^ Honestly stim and banshees crush even balanced toss armies if you can manage it.

3-4 storms can destroy infinitely many marines/banshees

i suck ass at terran vs zerg

So i was playing with sc2gears proggy today. Stats are from both league and custom games. I have around 200 games logged as terran and 70 as toss

Avg apm (damn i suck) | win ratio | Avg RL game lenght
TvZ 70 | 44% | 13min
TvP 76 | 60% | 10min
TvT 60 | 64% | 14min

PvT 82 | 53% | 14min
PvZ 86 | 52% | 11min
PvP 80 | 49% | 11min

That's it! I'm officially giving up on Banshees. People just always have detection up and ready and after that they're basically overexpensive fragile flying marauders.

TvT crushes them cause people go Tank+Viking and have scan.
TvP crushes them cause everybody does a fast observer now to scan terran's base and they have masses of stalkers.
TvZ should be the good matchup but so far everyone I play gets at least one overseer and the queens prevent mineral harass after that.

Vikings are just infinitely more useful in every matchup, cheaper and allow you to keep your starport on a reactor.

^ They're pretty good against terran. You realize that if you snipe like.. 2 scv and they scan twice for it you've made a bunch of money, right?

Minerals are not really a problem and u spent like 350/200 for 400 dmg or so.
And if opponent goes similar build u are behind in viking count and maybe even in tank count.

Ofc this might change in next patch i suppose

It's the gas that's important, not the minerals.

Anyways, a medivac drop with 4 hellions is way more effective imo and it costs less. I'll often get 6-8 worker kills at the cost of zero or one hellions.

Btw, I don't think banshees are completely useless. I just think they're useless in my hands. They require to much micro to pay for themselves.

I have a ton of success going 1-1-1 banshee, getting 2 with cloak and then harrassing my opponent. If they go for an early push all you gotta do is wait out a scan or 2 and then you pick off all their tanks and it forces them to turtle up while I expand and out macro them.

I like the first part about harassing. I think what banshees are useful for.

However I don't understand how you plan on picking off tanks when there's gonna be marines and vikings around those tanks and since you revealed earlier through your harass that you have cloaked banshees your opponent will have at least one scan ready for them, if not a raven.

Personally I think that cloaking is a waste of resources. As soon as your opponent sees you've got them, he'll be prepared for them for the rest of the game. I think the way to go is to get one or two banshees out and continually hit-n-run their mineral line and not get cloaking and hope your opponent overreacts and spends to much resources on detection and mineral line defense.

Split your banshees into 2/3/4 forces depending on army size, and attack various places (mineral lines if possible). Works real well against scan, and opponents get flustered easily in general. Requires a little more micro, but it's well worth it.

he has 1 scan, you send in 1 banshee with cloak, fire a volley and instantly retreat

he scans, you wait for the scan to pass

then you send in the rest of your banshees when he has no detection

if he has vikings, watch your NRG and pull out banshees as their cloak runs out

if he has only marines, pick them off then decloak and snipe tanks so you can recloak if more marines/vikings show up

the entire point is to take the initiative and outmacro him, although I have won a few games outright

Reinitiating cloak costs 25 energy, which I believe takes 25/0.9= ~28 seconds of being uncloaked to recover cost (Cloak drains 0.9 energy a second). I doubt decloaking your units is worthwhile unless you're rather certain your opponent is unable to muster enough forces for a decent amount of time. It's also not a good ploy since your energy is common knowledge for everyone when your banshees are uncloaked.

I'm definitely with wolfram on cloaked banshees being too costly and not worthwhile. Being able to use a starport/reactor for double vikings/medivacs is terrific and will help you deal with flyers across the board and quickly bring your bioball army up to snuff, along with allowing for some drop plays to pull off a harass. I do like the idea of a single banshee harass in the hopes that your opponent will overreact with either emplaced defenses or poorly utilized mobile detection.

Yeah, this is all great in theory. The problem is putting it into practice. If I'm spending all this time microing my banshees my macro will suffer every time.

I think I've never won a game where I built more than one banshee.

I also think I've won about 90% of the games where my opponent went for banshees. Most of the time I'll have enough energy for 2 scans cause I tend to lag a little on the mules mid game. I favor marine heavy bio armies and I always make vikings now. I also tend to build turrets in the middle ground when I push out with my tanks. They just never cause me any problem.

So let's just call them a "high skill" unit and leave it at that.

what is the proper defense when a toss throws a pylon in the corner of your base?
I mean immediately when the game starts.
with chrono boost he has two zealots out before I have one marine (10 depot, 12 rax, 13 gas, 15 orb build).
Should i be attacking the pylon with SCVs or should I immediately build two rax once he warps in the pylon?

as soon as you see the pylon, bring 3 scvs to attack the pylon and 1 scv to chase the probe around. Also make sure not to be late on getting up a barracks while you are microing the scvs.

If you are walling in, make a bit quicker wall in to prevent more probes from getting in if you kill the first one.

If the gateways are starting to go up, fall back and build a bunker near your mineral line. You then have to do some micro to keep the zealots from hitting your marines by retreating them to the bunkers.

Just played a TvT game and I noticed his first probe scurry into the dark area of my base without doing any scouting. So obviously I realized he was gonna proxy barracks me in my base.

I decided to wait a little bit to let him commit resources to the build and then I brought 3 or 4 scvs to the building barracks planning on attacking the scv. But I just couldn't get them to target the worker as it kept moving to different sides and underneath the building barracks. So his plan actually worked in a sense, however I managed to outmicro him with my own barracks and finally fend off the proxy attack and it was smooth sailing after that.

But it left me wondering: what is optimal response when you see an opponent sneak a very early SCV into your base? I was still in the process of building my first supply depot when it happened.

I'll say this though. Tanks outrange marines in bunkers, even without siege. I didn't know that before.

Yeh, tanks are good.

You could always stall more SCVs in order to get your barracks up faster. You should also make your new buildings in such a way as to block off access to your mineral line. But as long as you aren't too far behind him on marines, you can also fight with scv - 2 scv + 1 marine beats 2 marines without scv losses.

What's much more dangerous is if he makes his barracks just outside your base and goes for a reaper rush. Then you need to have scouted his base and spotted no barracks there. Then you need to immediately get two bunkers in your base with a marine in each & cross your fingers that you can get it up in time - if you've walled in miles away then he can kill your marines before you can reach your minerals (I really don't like walling vs. T). Then tech to tanks and you've effectively won.

(I like how enemy workers are probes and yours are SCV)

dont really recommend banshees in tvt, you reallyu only want to go for them if the guy is sticking on marauders/tanks for too long. any normal tvt build is gonna be more then ready for banshees if executed properly

Alright, i've been having trouble with Banshees, what is everyone doing that just stops them?
I always seem to get turrets late, is this how you are fending them off?
If I have vikes, I scan, get a couple shots, he runs away, comes back in a minute when I don't have enough energy to scan.

Turrets are the counter, and you have spare minerals in midgame tvt. I think there's almost always a window where you can do damage with banshees before they have turrets in enough places though.

Had a couple interesting games over the weekend.
For the first time, I scouted early with a scv AND properly interpreted what I saw.
Got my SCV to his base, saw he already had gas up. Thought that was odd, pulled my SCV out of his base and left it just out of site range. He also had a depot and was middle of building 1 rax. about 30 seconds later moved my scv back on his ramp and saw a tech lab. Anticipated a reaper rush, built a bunker at each end of my mineral line, held off on OC and build a second rax. He got one or two scvs but I held it off for the most part, after defending, pushed in with mauraders and won.

Also had a game vs toss where I dropped two nukes on his mineral line and one on his army, that was fun.

If you orbital on 15, use your second 50energy to scan his base, the second 50energy is usually around the time hes getting an addon for his starport. If he's getting a tech lab you have plenty of time to get turrets up, since he'll wait for cloak most of the time before attacking.

scouting is important!

building e-bay and a turret from mule > scaning and hoping to hit starport

ok, so my key for early banshees is starport w/tech?
I probably won't see anything hinting at this with my SCV scout, still too early right?

If I go and blindly build a turret in my min line, should I be building 2 at each end, 1 at each end, 1 in the middle?
How much in minerals do I dump into it?

Another question, I usually go mule/mule/scan, should I be going mule/scan/mule? This is for everyone not just terran.