Now that Zerg is buffed and Terran are nerfed the balance of power has shifted. Although there are still less zerg players in diamond level and far less zerg in professional gaming the number of zerg wins is going up and similar to the warlock in World of Warcraft, an under-represented race is getting equal representation at high levels.
This has lead to the wide scale argument that Zerg is overpowered and the wide scale denial with the common quotation that terran need to ‘learn to play.’
It’s a short historical comment relating to reaper play. If you looked at the zerg forums on launch it was felt that reapers were a no-win scenario for zerg, that they’d always lose against them. However professional zerg players showed what it requires to stop reapers. That is a cliff surround, some lings on low ground and some lings on high ground. Really never even a need to get roaches unless they invest in 5-rax reapers. At that point you just get a bunch of roaches to shut him down. Dimaga even became quite adjusted to doing an in-base hatchery so he could get more aggressive units.
These matches were short and with the building nerf on reapers it transformed to a 1-rax reaper push into an early expand. It was a map control strategy that allowed the terran to get up an expansion while preventing cheap zergling aggression. All the while the terran could get out marines/thors and turrets for mutalisks. This was successful because it allowed you to harass while shutting down zerg harassment. Roaches of course were not an issue because if they tried to make any push the reapers would simply kite them and take pot shots at them. It does take time for a reaper to kill a roach but if a zerg lost 1-2 roaches to reapers while trying to make a push, that’s huge and makes your marines even stronger.
As an alternative terrans went to factory play to do some early hellion harassment. This quickly transformed into a marauder/thor/hellion timed push designed to counter any early units the zerg could get out. Both of these tactics however relied on early harassment in order to secure some future objective. That is it crippled the zerg’s economy so they would be unable to defend this inevitable push or assault this fast expand.
The roach changed denies both of these tactics. Now roach is an extremely powerful early unit simply because it denies this harassment. A lot of zerg opt to put down a roach warden so they can get 1-2 roaches and then continue to drone up. As well with the rax change it allowed for zerg to always fast expand. These two factors combined have made it possible for zerg to always fast expand in all protoss and terran match ups.
Zerg claimed that the problem was that they had no way out of the early harassment. However protoss and terran players both learned how to deal with speed reapers, zerg in general did not. Reapers have slightly higher range than marines so much like the roach good reaper micro would kill a lot of marines. Terran players learned that opening marauder in TvT was favorable because it shut down reapers and any early aggression. It also gave you a tech lab which you could use later for factory play. Protoss learned to get out a stalker as soon as possible because a stalker was faster than a reaper. At no point though did the majority of the zerg community think about cornering reapers. They didn’t look to examples set by other players and emulate it, indeed they just did not want to get better.
That argument has been turned on its head but unfortunately does not have the same merit. The argument is that terran players are used to be aggressive early on so they’re not good at turtling. This of course could be far from the truth. TvT, which is the most popular match up in the game is 100% about turtling and thwarting harassment.
No the problem lies in expansions and reprisal. If a terran was to fast expand in a TvZ match up the zerg would reprise by sending zerglings to harass the expansion (and your main). A zerg player has all the tools to effectively deal with fast expands. A terran on the other hand as an early option has slow reapers or marines with a bunker. However both of these get shut down very easily.
An easy example to illustrate to zerg the problems for terrans is in the ZvZ match up. It is the least common match up simply because the game has proportionally less zerg and very few zerg in diamond league. To this extent most zerg players will admit that zerg v zerg is their hardest match up. Idra in a league game chirped “no wonder people do this, you don’t have to be good to win” remarking on how he played 1-base and just massed zerglings/roaches and steamrolled his opponent.
In ZvZ zerg do not fast expand, instead they 15-pool 14-gas and get out some zerglings to defend his zerglings. Then they throw up a roach warden get some roaches and go. The entire match up is implicated by one-base play and constant streaming of troops. The only time that people really expand is when they have this interesting scenario where they have enough units to defend. My favorite game by far is one where Psy is one-basing against a one-base zerg for 25 minutes and then both of their mains mine out. Both start long distance mining instead of building an expansion as each tries to pick off the others drones.
This is specifically the sort of situation terrans are in. That is every expansion is pretty unsafe because zerg can produce so much off of so few hatcheries. To this extent 2-base play into a timed push feels like the only option despite it horrendously will fail so hard.
TheGameGuru.Me 