[Woddles]

Hi everyone!

I hope I'm posting in the right section I have questions but I also just want to introduce myself

I'm a reasonably long time lurker of sc2sea mainly because I didn't have SC2 and I've only watched it but my brother bought me SC2 for Christmas and I feel like starting off in a good community will help me more than just teaching myself.

Anyways introductions aside, I'm a Terran player and I have trouble versus Protoss, my main problem is collosus, I know I need to make vikings but what I don't know is how many. If they're producing off 1 building and I have 1 reactor starport should I completely stop making medivacs and just power vikings once I see he's going collosus? and also vs collosus what should my army look like? mainly marines or mainly marauders I heard marines are always better but I read that marauders counter stalkers which from what I've seen is the main unit Protoss make.

[syfCabracan]

Hi, glad to see the ranks of the terran army growing. Usually what I do is as soon as collosus is revealed I make only vikings off my first starport and place a second starport to get medivacs off. I'm pretty terrible at tvp but I think this is a reasonable reaction.

[ROOT`iaguz]

Marine/Marauder, to a ratio of 60/40 to 50/50 depending on preference. You can go really marine heavy if he's colossus/templar light but the more colossus heavy he is it's good to have a lot of beefy marauders soaking up shots and being huge so it's not just a tight clump of 40 marines getting roasted.

Make 2 or 4 medivacs then keep making vikings til he stops making colossus. You're aiming for about 3 per colossus and preferably til you have enough to just 1 shot a colossus per volley which is.... I forget. Some awesome number like 12 or so?

The main thing you have to be aware of is how many colosuss he has and if he's faking. Some Protoss are dickheads and make 1 colossus without range or something gay and move straight into templar. Having 14 vikings vs the 1 colossus man is not where you want to be.

Depending on your opponents build, he will start his colossus production before you can get into vikings which can be a bit of an issue. This is just one of those things you have to learn to live with somehow.

[Woddles]

Thanks for the replys

iaguz, if they kill one of my medivacs should I make a medivac over a viking so I keep having 4? or just try save them when i can and keep making vikings

[ROOT`iaguz]

The trick is to not lose medivacs.

2 is the minimum to keep your army topped up during the game. Anything more then that and you should be trying for successful drop harass.

But it's most important to never lose medivacs doing something stupid. This is important.

EDIT- I feel like saying "not lose medivacs" is a little unhelpful. Ideally we make it through a game without losing any of our precious soldiers whom we care for so very much but that's never the case.

Basically it's like this. Our starport has extremely limited production times to deal with a huge demand; we need 2+ medivacs at all times for healing and dropping, and anything from 4 to 16 vikings. Once you start viking production for dealing with colossus we need our starport spinning without stopping. That means queuing up the next pair the second the current pair is finished. That means not being supply blocked at the time, and it means not losing medivacs that we have to replace because we don't have starport production time to cater for that!

The best way to retain medivacs is to not lose them in a drop attempt. Dropping can be really strong in TvP, particularly in lower leagues where they can't use observers well and haven't experienced years of soul crushing disappointment of watching a medivac and 4-8 chums kill everything, and we want to do that. What we don't want to do is fly into stalkers and cannons and templar and die. It's very important we avoid that, so you're going to have to learn to control your dropships and fly around stalkers as demands.

We only want to make an additional starport once we're on 3 base and it's not uncommon for Protoss to be on 2 robo bays. Or if your opponent is Ray Zi Wang and has a goddamn Colossus quota to hit every game but that is a very special and unusual case and does not apply to you.