So one of my SC1 buddies got tired of me not playing SC2 and bought me a copy so I'd play. It's been a week or two. I have both comments, and some questions for bay12ers. I'm going to be a bit verbose, but if anyone is willing to take the time to read and give some feedback, that would be great.
Question:
Are terrans and zerg both as horribly gimped as they seem? For SC1 I was primarily a terran player until Brood War, then mostly swapped to Protoss because suddenly they were so much better. In SC2 it seems like protoss continue to be the best race. My friend and I have a team and we ranked roughly the middle of silver after our preliminary matches. Playing as terran, after having played almost exclusively terran since I started a few weeks ago, matches tended to be difficult, and we lost the majority of them. So I tried swapping to protoss, and instantly we started winning the majority of our matches simply by mindlessly pumping out zealots. Every match? No. Most? Yes. And the matches we lost were exclusively to protoss players. Coming out of roughly a six hour playing session with most matches lasting about 20 minutes, going back and forth between ranked matches and playing each other to experiment, I counted a grand total of one single match that wasn't won by a protoss player. Over the course of six hours.
Question:
In a terran vs protoss 1v1, how is a terran player supposed to survive the first few minutes without becoming horribly crippled for the rest of the game? My friend and I spent hours tonight trying different things, but neither of us have come up with a viable solution. The only way we found to stop a zealot rush seems to be for teran to completely wall in...fast. No bunkers, no early factory, just straight supply depots and barracks in the chokepoint to get it closed off in time and start pumping out marines. But that only seems to work on maps with a single chokepoint. A lot of maps have two entrances, whether or not guarded by a destructible barrier, and it seems impractical to wall in two chokepoints before zealots arrive. What...are terrans just supposed to lose on maps that aren't designed to accomodate them? I don' see anyone else depending on terrain so much. But even on a single-chokepoint map, sure, terran stops the rush...but now what? Protoss player controlls the map, stations a zealot at every crystal pile, and starts transitioning from zealots to stalkers, and if need be, void rays. Which brings us to the next question:
Question:
What are terrans supposed to do about void rays? Terran anti-air has all been nerfed. I used to use ghosts as early anti-air defense, but lockdown is no longer in the game. Goliaths are gone, and thors aren't as good vs air, and twice as expensive. So there's no building a dedicated factory air defense. And wraiths have been replaced by banshees, which can't attack air units at all. Missile turrets are much better than they wre in SC1, but being stationary seriously limits their use. In the above scenario, terran has walled himself in and needs to expand. The most effective solution I've found so far is to swarm marines. Marines do fairly well against void rays. But they're often impractical. Their range is poor, so a couple void rays off a cliff can easily pick off buildings and run away with impunity. If terran tries to expand, and uses marines to defend the expansion, void rays simply go back to terrans base, take out a missile turret or two and blow things up from the inside. And saying "oh, well you need to have more maines" isn't a great answer. Remember, terrans is already walled in with a single crystal pile while protoss controls the map. Vikings? They're an option, they do work...but they're not great. Vikings seem like adequete, all around units, but they're not overwhelmingly more effective than marines, and they're expensive for how easily they seem to die. How is a terran supposed to deal with air?
The best answer I've been given so far is that there is no counter to void rays, but that as a terran player you're supposed to prevent a protoss player from getting them in the first place by constantly harrassing him and compelling him to do other things. Which brings us to question #3:
Question:
How is a terran supposed to rush/harass an opponent? In SC1 my standard first attack was a couple marines, an SCV and siege tank in a dropship unloaded on or above my opponents crystal pile. But combat in SC2 happens way faster than that. Games are routinely over before a spaceport is built. I've seen several youtube videos where people try using reapers to destroy gatherers, but having both tried it, and had it tried on me...it seems like a lot of effort to maybe, sometimes, barely get better than breakeven. Protoss and zerg don't need chokepoints. Their armies tend to hang out relatively close to the crystal pile anyway. If an opponent doesn't expect it, you might take out a couple gatherers before the reapers are destroyed, but personally when it's been done it me, as often as not I hear the game say I'm being attacked, and press spacebar just in time to see the wisps of vapor from reapers being blown up, because it's just not that difficult to drop a photon cannon or a bunker in your crystal pile. Certainly way less effort than walling in, and not many protoss players can't spare 150 crystal and two seconds to place a cannon, just in case. So...how does terran harass? Mass marines is not reliably a winning proposition. Yes, I've won some games with it. But not many. And while marauders seem to be more effective at an early attack, they're not so hugely effective that they seem like "the answer." Yes, it works against bad players. But good players just kill them and advance to stalkers and void rays. With protoss, there's no reason not to build 3-4 zealots and go attack your opponent with them. It requires no special effort, just buildings you want regardless of what you'd like to be doing later, they're cheap, and if your opponent doesn't specifically go out of his way to stop it, they'll win you the game. Helions? Ok, but by the time terran gets a factory, protoss can easily have a cybernetics core. You're keeping pace, not getting ahead. But not even keeping pace, because if you're walling in and swarming marines to survive the zealot rush, by the time you have a single factory able to build helions, protoss has three gateways able to build stalkers because he built them anyway for zealots and just needed to add a cybernetics core. What does that leave? Siege tanks guarded by marines? But siege tanks fall very easily to the much cheaper zealots that protoss has laying around in abundance, and require both a lot of micromanagement and the elemnt of surprise or else they end up being a very expensive failure. What does that leave? Anything else and you're no longer talking harassment techqniques because it's a mid to late game unit and you may already be dead.
How does terran deal with protoss?
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Topic: Starcraft II (Read 31551 times)