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Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

How it started: Idle Thoughts

A month or so ago one night as I was drifting to sleep the thought occurred to me that I crush Terran. This was an odd thought because I had been practicing almost purely ZvP for my Challenger match, and I felt pretty sloppy with my muta-lingbane. However mech was the craze and all over ladder I was facing it in 90% of my games. It felt like I almost never lost games, even when experimenting with mass mutas, I could normally win by forcing heavy Thors and swapping back to SH.


I tried mass muta for the first time after seeing Leenock pull it off in his GSL group. Luckily SH make up for horrible muta-usage :P



It occurred to me that since my endgame was unrivaled I should only lose to mech if I fall enough behind to let them mass BC-Raven (Terran need a good hour left alone for this to happen :P). However vs bio my play was getting little practice and I was struggling, even when I'm on form I feel bio vs muta-ling is a very evenly matched mechanical contest. So as I began to drift to sleep I started fantasising about finding a way to force a match vs bio to the point where I have Hosts, infestors and vipers. Oh how awesome it would feel, if a bit dirty :P

I quickly forgot about these idle thoughts and didn't think about it again until a week or so later when I was streaming a game vs some nonstop helion-banshee aggression. Assuming my opponent was going mech and being too lazy to double-check it, I went straight for double upgraded roach-hydra and teched for my hive + enduring locusts. I was shocked to see bio walking across the map, and began to laugh at how badly I'd misread the game. I figured I'd just have to play roach-hydra-SH and see how it goes!

Figuring it out on the fly

My opponent quickly swapped into tanks seeing my composition and began expanding aggressively and trying to find holes in my defence, I had already realised I would need to be airtight against drops though, and had spore-batteries on the exposed flanks of my far bases. 3-4 Hydralisks were on mobile patrol plugging gaps as they spotted drops coming in, and not a drop was able to land.


Often the Terran will try to hit before you get SH, or many SH out. 12:34 is what the fight looks like

I quickly realised that with the fast bio and medivacs boosting around the map there was no way to secure a 5th and began adding static on 4-base. I needed a strong economy to afford the static D and high-tech composition, but with roaches in my composition this left me with little army supply. I needed to use my units perfectly to survive. I quickly realised the key points of making this work were not over-building SH, just enough to wittle down frontal pushes. Most important was adding quick infestors to limit the mobility of the bio, which otherwise can stim right by the slow locusts. I also needed to add spine fortresses on common attack paths so that if the larger terran army splits I can defend multiple locations with my tiny yet elite army of locust-fungal-abduct. As soon as the tanks came anywhere on creep I would abduct them mercilessly. If the marines try to shield I would chain fungal them to death. It was beautiful, horrible, disgusting and imbalanced all at once.


Even when you're down on bases if you don't let drops in you're fine...

Should Terran attack or defend?

One of the key reasons you can tech so high is the way roach-hydra can absolutely crush an aggressive bio player. It forces bio-players to defend, and there's no way for them to confirm if you're going to all-in at 2-2, or just stop at 160 supply and add SH-infestor-Hive. Terran are caught in a really tight place against this. Their best option is still to drop and counter-attack and find the holes in this intricate zerg setup. The zerg needs masterful defensive positioning and control to be airtight. On maps where you can zone out drops relatively easily, I feel it's actually completely broken and I'm not sure what Terran can do to win: Daedalus, Habitation.


Thanks Dayvie

So here I was, figuring out this abusive and powerful way to crush Terran with roach-hydra at its core, and then my boy D-Kim gave Hydras +10% attack speed. Thnx bro

Re: Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

Soon Roach/Hydra/Swarmhost will be used in every matchup, and it will be beautiful.

Great blog Pig, interesting style and I'll be sure to give it a go Or maybe a few goes....

Re: Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

2 hour games are imba vs bio* hahaha jkjk

Re: Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

ACL to ban Swarm Host use at LANs to avoid changing tournaments to a four day event.

Re: Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

They'd just go broodlord infestor instead to spite you

Re: Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

Haha Flux yeah have a go, just don't take bad fights and you can crush with it . Profficiency with the old roach-hydra ZvT makes it much easier to pull off

lol Prozer boring your opponent to death is a legit strategy!

Re: Swarm-hosts are imba vs bio
 

That's the first time I've seen SeleCT like that haha must have been so frustrated! gg wp!

Binding Cloud, Locusts and Fungal when used correctly as above almost always trades efficiently. Spending energy and free units for minerals and gas is always welcomed in my book