[NvRossi]

Originally Posted by ThePandarine

My past few TvT games have made me wonder if its possible to read what your opponent is about to do.

From my games I normally guess the following:-
1) Opponent opens with Banshees. They will immediately transition to BC once Banshees are shot from the sky by turrets/marines.

2) Opponent opens with Reaper. I don't see it of course but react accordingly to it. I leave a few Marines in my mineral line. A second Reaper comes knocking. Will transition to mech/banshee

3) Opponent opens with Hellions. Either Hellion drops or Marine-Tank-Viking are the follow up.

4) A few too many marines at the front door when scouting. Mass Marine-Marauder/All-in SCV Marine army follows pretty soon.

This is just me and my predictions tend to be 45-55 correct.

It's good to see you're making judgements based on what you have seen/scouted and are attempting to make a decision based off it. However you need to think a bit more logically about the production the opponent has built, the damage he has done and the common followups.

1) Simply seeing a banshee cannot lead to the conclusion that they will continue with this tech. As you said it is simply guesswork and you need to use a scan or a reaper/drop/viking to correctly identify his tech.

here are some ideas regarding what to think about when you see a banshee opening

- You need to consider whether he got cloak or not and how many banshees he has built
- is he expanding behind it?
- has he made a raven?
- is he making helions? he may follow up with a blue flame drop or may be transitioning into mech
- Has he thrown down more factories or is he transitioning into marine tank?
- How much damage did his banshees do?


From my current experience a cloak banshee opening has weakened recently as your ground army may not be sufficient to stop the increase in blue flame drops/ run bys.

Originally a tank marine followup was most prevalent, however mech is currently the most common followup to both a cloak banshee or standard banshee opening.(if the terran has expanded)

other scenarios could include a 1 base marine tank banshee push.

2) Reaper openings can literally transition to a huge variety of builds.

try and see if you can scout whether a factory is being built on the tech lab as this may limit the possibilities to a tank or blue flame expand.

The other tell is if you scout/scan and see if tech is being researched on the baracks tech lab, if this is the case it will most likely be bio.

Another thing to consider is the more reapers built the less chance that your opponent will be doing a mech or tech heavy build in my opinion. I would assume a bio followup.


3) Based on how many helions you see you should be able to determine whether he is going mech or marine tank. Try and use a scan to determine this if you are unsure.

4) This would be very common at lower levels, try and keep the watchtowers and/or a scv in his natural to scout when he pushes out or if he is actually expanding.

TvT is currently a very volatile matchup but it sounds like you need to improve your scouting and work from there. Always use a scan around the 6 minute mark and try and determine what your opponent is doing as playing blind in TvT is very difficult and requires well timed out build orders.

Not the most technical post but hope it helps you with your decisionmaking/ ideas about the matchup

Quick Comments

	Maynarde:	Knowledge is power
	ToRPandarine:	makes sense
	Nemo:	Same as Maynarde, "know your ennemy"