Depends how you play, I mean if you get BCs you have 2 options for excess Minerals; Hellions or Marines as most of your gas is going into BCs.
Out of the two, Hellbats work better in that army and don’t require you to keep dumping gas on Medivacs.
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Totally depends. Marines have much much higher dps density and shoot up; if they exist solely as a mineral dump, you don’t really need medivacs since you plan on them dying anyhow.
I remember having this discussion a few years ago and found it really, really odd that people invest gas, beyond upgrades, into their mineral sink. Totally defeats the purpose.
Yes, and they melt like butter without micro and support from Medivacs, often without dealing enough damage or preventing enough damage to other units to be worth wasting the resources in the first place.
There’s a huge difference in effectiveness between an army designed to support Bio and one that is not; so it is often better to go without Marines entirely if you aren’t building your army to explicitly support them.
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Dunno man, I’ve had this discussion before and honestly, while Hellions can be good, they completely lack versatility. They don’t shoot up, their dps density isn’t that good vs anything that’s not a worker or melee unit and morphs into a slow, fat, wide AoE light unit mulcher, which is somewhat redundant in all but cheesy 2 base BC Hellbat allins vs Zerg.
Whereas Marines have superb dps density, are so cheap who cares if you lose 20 of them in 30 seconds, soak up a ton of damage with how numerous they are and scale better with any of the upgrades they can get.
If for some reason I developed brain damage and had to pick one over the other (you can get both) I’d pick Marines in everything but TvZ.
Ideally though, just plop down a Reactor on that Factory and get Marines+Hellions.
Us team game noobs who only makes BC’s learned how to deal with zerg.
Hellbat, ghost, mines + 1 raven aa missile corrupter.
Spray and pray your EMP’s and scans during the big fight. Only burrow under corrupters.
Put a couple of medviacs on follow to save your ghosts.
Yamato the infestors with scans up, let the mines do the work ont he corrupter, and the aa missle + bc’s will shred what’s left.
So aim EMp’s at vipers, then infestors, then rapid fire yamato into the infestors (then vipers after), burrow mines and aa missle the corrupter. In that order.
Holy crap, that’s a lot you need to do to play BC late game. Getting BCs just for the yamato?
Hellions are better at responding to harassment, better at keeping the opponent from getting under your air army, better at harassment without Medivac support, better at soaking damage to protect your gas units, and better at surviving in general. Hellions are the more useful unit whenever you aren’t building your army to explicitly support a large mass of Marines. In those cases, the Marines typically melt too quickly in combat to be of much use.
Anti-air typically won’t be a concern with a late-game sky army because the bulk of that army is comprised of very effective anti-air units; however, Widow Mines are a better alternative if the player does need extra cheap anti-air for some reason:
- Widow Mines are cheap enough on gas that they can be used as a mineral dump.
- Widow Mines survive much better than Marines in combat.
- Widow Mines deal their damage in single large bursts; such that you don’t care if they die after they fire off their shot.
- The burst from a single Widow Mine is very likely to deal more damage than Marines will do over their short life-time.
Uhhh you lost me on the Hellion bit, they’re faster but do terrible damage to anything not light, are they supposed to witness the SCVs getting killed? Because unless it’s light units, they’re not doing much to help. You know what does though? Marines.
Better at harass, yes - and that’s about it.
They are awful at soaking damage, much worse than the Marine, they can’t really zone away from your BCs either. I mean Hellbats can but Hellbats are even more niche…
Marines are the better choice in like 80% of the situations you’ll end up in or you can just make marines and hellions, use the hellions for map control and mineral line dives while saving up marines to do a fat frontal push.
So long as there’s no mega splash damage on the field, you’re golden.
Most harassment units are light, particularly the ones that will be used in the late-game (Zerglings, Zealots, Dark Templar, etc); so Hellions work just fine for cleanup.
Hellions also have the potential to contend with units like Roaches and Stalkers with a surround + morph.
Which are useless without Medivac support; defeating the purpose of using them as a Mineral dump.
Marines are half the speed of Hellions when they don’t have Stimpacks up or a transport to ferry them; and they cannot afford to use Stimpacks just to get around without the healing either since they won’t have enough health left to fight anything.
Hellions are twice as tough as Marines in transport mode and 3x as tough as Marines in Hellbat mode (a less than 2 second transform). Hellions are significantly better damage soaks than Marines in both modes; except against Disruptors in particular since those one-shot everything.
Most ground-to-air units have at least 6 range, so they cannot be “zoned away” from Battlecruisers in the first place if the Battlecruisers are going to fight.
That’s not the point in this case though: The point is keeping the opponent from getting under the Battlecruisers so that they can’t maximize their DPS against the Battlecruisers. Hellbats are great at doing that.
Marines are better in a Bio army, one which is mobile enough to avoid splash damage units until those are softened up or taken out by specialists, and one that has plenty of Medivacs for escapes and to heal them between fights.
They are not better when the bulk of your army is slow and built around direct engagements; which is the case you’ll run into with either mech/sky or a Battlecruiser fleet. In those cases it is fairly easy to eliminate the Marines with splash damage right at the start of combat (or to force them out of the fight while everything else is still fighting); and it is better to have support that can either take a beating (so damage gets inefficiently divided against the Terran army) or that the opponent simply cannot reach.
I think you’re 100% wrong. The dps density, even without stim is much, much higher than Hellions vs anything except light units, they shoot up, the infrastructure doesn’t cost gas and their movement speed works with the battlecruiser naturally.
There are very few instances where getting Hellions is better, they do exist but they’re few and far between.
Additionally, you’re not limited to either or. Hellions are inefficient at what you want to use them for, that doesn’t mean you should make some, it means you need to use your brain and decide if Hellions are a stupid idea, for example, since the context of this is TvP BCs; if they get a bunch of Stalkers you’re an idiot for getting Hellions/Hellbats instead of Marines to support the BCs as the Hellions damage is garbage vs armored whereas Marines have very high dps density.
Overall though, if your response is to make Hellions instead of Marines as a core to support your BCs; you better have a damn good reason to do it or you’re just being stubborn and short sighted.
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Not to disagree with Terranicil but the biggest advantage hellions/hellbats have over marines is they are so much better against splash damage.
If there are collossus or storm or banelings, marines can quickly become a liability.
But particularly for TvZ, BF hellbats and hellions can easily trade much better with ling bane than marines with much less micro. You dont care if they are split because BF hellbats trade just fine against lings even alone and take a whopping 4 baneling hits to kill. Hellions still take 3 but are more mobile than marines without the need for medivacs to heal stim.
Now in PvT its a little bit weirder. Mech is harder to do but if they are going heavy chargelot, BF hellbats are insanely good at killing chargelots trying to get on top of your tanks/thors/whatever. Plus the added bonus that they are better against splash. Still, bio is just so much better than mech in PvT IMO.
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Not even gonna bother with this. This is mostly unprovable what you claimed and is extremely subjective in playing description. I can do the same with my claim and make it sound convincing as well. All I see are:
“BC outcompete this”, “BC outcompete that”, etc, etc. This not proof at all. Proof needs to be demonstrated in at least 1/3 of the top pro games and that has not happened.
So no I disagree completely. BCs are not the answer. Protoss late game is broken and needs to be nerfed to the ground.
Nerf to the ground, like protoss auto-loss in the late game?
What a clueless post, why anyone even would wait to make BC vs Protoss? The concept of the matchup since WoL and no patch changed that is to kill them fast, one time frame when Terran can win. Late game bothering lol, when Protoss on max upgrades will still be stronger… rarely even on pro games that happens
I agree. The P was doing better when he was making stalkers. When he started massing tempest, he started tlosing the game. Also, the 5 prong nuking is what won this game, not the BCs.