Countering Thors and Hellions.

I've enconuted this set up a few times now, and I have a bad feeling it going to get more common.

Its nasty becuse the units cover each others counters. (Hellions eat lings and Thors eat roaches) I can't see a mix forces working too well either.

So whats the correct way to deal with it?

 

MACRO: Fast Expand, have 1 Queen at your Main and 1-4 Queens at your Natural (Use the Queens to Pump Larva). Have a Couple of Spine Crawlers at the Two Front Corners of your Natural. Pump Roaches and Hold you Ground.

I'm a Terran and my Main Zerg Strategy is the Hellion/Thor Build because it Works soo Well, and I used to get my *** kicked with the Zergling/Muta Build. Yesterday I Lost Twice to Roaches, one was a Pure Roach Rush and the second was the Zerg Strategy I stated above - which Absolutely Decimated my Hellions/Thors in Seconds when they Circled me, then they went Straight for my Main with an Army of Roaches. Needless to say it was GG from me.

(I'm not saying this is the Best Strategy, I'm only a Bronze Player. I'm just Suggesting a Plan that Worked Against a Similar Build I Use.)

 

Depends on how many Thors and how many Hellions. But Hydras would dice both thors and hellions it attacks like 3 times before they do. If that build was beating my Id drop an evo chamber train ranged attack and pump Hydras GG probably with some mutas first to harass then scout a lil bit if you pull out the Muta Magic Box Thors arent that scary.

I personally don't like Hydras but bottomline you gotta know how to use em for stuff like this youd be suprised how well they do. Obviously though you get hydras he gets siege you get mutas... Its a tango and a decent build vs Zerg for that reason but bottom line Thors are slow hellions are fast make it so they cant be in the same place at once with ling muta harass if he ever gets more than 2 base his thors wont be able to cover everything..

Use the mobility of the zerg to force him to turtle up and GG

 

There's a couple things (and then some) you can do in this scenario. Some are more all-in ish and some are more prepared for continuing transition. Lower level play you can be more all in and still get the W, but the further you climb the more you need to consider the next link in maintaining a strat (although all-in type things still work). There's no easy answer....


A) Consider attacking him preemptively in this scenario. Thors take a long time to build and if he's going all in thors helions you probably have a timing window to attack him in. A good roach baneling build I've been playing with lately goes something like this:

15 gas
14 pool
15 roach warren
15 queen


Throw the baneling nest in when you have the gas and make 2 pair of zerglings for banelings. Follow that with about 5 roaches. It's a fairly good aggressive opening that can really catch the terran opponent off guard. If he's really unprepared you can baneling bust his front and rush in with the roach. Make sure to expand when you're doing this push unless you want to finish him off with the bust. Don't hesitate to pull units back and call of the bust if you need to- they're still really good/diverse for an early game relatively big push coming at you.

-OR-

B) Fast expand into roaches to defend the early helion harass, followed by massing up your economy.

15 hatch
14 pool
13 gas*

*gas can be improvised a bit depending on what you're planning- personally I still like early gas to keep my possibilities open.

Get a roach warren up relatively soon after the fast expand followed by a spine crawler in the front of your natty- that should hold off any early helion harassment. The early factory and reactor should be a dead give away. Same with early double gas. If you see real early double gas you know he's going to tech into something quick (although this one is a little harder to catch because you're drone is probably already dead).

I like some mutas to contain him in his base. If he's only going thors and helions he has to keep his thors back while you harass him, otherwise he has no counter until he pumps out different units. Control the middle of the map, try to attack him while he's out of position advancing his thors. Expand often.

I don't know what league you're in, but if it's like bronze you could basically just out macro him and push out mass roaches...that's probably the "easy" answer for a lower ladder player, although it's holding back some key concepts to be learning as you get better.

C) Baneling Bust

google baneling bust. :L

Don't know- best of luck.

 

get brood lords and hydras, simple

 

I often get the feeling that people play a different game or a hacked older version. Hydras have been countering tanks since SC1.

And the suggestion to get hydras against hellions and thors? Don't listen to them. Hellions are cheaper than hydras and fry hydras with ease. Roaches are the way to go against a thor+hellion strategy - thors don't counter roaches any more than other units. Moreover, if you have some APM to spare, you can burrow-unburrow your roaches since they can take 4 thor shots, thereby saving you units. Just be sure to spread creep to somewhat keep up with the fast hellions. A few spine crawlers at your expansions help.

 

I imagine infestors would also work quite well.

edit: and it isn't entirely true that Hellions "fry Hydras with ease." Hellions do a good job at softening up Hydras, but if you just threw a group of Hellions at a group of Hydras then the Hydras are going to win. It is what you would consider a very soft counter.

 

With the preigniter upgrade and en masse to the extent where we account for the 50 gas for the hydra in terms of minerals and where we consider AOE damage? Not only would hellions outnumber hydras, they'd outmanoeuvre and butcher them without a doubt. As I said, we must be playing different games lol.

 

Hellions with blue flame hardcounter hydras.
I just run a unit test map and saved the replay.

1 hydra kills a hellion when both equal on upgrades(even with blue flame) when when hellion is unmicroed. A microed hellion kills a hydra since it has a long cooldown in the attack so it can hit and run to evade shots.

50 hellions kill 50 hydras when on equal upgrade-terms(I did 2 fights 1 unupgraded and 1 with full upgrades for both). 50 hellions with full upgrades easily beat 75 hydras with full upgrades.

As shown in the attachment.

 

Thanks for the help guys .

Looking at everything people have been writing it seems that roaches are a must and early hellions should be countered with a ealy roach atack ( with a little baneling back up if I can sneak it in) aghainst a base that will likely be low on the old MM.

After watching the replay, it seems if I'm going to use hydras in my force to protect against air attacks, I have to be very carefull to keep them away from the hellions, otherwise it could get very messy.

 

I kinda had the same match up yesterday. Thors don't really kill roaches that effectively anymore since the recent range improvement. The only problem is if the Terran has a few SCVs repairing the Thors. If you see Thors and Hellions the logical thing to do is get a number of Roaches and either defend or make a decent enough push.

If you think about it the Thor and Hellion DPS isn't really that good as compared to Marines and Marauders with stim so the Roaches can actually hold their own. After which you can get Ultralisks or Broodlords to win the game =)

 

Dont try to call me out like that... You can lose your own games massing ground units against a mech using Terran gl with that. And I didmt just mass hydra if hes having these problems obviously hes not super amazing at controling more than one type of unit so i didnt wanna over complicate but dont directly say my idea doesnt work cause bottom line stuff. I always do a Hydra Roach combo. Never just one or the other.

 

Ok, then I'm going to say that your assumptions don't work. Just because someone asks for help doesn't mean they can't play the game decently, or whatever your definition for 'super amazing' may be. Moreover, how do more unit types complicate their control? Put them in one control group maybe? And roaches are faster than hydras so they'll soak up the damage and provide the protection hydras need, if you really want to put the latter into the mix.

And I don't even get your 'massing ground units against mech' part. If you keep up the pressure they won't have the opportunity to go for air units where you'd need hydras, because last time I checked thors and hellions were factory-intensive, and they don't even need medivacs either so starports would be a little out of their way. If they do go air you'll grind in their ground army and burrow your roaches against banshees... and even with detection, if you get tunneling claws and glial, you're good to go.

I'm not saying this for the sake of going against you but for the safest way to go against this T combo. I don't even know why you'd take this personally since I said "don't listen to them" because I remembered seeing it from several people. But having read some of your other posts, I'm not really surprised.

 

i dont understand why nobody considers broodlords and hydras. As the guy above say, if they have hellions, tanks and thors, then they are factory intensive, meaning they wont have vikings for some time, plus, hellions and tanks cant hit broodlords and the broods have an amazing range. So, broodlords with hydras behind to defend angainst air is the perfect counter for Hellions, thors and tanks

try not to fight guys

 

Muta magic box doesn't make mutalisks cost-effective against thors, you still need like double the thor's resources in mutas to kill thors and as I showed with the hellion replay, hellions also fry more than double their cost in hydralisks. So if a terran goes hellion/thor and gets A amount of resources woth of hellions and B worth of thors, and you outmacro him by 2 times getting 2A worth of resources in hydras and 2B in mutalisks and engage him in battle you will lose.

Magic box does not counter thors, it just softens the rape mutas take from them. 10 Thors(3k minerals 2kgas 60 pop) can kill 50 mutas(5k minerals 5kgas 100 pop) without losing a single thor if mutas don't magic box, or losing 7 thors if they don't magic box(I've included a unit test map, you can make more of these yourselves)

So yeah, like kuvasz said: Don't go muta/hydra against hellion/thor or you'll need 3 times the macro of your enemy to beat them. Use other units like roachese, ultralisks, broodlords. Ultras evaporate hellions and broodlords are very good against thors especially with ultras on the ground to absorb damage(plus the broodlings absorb valuable attacks too).

That is correct. For this reason having mutas against a terran with a few thors isn't bad, you just shouldn't use them to engage in a fight against those thors. They have other uses that exploit the terran's lack of mobility but to wipe out a thor/hellion army you need other stuff.


Also I'm not sure how ultra/broodlord transitions work and if they're worth making for the zerg since I completely suck against that race... I've only played a bit against AI with zerg just to try out the race and know what I'll be facing nothing more. I just mentioned the unit combos I've tried pitting against each other in unit test maps I suck badly at playing zerg, or at least I'm confident that I do cause I haven't played any multiplayer games with them so I naturally assume I'll suck

 

If you want to conduct a proper test message me in game. Sending two masses of units to auto attack each other is not simulating real game conditions, without which your 'lab' test doesn't really show anything not already known, i.e. the cheaper unit with the damage type advantage and splash will win in an unmicro'd situation. Hellion's poor pathing and the severely one sided advantage of focus fire for Hydras make Hellions a lot less effective then they are on "paper", which is really all you tested in that replay ~ their paper stats.

 

I'd be interested in such a test. However, it'd be very hard to draw the line for 'real game conditions' since hellions come much earlier than hydras, especially with reactors. Hence, technically, you could allow the flock of hellions to cost more. They're also cheaper than hydras... there's just no chance for Zerg to win that test. I also think that not being able to attack air is a big enough 'disadvantage' to further back up Stirlitz's and my claim, irrespective of the hydra's crawl speed trying to balance that. If that makes any sense.

 

With the speed of the hellions vs the lack of speed of hydras hellions are the unit that gets to have more advantage from micro, and that's why I used it in my example(move+attack) cause it has a high delay between attacks so move-attack-move-attack works awsome with it. Hydras on the other hand are way slower and have way greater range and attack speed(so when moving them you're losing attack time) so on large scale(big note on this) the fight conducted in that map is realistic.
Focus-firing on large numbers will also kill the hydras faster, because those hydras that are not in range will try to move instead of attack nearest and lose time and shots fired while hellions die so easily to hydras that till you try to focus a single one(on large scale fights, again) it's most probably dead or almost dead already.

On a 4 hellion vs 4 hydra situation however(or anything similar in smaller scale which I believe you mean by real situation) microing the hydras is helpful both to target fire the hellions and spread to avoid splash.

Still, when talking mass hydras, which is not uncommon in real games played by players(mass hellions is quite uncommon by terran players on the other hand), mass hellions with preigniters will fry them if both armies are equally well controlled(due to hellions having the micro advantage due to speed and slow attack speed- an a-moved hellion pack vs a carefully played hydra pack that's also split in small platoons and gets somewhat of a surround and a good concave will obviously win).

Of course in a real situation you'll have a mix of units on both sides and then the dynamics of fight will completely change. Also hellions are unable to attack air and don't even cause a scratch to non-light units making a mass of them extremely easy to deal with by just making a 1/4 of that mass of any heavy unit(roaches/stalkers/marauders) while hydras are an all-around unit that does insane damage to all.

Hydra is the better unit deffinitely, but if hellions weren't able to easily fry a mass of light units given that they are only focused against such units(8(+1)+6(+1)vs light with a further +10 vs light from preigniters) then both the preigniter upgrade and the unit in general would suck really badly.

It would be exactly the same as if an immortal lost to 2 stalkers. The immortal would suck real bad and it'd be a bad idea to make it in any case.

I'm generally up for any custom game, btw and willing to try out pretty much anything, so if you're EU and wanna add me, add Stirlitz.823, I usually log in the afternoon or night, at a gmt+2 timezone.

 

I'm not EU :arghh:. I suppose it's not possible to choose realms like you can for say WC3? I've never really looked much into it but the little bit I've picked up from random posts seems to indicate that.

Do you really see masses of Hydras like that in competitive games? Granted I haven't played 1v1 since beta, but I never saw Hydra numbers approaching that in 1v1, and even rarely in 2v2. And by competitive I mean platinum or better (I'm even reluctant to include platinum frankly).

I'm thinking more along the lines of anywhere from 6-16ish units, which is what, in my experience, you're more likely to see in an actual diamond ladder match, at least as far as # of support units go in your average engagement (cheaper units like lings may tend to reach higher numbers). Since the engagement is revolving around something, usually a push/attack on someone's expansion, the Hellions can't simply reverse kite, because there is a stationary area that is being contested. Because of that the clunkiness of the Hellions (and as fast as they are, they are very clunky for microing to ff and draw back injured units) and their lack of effectiveness for ff'ing in the first place due to that (and also I'd argue a reduction in the efficiency of their splash by doing so) hurts them a lot more.

Also, I think you mentioned something about Hydras having a fire rate disadvantage, which should also be reduced by ff. I'm not sure off hand how range compares. I don't make a point of learning hard numbers, most of how I play comes from experience. The actual engagements I've been in, on both sides of the coin (although only as zerg in ladder games), lead me to reject the idea that hellions provide a hard counter to hydras in those kind of actual game situations. Does that mean I don't think/build Hellions if I see a Zerg player has 80%+ hydras (or vice versa, that I diversify more if for some reason the terran has a ton of Hellions)? No, but I also don't start mass production of Hellions because I've seen that fail and be overall less effective than mixing in a smaller ratio as support, and not simply because Hellions aren't very flexible (i.e. good against a number of units), although that factors in.

 

I agree with some disagree with some other of your points.

I'll arrange them randomly as to how they come to mind, sorry if it gets a little messy:

-Hellions aren't clunky to micro, they're actually pretty good. But you can't micro injured units out like you do with stalkers because they have little life and no armor, so they die so fast it's generally not worth even trying.
-Indeed I already said in my previous post that hellions are a generally inferior unit as a core unit in your army compared to hydras as they're only good against light-ground units. If it's heavy OR air hellions are as good as a handful of scv's combat-wise. So yes, you won't make a crapload of hellions hoping the enemy gets only hydras/lings/infestors. Especially if infestors are in the mix your hellions are dead due to being outranged by the hydras and unable to close in due to infestors rooting them in place.
-Metaphysically speaking, that is not taking into consideration anything else army-wise like whether it'd be wise to do so or not and what other units are in the mix, blueflame hellions hardcounter hydras in all cases but one: When hydras start off in a 1-unit-depth concave (all hydras in concave in regard to hellions and no 2 hydras one behind the other). In every other situation hellions are about 2 times the total money worth of hydras(though even on that situation they're pretty even since hydras are more expensive due to the gas cost).

-What I mean about attack speed disadvantage is that with hellion's 2.5 speed you can attack and then have 2.5 seconds before being able to attack again to move your army for a better position, with hydras you only have 0.8 seconds and slower speed so moving for however short time will cost you shots fired.

-I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "reverse kiting". I know kiting as the "hit and move away, hit and move away" tactic, so reversing that would mean hit and move closer? If that's the case then it does not interfere with a contested area since you don't move away from the battlefield, if you mean the actual kiting(the hit and move away type) then that's not how you kite hydras with hellions. Since hydras have a bigger range, you will lose hellions by moving back and lose more by moving back in-range. The way you should micro hellions against hydras(when both armies are massed, that is) is hit and move closer in a diagonal way to reach the side of the concave, so you get to do more damage in depth and occupy dead hydralisk spots with your hellions.

-I've seen both fruitdealer and TLO mass more than 30 hydras, so I guess that counts as competitive play

-Even in ~6-16 vs equal number situations hellions still kill hydras because hydras will by nature be packed so they will take splash damage and even if 1 more hydra gets hit by an attack then the scales turn dramatically in favour of the hellions. Also in such small scales it becomes worth the investment to make 10 hellions or so fast from 2 reactored factories and not something hard to do(you just need 2 reactors to plug the factories in and you got 12 hellions in virtually no time).

-On a Thor/Hellion army, hellions are most effective when they engage after the thors. The thors can take quite a beating which will give enemy hydras time to get a good concave around the thors. Which will mean that if the hellions come from the side then they'll have tons of hydras in an almost straight line and evaporate them in seconds(it takes 4 shots for a hydra to die from a blueflame hellion, 3 if it's got an upgraded attack, so you won't need too many hellions to pull that off)...

-Another thing: Hydras are not infestors, they are a core unit which means it's easy to get many of them. TLO said that ling/infestor/hydra is one of his favourite combos, and these are all ground and light units so blueflame hellions should be extremely effective against all 3 so it'd be a nice unit to generally have in your army. I'm not suggesting that massing hellions will win you a game against this strat but a few of them will be a good addition to your core army, esp if you go mech to benefit from +1s etc...