Zerg Strategy Discussion

Sounds like your lings had a good lunch, good on ya! ^^
I don't think the question you should be asking is "when is the proper time to tech for lair"
but maybe, when am I getting my gas? The only way to feel confident about tech,for me, is when A) I have a strategy of plan, and i get the necessary tech as smoothly and quickly as I can to maximize what that tech is supposed to and B) When I scout my opponent and react to his tech(which is bad, in my opinion,because reactionary TECH is going to be behind unless you are doing a good job with your scouting) C) would be a an inner clock that tells you "ok, it's 10 minutes into this game and I still haven't got my LAIR, game tiem dictates this needs to happen(unless you have control of the game, which we could call a variable)

With that said, teching is never a bad idea. Higher tier units are stronger, in general, cut and dry. Throughout the game you should be investing in tech, but knowing when to do it kind of depends on what you're doing. With all i've rambled, the best way to know is to define a BO, or just play a lot. I have acquired tickers in my head, little flashing red mental lights that say "right about now he could have his banshees/thors/4gate up"
After you play a lot you start to get a "feel" for the WHOLE game.

I am sorry, I am scatterbrained today. My main point was asking when do you get your extractor? What are you teching for? If you are going for mutas or hydras early,you'll want a lair quickly. Do you want to rush the lair? expand before you do it? play roach and tech switch after you attack once? there really isn't a wrong answer to wehn to go lair, but if you find you don't go fast enough,watch those replays and adjust.

 

I normally get my extractor right before my spawning pool. I know it's early, but I like getting ling speed asap. Plus it gives me the option of getting roaches or banelings earlier if need be.

I've had really bad luck teching to Lair recently though. I normally get attack just as my Hydra Den goes down or as my first wave of hydras pops.

I used to go tech crazy, teching hydras, infestors, Overlord speed and unit carrying all at once and it was way too much. I wanted to do infestor drops, but then I figured I still needed hydras because they'll have ground units. It just took too much time and resources, so I don't do it anymore.

 

Vampire bob, I recently have been giving my ext priority over my pool, for the same reason. I've been trying to optimize my speedling opener, teching up to speed asap, and getting my 2nd hatch just before speed finishes so I can macro up easily while I attack, decide to defend,etc.
Ext 15,pool 14, i think is what has been working ok. I think my hatch at my NE usually goes down somwhere around like 19 or 20, but I'm not positive. I'm going to study my replays tonight so I have a better feel of what's been working the best. Good to know someone else is using the strat to success! The lair is kind of something that I've been doing depending on what I see and what's going on. If I play ZvZ and force my oppenent to go speedlings as well, I tech to lair quickly, build up my econ and try to switch to mutas(without them seeing until its too late, i hope!) Otherwise it depends how much success my lings are having and what I see for tech and unit composition.

 

@ Vampire Bob:

About teching, sounds like you tend to tech up everything there is to tech, that's not necessary. For example, ventral sacks, which makes dropships out of your overlords, is a very expensive upgrade and should only be bought if you really plan on doing some drops. Only tech what you plan to use, and with the rest of your resources, build units and expand. Techs which upgrade units also only make sense if you have lots of these units which would benefit, OR if you plan on massing these units. No sense in teching a unit type which you will not use.

About the lair, same as swifty. When I feel like having enough units to defend or put on pressure, I try to tech up and/or expand. I'm not very experienced, but I begin to "feel" this, as swifty described. Which units you are fighting against, if your enemy defends, turtles or attacks, which buildings you scout, this all draws a picture of what he is planning, and in consequence, where he is vulnerable, or where you should react.

For example, a protoss which hides behing some zealots, a sentry and a stalker will be teching insanely, maybe to void rays or dark templars. His strategy would be vulnerable to a push which breaks his defense, or to a harass by drop or something else. Of course, if you draw false conclusions from what you see, which happens quite often to me, you might be f***ed. That happens often when I only see half the base with my slow overlord. For that, you might upgrade to overseer or tech for faster overlords & oseers.

 

@ Domanz & Swiftly

Thanks a lot for the advice. Could I get your Build Orders? I looked online and I can't find any BO's anywhere? Also, would you guys like to play together online? ZvZ is my worst matchup and I'd really like to practice it, a lot.

I'd give you my email, but I think it'd show you my Real ID, which I try to avoid. How do you friend someone so they don't see the real ID?

 

Not sure how to friend w/o real ID, to be honest. Last night I was playing some 4s and 3s, just for fun, and my BO was working well, i think it was this...
10 ol
while ol is building, do the "extractor trick" to be 11/10 (this is where you are at 10 food, and make a extractor with your drone,giving you9/10, build a drone, then cancel the extractor to get a cool 11/10.
around 13 send a drone to scout
15 extractor
14 pool
16 ol
3 drones on gas as soon as it finishes
queen when pool pops(around 17/18 but ol will pop then anyways)
metabolic boost when you get 100 gas
from there it depends on what you see, mixing your inject larva with drones and lings
around 21, build a hatch at natural if you aren't getting harassed or if you can reasonably
otherwise,banelings might be a good option(or in addition to)
keep injecting and pumping drones and lings
somewhere in the mid twenties your boost is done, and soon therafter you could have banes, or you could switch to lair or roachesm depending on your intel
when you're in mid twenties and you use an entire set of spawned larva for lings, you should have like16-24 or so at this point, maybe you already got your first 6 or so there,morphing to banelings, and they would finish about when your spawn larva'd group of lings gets there. blow up the wall if there is one with the banes, or kill the zerglings(if Z) with them. attack with your lings, and have your next full spawn larva'd lings en route, if you got the Expansion then you'd have another queen, and another hatchery sending straight lings, your macro should be enough for a good follow up of a solid12-20 lings, and you can be teching, macroing.....It's freestyle after around 20, because you should be able to react towhat your opponent is doing. Sorry if I'm not explaining it well, i'm really tired and im high. i have a few replays if you'd like, but im not sure how to upload them here....
-Swifty

 

I make my build order dependent on the opponent. Against other zerg i want a 13 pool just to make sure, otherwise i copy the economic bo from IdrA. 15 pool, 16 expansion.

 

Last I knew Idra went 15hatch 14 pool....

 

I believe there are some BOs buried deeper in this thread, including Roach builds, 2x hatch/expo builds, and fast muta builds.

When you get gas is going to vary a bit depending on your build. E.g. muta builds get 2x gas going much faster since they need to stockpile it for their intial mutas.

 

let me try to summon my internal Day9 here.

So for VampireBob I'd agree that maybe you're trying too many things at once. have you tried against Terran, a ling, roach and infestor army? It is pretty straight forward, and adding the ventral sacs isn't too much extra to add to the mix. I think you're goal should be to have a healthy economy that can support building what you want, instead of focusing on having an infestor drop rush and then in parallel building hydras. The other option is cut out the roaches and just go mass ling and infestors with fungal growth and drop. What if you used the drop for more than just infestors?

The 1-1-1 has a lot of overlap in units and the starport is crucial. Meaning that because of you're going to go barracks and factory anyway, especially against protoss, getting the starport is a necessity. Think of it this way. With a starport, you can get a raven, which eliminates damage from stalkers, gets rid of the observer and can be used for harass or scouting (saving energy for mules). Because you can swap buildings onto reactors, you essentially can build a different set of units at the cost of time to lift and drop, as opposed to having to build a different branch in the tech tree the way zerg and toss have to. Those three buildings pretty much build everything. With zerg we have to build unit specific buildings to unlock the tech tree.

 

So here are the BOs as I understand them. First and foremost you need to understand why are you building X building before building Y and builging Z. For isntance Sen has a build that is:

9/10 ovi, drone to 14
14/18 extractor, drone to 14 again
14/18 pool
expo later, I think it was 16ish.
18 extractor, I think

The question to ask is why? what purpose does this serve. Well he wants to get extractor first and foremost, because he wants to get gas to do something with. If he was afraid of a super early rush, he obviously would have gotten a pool first instead. However if he is getting gas first, he's looking to get to a lair and then tech (muta in his case).


The standard is

9/10 ovi, then drone to 14
14/18 - pool, then add two drones
15/18 - hatch, then add two drones

Idra's variation is to send a drone at 15 to scout, build a queen, extractor at 18, and begin increasing the zerling count, before moving on from there. This is a far more passive and ling, roach play and is looking to build the economic advantage first and foremost, while giving you some unit flexibility.

I've seen this as well and I think this is the BO i'm going to take up:

9/10 ovi, drone to 12
12/18 add extractor, then drone to 13
13/18 pool, then drone to 15
15 hatch.

TLO does a strange BO that is:

10/10, double extactor
12/10, cancel one extractor
11/10, pool & ovi
drone to 14
14/18 expansion
16/18 ovi and queen.

He was worried about an early rush and wanted that pool asap. On another forum, they established that 9/10 ovi is almost always the best build start regardless of what build order and the only other reason to do anything else is if you mistakenly build a 10/10 ovi.

That's all I've got. If you see any others, please post up.

 

it seems so nitpicky how much talk is about on which drone to get your pool... I would find it much more helpful to discuss specific unit counters. I'd like to make a chart over time that displays every unit and their strength/weaknesses, including how the units are used and such. so... what counters what? I hear roaches are good against hellions, hydras good vs stalkers, zerglings for tanks and generally anything slower than them, banelings for masses of small units who tend to be found in clumps, as well as good for harassment. Infestors are good against a few giant units that you can take over, or a lot of small stuff that you can fungal growth...

anything else in particular?

 

Are you just looking for Zerg (given that this is posted in the zerg strat thread)?

I'm not aware of any single compilation, probably due in part because it was still in beta and in part because the system is a bit more complex than before, with damage bonuses based on armor type/unit type/unit size. I would keep an eye out for this in the first month or so after the game goes retail.

 

I would definitely start with zerg, as they are my favorite (I admit I was much better with protoss in the original, much easier to play, at least for me). The fact that there are hard counters would actually make this job really easy. I can literally hop in game on each race and document what their damage types and armor types are. Heck, it'll be easier than pokemon types. There are counters that are better than others though, and some units that are good vs others unrelated to damage type/armor type. Those will take a bit more thinking.

 

sorry for noob question but what is a pool?

 

Spawning pool, you need it for zerglings and it's needed for spine crawlers and mutation from hatchery to lair as well. Basically one of the first buildings you wanna build as zerg.

 

i tought it was something else.. hehe!

 

can anyone tell me how to counter a marauder rush? are the lings useful on this one?

 

Lings + Queen. You need to anticipate where they are going to come in from and cut them off/get them surrounded using your speed advantage on creep. This means keeping your lings out of sight deeper in your base (and start flanking the marauders as soon as they come in), otherwise the mauraders will just hit and run on your lings without coming onto the creep.

Once you have speedlings you won't need to rely on the creep, but by that point it is just harassment and not a 'rush'.

 

Im new to the game im looking for a zerg strar and i rly dont undersatnd much of what u are talking can someone show the basic plz
ty