Void Ray Massing

[Mucky]

We had another FFA after the one with you in it (albeit with only 5 people), and AA7 pretty much curbstomped everyone with Void Rays. At one point, I managed to scrounge up 76 Vikings and that killed the Void Rays with 35 left over. At equal numbers, Vikings definitely don't beat Void Rays. I had to substantially outnumber his Void Rays in order to win, and with all of my supply invested in Vikings, I couldn't do any damage to AA7 even after his Void Rays were dead. This was with full upgrades from both sides, by the way. It might be significant to mention that I didn't bother kiting. I figured it wasn't worth it, since Void Rays are apparently faster than any air unit in the game.

Terran's anti-air options are really lopsided. Thors can't do anything to Carriers, Void Rays, Battlecruisers, or Mustache Lords (unless they bunch them up). They're only effective on Vikings and Mutalisks. That leaves two other options: Vikings and mass turrets. The thing about Vikings is that, being an air unit, it counters itself. That's how the battles between me and Bill went in that FFA. One of us would attack with Battlecruisers, the other comes in with Vikings... only to be met with more Vikings. It was only when I threw turrets into the mix that the cycle stopped and we just hurled Battlecruisers and shit at eachother.

IMO Terran needs their Goliaths back, and Protoss needs better anti-air options themselves. Stalkers don't cut it, as Mesk said. Immortals would be nice if they could attack air. Arbiters coming back would also be good for them, or at least being allowed more than one Mothership at a time. And while I'm at it, Mothership is a terrible name for a unit. Dead horse: BEATEN.

[Krazy]

It should be something close to 2 vikings to the voidray, and when it is that, the vikings win. Bear in mind that 2 vikings to the voidray is about equal cost (150/100 viking, 250/150 VR). Remember that "equal numbers" should mean equal cost, especially since terran can build a reactor and spam 2 vikings from a starport at once.

[Mr.]

I think that Void Rays need to cost more supply. What are they now, 3? If they went from 3 to 4, then... I think that would make a difference, but not make them worthless. But I really am not an expert.

Another thing that happened in the ffa with Mucky and AA7... I had 200 supply of 3/3 hydralisks. They got destroyed so quick by AA7's void rays. The ONLY thing I could do against his void rays was make 153134 spore scrawlers, then make a bunch of Infestors, then AIDS them all in a big clump when they were over my spore crawlers, and then throw some more hydras at them. That actually worked fairly well. My problem, at that point, however, was that my base and his base were on the other side of the map, and hydralisks are slow as hell. So by the time I got my dudes halfway across the map, AA7 had another fleet ready to go.

[Krazy]

I just tested a bit and thought this was interesting:

at 0 ups, max supply for a terran player on vikings and a toss player on void rays, terran wins with more than a dozen vikings left.

However, at 3/3/3 toss with void ray upgrade and 3/3 terran, with again max supplies, this time the terran is left with only like 4 vikings left.

Early game, grouped vikings dominate grouped void rays of equal supply cost. However, end game, they're almost evenly matched.

[IskatuMesk]

If VR's cost 4 supply that would be retarded. Fuck, part of the problem with this game is units costing so much fucking supply. Armies are like half the size they used to be in BW and this is why units like the Immortal are so dumb in the first place. DURR 50 DAMAGE VS ARMORED LOLOL UR 3 SUPPLY TANK DEAD IN 3 SHOTS BRO

I think letting Immortals hit air would be a disaster.

The thing about VR's is unless they are focus firing/specifically targeting something you can micro some vikings to extend their chargeup period. The key is to kill them while they are charging up and disengaging or trying to minimize damage when they are charged. Of course, throw in a few ravens for HSM and the VR's are totally fucked because they MUST stand still to get their charge, and they definitely can't run away. But they have to run away or die anyways. Ravens are still insanely good even if DD's aren't usable against VR's.

And yeah the speed up for VR's is a bit silly... I'd rather see an upgrade that gives Phoenixes Overload back.

[AA7Dragoon]

Alright, let me weigh in on the discussion given here so far. I agree with the racial balance issues needed for end-games.

The last FFA we played that I won in had certain conditions that made it all possible. I never would have beaten Mucky or Mr if I didn't have A.) a shitload of minerals and gas from the aggressive expanding I did, and B.) The 12 Stargates I had pumping out replacement Void Rays at any given time.

Basically, I expanded my Void Ray fleet until I hit 200 supply. By then, I was floating 2-3k minerals and gas. I lost a ton of Void Rays to Mucky's Vikings and Mr's Hydralisks. No average Protoss player would have been able to recover such losses had I not anticipated the skilled professionalism that Mucky and Mr. plays. Void Rays do overpower most units, but if you can destroy most of the fleet, the average Protoss player can't recuperate those numbers so quickly and at so many resources. Whereas, Vikings are easily replaceable, and Mucky would have easily destroyed my main base, if I didn't have 12 Void Rays warping in from my Stargates at the same time while I warped in Stalkers from my Gateways to harass the landing Vikings.

When Mr. tried to destroy my main base after wiping out my 2nd fleet, I simply warped in Dark Templar to tear apart his assault while I recovered my Void Ray numbers.

I wouldn't say Void Rays are overpowered. On the contrary, I believe everything else just needs a buff. Protoss Stalkers need a buff. Zerg air needs a buff. I think Terran, for the most part, are okay. Thors need help though. Void Rays just happen to be a complete unit that needs other units to balance it, because they are definitely expensive, and not always easy to reproduce like the Terran reactors, or Zerg spawning rates.

[Mucky]

Wait... Immortals kill tanks in THREE HITS? In addition to reducing siege damage to nearly nothing? Wow. How 3 supply could possibly be justified for tanks is a mystery to me.

[Falchion]

Wait... Immortals kill tanks in THREE HITS? In addition to reducing siege damage to nearly nothing? Wow. How 3 supply could possibly be justified for tanks is a mystery to me.

Simple. To value Marauders.

[IskatuMesk]

Unless tanks had their health increased beyond what I recall then yes the immortal does 150 damage in 3 hits and far more if upgraded. They also attack fairly quickly, so anything that is armored will die very, very fast.

Watching this replay leads me to believe that the reason mucky won was two-fold;

First of all, I'm an idiot and play like a D- player a best.

Second of all, he got the best spawn location in the map and benefitted enormously from player spawn randomization to have no less than 4 immediately accessible expansions and such. To penetrate his defenses I'd have to have made and rebuilt at least 3 armies. At one point around midgame I'm sure I'd have killed him, but Bill attacking me and forcing me to pointlessly pull back saved him long enough to get his gas economy going and become impenetrable.

Meanwhile I got screwed by having most of the expansions readily available mined out or mostly mined out. I was too slow to take the ones that weren't.

And stalkers suck.

/edit

That's right, tanks got "buffed" from 150 to 160. Immortals do 65 damage when fully upgraded. 65. That's ridiculous, and yes they'll be 3shotting tanks at full upgrades but not unupgraded. 3x 65 = something like 195 damage. Marauders do 20 unupgraded. And people wonder why Ultras are useless.

[Mucky]

Wait... Immortals kill tanks in THREE HITS? In addition to reducing siege damage to nearly nothing? Wow. How 3 supply could possibly be justified for tanks is a mystery to me.

Simple. To value Marauders.

Was that a serious response? Because Marauders are also armored and die in 3 hits from an Immortal.

[IskatuMesk]

I've played a few FFA's as random. Basically, it drums down to this;

If I'm Zerg, one of two things will happen;

- Reapers or Banshees will come. In one FFA I was attacked by TWO terrans, one going reapers and one going banshees, who knew how to play quite well. I had FE'd to a high yield and lost that to reapers, but managed to keep them from doing damage to my base. Directly after that banshees showed up and did a lot of damage to my main but left before finishing me (presumably to defend that player). I was then allowed to expand and build up relatively easily to tier 3.

I had Hydras, Infestors, and Corruptors. It came down to 1 T who I knew was making air (vikings and BCs + reapers). I fought him down as he attacked my new main and killed all my tech, using aids on his clustered vikings repeatedly. They did not die. In fact, they didn't suffer much damage at all. I had Corruptors and Hydras I used to pick off lone bcs and shit but corruptors do zero (0) damage vs vikings and die extremely fast due to their slow speed, low range, and meager hp. Then I died.

- Second game was on Metalopolis, I again FE'd to the high yield but another zerg found it and killed it with lings. I fended off the lings and acquired roaches and then eventually hydras. My goal was to mass hydra and kill him before he could get air, but the Protoss player had left and he had the whole south of the map to himself. Every now and then the Terran sent a few infantry I killed. Since I was aggressively trying to prevent this Zerg from expanding and trying to tech I had very little gas and only Hydras. Of course, BC's come out the Terran base and kill my high yield.

I had some time to prepare in my main and made around 10-15 spore crawlers. I healed them with queens when the BC's came but maybe killed 2 bc's at most, out of 7-8, that were not upgraded. I had a few Corruptors and Hydras and as his bc's slowly attacked my base, wary of my hive and the other crawlers, brought him down to 3 bc's. After he kills me with a second attack (I killed the last three just barely) the other Zerg messages me in my next game saying he finished off the Terran with 200/200 air when I died.

You literally need like 4-5 Corruptors to a BC to kill them reliably. So vs 3 bc's I did 1/4 health damage to one BC with around 6-7 Corruptors. They are awful, and it's because their firing speed is dreadfully bad. Even with Corruption that gives you +20% damage that's only around 2-3 extra damage per corruptor on a BC. They suck, and Yamato makes them virtually worthless in anything but a giant mob.

- I played an FFA as T and had a fun time forcing away a tier 3 Zerg with mass air away from my high yield on Kulas Ravine. With Ravens and Vikings I was able to decimate his air force repeatedly. I had made Thors thinking he was going to make Mutalisks but after the first batch I HSM'd he never made any more. During this time another Terran was left uncontested across the map massing Battlecruisers.

When he finally showed up to take the high-yield from the zerg as I was preparing to kill him, I realized he had only BC's and attacked them with vikings. I was able to kite his BC's across the map killing probably around 3/4 of them (he had an upgrade advantage) until he got vikings. At this point I was fucked because I had no resources but put up an effort to kill him. Instead he just made marines, which I tried to counter with Hellions.

* Hellions absolutely suck as combat units. Cost ineffective compared to Vultures by far and you need a 150/150 upgrade to do any damage. No mines means zero utility.
* TvT you absolutely must have both ravens and vikings. Then it comes down to Raven control and I lost all of mine to stupidity and Yamato.

Then I played a game as P and abused DT's and this one poor Terran who made vikings and nothing but.

* Carriers only do damage to vikings if they are under cloak and the T has no detection.
* Void Rays CANNOT WIN against Vikings, even with an upgrade advantage. If the VR's already have a charge up then yes they can win. Otherwise they die very, VERY fast and it takes too long to charge up. If you have something like 30-40 VR's then yeah you'll probably win. But in numbers ~10 vs ~15-20 vikings you can't win. It's worse if he focus fires two at a time.
* Few people build any kind of a pre-emptive defense vs DT's. I've learned to really like dt's even though they are really expensive. They are great in FFA's. Not so great in 1v1's.

- I played a lengthy FFA on LT as Terran vs 2 Zerg's and another Terran. The other Terran went nukes and vikings and the Zerg next to me went pure Roaches. His strongest attack killed maybe a few tanks, a barracks, and some depots. I was able to fairly calmly take the island my nat and hunker down with ravens and vikings, eventually acquiring a few BC's. When I decided to move out on the High Yield I built two PF's there and some turrets for good measure, then held down and waited. The Zerg I eventually killed with nothing but PD, he wasn't a very good player. Anyways, this T had been nuking the other Zerg for a long time and I had been watching the two.

Well, I've got a recording of this game so I won't go into major details. In short, I was practically unkillable unless I fucked up my micro or something.



FFA's really skew the balance of the game even further but really the following conclusions seem fairly solid.

- Zerg as a race are incomplete and very weak. They don't have many options and they cannot swarm with 2 supply units. Corruptors are terrible as anti-air and Mustaches being your only viable late-game anti-ground doesn't cut it because they cost a metric shitton of gas. Infestors are decent but they alone can't turn the tide of the game; Aids doesn't do enough damage to solo ground a fleet of vikings. Hydras are kind of terrible units. They do a lot of damage but with so little health any kind of an air or AoE force can tear them apart.
- Protoss are in a better seat but against Terran air it basically comes down to feedback. If you can spam feedback you'll do a fair amount of damage to ravens and BC's (if not killing the ravens outright). However, HT's are very slow, expensive, and storm is kind of eh. The Protoss doesn't have many options outside of that. Void Rays are ok if you can make a LOT of them... but against HSM they are still powerless. Carriers aren't really that great.

So what do I think about Terran? Is it that they are too strong? Nah. Defense Drones and Vikings might need some nerfs or changes but really, the problem is that Terran has a lot of options. Zerg has next to none, and several Protoss units dramatically lose value as the game progresses.

I really don't think I'd play a serious game as anything but T right now.

[New-/Hydrolisk]

If VR's cost 4 supply that would be retarded. Fuck, part of the problem with this game is units costing so much fucking supply. Armies are like half the size they used to be in BW and this is why units like the Immortal are so dumb in the first place.

Factor in that each base "needs 30 workers to function at optimal speed", what you get is that anything beyond 2 expansions sounds stupid: 60 food right down the drain. Only 140 to work with. Wanna know how 1-basing works? Because the guy has +30 food advantage.

Code: Select all

bases | -food
1     |   30
2     |   60
3     |   90
4     |   120
5     |   150
6     |   180
7     |   200 + 10

The only way it can work is if you're massing units constantly and replenishing after every battle.

[AA7Dragoon]

Bravo, Mesk! I've played dozens of games, and this is the same kind of assessment I am noticing about the current SC2 version.

Terran is the most powerful race. It's not that they are overpowered, it's just that they are the most complete. They don't need to be nerfed. The other races just need more expanded and buffed options.

I enjoy playing the Protoss because the playstyle fits me well. Unfortunately, late game anti-air and early game ground is challenging for me against a Terran player. Marauders and Vikings are very difficult to handle. Marauders destroy all my ground forces except for expensive, late tier Immortals. Vikings neutralize me in a 1v1 because I can only build a few Void Rays, and they easily destroy the Colossus I need to destroy M&M&M's. However, some advantages I have as Protoss are the Blink Stalkers, Dark Templar, and Nexus build rush. The problem with Protoss vs. Terran utility comes down to resource cost. The Terran units are far cheaper, and can be produced more in mass to effectively counter Protoss tiered units. It's not that the Protoss units are necessarily bad, it's just their strength doesn't scale to resource cost. So you can't build enough Protoss units to counter 15 Marines, 10 Marauders, and 3 Medivacs (a minimal cost to a Terran player).

Zerg are awful. They are suppose to be the swarming race, where you can send massive numbers of units to overwhelm the enemy. This is not possible for two reasons:
1. Supply. The moment you start a game, supply kicks you in the face. "Spawn more Overlords, spawn more Overlords." That's all you hear for the entire game. Something needs to be done about Zerg supply. Either the Overlords need a supply increase of 1, or some of the units need to drop in supply cost.

2. Gas. This is what kills the Zerg race. Every unit costs huge loads of gas. Corrupters and Brood Lords? Forget it. You'll never maintain sustainability. Whenever I play Zerg, I always notice I have a huge influx of minerals, but I'm always running low on gas (this coming from a guy who saturates expansions for gas before minerals).


But that's only half the problem with the Zerg race. Balance, is the other reason for the race's inferiority. There are no late game options for Zerg. None. Brood Lords will destroy ground, but Corrupters are inferior to protecting them. The Terran player will instantly build Vikings while the Protoss will focus on Void Rays or Stalkers. Late-game ground is even worse. Ultralisks are a joke. I've never seen a serious Zerg player survive to that point, and then use them as a viable option to win a game. Brood War Ultralisks were scary! SC2 Ultralisks feel softer than Immortals. As Mesk also said, Zerglings are too weak. This is a unit that should remain viable throughout the game. The attack speed/attack nerf ruined late-game Zerglings. They're useless beyond rushing much like the Zealot is against Terran.


So yeah, my assessment pretty much aligns with yours.
Terran - Don't nerf (exception: Marauders). They're just the most complete.
Protoss - Needs buffed counters to Terran for early ground and late-game air.
Zerg - Needs a total workover. Supply, gas, late-game viability needs to be reviewed and altered.

I'm just concerned that Blizzard did not address this during beta, and that after a few post-release patches, not a single balance change has gone into effect yet. Part of the problem may be the Expansion idea. Since Blizzard focused the most on the Terran race for the single-player campaign, both the Zerg and Protoss's core philosophies were underdeveloped. Is it merely a coincidence that the 2nd most complete race was the Protoss and you could play them in the single player campaign? The Zerg has always been put on the back burner since development and it shows.

[Krazy]

It's almost like the zerg need a spellcaster unit... maybe something that has a DoT and a support spell, like giving ground units temporary invincibility.

And the protoss need a ground unit, something a bit stronger than the stalker... you could even call it a "Heavily Armored Soldier." Or wait, no, a better name: Dragoon.

[New-/Hydrolisk]

I want to build on m previous post regarding expansions and how each base chews up 30 food.

This problem is HUGE for Zerg. DOUBLY huge, because they need scores of units, which needs several bases and map control, which in turn requires 30 food each to "run optimally." This problem is tripled because Zerg probably have the least cost-effective units ATM, judging from previous analyses and personal experience (note: Silver league, may not apply to higher-level play).

Zerg is incredibly gas heavy. How to waste the piles of minerals you've accumulated? Zerglings, right? Too bad that you're 1food:2lings need so many more numbers to be effective thanks to their nerf, and so you try to make more lings to account for the nerf; oh, but what's this? You've been cockblocked by the supply limit! Now, you can only send a half-assed army of weak zlings that can't even move fast enough to reach the enemy before getting blazed, at which point units that CAN shred lings are already on the field.
But that's beside the point, the point itself being that food is at a premium for Z. The only way is to maintain map control and scout the enemy a lot. Ovies and suicide lings, also changelings, should be useful, but the other races have stacked on AA, so you're only ever going to get a glimpse at perhaps their army composition.

If Zerg's selling point is macro, it's been damned to Hell.

Also, yea: Z REALLY need some unit that can screw with the other races.

Stalker: bitches don't know 'bout the void in my hp pool.
(Though, IMO, between their Blink to pull back and the new shield regeneration mechanic, the have a bit of effective staying power compared to what's apparent.)

BTW: I think mass Void is a terrible strategy (against Z); Hydras and Queens squish them easy unless there are more than 5 (in which case, by this time, Z should have a shitton of Hydras to work with, whilst if P is going heavy air, they're investing in something that's gonna get washed by a timed attack by Z).