines and a siege tank but it just won’t survive long enough for cost.

Step 1: Scouting

Alright so you can’t really see this coming pretty far away but you can get an idea about it.  The first reason why you probably lose to this is scouting and that you’re pretty terrible at it.  To be fair scouting protoss and zerg is far easier than scouting terran.  Protoss and zerg have to build specific buildings to get out specific units so it’s pretty easy for people to prepare for this.  It’s like omg it’s a robotics bay colossus are coming.

Terrans it’s a little harder.  If you see a tech lab on a rax it could mean marauders or reapers.  If you see a tech lab on a factory it could mean blue-flame hellions, siege tanks or thors.  If you see a tech lab on a starport it could (and usually does) mean cloak banshees or ravens.  So it’s not your fault for being so bad a scouting.

The first big thing about scouting you need to get good at is ramp vision.  You take a probe move to the bottom of the ramp and move ever so slightly up the ramp.  Just a little bit of moving up that ramp will give you vision.  You may even get fired at.  If you get vision you see his unit composition.  If you get fired at you can see whether he has any marauders.

If he has all marines your interpretation should be either that he is teching to a starport or mass marining.  Either one has the same solution, more stalkers and make sure you have a robo down.

Second scouting is your observer.  The usual scout is to just send it to the front of the terrans base.  I’m here to inform you that this is HORRIBLE play.  You want to manuever it towards the front from the back.  This will give you better vision of his tech and you won’t get it sniped if he has a missile turret.  As well terrans are usually focusing their vision at the front so it’s VERY easy to snipe it.

Once you get your observer some nice vision of his base you want to have it placed right.  You will want to check out that spot every now and then.  I have that observer keybound and I’m macroing up and doing my regular build and then I tap my hotkey for observer (2) and check that spot to see what’s up.  If it’s over a minute and your observer isn’t dead there’s a banshee coming and you should pull that observer to your base while making another one.  If you spot the raven and you’re able to pull the observer out, good job huge advantage.  I usually sit my observer at his command center just so you can spot if his SCVs are building anything.  That’s really all you can use it for.

Step 2: Positioning

So you’ve figured out he’s got a raven.  It’s time to get away from your base.  Positioning for your battle is pretty important, composition is not.

You have to know your maps.  I’ll show two maps to illustrate good and bad spots but really you want to be in a position where you can effectively use force fields to assist you in retreating…. what a silly thing to say, but here it is.  I should note at the timing of his push you should have your expansion up and he’ll have his expansion moving as he pushes.  You’ll have roughly equal sized armies.

Blistering Sands is one of the more common maps to choose.  This is because it’s big enough for zerg players to freely expand around and creep about, it’s a good enough rush distance so protoss can be aggressive and terrans can multi-prong attack.  The natural expansion is protected by a choke point.  Each base hsa two choke point entrances each protected by rocks.

You want to sit your army at the choke point in front of your enemy’s natural expansion with your army.  You want to place force fields in the choke so that you pick off his marines one at a time.  Your second observer is placed behind your army so that if he throws his banshees up you can easily pick them off with few losses.

Okay.

So this is pretty scary for a terran player being if he continues to push he’ll take significant losses.  So he’ll throw out that point defense drone to save his army.  This is where you back off.  You run your whole army back to YOUR CHOKE POINT.  I’d hope on this map you’d have a pylon up at your rocks (at your second opening) in case the terran is going to attack these rocks.  If he does you engage him.  If he marches up your choke that’s great, more foce fields so he has to feed marines/hellions slower and once again observer behind your army so you can pick off banshees.

The big strength here is that stalker range is slightly longer than marines so he’ll be forced to move his marines through these traps.  The scary part is point defense drone part 2.  Energy does go up and he will eventually get another one up.  You don’t have an option to run away again you can only fight it.  The PDD has enough energy to soak up roughly 3 volleys of stalker fire.  If you’re really hard up pull some probes off of the line to beat up marines/hellions.  You’ll lose a lot.

And boom you defeat it.  Like I said this isn’t how to win the match it’s how to defeat this early opener.

Alright map features of my second and another common map choice, Steppes of War:

The close rush distance of this map makes it rather scary.  This map is devoid of useful Xel’Naga watch towers however one thing it does have is a really large building space in your main base.  The key and most important feature of this particular map is controlling the middle.  The middle is protected by two bushes meaning that you can easily ambush any forces.

Unfortunately another feature of this is HUGE gaps everywhere.  There’s really no good place to drop force fields   You want your units to be between your bushes and the middle.  This means you’ll have vision of all of his units but he won’t have vision of all of yours.  So when he attack she’ll be picking off units at the edges.

If he point defense drones you run up your ramp.  You want to force field off the left part of the ramp and move to the right corner of this little plateau.  Once again his units will be funneling through your force fields (if he attacks) and your stalkers will once again pick off banshees pretty easily.

Conclusion: Tactic

So if you haven’t gotten so far your tactic here is to run from the point defense drone and engage him on even footing.  Normally you use force fields to split up his army so he has a weaker arch vs. you.  Instead you are going to use non-standard play and use force fields to withdraw.

The strength that I am emphasizing here is how much faster protoss armies are against non-stimmed biological units.