SaDGoWu Profile Joined July 2010 United States 133 Posts #1

Map: Blistering Sands

Terran Strategy: 3 rax 2 tech/reac Bio stim push.



Currents stats of units involved:



Zealot Hitpoints: 100 Stalker: Hitpoints: 80 Sentry: Hitpoints: 40

Shields: 50 (0) Shields: 80 (1) Shields: 40 (1)

Damage: 8x2 ( Damage: 10 (14 vs armor) Damage: 6

Armor: 1 Armor: 1 Armor: 1

Attack Speed: 1.2 Attack Speed: 1.44 Attack Speed: 1

Resource: 100/0 Resource: 125/25 Resource: 50/100



Marine: Hitpoints: 45 (55) Marauder: Hitpoints: 125

Damage: 6 Damage: 10 (20 vs armor)

Armor: 0 Armor: 1

Attack Speed: .8608 Attack speed: 1.5

Resource: 50/0 Resource 100/25



Some Interesting dynamics that i already know, without upgrades, marauder vs stalker, marauder always wins, with stim pack, marauder wins harder. Then something interesting happens, marauder vs stalker with 1 attack upgrade, marauder and stalker tie. after that the upgrades don't scale so at least for stalkers further attack upgrades won't benefit you at all. Also, no matter what your stalker attack upgrade is, if the marauder is stimmed you'll always lose.



Another interesting note that in marauder vs stalker, gaurdian shield is absolutely worthless and does not effect the outcome of the fight this means you shouldnt waste even 1 gas on a sentry if your going blink stalker and hes massing marauder. However what gaurdian shield isnt completely worthless, against marines it's quite useful, as it is now it takes 3 marines to kill 1 stalker with 1 and 1/2 marines left, now if the stalker is under the effect of gaurdian shield only half a marine of the 3 is left, this will definately effect the outcome of a battle so just react to what the terran bio mostly consists of.



Another interesting thing to note, Zealot vs Marauder with 0 micro, zealot wins, once concussive shells upgrades which you can expect from the very first confrontation against a bio push your zealots become quite vulnerable to kiting so its tempting to switch to stalkers, unfortunately this only plays into the terrans hands because as we have discovered before, marauder vs stalker, marauder wins.



So how do we as protoss users deal with this situation? the answer here lies with the Sentry, first off, vs zealot, marauders do not get the extra +10 damage bonus, Zealot however pays for this by having a total of 10 less shields, but it's not a very hard price to pay because it takes 17 marauder hits to kill 1 zealot, something VERY interesting happens once gaurdian shield is involved, it scales from 17 hits to kill a zealot to 21 hits, for 100 minerals a peice this makes zealots MUCH more effective against marauder. which even with stim does not beat a zealot so long as the marauder can't kite your zealot. this is where sentries come in once again, until charge is researched, your zealots are going to be kited all day, so your going to lose, what you need to do is stop dumping gas into stalkers (aside from the first one you MUST have to counter an early reaper) and instead put your minerals into zealots and a few extra sentries.



Until charge is researched you MUST be defensive against a bio army, and use forcefields and chokes to prevent your zealots from being kited, yes this comes at a hefty price i know im a protoss user, but there is simply no other way to beat a marauder push, instead of wasting forcefields keeping the marauders from coming in, let them in and block their kite route and use zealots to kill them. also gaurdian shield is VERY much worth it if you have succesffuly forcefielded their kite route and have the energy to do it, if your forcefields are bad or your missing one and gaurdian shield instead it doesnt matter if it takes even 30 hits to kill a zealot your going to be kited and will lose. so forcefield #1, gaurdian shield #2



Also note that stim pack although improving the damage marauders are able to do will not turn the tide on your zealots so long as they can't kite. victory is assured.



Personally i think this situation is not fair considering how situational the counter to bio is but aside from switching races the best we can do is get better at forcing those good situations where we know we can win and hope blizzard patches.



Hopefully this helps some protoss players compete with 3 rax bio, if anyone has a problem with another strat feel free to reply here or pm, or disagrees with me go ahead and reply to and we can work it out.







Xanatoss Profile Joined May 2010 Germany 539 Posts #2

Besides of that What about at last reading some of the other Threads about 3Rax before posting?Besides of that Personally i think this situation is not fair considering how situational the counter to bio is but aside from switching races the best we can do is get better at forcing those good situations where we know we can win and hope blizzard patches. violates Strategy Forum Guidelines.

violates Strategy Forum Guidelines. The chair slowly turns around. You see his face, but it can't be. He's not supposed to be here. Not him. Not a Protoss. Not THAT Protoss. MC says, "Hi Greg, long time no see." You back slowly out of the booth. But you can't. It's already forcefielded.

Quasievil Profile Joined August 2010 Canada 1 Post #3 I am having incredible trouble against MMM, and I just had a match today where marauders quite effectively shut me down on the second push even tho i had amassed stalkers. I will deffinately try out this strategy and focus on zealots in the future until i can get HTs with storm.



Ive avoided sentries until this point simply because my micro is severely lacking.

SaDGoWu Profile Joined July 2010 United States 133 Posts #4 I actually have looked at the other threads which all of them seem to suggest void rays, which aren't very applicible in these times since the range nerf and now terran users know how to deal with them quite effectively, also i feel my post has some unique information regarding how upgrades scale as well as gaurdian shield scaling.



Also where exactly are these sc2 forum rules posted, and how did i break them, i can see the logic in not allowing a million omg X unit so imba X race no chance posts with no content however it was only 1 small section of a large article

Bibdy Profile Joined March 2010 United States 3479 Posts Last Edited: 2010-08-26 23:08:56 #5 From my math I see that



Stalker shots to kill a Marauder (1.44 speed)

+0 = 10

+1 = 9

+2 = 9

+3 = 8



Marauder shots to kill a Stalker (1.5 speed)

+0 = 9

+1 = 8

+2 = 7

+3 = 7



Marauder shots to kill a Stalker with GS

+0 = 10

+1 = 9

+2 = 8

+3 = 7



Since a Marauder gains +2 damage per upgrade against a Stalker, and GS removes 2 damage, GS counteracts one upgrade level for the Marauder.



I believe there's a reason why the price of two Marauders, and a Stalker+Zealot are very similar (225/50 vs 200/50). The Zealot is needed to tank for the Stalker, while the Stalker takes out one of the Marauders unhindered. Scale it up, and a wad of Zealots are needed to tank for a wad of Stalkers to allow the Stalkers to fight the Marauders without getting totally obliterated.



Blink can be used for the Stalkers to then escape the confrontation, or chase after the Marauders, Warp-Gate tech is used to spawn more Zealot-tanks, and fight once again.



Now, this is great when its just Marauders. They're kind of easy to deal with, with either tech path option since an Immortal or Void Ray shine against Marauder-heavy armies (although, admittedly, the Immortals tend to get focus-fired instantly, but at least it distracted him and you had that Robo Fac doing something useful).



Things become a problem when they start adding Marines, and you have to start adding Sentries, because now you're cutting into the precious resource need to tech. Once the bio ball reaches a certain size, and has Stims, it becomes downright impossible to take it on without Psi-Storm, which is downright impossible to get without an expansion...which is difficult to get with bio-balls being constantly thrown in your face.



Pretty much the only thing stopping you getting rolled by bio balls all day is Terran's production capacity i.e. having no equivalent to Warp-Gate Tech to quickly reinforce or build clutch armies on the fly. When they lose it all, they've got to rebuild it all from scratch.

WySloth Profile Joined August 2010 10 Posts #6 i too find this unfair. because most units in starcraft have counters that are in the same tiers. for P to counter a terran bio push u must be defensive and to have any hope of being on the offensive colosi or HTs are a neccesity. tier 2 or 3 to beat 1 and 1.5? ridiculous? i think so

Entropic Profile Blog Joined May 2009 Canada 2374 Posts Last Edited: 2010-08-26 23:18:16 #7 On August 27 2010 08:07 WySloth wrote:

i too find this unfair. because most units in starcraft have counters that are in the same tiers. for P to counter a terran bio push u must be defensive and to have any hope of being on the offensive colosi or HTs are a neccesity. tier 2 or 3 to beat 1 and 1.5? ridiculous? i think so



Did you know you need storms to counter hydras PvZ in BW?



On the subject of the OP, interesting look at zealots and guardian shields vs marauder heavy compositions. Did you know you need storms to counter hydras PvZ in BW?On the subject of the OP, interesting look at zealots and guardian shields vs marauder heavy compositions.

SaDGoWu Profile Joined July 2010 United States 133 Posts Last Edited: 2010-08-26 23:36:26 #8 What you say is true, i conducted my tests within the engine rather then the math but stopped adding upgrades after +2 for stalker and + 1 for marauder because in a realistic game early bio will not have an attack upgrade nor will you and i experimented with stalker and gs to discover if stalker was ever viable, which never happened.



Also I have conducted many tests with Zealot/Stalker combo, and what i found was that attack moving it works great, but it's the kiting that really hurts what ends up happening is your front zealots can't get any significant damage in and are effectively kited, while the stalkers fall behind the stimmed rauders and although do do some damage, the marauder will come out on top.



Also, immortals currently do not justify their cost against marauder because they have 5 range as opposed to marauders 6, and the terran user will simply stim up and kill it as fast as possible to keep the immortal from getting real damage in. not to say its useless, it might be useful to get an immortal while your robotics bay is being warped in, but your sacrificing 2 zealots and a sentry, which takes 34 hits to kill the zealots, as well as get a forcefield or gs if you have enough forcefields, where as it takes 10 marauder hits to disable hardened shield and then 11 hits after that to completely destroy it, clearly 250/100 is not justified against marauders, though the story changes against siege tanks this isn't this situation.



I from my experience a templar tech should be much more effective against mmm because of charge, and psi storm + feed back, Robo tech being more effective against tank/marine.



Edit: Also to the above post about another problem with Robo is that your sacrificing slow zealots so your colosi are going to be right on top of your zealots, the problem is it's really easy for a terran user to stim up and use the ultra fast move speed to quickly snipe the colosi with 20 damage per hit and super fast attack rate, colosi however become viable again in larger numbers where they are able to fry marauders also, because the terran probably has a reactor on the starport for medivacs, he can also reactor vikings in the mix.

proxY_ Profile Joined July 2010 United States 1556 Posts #9 There's an inherent problem with needing a tier 3 unit or very situational micro in order to deal with a terran bio ball. I've had numerous games where the terran is aggressive with marine marauder, recognizes that i have a good composition to deal with it, doesn't come into my base, prevents me from having any map control and expanding and the terran is free to expand and roll out medvacs, tanks, banshees, vikings whatever to supplement his force and I can't push out of my base until I have either 2 or 3 colossus with range up or I have 2 or 3 hts ready to storm. By that point, the terran has his expansion up and running, has medvacs supplementing his army and has enough spare res to outproduce and steam roll me. It's just so frustrating.



And btw the general skill level that the terran has to be at in order to pull that off is far lower than the skill I have to have to stop it as I need phenomenal micro, a perfect unit composition and the ability to to expand and macro up the second that I beat back his initial force.

SaDGoWu Profile Joined July 2010 United States 133 Posts #10 To Proxy, I agree, i'm actually a former high level Orc wc3 player, for a long time, Night Elf would mass 1 unit Druid of the talon and simply cyclone all your heros and half your army and quickly decimate half your army and then the other have (cyclone disables the unit for 12 seconds heroes 4) The Orc player must disenchant (AoE dispel negates cyclone) very efficiently as well as use Raiders to ensnare the Druids so they can't micro away as well as ensnare Demon Hunter away from the orcs AoE damage hero.



We should take on an Orc style philosophy while playing protoss, find a way to beat it, no matter how hard it is to execute, and reach a level where you can execute it and win.

Gnial Profile Blog Joined July 2010 Canada 907 Posts #11 I completely disagree with your conclusion that you have to play defensive with tier 1 units against Terran 3-rax. You can use forcefields to keep some, or all, of your opponents army from retreating. In order to get those forcefields off, make sure your zealots are close to your sentries. I've read so many times about people getting their zealots get kited and being unable to forcefield with the sentries because they are too far away - just move the sentries closer to your zealots - basic, easy micro - problem solved.



As well, make sure your composition is built properly. Don't go into battle with 15 stalkers, 3 zealots and 2 sentries if they have a bunch of marauders. For less resource cost you could get 13 zealots, 6 stalkers and 6 sentries. Now that is a well-rounded army with lots of casting potential, and few enough stalkers that they don't block one another from getting in range. Remember that they can't target your stalkers unless they want to get in range of the zealots.



You would only believe that Protoss has to play defensive if you believed that terran bio will always win in a fight with a gateway army. Once you start using all the tier 1 weapons available - forcefields, guardian shield, zealots to tank and stalkers ONLY for damage dealing, you will find that it is not a one-sided battle, and aggressive play is not only possible - but I make it a staple of all my PvT games. 1, ｅｈ? 2, ｅｈ? 3, ｅｈ?

Doko Profile Joined May 2010 Argentina 1737 Posts #12 You would only believe that Protoss has to play defensive if you believed that terran bio will always win in a fight with a gateway army. Once you start using all the tier 1 weapons available - forcefields, guardian shield, zealots to tank and stalkers ONLY for damage dealing, you will find that it is not a one-sided battle, and aggressive play is not only possible - but I make it a staple of all my PvT games.



You make it sound like people are fighting terrans that only use MM for 15 minutes. Ghosts basically turn sentries into 80hp unstimmed marines that cost 50 minerals and 100 gas.

Once medvacs or ghosts are out combined with enough marauders to tank zealots long enough for the marines to kill everything in sight I honestly see no way to win without a much larger force or something to bring down the bio ball to killable hp.



You make it sound like people are fighting terrans that only use MM for 15 minutes. Ghosts basically turn sentries into 80hp unstimmed marines that cost 50 minerals and 100 gas.Once medvacs or ghosts are out combined with enough marauders to tank zealots long enough for the marines to kill everything in sight I honestly see no way to win without a much larger force or something to bring down the bio ball to killable hp.

Dystisis Profile Joined May 2010 Norway 712 Posts #13 This "you need this to counter that" thinking is just idiotic. Same thing with comparing any single unit to any other single unit. Things don't work like that. Warpgates work entirely different than Barracks, for one thing. Another factor is the cost of units. Another factor is the build time of units. Another factor is the speed of units. Another factor is the AI of units, etc. etc.



Develop macro, develop your mechanics, develop multitasking, stop worrying too much about "counters", and you will win the game.

Gecko Profile Joined August 2010 United States 516 Posts #14 It doesnt take complex math to know that pure bio beats pure gateway, thats why we get robotics facilities and chargelots.

Mr.Minionman Profile Joined April 2010 United States 164 Posts #15 individual gateway units do poorly against Marauders. Combined they do well, better with micro. Marines only really become a threat when they get Medivacs.



Going with base stats alone, MM always wins. but Protoss have several counter tactics, on top of the fact that Marauders fail hard vs Immortals.



I can't really advise you on this as it is very hard to explain. Just play with it, and try not to take such a single-tracked stance on it.

PulseSUI Profile Joined August 2010 Switzerland 305 Posts #16 on top of the fact that Marauders fail hard vs Immortals.





they do?

last time i tried, 3 Marauders could just about take out a Immortal, 3 stimmed marauders and it was not even close.

did that change?



ever since that day, i never ever build a immortal ever again in PvT... just delays 1 base Templar tech for 30 sec longer.. they do?last time i tried, 3 Marauders could just about take out a Immortal, 3 stimmed marauders and it was not even close.did that change?ever since that day, i never ever build a immortal ever again in PvT... just delays 1 base Templar tech for 30 sec longer..

proxY_ Profile Joined July 2010 United States 1556 Posts #17 The protoss could do an aggressive four gate and into expansion and possibly take map control. The problem with this strategy is the protoss is blind to what the terran is doing because there are no observers out. If the terran goes up to cloak banshee he wins, if he gets siege tanks out then he can hold the push and cover his expansion, he could go like 4 barracks stim + medvac and steamroll the gateway units while bunkering his ramp.



I just think the fast observer is by far the most safe play for toss unless they want to play a guessing game. It's also worth mentioning that terran can just drop a few well placed scans on the toss base and know exactly whats going on and they can switch tech routes extremely fast with tech lab + reactor swapping structures.



Veritassong Profile Joined April 2010 Canada 393 Posts #18



User was warned for this post T>P 人族英巴

b_unnies Profile Blog Joined March 2006 3579 Posts #19 Would you also be able to do a hits analysis using armor instead

SaDGoWu Profile Joined July 2010 United States 133 Posts Last Edited: 2010-08-27 02:59:50 #20 I don't see how you can possibly be offensive here, are you 4 gating? because someone above is right, warpgates don't work like barracks, 3 rax terran is basically = 4 warpgate in production. the reason i said we should play defensively early is because how are you supposed to forcefield them in on open ground? unless your dumping 400 gas into 4 sentries it's going to be incredibly difficult.



I would do it, however the problem with Protoss defensive upgrades is how bad they are, for most units roughly hitpoints wise they are half shield/ half hp, and a defensive upgrade only effects one or the other, shield being prohibitively expensive to only 3 base+ lategame



For example lets take a stalker with 1/1 for the same price terran gets 1/1, basically that 1 boost in defense upgrade is applied to all 125 hp, however for the stalker its only going to be applied to 80 hp of there 160 total points.



This means that protoss defense/shield upgrades are largely pointless except for zealots vs marine etc. Marauder doing 20 damage per hit to a stalker makes even 3/3/3 protoss upgrade not very beneficial.



This needs to be fixed because Protoss need to pay much more in resources to scale equally.

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