playing TvZ, I have always struggled against zerg that masses hydras, no idea what to do so im trying to build thors and seige tanks against the hydras, i dont know if thats a bad choice or not but no matter what I do they I just cant stop them heres a replay from my latest gold league match. what could I have done differently? and how do terrans counter hydras in general?
I would try mass MM's with siege tanks behind it, and maybe a couple Thor mixed in. As long as you can keep the tanks protected and put them in siege mode before you start attacking with them, they will be a lot more effective.
hmm i gotta work on that seige tank micro then and also, in the replay the zerg player just sent all of his hydras in by overlord, is there any way I can see this coming by looking at his base structure?
Siege tanks, with marines and marauders in front to take the brunt of the damage. Just scout around to find his hydralisk army before you commit to an attack, it could be fatal if they flank from multiple directions before your tanks are sieged up.
A good strategy for stopping mass anything is to disallow it to be massed. I watched your replay and can see that your early game is very weak. You produced units from only one barracks for a good 7 minutes of game time, and then later you queue up three supply depots. You should avoid mass queuing of objects as it prevents you from using those minerals for things that would be more useful at that given time, like another barracks or two. I always at least produce two barracks and more often three before I even start on my third supply depot. If you were producing units from two barracks instead of one you would have been able to attack with a larger force early on. Your opponent just plain outmacroed you. By the time you started producing thors you most likely would have been able to expand. Do that, expand. Don't sit inside of your base and wait for your opponent to attack you, attack them. You want to control what they do, not wait to react to it.
A few hellions are nice to have too, if you can get a good flank off they can really take advantage of the hydras low hp and light status. And you can also use them to just do general harass and keep the zerg from balling up too much. Oh, and remember, hellions can kill larvae pretty easily if they have the infernal pre-igniter. He can't instantly rebuild his hydra army if you just took out all the larvae at a couple of his hatcheries.
Try to keep in mind the slow speed of hydralisks off of creep, this means that you can try to explot that immobility of hydras by having some very fast units to complement the siege tanks, which I would advise being fairly aggressive with. The reason for being aggressive is that zerg can quickly change from one unit to another so you need to exploit hydras for as long as you can. I would suggest having a tank and marine heavy base army with some helions or banshees/vikings prowling the map attempting to give you an advantage whenever possible. Since hydralisks are slow, move the tanks to an advanced position and have your harassment army do whatever it can (I personally reccomend a mix of vikings and banshees because they can attack mineral lines, scout and snipe overlords)
one amazing way to take on hydralisks with very low casualties is a large army of cloaked banshees with a strike team of vikings to quickly take out the overseers before you attack with the banshees. all of the other strategies mentioned above work also. watching his movements with the orbital command helps alot also to make sure he doesnt pick them off before you can take his detectors out if he has any. if he has no detectors then there will be a large pile of hydralisk corpses in seconds
all these strategies are too complicated...... just do MM with few medics and you can own any zerg setup. (not much micro involved) I am a platinum random player and I never lost to zerg with terran.
