u can get 2-3 vikings before he can get a banshee into your base. So just spread them around mineral line if u dont want to build early turret,
i think early scans in TvT are wastefull (+ i like to take early 3rd so mules are helpfull at that) i rather scout with my 3rd viking or so, but u need to be carefull

It's going to be hard to scout banshee tech because you need to have an scv there for a long long time - he should have sent his first marine to check for hidden scouts. That's part of the reason that I like going for it.

Assuming you went reactor instead of tech lab, you'd have 2-4 vikings by the time he has 2 banshees. You need to make that advantage pay off - i.e, those 2-4 vikings need to be worth more to you than those 2 banshees are to him. Time's the important determinant at that stage of the game, not gas.

I don't think it's awful to go starport, reactor & 2 viking -> eng bay. You most likely have spare minerals here, particularly if you skimped on marines (and there's no need to build more of them once you have tanks). If you use your 3rd 50 energy to scan his base and see him going viking, that's fine - you can still use the turrets to help protect your tank push, particularly if you can get anything on high ground near him.

Agreed. You can always just go vikings to hold off the first banshee then get turrets once he reveals them. Only problem with this is, if you just dropped a mule when his cloaked banshee comes in you're going to be very far behind.

I never think scans are wastefull, I'm a huge fan of scans. I'd rather have more information than a little more money.

in the mid-late game sure, but early if you're burning energy on scans you're giving up basically 6 marines/3 marauders.

If you scan banshee tech though, you're potentially saving 5-6 scvs.

and if you blindly prepare for banshees every game, you're wasting money on an ebay/turrets or if you go quick vikings you still need to save 50energy for a scan to deal with the cloak banshee.

Wolfram --

I get the feeling you may be sac'ing your banshees. You should be pulling them out once units come -- the point is to just harass his mineral lines not go for auto win. If you can get his stalkers out of position to defend the banshees (for example) then you can push your main force up the front and set up siege. It's more about just throwing a bunch of **** from all different directions, which is one area that terran are exceptional at (and that I also need to work on as well).

Also Day9 made a great point about harassing with stuff like banshees/mutas. He said they follow a "U-curve" for utility. If you get them super fast, their utility is high because your opponent won't have detection/enough AA. But then slightly past that, your opponent will be prepared so they are reaching minimal utility (with detection and AA and static D). But then later on they see you aren't going air so they will build more ground units, and they won't be preparing for late banshee harass and their utility goes up a bunch again.

Well, there's definitely a stage where you can get turrets "for free" - i.e, at the cost of nothing else useful - but I'm not totally clear on when this is. That's probably because I'm the one going banshee so see that side of things 100% of the time and rarely have to worry about the counter.

I agree with the premise, but I think that the u-curve is less important if your opponent isn't that great. He'll always over-react to your tech and you gain a lot just by demonstrating flexibility. That's how Z beat T a lot in SC1 before people got good at lurker micro.

i like banshee rushing early undetected and getting there with my banshee just in time to see a mule drop. he ain't gunna have a scan for a while.

Great great great TvT opening is Gretorp's in a recent Day9 daily. 10 supply 12gas 13rax and you can drop a factory as soon as your rax is done. Orbital around 18, build marines, get 2nd gas around 50% factory and then starport as soon as factory is done. Build tech lab, swap starport onto tech lab and get a super fast banshee. Then you push with banshee as part of your main force as you expand. You end up trading armies (either he has only 1 viking and you killed all his ground, or he kills all your ground but you have a banshee that sniped all the marines and just cleans up marauders). Neither player can attack, but you gain an expansion early and you gain a huge advantage.

Nooo. I win almost all of my TvT's going quick banshee's. No one is ever ready for it. If they do happen to get lucky and get a scan down after I've switched my fact/starport then I'll just re-switch them back after scans end. They will turtle and build turrets while I transition back into a tank.viking build.

90% of the time it never gets that far and I get a quick banshee up, send it to their mineral line about the same time they are pushing out, I defend with 1 bunker (with marines) + hellions, I use the 2nd banshee I was making to defend their push if my hellions/marines all died. By that time the other T had stopped mining for a while to get their scvs out of the way of my banshee. If it goes longer than that then I add tech labs to factory/barracks and just crush them with banshees/maruaders/tanks.

I'm at the 600-800 level for diamond so obviously the higher up diamonds are probably more ready for this sort of harass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pdLjI0_DQs

Part 1 of 3 of a mass raven TvT game. Pretty awesome.

sick game. i cant wait to try this. and fail. miserably!

In TvT I go for a fast banshee and it often gets a 3rd scan from the opponent just as I switch the fact/port and begin the bansee + cloak. If they do get this scan down on it I wait until the scan is over then cancel banshee + cloak and then switch fact/port back and go into a standard tank/viking build. It works very well because the opponent will waste at least 400+ minerals and scv build time creating turrets. This usually gives me a 3-4 tank advantage over them (if they were going tank/siege as well).

http://screplays.com/system/files/re...vich.SC2Replay

bronze league, 1 minute and 20 seconds.

pretty funny iyam. haha.

im determined to find a solid bio counter to tank/viking under the new patch that pwns

have failed very frequently this evening

Try loading it to a site that doesn't require membership to download.

like which

Like this one.

gratze

I'm the blue terran (is that player 1 or 2?)

Just played this a few minutes ago, I'm usually pretty horrible at TvT and I was expecting to lose (he was "favored" before the match).

I'm Bronze (but 4th in my division, no idea what that means tho) and would really appreciate criticisms I tried as best I could to play my A game to get criticism. I think this is probably my best game vs. Terran (not saying alot as I don't think he was that good in the end). I just started playing yesterday (although I've played 80 matches now lol, embarassing 35-40 record tho).

Basically (with spoilers):



If you guys could had any input at any and all aspects (initial build, gameplay, decision making based on above analysis, micro, etc.) I'd love you forever.

<3

As a bronze level player, fundamentals are much more important then any other factors when it comes to improving. Strategy, tactics, all that other crap doesn't matter at all if your fundamentals suck.

Let's start with build order:

Your build order was actually half decent at the start you did everything roughly right for a standard opener. Except you went for 14 gas, you shoulda grabbed it at 13 instead. Uh other then that it was basically okay. Make sure to get a marine when your barracks pops after you grab the orbital command.

Control Groups:

You need to start using these. Are you aware of them? You can set any units or buildings to a hotkey by holding control and pressing either 1-9 to assign it to those numbers. When the game starts you should immediately hotkey your CC. Also hotkey your scouting scv, your army, all your production buildings can be hotkeyed onto one key and you can use the tab key to switch between them. This is essential if you ever want to be able to multi task, micro, or macro well.

Building 3 factories right off the bat like that was kind of nonsense but thats not even really important at your level so I'll leave that aside I guess.

Expansion:

You have no reason to go for a ninja expansion that you can't defend. Expand at your natural.

Base Layout and Turrets:

I'm sure you noticed your base was messy like a kids play room. And it made it difficult to move your thors around and such. Try to organise things in your base nicely and create paths for your units and such. Keep things tight together in general but not so tight that you don't have paths to move around your base. As for the turrets you built tons of really uncessary turrets inside of your main base there. You woulda been better off lining them along the edge of your base in that situation. Turrets at your mineral line and such are for when you are facing like phoenix harass or banshee harass you dont' need to do all that vs slow battle cruisers. A few turrets is fine.. get some good coverage with them spread them out nicely keep them out of the way.

SCVs:

Your scv production was weak. You kept up with it nicely in the early game but you stopped at 35 scvs total. This is too few. When you are maxed at 200/200 you should have something like 70 or 80 scvs. You had tons of bases but no scvs mining them. Not constantly building scvs is the biggest leak in any lower league players game. It's easy to do if you are using control group hotkeys. If you have your CC hotkeyd to 4 like I do (the number is arbitrary I just use 4 for mine). Then you can simply push 4 S to build an scv and you don't even have to look at your CC to do it.

Solid fundamentals alone is what you need to progress. Even all the way to diamond. Anyone who isn't in diamond level it's not because they don't have the apm or the strategy or tactics it's only because they lack fundamentals.

Anyway, good luck.. D=

I didn't watch the replay, so I will defer to the above poster, but thors against battlecruisers are not a good choice. They are costly, and fire a lot of weak anti air attacks (Their base damage against battlecruisers is 12 damage per barrage, and the barrages are SO slow). If you upgraded them, terrific, but it's still not very economical, given their costs, since your thors will get thinned out by yamato cannons if your opponent has them. Vikings do much better against BCs, since they can attack from about the same range, can chase them down, and can run away too.

Bioball + a few banshees + 1 raven (point defence) aginst protoss = gg

Like seriously, WTF can they do about it? Stalkers don't work... no ground units work... phoenix won't work (they'll just cloak and we'll target the phoenix with our mass marine force)... nothing works.

throw up FFs and back away, feedback banshees/ravens, storm bioballs, colossi melt your bioball, etc