StarCraft 2: Ten Early Game Harassment Techniques

StarCraft 2: Ten Early Game Harassment Techniques​

1. Playing as zerg you can build an extractor in your opponent’s base. Cancel this extractor before it finishes and rebuild. Continue doing this until they have enough units to severely damage the extractor. Once they do cancel one final time and try to manoeuvre your drone to gain additional information.

2. Playing as zerg you can gain additional supply early on by building two extractors then two drones/zerglings and then cancelling the extractors. This will put you up to two over your maximum supply.

3. To prevent a quick expand place a worker on at the natural of your opponent preventing them from building until they have units to kill it. This is an excellent strategy against zerg players who try to quick expand before getting a spawning pool.

4. If you’re playing against a terran player they will often wall in an excellent way to harass a terran player doing this is to use your initial scouting drone to attack the SUV building the wall. If you are playing an inattentive player you may actually kill it stalling and disorienting your opponent.

5. Using an overlord for scouting is a standard however if you pay slightly more attention you can abuse the extra view range on an overlord and once you locate your opponent immediately turn the overlord around to prevent your opponent from seeing it. This is also great if you play random and want to scout but do not want to give away your race early on.

6. Proxy factory/barracks on large maps. On large maps people tend to be less prepared for early attacks and as terran you have the ability to not only use early game proxy factory/barrack to put lots of early pressure on your opponent you can also lift off and fly them back to your base any time.

7. Hide a bunker in your opponent’s base. This is a classic move from SC1 but in SC2 there are a few more interesting things you can do. The two that are most effective are reapers that can hop over cliffs this is best in maps that you can jump right up the ledge of your opponent’s base and into a bunker avoiding the ramp that is normally blocked off with buildings/units. The second is summoning a mule to repair the bunker because a mule can be summoned anywhere you have vision.

8. Proxy pylon in or near opponent’s base. Very effective simply get a pylon in or near your opponent’s base and build warp gates as quickly as possible then warp in a few zealots to do early harassment. Proxy pylon tends to work best on larger maps when players are least expecting early pressure.

9. Fast two zerglings. In lower level matches you can easily get into your opponents mineral line and disrupt and possibly get a few kills. In higher level games the two zerglings might not do much damage but it will put your opponent in a defensive mindset often leading them to waste more resources on weak units while you build your economy.

10. The mineral heist. A definite favourite of mine, before you take your worker out of your opponent’s base steal some minerals!

So that is it, enjoy. I hope this helps you win a few more games.

 

Thanks. In respone, I'd like to ask the best counter for a reaper rushing terran. I guess I know the answer, scouting for early gas and tech lab on rax. But what do you do as a zerg if you get surprised? Not much sense in sending drones after reapers, or is there? I guess, anyways, a zerg player shoudl have some lings as soon as the first reapers show up, no?

 

You normally have queens to spawn larva, but they have ranges so they kill reapers pretty fast. But don't attack with your drones, the reaper is fast than a drone i believe, so he can hit and run and make sever damage. Or zerglings with speed upgarde can catch up on the reaper, surround him so he can't run and destroy him.

So either your queens attack the reaper or some speed lings(zerglings with speed upgrade).

 

Thanks!

 

Hellion harass deserves a mention here. It can be disastrous if pulled off right, and disastrous for Terran if it's done wrong. People often use this harass to play into Ghosts and Nukes against a disoriented Zerg.

 

Read that hellions are easily contered by one spine crawler on each side of the hatchery. If one scouts a factory with reactor or some early hellions, one should definitely do that, as zerg. Problem is, scouting turtling terrans is hard to pull off.

 

2, 5, 10 can't really count as harassment.

1 is used on me all the time. My poor opponents don't know that I rarely get my second gas early anyway.

9- Two Zerglings? I mean, if a player can be thrown off by two, you might as well toss in four more and kill them outright.

 

As a terran player, there's nothing worse than having a very early scout start attacking my scvs while they're building. I typically have one scv building my barracks at the ramp for a wall, while the others gather minerals. An early drone or probe will start attacking that scv, and then I have to run that scv back to the mineral line so it doesn't die, and I have to send two scvs to my wall. One to continue building, and one to scare off that annoying scout!

Basically it forces me to lose mineral time and I get my barracks out slower. So if you are ever against a terran player, send that early, early scout. You may not get a lot of info, but you will distrupt them and throw them off their game and build order. Attack an scv, get him off of the building he is building (or if you're lucky/ your opponent isn't paying attention, kill the scv), then steal a gas. Especially works if your zerg as an extractor is 25 minerals. This makes him get his marines out slower and his gas out slower. Basically he'll respond to your gas-steal by building 5 or so marines quickly to kill that extractor.

If you do this correctly, send four or so roaches against his marine force (or stalkers). This has happeend to me before, and I've lost. Worker harass by scout followed by gas steal followed by quick tier 1.5 units can really mess a terran player up if executed correctly. If your worker harrass or gas-steal doesn't work out, don't bother going for the roach rush. You've put the terran player on defense: take this time to fast expand.

So there is my advice for harassing terran. As a terran player, maybe this wasn't such a good idea to post

 

That is a lot of resources to commit so early to static defense at your main.

 

True. Maybe it's better to build 2 or 3 roaches to block the ramp and 2 spine crawlers at the ne. Later, one might move them to other strategic positions anyway.

 

I've been wasting resources on this a lot lately because this is the current fotm for terrans to win a game in the first couple minutes because nothing is as fast as reapers that early, especially when they can just hop a cliff to be safe then jump right back up. I went with 3 spine crawlers. It worked against the first 2 reapers....but then 4 more showed up and one shotted my spine crawlers.

This really should work and it's a shame it doesn't. So what i've been trying now is dual queens. Maybe zerg shouldn't be the only race without a unit that can jump cliffs so we could harass with impunity as well.>=\