Armor vs. Weapons Upgrades

When this game first came out a friend of mine asked, what do you get first weapons or armor upgrades?

I flatly looked at him and said armor.  I am a child of a philosophy that indicates if a mass of units can take more hits they will get off more shots and thus do overall more damage.

Of course, I was wrong.

It’s not quite as simple as one being flatly better than the other.  One thing that is not immediately evident is that different units benefit differently from the upgrades.  So right off the bat what units you are favoring is going to heavily decide what sort of upgrades you will want to get.  A marine for example will benefit more from a weapon’s upgrade than a marauder because the marine has such a high attack speed.  The marauder on the other hand will benefit more from armor because he has +2 armor which means every armor upgrade is going to be +2.

And it just doesn’t stop there.  If you go “I have a lot of marauders time to get armor upgrades” you will have the maximum upgrade potential…. but you may not have the best upgrade for what you are doing.

Weapon’s upgrades will allow you to kill stuff faster.  This means that if you intend to do things like drops you might want more weapon’s damage so you can pick off buildings or SCVs faster.

And a third consideration is, what sort of units is your opponent using.  Armor upgrades are strongest in unit vs unit match ups where your opponent is using faster attacking units.  Units with faster attack speeds will be punished heavier by armor upgrades.  All zerg units but ultralisks and roaches are pretty fast so armor upgrades are going to be very strong against zerg units, especially if you favor those tanky units (marauders, siege tanks and thors) to try and cripple the swarm of units he can create.

About two months ago I indicated that upgrades are unimportant.  This is of course compared to Starcraft I where a +1 timing push just did so much damage.  In Starcraft 2 +1 timing pushes are less likely.  Upgrades are for multi-base macro games, not rush games.  Kiwikaki is probably the only person left in the game that does any sort of +1 timed push.  However he does it with a 1-gateway fast expand and pushes out with a lot of +1 zealots and stalkers, very beefy units.

However Kiwikaki’s success rate with this tactic have dived in recent tournament play as he’s moving from being the second base North American player to not even top eight.

When to upgrade is an important decision as well.  I generally lay down an armory (if I’m using starport or factory units) as soon as I get my first expansion and an engineering bay slightly after.  My thought on upgrade timing is that you need to be able to make enough stuff for it to be worth while.  If you can only afford one factory in TvT then upgrades is probably not going to win you a match here.  However in TvP which is heavily bio maybe you’ll appreciate those upgrades once you can afford 8-rax on two bases.

The other big down side to upgrades is tech switches.  If you get upgrades too early and figure out later on you need air support then you’ll be running unupgraded banshees or vikings over say upgraded tanks and marines.  It kind of sucks running unupgraded vikings against highly upgraded mutalisks.

One thing I always do is get engineering bay upgrades constantly.  it’s kind of sad but no matter what I’ll always be a slave to the barracks.  In my latest TvT I did 1-rax fast expand and from there a 1-1-1 build into tanks and vikings with marine support.  I sent one scouting banshee off (probably the most expensive scout possible to be honest) and for whatever reason this caused him to build turrets everywhere.  In my scout I didn’t see any tanks so I thought cool and charged in.  In all reality he had an equal tank number and so I was forced to retreat after I realized this.

He made a contain around my base and actually did a sizeable amount of damage.  Of course I had already made my third expansion by this point so economically I was ahead of him, it was merely a matter of breaking his tank line up…. which was hard due to his superior viking count.  It actually came down to him making grievious errors.  He broke the rocks (Shakuras Plateau) to try and flank me but of course I spotted it and he lost all of his tanks.  He had a lot of marauders so he went in to finish off mine and in that one attack, no one had tanks.

If you know the map you know why breaking these rocks is a strategic mistake.  He was cross position so obviously destroying these rocks didn’t just instantly lose the game for him.  But what it did was it created easy routes to hit all of his expansions with.  So I did.  I knocked out his expansion, with marines.  Then I pushed his main base with pure marine.  He had some tanks and some marauders but 3/3 upgraded marines DO NOT DIE TO TANK BLASTS.  I was able to storm in his base and destroy all of his supply depots and most of his SCVs.  My second wave of marines forced him to be bad mannered and float all his buildings off into a corner until I could get enough vikings to kill them.

Upgrades matter when you can afford them.  Until then every upgrade is 100 gas that could be used elsewhere.