In your games, playing either as Terran or against them, how effective have nukes been against gold players and up? I haven't seen much success. Anyone who knows the game, and doesn't necessarily have to be a good player, knows that when you hear the warning, just move your army and then your workers quickly and you're safe, no? Share your experience.
nukes are best when used to force a player to "pick their poison" what i mean by this is to give the other player a consequence for dodging the nuke. Perhaps you find that your opponent has an expo with units very close to it as defenders. Nuke the expo while moving in with your army just out of range of the nuke, this way your opponent will either retreat with the army, and lose the expo, or stay with the army and have it take massive nuke damage. Or something like that....anyway ^_^
In broodwar, ghosts could lockdown perhaps 12 carriers and nuke them. Somethinng teamwork oriented is more reasonable however, like darkarchons using maelstrom or queen using ensnare. Perhaps the pheonix can lift dudes in the air for them to be nuked? or time it so that when they fall to the ground, the nuke hits the ground as well. Maybe fungal growth.
I like using Nukes to take out an enemy's worker units (SCV, Probe, Drone). Your opponent suddenly loses a good portion of their income, which takes time to recover from. Even if they move their workers out of the blast radius; that's still time not spent gathering.
Ì highly doubt that any ability in the game is designed from anything else then the standard 1v1 perspective. So no, I don't think it's reasonable at all. There's some great games in which TLO uses nukes against his (Terran!) opponents throughout the game. I might post some a couple replays if I happen to run into them again. Otherwise it can't be to hard to find them yourself, and learn something along the way. All I remember right now is that Husky found it just as exciting as yelling "STOOOORMS!", so it was pretty neat. ^^ Edit: lols, that was easy to find. [youtube]0pHQ6NE0Z4w[/youtube] [youtube]DK1025uIUnY[/youtube]
Nukes are hard to pull off, but can be very effective in certain situations. Nuking someone's army that's just sitting there is NOT one of those situations. Nukes are designed for structures and any units it catches are bonus. 1. The front-door bust nuke You know there is a big wall of pylons with cannons in back of them in your way. Sure, you could tech to battlecruisers to yammato cannon them, but you got a ghost *anyway* just for the emp on protoss shields, so why not spend 100 min/gas and take out many hundreds of minerals worth of cannons? 2. The double-nuke or tripple nuke. (requires two or three ghost academies) This nuke strategy is also for structures, but it's purpose is to completely demolish things like command centers, nexus', and hatcheries. Nukes do bonus damage to structures, so most buildings die in 2 nukes. This probably will not work if you try to have only one ghost call down the nukes back-to-back. By then, they've got a way to both kill you and detect you ready. 3 The "Get off my lawn" nuke. They've got siege tanks parked outside your base and all kinds of stuff. They are trying to take map-control so they can watch you starve in your base. Send a cloaked ghost out to drop a nuke. If they don't have energy for comstat, or raven/overseer/observer in the area and they know it, then they will un-siege their tanks and back off. That's your chance to break out. You can even cancel the nuke and then have your cloaked ghost run out and start shooting at them while you move your forces into position. 4. The "fake-out" nuke. Again, good for busting down doors and expansions, but this time it's best for players who don't have cannons/tanks. You bring a standing army and drop down a nuke on someone's front door (or expansion) while attacking that same spot.. They then have to decide between running all their stuff away and losing those buildings to your ground army, or they might send their ground army only to have it nuked! Just remember to cancel the nuke, otherwise you will nuke your own army and lose the game. :/ 5. The vortex-nuke (requires 2v2 with protoss ally) If you really want to destroy an army with a nuke, use the vortex nuke. If you use vortex around the time you call down a nuke, and time it just right, an entire standing army will be destoyed. See this video for the timing of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ-nP98VI5g 6. The distraction nuke Nuke a random spot of empty ground just before going into battle. Your opponent will be looking all over their bases for the nuke, but they won't find it. They might pull all their drones/scvs, or move all their units out of position instead of responding to your attack, and they probably won't micro very well during their response to your attack. It's hard for players to imagine that the little red dot isn't *somewhere* on their stuff. 7. The defensive nuke Hard to do, but if you place it and time it just right, you can force an attacking army to back off temporarily while they wait for the nuke to land. It can buy you a few seconds while the rest of your army marches over from wherever you had them. There are all kinds of uses for nukes I haven't even thought of. Just remember that most buildings can't move out of the way of a nuke and remember the bonus damage.
Now... in 1's id say a well placed nuke could do wonders offensively or Defensively... now in gold+ (maybe im giving to much credit to gold but oh well) Nukes shouldnt effective vs armies. still great for base rape if they dont have a detector... Now for 2's TP v ?? can be devastating if you know your partner... If you go Rine/Ghost/Sentry/obo you can have a high micro very very very deadly combo... Forcefield surround the army while dropping a nuke works wonders! (so yah 10-15 sentrys using force field and no im dead serious) On a random note Raoches/Queens can be quite devastating (no joke)
I appreciate the posts, and they're very helpful Many ideas I hadn't thought of. I had some of the ideas on using the nukes myself, but I had never really tried it because I have very poor macro and APM so if I started concentrating on Ghosts I would really lose out on the rest, not to mention as a noob, I don't fancy my chances at executing it just right either. But since you guys have had some experience with this, I'll give it a go
In my first 1vs1 i played terran. It was before even I tried the campaign or anything and well, I was deffinitely not expecting to win for any reason(hadn't played strategy games for 10 years before that match ). Anyway I built a ghost and decided I'd throw a nuke at the enemy for the fun of it. I targeted the nuke at the ramp in the entrance to his base, but for some reason he must have thought I was targeting his workers so he started moving them away. They got crammed with his infantry and tanks at the ramp(yes the same ramp I was attacking) and I managed to take out the whole workerforce and all the army but for 4 marines of my enemy with 1 nuke. Bad vs Bad player matches are always fun, lolz
