[Delraich]

I have a silver terran practice partner (I'm still bronze btw!) who has taken a shine to tank heavy builds that I am struggling with at the moment. He has a defensive style where the natural is turtled up with many (e.g. 5-7) or so tanks on the low and high ground (e.g. main base), with a fair few marines and a couple of marauders, and he also makes a planetary fortress. From this he then tends to send out banshee or the odd ball of medivac drops which gets annoying. I want to attack him back, but going into his defence is seriously annoying and I am not sure how to not waste my army engaging this lot. When I look at the graphs I often have a much bigger graph that then plummits after the attack.

He also has an aggressive style where he goes one base with marines, marauders and about 4 or 5 tanks (he doesnt bring SCV's). I have been practicing my map control and I saw the marines in the beginning with the stalker poke, so i decided to go for collosus. I then saw the tanks rolling in, following them with my obs, and watched them seige at the base of my ramp, scan and start shelling my main. with the army at the top waiting. I was on 3 gates, robo, robo bay, expo. I had 2 collosus and some gateways (a bit of each: sentries, stalker and zealot). Should i have gone immortal? should i have run down the ramp and tried to engage sooner?

I read the how to stop terran cheese guide, but I am still not clear on how to stop these evil tanks!!

[antarnis]

Chargelots and void rays? :x

Quick Comments

harrad:

trash post

[TCPLemminks]

It would help if you give us timings so that we can get a better idea of what you're up against, replays are even better ^^.

Firstly I want you to think about what disadvantages he has by doing this?
From your first description it sounds like he's just sitting on 2 base for a while, so what's stopping you getting a third or a fourth even? The thing about tanks is that they are very immobile, so if he's investing heavily into them, exploit that by being mobile and taking expansions.

Now the only thing you to worry about is the odd banshee and medivac, a cannon or two at each base will suffice. After that you can simply just build up an army, wait for him to unseige and win.

As for your second problem, if you knew he was coimng you should have taken the upper hand and engaged while he was unseiged, your Colos should be able to tear apart his infantry while he seiges.

As for dealing with tanks, immortals work wonders, however if you're just a-moving (like i do^^) theyusually don't focus armoured units. Lastly Chargelots, if you're not going chargelots against a terran you're not play toss right (special exceptions apply).

lastly small micro tricks can help, although you sometimes don't have the apm to do them:

You Tube

You Tube

Basically if you want to grow as a player think about the strategy your oppent is doing, and think about the best way to expolit it.

Quick Comments

	harrad:
	Nemo:	That's useful
	Delraich:	This is very helpful, thanks.
	TCPNishy:

[harrad]

Depends on his unit composition. If he goes for a MM ball supplemented with a few tanks you'll want to tech to Colossi and eventually HT. If he pushes with only a small number of rines and rauders, you'll want to get an Immortal and you should hold with a standard 3gate-robo.

What you should get rid of is the "bit of each" mentality. SC2 is a thinking man's game, whenever you invest in a structure or a unit it has to be justified. For instance, against a marauder/tank heavy army you'll want to get a Zealot-Sentry army with maybe an Immortal or two. Zealots have 1 armor, but are light units, so they don't take bonus damage from marauders and tanks as stalkers would do. Sentries allow you to constrict surface area, split his army with force fields and drastically reduce the damage you take from high dps units such as marines. Immortals take down tanks very quickly and can tank shots from the tanks, allowing your army to move into position unscathed.

Another thing, don't go 1base colossi, it's uneconomical and ineffective, go 3gate-robo (CB out obs as soon as robo finishes), expand at around 6 - 7 min depending on whether terran is aggressive or not (scouting!) then tech to colossi behind a solid gateway army.

Quick Comments

Delraich:

this is all good - sooo much to work on.

[Nemo]

Basically, a turtling is countered by expanding and denying him his third.

He can't defend it or attack you without unsieging his tanks. As you have a obs nearby, you can see this coming the moment he does. You hit him at that right moment with all your deathball and you should prevail. That means you have to be really attentive to what he does and have your whole army nearby ready to ambush.

If he turtles and you have to send your army far, you can defend your bases and expand with:

• Photon canon (if you have tons of minerals)
• Warping Chargelots or stalkers
• Same as above and keeping a Templar in each base to storm them
• Having 3 Phoenixes to patrol the Vicinity of his base and intercept flying Medivacs Phoenixes can also lift sieged tanks to help assaulting a fortified position

Side notes:

• A deathball (with Colossi OR (High Templars AND Archons) cannot be beaten by a army of same food size unless the Deathball impaled itself on a big sieged tank position
• Charglots do very well against Marauders and Sieged tanks as long as there are not more than 3-4 I would say.

Use those tips and if you cannot make it work post a replay there : http://www.sc2sea.com/showthread.php?t=202.

Quick Comments

	ToRDeathsFang:	i approve of this man's beard and his wisdom
	Delraich:	thanks, this is really useful feedback.
	harrad:	not quite there yet
	MooZfY:	positive

[harrad]

I might be alone in this, but I strongly dislike the notion of "deathballs". They are more or less a myth based on the fact that protoss have perhaps the most cost-efficient late game army compositions if they get to have their way. Colossi can be sniped by vikings, HTs can be EMP'd, Stimmed bio melts gateway units.

The true strength of protoss in late game vs terran is the warpgate mechanic supported by income off multiple bases. Protoss can rebuild almost their entire army on the spot anywhere on the map where there's power while terran re-production stems from one or two places and is much less convenient, plus it's vulnerable to add-on sniping for instance.

As you get to higher leagues, you'll notice that, at least in the current metagame, almost no one goes mech vs protoss.
The current TvP is all about either killing the protoss before the late game and/or constantly edging out advantages by abusing the mobility of bio play (utilizing medivac drops to snipe tech etc.). There is a reason why the 1-1-1 all-in is so popular right now.

[MazEi]

actually I think if you macro hard enough while going for blink stalkers/colossus deathball/air play/chargelots(any combination of these or just one) you could pretty much kill him off quite easily. And when I say macro I do also include stuff like expanding properly into there. Basically I'm pretty sure if you have way more units it'd be all good.

[Next_rim]

OP,

What's your build?

Imho, it's a mistake to look for counter builds. Make (find) your build first, and then adjust it to counter a particular build of your opponent. In every build there are elements you can swap to get army, tech or econ advantage earlier.

For example, I open 3-gate into DT into expo (aka really delay my expo to early push and harass like a boss and diminish terran ability to do 2-base timings).

I see terran turtling with tanks, which means his 2-base is going to be delayed by default. So why not grab expo first, then get DT? I match my harassing capability with his pushing capability timing-wise so my strat works. If I got straight DT, I'd just tend up with a bunch of useless DT's running into tank walls and turrets without my expo.

Alternatively, I see signs of 1-1-1. Depending on map position, I either proceed with TC after 3-gate to get charge, and add robo for immortals and obs, or skip TC in favor of slightly bigger army.

Quick Comments

harrad:

[Delraich]

thanks so much for all the advice, now i just got to slowly put it all into place one step at a time.

Regarding my reaction to the turtling style, I totally understand that I should have expanded to get at least a third and will have to work on this big time. And yep, the cannons advice is great - normally I dont have a problem building cannons, but my build orders against terran often seem to get the forge quite late and then when the time comes that I need the cannons it is sometimes too late. My one "build" often either goes 3G expo, robo, robo bay, and then 3 more gates (so now i have seen from streams that I probably should add the forge and council after the robo and before the 2-3 extra gates). The other one I try to use is 1g, council, 2g, expo, dark shrine, and try and harrass with the dt's until the no longer become effective due to missile turrets. i am then so sure where to go with this - i have tried using dts to make archons but this seems really expensive, but making the templar archives on top of everything else seems too expensive and spreading myself too thin (bearing in mind i'm on 2 base). the one good thing is that i can get charge fairly easily because of the early council. there is no chance i can micro phoenix at this stage, so i dont bother with them - and tend to avoid air in general because i have enough to worry about already with the ground units. my fighting is pretty rubbish, and attacking straight into seiged tanks is probably not the best idea. I will try and follow the advice about attacking in key moments when they are moving. I dont know why, but i dont tend to make immortals that much (i didnt seem to get so far with them because the marines/ marauder used to kill them too quickly before they could get to the tanks), but after reading this advice, I am going to try them out again.

regarding the more aggressive style, looking at the replay in context with this advice, I definitely should have engaged much much sooner. regarding the macro side of things, yep, guilty again. My probe production is definitely getting better, but my production buildings after the 3G, robo and robo bay didnt happen even though i had time to build them (maybe i was spending too much time looking at the observer and following the friggin tanks around!). As a result his army was bigger than mine by a fair amount. Its pretty embarressing, but after Lemminks asked about the timing of the attack, it was actually much later than i thought... like 14-15min!!! arg... by this time Light would have like 92343 bases and one billion units...

[Snx`Azz]

Originally Posted by Delraich

I have a silver terran practice partner (I'm still bronze btw!) who has taken a shine to tank heavy builds that I am struggling with at the moment. He has a defensive style where the natural is turtled up with many (e.g. 5-7) or so tanks on the low and high ground (e.g. main base), with a fair few marines and a couple of marauders, and he also makes a planetary fortress. From this he then tends to send out banshee or the odd ball of medivac drops which gets annoying. I want to attack him back, but going into his defence is seriously annoying and I am not sure how to not waste my army engaging this lot. When I look at the graphs I often have a much bigger graph that then plummits after the attack.

He also has an aggressive style where he goes one base with marines, marauders and about 4 or 5 tanks (he doesnt bring SCV's). I have been practicing my map control and I saw the marines in the beginning with the stalker poke, so i decided to go for collosus. I then saw the tanks rolling in, following them with my obs, and watched them seige at the base of my ramp, scan and start shelling my main. with the army at the top waiting. I was on 3 gates, robo, robo bay, expo. I had 2 collosus and some gateways (a bit of each: sentries, stalker and zealot). Should i have gone immortal? should i have run down the ramp and tried to engage sooner?

I read the how to stop terran cheese guide, but I am still not clear on how to stop these evil tanks!!

go: immortal/high templar/zealot and you will destroy him.