Man, I suck at multiplayer. Of my six games so far, I’ve lost four, even when I should’ve won–retreating troops when they don’t need to be retreated, for instance, or insufficiently scouting an enemy to figure out that they’re going total-void-ray.
What’s your handle? Sounds like you played me yesterday. 
I didn’t go total voidray, I just sent in a voidray push while I was warping in my ground army. Turns out I didn’t need my ground army. And even if you had scouted, I hit my second stargate so you might not have known I was gunning hard for airpower.
I lose a lot, too. I’m just inexperienced. It will take awhile to catch up with all the people who have been playing these kinds of RTS games for years.
I’m 7-5 in the practice league now, fwiw.
Heh. I’m Palanquin, but this was a couple of days ago. I saw the Void Ray army coming, and spent awhile trying to figure out why I couldn’t start pumping out Goliaths :smack:. A lot of my problems are like that: I’m making total beginner mistakes. Hopefully as I become more accustomed to the settings for multiplayer, my win-loss ratio will go up.
So, for the single player campaign, what tech choices do people recommend?
On Tychus:
I’m still trying to figure out his mission. He may have been meant to get Raynor to just give up and quit, hence his constant push to take the money and go. But obviously he wasn’t meant to just shoot Raynor, either. Presumably, Mengsk was really, really afraid of Kerrigan deep down. Which makes it doubly hilarious when Tychus steals the odin and wrecks Mengsk’s stuff up and then broadcasts the naughty little secret everywhere…
Yeah, but as everyone else gets used to multiplayer, we all get better.
Not sure if Goliaths are the best response to voidrays, fwiw. Unless you get the anti-air upgrade, the voidray can laser down a Goliath before the latter even comes into range.
In multiplayer, you can make Goliaths? In single you can but I didn’t know you could do that in multi. What’s the tech tree to get them?
I don’t think you can–thus my headsmack at trying to figure out how to make them.
Yeah, everyone else will get better, too–but I started playing about a week later than most folks (more, if you figure I’ve been overwhelmingly playing campaign, and that a good percentage of folks on multiplayer have focused on that). I think I’m unaccustomed to adjusting strategy for an opponent, and that’s been killing me. I finally won another game just now by keeping myself really flexible: sending squadron near cliffs when opponent started pumping out reapers, meeting marauders with other maurauders, building towers everywhere when banshees show up, and most importantly keeping a squad handy to wipe out the opponent’s secondary base. I let the opponent control the game for most of it, except for killing off the second base, and I’m pretty sure I won through attrition, starving him out. Very satisfying :).
Yeah, I’m on crack. Look for Vikings instead.
Learning what effectively counters what takes some practice, too. I fell victim to an early reaper rush exactly once. One stalker sitting amid my probes is now more than enough to take care of it.
I was playing a pretty solid game just now: early voidray push wiped out the drones in my zerg opponent’s natural expansion and I demolished most of the buildings as well. I was just about to push my ground troops when bam, tunneling roaches in my base. The first wave was not a problem: I had three voidrays up and a nice group of stalkers. But once he brought down a pylon or two, I just couldn’t keep up. I know very little about zerg, so now I have to figure out how to counter tunneling claws.
And the answer is just detection. He must have powered down my robotics so I never even got a chance to warp in my observer. I hate building cannons since I don’t like static defense, but next time, perhaps I will.
Static defenses do have their time and place. If you’re that far ahead you can certainly afford a cannon at the chokepoints to prevent exactly such all-in gambles. It takes an awful lot of roaches to get the level of firepower needed to make sneak attacks effective, and roaches are weak against almost every Protoss unit, so it’s a very risky move. Mobile detection is only really essential against roaches if it’s small-scale battles where they can exploit their burrowed regeneration and even then, with 4 stalkers or even a single immortal on the field it’s nearly impossible to unburrow at all without losing a roach every time.
FWIW, you’d be better off with marines against void rays than goliaths anyway. Don’t discount the little guys, they trash light air for their cost, and void rays particularly since individual marines die before the lasers can charge up. Vikings work just as well, but you have to micro them to exploit their range advantage to get the same effectiveness.
This is certainly true. In my case, I wasn’t all that far ahead and I just didn’t see it coming. I also can’t even remember if I had built a forge at that point. I think that people can go way too nuts on point defense and this really hurts their play.
I lasered his roaches by the dozen with only a handful of units. But the problem was, I must have messed up the micro somewhere along the line. He was able to make a few probe kills and took out one or two pylons. The economic damage and supply lock are what did me in. I couldn’t get new pylons built up back in time to warp in more units or replace lost probes. He was assuredly able to get his natural back and could tunnel in enough roaches to keep me from recovering, even though my handful of units were racking up stupendous numbers of kills.
I think it depends. Marines are wonderful against voidrays (grumble grumble), but rest assured, I will find a weakly defended structure to charge my aircraft up before I send them against marines. And if you aren’t already going to commit to getting Stim and some reactors, then I question the wisdom of churning out 6-8 marines per voidray. That’s not a great trade, and there are opportunity costs here, toe. I think that if you’re going to use marines, it’s probably a good idea to transition to a marine build instead of just using them as a counter. I’m not a terran player, but if I were going robotech, I’d probably go heavier with the vikings. But I’m not terribly experienced, so I would cheerfully admit to being wrong.
A good point about charging up on a building first, but that’s another one of those things where offense is the best defense. Voidrays are much more dangerous if the first sign of them is getting a building beamed. Ideally you want to force a meeting in the field with them, where the enemy has no choice but to use them as generic combat forces just to stay afloat. Voidrays aren’t so inexpensive that you can crank out a bunch and still be on equal army footing.
As for which unit is their “counter”, I think the entire concept of “X counters Y” is an oversimplification that doesn’t apply to most of SC2. For one, there really isn’t any unit that you can make a handful of, attack-move, and expect voidrays to just fall out of the air with no losses taken. Fighting voidrays is largely based on timing and positioning rather than unit composition, and exploiting the weakness of sinking heavy resources into rays instead of something that bulks up or supports army to army combat, which even sticking with Stargates, the Phoenix tends to do better than the ray.
Similarly, the suggestion of marines over vikings to fight rays is largely one of momentum. Infantry has a heavy presence in Terran vs Protoss through the entire game. You will always have the capacity to create marines and will very likely have upgrades for them already in place. Vikings, on the other hand, require either lots of map space to work or some quantity built up to defeat voidrays, and if rays are coming out as an opening gambit then generally Terran won’t be anywhere near serious starport capacity. Despite officially being the voidray ‘counter’, scrambling from a standing start to try to get viking production going at the last minute is going to be a lot less effective than simply focusing on best using your existing marine infrastructure to take the rays out, particularly as a marine force doesn’t leave you weak to the rest of the Protoss arsenal like vikings do.
Well tried my first multiplayer today. In the practice arena thingy. I got skunked badly 
This guy is making some great guides. The link goes to a video on using groups, but he’s also got ones on using the grid hotkey arrangement, on scouting, and on what it looks like to be an awesome aggressive player.
Don’t feel bad. I usually get like 1 building completed and 3 guys made only to find my base under attack by like 48 ships, 15 vehicles and 3 dozen troops, all with a complete support network and upgrades. I have no idea how people can do it (unless it involves running mods of some kind).
Nope, no mods. It’s technologically impossible to cheat like that in multiplayer, due to the way the game’s networking works - it would desynch the game.
The ‘secret’ that most new players tend not to pick up on is in workers. LOTS of workers. The start points in multiplayer tend to have 8 crystal patches and 2 gas geysers. Each crystal patch can have at least two workers on it at a time - one to carve off a chunk while the other is taking theirs back to the headquarters. The gas geysers can have 3 at a time in the same manner. This means getting full income from just your start point requires at least 22 workers…actually a little more since not all the crystal patches are equally distant. If you take an expansion point, you can double that. 44 workers all busily toiling away creates a huge amount of income, enough to fuel several barracks & factories cranking out units at once. Most new players tend to stop at 10 or 12, not realizing that more can be effective.
The usual approach (zerg deviate from this due to their larva system) is to have the headquarters constantly producing workers for the entire first 10 minutes of the game straight. This is augmented by MULE drops or chronoboosting the nexus to get even more resources. A common gambit is also to hold off on military for a while to instead get another harvesting point running early, which produces a short term weakness but very quickly turns into a massive production advantage.
At the starting levels of play, often times you can meet with success just by focusing on churning out workers and making sure you put all your income to use. The exponential curve in income over time means that even a small difference in number of active workers can translate into a major army difference in a short amount of time.
So, no one’s playing single-player, then?
Heh. I played it, but I’m honestly not sure what to recommend.
I went with science vessel, for one, because it meant less micro. I love spamming battlecruisers and tanks, but I hate keeping SCVs around to repair them; science vessels take care of that nicely.
I went with large bunkers because I also like infantry in early game. I’m not sure how often I used that, though. Anyway, they seemed more versatile to me than the bunker defense towers.
I went with barracks drop-pods, although that was a really hard choice: still, speeding up getting troops onto the front line was pretty awesome.
I went with the hypnotize-a-zerg thing, but never used it.