With eSports developing so famously in Starcraft 2 it has lead to a lot of recorded and live matches. The ending result of this is mass personal and group statistics. The folks at GomTV can tell you who is more likely to win on maps and what races is heavily favored.
Protoss vs Terran has always been one of the most imbalanced matchups in the game. For the early part of the game it is very easy for terrans to crush protoss. For the late game it becomes insanely hard for a terran to survive.
In the first six months of the game Terrans statistically would win more often under 10 minutes as the meta game of the time was 1-base play vs 1-base play. I can personally remember at that time doing 3-rax and 1-1-1 builds against protoss every single game with massive success.
However as protosses have had more experience and as buffs have been made to warp tech research, protosses have been able to beat off any one base play. So the shift has been made to the 2-base play.
Statistically Terrans are most likely to win a PvT matchup between the 12-18 minute marker. The statistics is something insane like 70-80% depending on the map. After the 18 minute marker the game starts favoring protosses and as the game goes further and further the odds of a terran winning shrink to nothing.
So with this in mind it becomes important that when playing you have the intention and the effort to attack as much as possible between the 12 and 18 minute marker.
For this reason PvT can be thought of as heavy pushing protoss for 6 minutes and dealing so much damage in that time that you are ahead for the rest of the game. In the remainder of this article which will be updated often I will go through some 12-18 minute 2-base builds that will crush protoss and give you such a massive lead that you will just win.
Build #1: Marine/Marauder/Medivac
In this build you open with a 1-rax fast expand. This means you build a barracks, get Orbital upgrade for your command center and lay a new command center in the closest expansion location.
In this build you will want to lay a second barracks and then get double refineries. Once you have 100 gas get your factory and then get your starport. Simultaneously you will want to get one tech lab on one of your barracks and get the stim pack research complete.
The idea here is that you are going to try and push the front around the 12 minute marker with a couple of medivacs, a large marine force a couple of marauders and minimum stim pack research and +1 upgrade from an engineering bay. Some may also want to get Concussive Shells and maybe combat shields by the time the push arrives.
It is a simple push you stim the front, kill most of his units and keep pushing. When it looks likeyour army is going to fall pull your medivacs back. You will want to keep your medivacs alive after each battle.
After this point the build offers up a few options as to what you can do. If you want to continue pushing the front that is an option and it will do fine.
You can also hit multi-prong attacks by dropping multiple locations at once and pressuring multiple spots.
My favorite option that you can do is the ‘monster drop’ in which you load up 4-5 medivacs full of units and just drop the main. The monster drop is particularly great because it keeps the constant threat of the monster drop in the head of the protoss and he is constantly forced to invest in a lot of static defense, or split up his army.
So from here I’d like to talk about how this build deals with various protoss cheeses and builds
Stalker/Void Ray
I think on Metolopolis specifically the stalker/void ray cheese is particularly scary. The reason why this build works is because you are presumably hiding behind a wall. Since you will probably have a bunker in the front the void ray can only harass and unfortunately the number of stim marines you will have available by the time it comes will scare it off quite effectively.
6-Gate
The 6-Gate push is a two-base protoss push. You can scout it by either identifying all six gates or by seeing the unit composition and identifying a large number of sentries.
In this mass all in the protoss will force field off all bunkers so that they cannot be repaired and just break your front. If you scout the 6-gate throw up an additional two bunkers. Make sure the bunkers are behind the original one.
If they push into this the supply difference will become staggering as the toss will likely lose most of his army.
4-Gate Robo
4-Gate Robo is a little scary and there are many things that can be done with it. The most common is a three immortal 4-gate push in which a bunch of zealots tank damage while the immortals break bunkers. You can scout this by sending an SCV to see his army make up. If he has immortals he is probably going to bum rush you.
Throwing up one extra bunker (next to the original) is worth while so not to lose to this.
Another formulation of the 4-gate Robo involves getting a Warp Prism and proxying Gateway units in your base. To beat this have a lot of marines and just stomp the units coming out of the warp prism. You should have an SCV placed fairly forward to make sure they’re not rushing your front simultaneously.
Sometimes 4-gate Robo can just mean they want detection and are playing safe so do not over react to this build.
8-Gate
This one is rare and harder to scout. Thus push has a unit composition entirely made up of zealots and high templars. It works out simply because of how cheaply both of these units can be made when the expensive stalkers are not in the mix.
The idea here is you charge the front with zealots and storm the SCVs off of the bunker. As well the storms will hit other marines and marauders defending.
Scouting this push is really hard. You have to scout the super fast Templar tech. The other thing you have to pick up is a high zealot count.
As always the solution to this is to build a lot of bunkers. Unlike other things, don’t repair these bunkers just micro your units away from the zealots. If you do not have at least stim by the time this push comes along… you are probably dead.
Fast Colossus
The thing people are probably most afraid of are colossus because of how much damage they deal. One colossus has the same resource cost as 10 marines. Just because it is undefended does not mean you should run head first to try and snipe them.
It becomes important when dealing with any colossus at all to not group up your units into a clump and instead try and get an arch of attack. You can pick a few of your units and attack the colossus but no point in using all of your units unless he has no zealots and you are microing forward.
Fast colossus means that you will have to change up your unit makeup from heavily marine (3 reactor) to heavily marauder (3 tech lab). This means that you will have less gas available for future upgrades or less medivacs. But having more marauders mean you will have more sniper forces for picking off colossus.
If you spot a colossus it becomes important to attack more often than you were before. Colossus are great in large numbers with a lot of zealots and stalkers supporting them. The less gateway units he has the less successful these colossus will become.
Switching out into vikings will be important in the long run but not before you have a decent number of medivacs.
Getting flanks using marines and marauders are very powerful against small numbers of protoss units. If a protoss gets a fast colossus he will in fact have a very small army. If you continuously attack and keep pressuring you can probably snipe his expansion with relative ease.
Build #2: Marine/Tank/Medivac
Becoming increasingly common in Korean style play to counter high templars with siege tanks. The siege tanks with their insane range out range the spell range of psi storm. It just ends up being a much better option to deal with mass templar than using mass snipe to try and deal with them. On top of this as it turns out tanks get bonus damage against armored meaning that they are very good against most protoss units.
There are many forms of this push. The one I want to talk about is a 2-base marine/tank/medivac push at the 12 minute marker.
In this build you will open with a 1-rax expand. You follow this up by double refineries as soon as you can afford them and build a factory as soon as you have 100 gas. After laying down your factory lay down a tech lab on your barracks. Get stim research. Get siege tech immediately and pump out tanks. As your factory finishes construction take your third gas at your expansion.
Once your first tank begins and your siege tech starts get your starport as soon as you have the gas. Your unit composition will be four tanks, stim marines, and a medivac. If you find yourself with a tonne of minerals add more rax.
Once you get your fourth tank stop making tanks. Instead add on a lot of barracks and start getting your infantry upgrades. This build wills witch into marine/marauder/medivac. If your opponent goes high temps make sure to always have four tanks.
On the push siege up your tanks in clusters of two. Four tanks can one shot a stalker so two tanks will deal half of the damage. It will also allow you to slowly creep up. You will use the medivac to spot for your tanks. This will help you pick off buildings. Your marines job is to protect damage from immortals. If they have immortals just right click on them with your marines and stim. If they have a lot of zealots use the tanks to soak the zealot damage as your stim marines kill them off.
The goal of this push is to do insanely high damage. This push can just kill but if you are able to kill off their natural I’d pack up and head home.
This build gives you access to all tech choices in the game and so you can have any follow up you want.
One of the great things about this build is that it also deals with so many different protoss timing pushes. With the massive tank damage there is no ground force that can hit a terran hard.
Build #3: 6-Rax Marines
This build was all the rage last season and Protosses became so comfortable defeating it that people stopped doing it… which makes it strong again.
It’s always a good idea to learn one of these powerful builds that protosses commonly stomp in in case you scout a really early Nexus.
In this build if you scout a Nexus before Cybernetics Core or before any unit do this build.
It is quite simple.
You 15-CC or 1-rax Expand and just continue laying down barracks as you can afford them until you can 6 barracks. Once you have your sixth barracks you start getting gas and you get one more round of units and then push.
While you are pushing you will have production of tech labs and reactors (two tech labs and four reactors) so that you will hit high production.
In your attack you do not want to A-Move up the ramp. Instead what you want to do is just move up the ramp with your units and attack. This will make it so you can skip passed force fields if the protoss is not paying attention. If you do this any force fields he gets off will probably be used to get past him.
If he has enough units to hold this off go for the sentries. Sentries are 100 gas each meaning that the protoss is less likely to re-make them. By having less sentries to deal with in the next upcoming battle you can rule out any powerful 6-rax timings or anything of that sort.
From here it transitions into a mostly normal game. You will have more units but your stim and combat shields will come out much slower. Most people from here will continue pumping out naked marine and marauder and constantly attacking into the protoss until the first colosssus pops out.
At this point the terran will take his third and create an arch of attack while slowly teching up to vikings. Colossus do not become an issue until there are 4-5 of them. Just make sure your units are spread in an arch to receive an attack and when the time comes, stim and A+move your army into his, you should always get the better end (unless he has 4-5 colos).
What a lot of players will do is get 2-starport production at this point, both initially making vikings and as the viking number evens out have one building medivacs.
If you push up the ramp and see high templars it becomes important to know how to Dodge a Psi Storm. You can actually still use this exact group of units against a 2-base protoss who goes psi storm as he will not be able to pump out the insane late game numbers of psi storms he could.
It becomes essential to dodge psi storms (watch the video) and also target down archons. Archons do too much damage and keeping them alive is bad. It is in my humble opinion that it is much easier to deal with this kind of unit makeup than one with stronger units like colossus.
Build #4: – Coming Soon –
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