What are the counter-strategies to Thors? Especially with infantry backup, I can't find a good way to approach them as zerg. Their splash damage devastates ground and mutalisks. Brood lords work okay, but they are expensive and very late tech. Ideas?
well... I do have to point out that thors are also very expensive and late tech. However the best way to deal with thors is neural parasite... heehee
FYI, thor's don't do splash damage against ground. Anyways, try a mix of infestors, banelings, roaches and hydralisks. Run all of those in to attack, while the infestors fungal growth the infantry and mind control the thors. The infantry, which now can't move, all die to the banelings, and the roaches and hydralisks clean up the thors. Obviously it will be a closer battle than that (since your infestors likely won't be able to fungal every infantry, and most will die to said infantry right as they mind control) but it will still give you a slight advantage against MM + thor.
zerglings. sure, thors 1-shot lings, but lings are cheap and they can easily surround the thor and tear it down. and thors have no ground splash damage, so the more units, the merrier.
considering you managed to tech to brood lords when he was Thors, you should definitly be able to get a mass speed-lings+roaches+hydras. speed-lings: to distract the infantry roaches: to tank the damage hydras: to deal the major damage split your forces so you can surround them well if you are gosu, get infestors and mindcontrol the thors then its gg
Thors are approximately the same tech level as Infestors in my opinion. Factory -> Armory vs Lair -> Infestor Pit (is that what it's called?). Brood lords further require a hive then a spire upgrade, not to mention morphing the corruptors as well (which are probably useless against that kind of Terran army makeup). Hm, I thought thors had ground splash, but in this case then lings will probably work pretty well. Unless of course they're also backed by tanks, which would be even tougher to deal with. Guess I just need to build infestors more often.
yeah, thors are roughly tier 2.5ish while brood lords are tier 3. or 3.5, if you consider it that way. in any case, lings are the hard counter to thors. roaches don't tank thors that well... they (used to) 2-shot roaches, now they take 3 shots but attack faster. speedlings do alright against tanks as well, just make sure you spread them out and surround the enemy. infestors are great once your lings have distracted everything else.
True, for some reason I was thinking that brood lords only required 4 or 5 buildings, hehe my mistake. So yeah, I would have to say that zerglings are the best counter with the exception of neural parasite.
maybe when i said to use roaches to tank the damage, was not the proper term but, you want them to take the damage, you don't care if they die, cuz once the big guns are down, you are left with hydras, which is sufficient enough to continue to push out to his base and finish the game cuz terran don't have fast production, unless they are pumping out tier-1 units which you will rape
The biggest counter to this type of play is infestors. Get a good amount of them and sit them in the back of your army, ready to neural parasite the Thors and fungal goo the infantry. It will aoe damage the infantry and stick them in one spot making them easy to kill. Plus the Thor's will be yours for controlling forcing your opponent to either shoot their own Thors down or march through all your unit to try and focus your infestors down.
Dont be so quick to disregard mutalisks. Consider all of the things that a terran player has had to have sacrificed in order to spit out those thors at a reasonable time. Mutalisks are only really hard countered by thors in excessive amounts, making them viable enough. By viable enough, by the way, I mean that they can work against the thors reasonably and everything else as well as they normally would. Look at it this way, realistically you have expos by now so really minerals and gas should not be a big problem, a thor rusher though has either a much weaker (vulnerable) expo or none at all. If this is the case then you can simply overwhelm the thors as long as you arent caught off guard. And since mutalisks are fast flyers, you should never be caught off guard. Plus, if the early mutalisks lose their effectiveness period and the terran player is for some reason getting the thors out fast enough, then take out his supply, and overwhelm him with harder counters. If your opponent has more expos, a larger supporting army and a generally better situation than you though then you may have just been outplayed and the thors arent the cause of your loss, but a byproduct of your opponent beating you throughout the game. If that is the case, then look at the replays and find what it was that allowed them to get into that good of a position, perhaps you didn't pressure enough or didnt scout properly. The list is endless as far as what had gone wrong but either way the thors werent the biggest problem during those games if you see what I mean. All in all, against a thor rush i recommend an aggressive and mobile strategy that will shut down, or even prevent, your opponent's big thor attack and allow you to wreck havoc once it has failed and they are just left to be overwhelmed.
I was playing a 2v2 and me and my team mate knocked out one of the enemies, but there was still one terran guy left. We were zerg and protoss and they were both terran. Now theres only one terran... We thought we were gonna win for sure, but then the other guy massively walled in and started massing thors. F*cked us over...he had at least 10 thors. killed anything we had... what would you guys have done?
"...what would you guys have done?" baneling bust inside while toss provide manpower. or stalker blink inside while mutalisks wreck havoc (unless missile turrets are everywhere, in that case... enjoy an easier baneling bust (he is focusing on stalkers) and wreck havoc with other units, even lings. honestly 2v1 against a walled in anything is insta-win.
as a terran player the only thing i watch for with small groups of maybe 1-2 thores and 24 rines is banelings. they tear **** up. they destroy the marine maurader meatshield and then what ever comes after banelings eats thores usually. however if your moving your whole army group of doubledigit tanks thors and vikings i dont stop for anythign and teh only thing that i have seen can counter heavey mech is very very high class micro and harrasment because of the immobility of thors and tanks. so take out hsi sensor towers constantly because without them his whoel army doesnt know heere to go
if he has that many thors that means you have LOTS of time to have expanded. The second you killed off one, I'd look to start taking over map control and expand like crazy, load up on larva etc, and go broodlords. ling broodlord is the hard counter, assuming you're going hard counters. To be honest, he's massively immobile, so you can use various tactics to expose the lack of mobility, but if you literally wanted to go up the middle, lings, infestors and broodlords would be my choice. I love this comment! I feel like in sc2 going muta is becoming more of a standard for me, than it was in BW. I used to love just going, lings into hydra, lurker into drops as a starting point and probably a significant percentage of my play was that. I just felt like I could easily react to my opponents, while with straight muta, I felt exposed and it felt like a bit of an all in and I just wasn't good enough to defend after my muta were pushed back. In sc2, with all that they've done to hydra, I'm finding myself favoring more muta focused builds. Even against terran simply because I don't think I can face terran directly on the field of battle without infestors and creep anyway, which while an excellent strategy and one i'll employ when the beta is back up, I feel like muta were a better choice (maybe I'm just too lazy to keep producing queens and creep tumours), because of the ability to abuse terran mobility, while taking down medivacs, banshees or ravens (assuming I still have muta). Most importantly I feel like I have an easy way to scout, and I can more easily react to his unit composition once I'm in his base. Maybe it's subjective, but I feel like with zerg I need to be more precise with what units I am going to make to counter a terran, while a toss I feel has more versatility within the units they have already made. Basically, I feel like terran and toss units are better at handling the current unit composition on the field as opposed to having to wait for the next build/larva cycle.
I would do a couple things. I would look for alternate ways to harass the Terran player like Mutalisks in the back of his base and expansion, Doom Drops in his base, Potential Roach burrowed crawls into the base, Protoss Warp Prisms into the base, and consistent pressure on the front of their base. Beyond that I would recommend scouting. Your sacrificial overlord is a good thing to use to see what tech your opponent is going, or having your Protoss ally send in an observer would be good as well. Lastly, when you know what he's going the best counter to Thor's for Zerg is Infestors. The Ultralisk may be decent now too, but the Thor still does a heavy dose of damage to them and the Infestor can outright cancel the Thor (or more than cancel). Here's a link to a video about this: Neural Parasite in Action.
