1 billion banelings will blow up on 1 marauder with medivac healing but 2 seige tanks won’t target the same zergling. The same is true for liberators and mines.
“The game uses consistent rules” … “rules which remove target fire from terran and require it from zerg.”
It’s fruit of the corrupt tree. A good tree does not produce corrupt fruit. If zerg has a different outcome for similar situations then the game design disfavors zerg. Assign whatever reasoning you want to this behavior, but there is no way to change the outcome and the outcome is clearly fruit of the corrupt tree. Make siege tanks equally likely to waste resources as banelings are, and terrans would lose their flipping minds. Zerg is the hardest race in the game.
That is because the Zergling dies after the first shot. The exact same thing happens if you try to kill Zerglings with Banelings. You are not going to lose extra Banelings trying to blow up the Zergling’s corpse. Neither Banelings nor Tanks are capable of wasting shots in this instance, because the damage of both units is instant. Either the target dies, or the next unit can try to finish it off.
The Banelings that explode to kill a Marauder are not “wasted shots”. Each one is dealing damage to a living target. This may not be the target you want to hit, and it may not be optimal given how your unit’s damage is specialized, but it certainly is not the same as wasting shots.
And frankly, every unit may attack a suboptimal target if you don’t focus-fire; since the two main criteria for auto-acquiring targets are proximity (sometimes by angle) and whether the target is a threat (caster or capable of fighting back against your unit). If you want your units to perform optimally, you have to focus-fire at some point.
Now that is certainly not true. Projectile units can waste shots because there isn’t a mechanism to pre-calculate their damage and prevent it. Any attack that occurs in the gap between the moment a projectile is fired, and the moment a projectile lands may lead to wasted shots.
Liberators have a projectile. The projectile is certainly fast, but Liberators can still fire their projectiles at a target up until the moment it actually dies. This means, necessarily, that Liberators can waste shots on the same target, as any shot that gets fired while the kill-shot is still in transit will be wasted.
Widow Mines are a weird case with unique behavior, but they can also still waste shots due to their projectile as long as more than one enemy unit is involved.
Widow Mines use a hidden marker to prevent multiple Widow Mines from automatically acquiring the same target. This feature was added to prevent a single unit from disabling groups of Mines for 28.57 seconds or so, which would render Mines near useless. The loophole here is that multiple Widow Mines can fire their projectiles at different individuals in a group, even when the splash damage of one or two Widow Mines would kill all of the targets. Shots can still be wasted as long as they are fired while the projectiles are still in transit.
Yes it does. For instance, units do not automatically attack the best targets. If you want to optimize your army’s performance, you sometimes need to focus-fire the units that are either the most threatening, or that your units are most specialized to fight.
Yes, we’ve established the game logic is consistent. The game logoc consistently requires focus fire on banelings but not on siege tanks etc.
Hello, 1984, is that you?
Siege tanks trade at am efficiency of 2 to 1; ling bane trades at 1 to 2. You say the tank has suboptimal targeting, but does it, really, though?
You can verify it in the unit tester. Liberators will automatically target infestors for example. Imagine if lurkers had auto target to ignore marines and kill ghosts, lmao, terrans would lose their flipping minds.
It’s called automatic target fire. It’s literally auto micro.
Targeting priority exists for literally every single unit in the game, with the exception of units that don’t have an attack at all (by which I mean units that don’t have an attack, cannot prioritize a target to attack).
The criteria for target selection are, from most to least important:
Which targets are threats to me?
Which targets have the highest Attack Target Priority (ATP) values?
Which targets allow me to use my primary weapon?
Only if I lost my previous target: Which target is the closest?
Yet only banelings will blow up on single marauder by the dozens and only terran units pick separate targets to avoid damage overlap. List all the reasons why this behavior exists. It doesn’t change the fact that banelings target a single unit and siege tanks automatically target individual banes, resulting in the need for micro / no need to micro.
Terran has auto target, zerg does not, zerg is the hard race. Welcome to reality.
That is false. If the Terran player is going Bio-Tank (mostly Marines), then they definitely do need to both split and focus-fire the Banelings with their Tanks. That dynamic hasn’t changed since WOL, except that Bio-Mine exists as an alternative composition.
Either way, you dodged the point. Banelings and Tanks are not capable of “wasting shots”. If a Tank or a Baneling kills something, the next Baneling isn’t going to suicide on the corpse.
Siege Tanks and Banelings have the same targeting system as everything else that attacks ground, and yes it is suboptimal.
In general, it is best to focus either the targets that the attacker will inflict the highest damage against or that are the most threatening, and for splash units in particular it is also optimal to focus the units in the center of blobs where the splash damage is the highest. Obviously, this does not happen automatically for either Siege Tanks or Banelings. In fact, no unit works this way.
If you want to target Banelings over Zerglings or Stalkers over Zealots, you have to explicitly order your Tanks to do that. If you want to target Marines over Marauders or order your Banelings to run past any straggling Marauders, you have to explicitly order your units to do that.
Infestors are categorized as casters. Thus, they are prioritized the same way as units that can attack both air and ground. High Templar, Ravens, Vipers, and other casters are categorized the same way.
For instance, if you have a group of Hydralisks and Infestors in a Liberator zone, the Liberators (being an air unit) would attack whichever Hydralisk or Infestor is closest, making no distinction between them. If you add Roaches to that group, the Liberators would still attack the closest Hydralisk or Infestor, ignoring the Roaches (because they are not casters and cannot attack air) until all of the Hydralisks and Infestors in the target zone are dead. Only then will the Liberators start attacking the Roaches.
That is false. There is no actual difference between the targeting AI of a Baneling and a Siege Tank. Both units will only attack living targets, without wasting attacks on targets that are already dead. In cases where a Baneling hit will kill a target, the next Baneling will go after the next closest living target, just as a Siege Tank does. In cases where multiple Banelings attack the same target, that is only because it takes that many Baneling hits to actually kill the target.
Those statements are lies. The targeting systems are the same, and there is definitely a need to micro if you want to optimize splash or explicitly target key units such as Banelings to protect your Marines.
How many fungals did Maru eat in game 2 of iem? Zero split micro and it was a close game. I am not going to debate with someone who refuses to use their eyes. Split micro is rarely required for modern terrans. It’s been replaced by “run backwards to siege tank protection.” That’s literally what they do in substitution for split micro.
It’s not “split micro”, it’s “run backwards” “micro”.
The difference is like night and day. Terran does not require nearly as much micro as it used to, and definitely not as much as modern zerg. If you ate 1 fungal like that in HotS it was over. Game ends right there. Maru eats fungal after fungal after fungal and people are like “terran requires split micro”. It really doesn’t. The best terran on earth often doesn’t even bother with it anymore.
Back in the day we had actual terrans. They knew their stuff.
Now we got a guy whining about bronze and silver being overwhelmingly terran and thus “proving” terran is the hardest race and another guy is so delusional saying you get instantly -400 mmr if you pick terran. Meanwhile he is too much of a chicken to play protoss or zerg because he knows that this attempt to “prove” his point would fail miserably. On top of that he actually thinks zealots would beat marines
Wait a minute. I read the first post again and he is literally also crying about t being bottomheavy. Lmao. This is his whole point:
Nothing has actually changed here regarding Siege Tanks or Marines. In cases where Marines can kite back to Tank lines now, they could also have done so in WOL or HOTS.
It took 1 valid criticism of terran for a hoard of relentless grifters to start lying about what their eyes were seeing. Bnet is still very much dominated by terran cry force. Top terrans replaced split micro with pull back micro, that’s just a fact, and terran has smart fire AI. Terran is not micro focused anymore. If it were, byun would be the top terran, and he’s nowhere near. Maru took 1 billion fungals to the face and almost beat serral. Split micro is not required to be good with terran. That is reality.
We haven’t even gotten to the more controversial criticisms, like how terran doesn’t require unit comps. They’ve legit spammed marine medivac for a decade. Terran also has free workers which mine free resources and make free marines. It’s literally a free unit race. Terran is tge training wheels race that automates micro (siege and forget, auto target fire), gives you free workers, and has the most basic unit comps in the game. 1 unit is a super unit that covers 99.9% of game scenarios. If I made roaches vs banshee I would die. Terrans don’t worry about that because their unit comps are on training wheels.
The justification for ez mode unit comps used to be that terran had hard micro. It no longer has hard micro. What is the justification now? Heaven forbid terrans have to actually scout and decide what units to make!
I guarantee you the upatree alt accounts are malding as I write this. His hands are quivering with rage as he tries to decide which alt account to spam with next, lmao.
The Siege Tank takes the same number of hits to kill Banelings in the vast majority of cases.
The targeting AI of both Marines, Tanks, and other standard units is the same now as it was in WOL.
Any case where a Terran player can kite Marines back into Siege Tanks with Marines now is a case where Terran could do the same in WOL. That dynamic has not changed.
All this talk about siege and forget units yet Terran still has the highest APM in GM. I think batz just can’t come to grips with the fact that terrans are honourable macro players that don’t rely on cheap wins.
Wouldn’t it be so nice to siege, forget about defense, and put 900 apm into maximizing the value of a double medivac drop? Berry tried that in a ZvZ, using mutas, and his third disappeared in a puff of smoke. God forbid that terrans have to actually multitask.
The thing about multitasking is that there are two kinds: proactive and reactive. Proactive multitasking is when you are in control, you are calling the shots. It’s like a turn order advantage in chess. It’s where you have spare time to seige up a liberator and then you time a medivac to hit at the same time. You only have to manage one while the zerg has to manage both. Reactive multitasking is when you have to deal with a liberator and a drop at literally the same exact time. Terrans generally don’t have to do reactive multitasking in the current game version. They siege their tanks and forget about the possibility of being attacked. They are doing proactive multitasking.
That’s why it was so hilarious to watch berry’s third base just poof disappear. Yeah, zerg actually requires multitasking. You can’t just forget about defense & focus entirely on offense like you can with terran.
Half the terrans in gm do proxy rax every other game. There is one called DeadlyMouse who does it literally every game. And by macro you mean “siege my whole army at the frontal attack path and wait for the opponent to leave the game”.
Whatcha talking about, Batz. Lurkers gave zerg players A HUGEEEE defenders advantage that they’ve never had before. In reality, terrans are so distraught about being overly aggressive because they know once lurkers are on the field teleporting everywhere they’d be on the back foot and have to tech up rather than staying on MMM all game.
Going from mutas to hydras has massively improved the A-move potential of Zerg, you’re not scared of losing 2k gas in an instant to widow mines, meanwhile terran has to split MM and their medivacs otherwise the combo of parasitic bomb and banes deletes their army.
It’s a step in the right direction but ultimately late game tvz is decided by range and terran has the range advantage. That means siege and forget micro. That means total focus on offense. That means proactive multitasking instead of reactive multitasking. It’s waayyyyyyyyyyy harder to micro if you have to watch the minimap at the same time. It’s waaaayyy harder to multitask if you are the one reacting to attacks.
No, lurkers are garbage. The real game changer is the infestor & microbial shroud. Microbial is absolutely busted with the ultralisk & hydralisk combo. It’s literally impossible to lose especially combined with the new nydus. You use microbial to allow the ultras to kill any tanks and to shield the hydras as they dive through the liberation zones. You use fungal to grab the ghosts. Normally terran can micro by running backwards, except hydras will delete all the terrans buildings in the blink of an eye if he gives up territory. Vs any other comp, the base survives & relands. Hydras delete the command center in like 5 seconds. Terran has no choice except to stand & fight vs a unit comp that will delete the terrans army via fungal + ultralisk splash + hydralisk dps. Oh and hydras + fungal are a severe threat to medivac retreat as well.
The current hydra+infestor combo is by far the strongest iteration of zerg that we’ve ever seen, and by a large margin. I’ve been doing a 2 base hydra build and hit 5600 mmr with it. The only terran to beat it was foxer and I think with some refinements I could make it work vs him too. It was so flipping easy to win that I went back to doing 1 base hive rushes. That’s my problem. If I play seriously I just utterly dominate my opponents and that’s boring As F. Mass swarm hosts vs bio terran at 5200 mmr is way more entertaining than dominating at 6k+ level. That’s why I wonder how on earth pro players can do what they do. It would be so boring playing the strongest strats on repeat like a robot. It legit takes a mental disorder. “Oh look, I won again. eye roll.” We’re talking 80% winrates with zero build refinement & just yoloing hydras to the top of the ladder.
lmao, infestors look good because they moved banelings back to their hots equivalent. It almost feels like cheating now when you play against 30hp banelings. before they would have a front line of hydras and the banes would trickle in through the cracks forcing terran to kite back, taking all dps the hydras are dishing out but now you just stay put and do a little bit of focus firing.
The real issue is that the midgame is like 1 minute long ever since the econ changes and people prioritize more bases earlier. You send your first double medivac at ~7 then the next at 7:30 but oh wait you’re also maxed a minute later so you may as well conserve them for the big 2/2 push.
Let’s play a game. To the right of the screenshot is either a barracks or 4 medivacs, guess which is which. They made medivacs MASSIVE on the minimap, lmao.
Because they are insanely busted. Why do you think mass swarm host works. It’s because of the infestor, not the swarm host. You get access to both via the same tech investment. 1 fungal and a wave of locusts will delete a terran army and not because the locusts are good:
I am glad they nerfed it. Too many “ape zergs” would win by just having a ton of banelings. They legit deserve bronze league. Snake is all crying on his stream about the baneling nerf and I am just lol’ing as I smash through terrans with an 80% winrate. It’s like, get good, dude. You just setup a counter attack while the terran moves out. He isn’t paying attention to his army, you fungal it. It’s that easy. We’re not landing men on the moon here. We’re beating 80 iq terran marine spammers. It’s one of the easiest things to do in the entire universe.
The way it works now is that you get +3 hydras and any time a marine tries to exist near a zerg base it gets deleted. Singular marines are instantly dps’d down. Clumps of marines are fungaled and deleted. The only thing that saves a terran is a monstrous tank count, but a zerg can get out ultras by then. If you can’t get ultras out, you can rely on a flank and some banelings.
That’s exactly how it worked. Their only skill as a zerg players was defending, making drones, then amoving a billion banelings. I assumed my experience was more or less how TvZ typically went, and I’ve come to realize that I am an extreme statistical outlier. We’re talking one in a billion. No zerg does anything except spam mass banelings. I am glad they nerfed it. Now they need to nerf the zergling too. Adrenal is absolutely busted. My doctor said I need to avoid high sodium consumption but I just can’t wait to see all these zerg abusers posting their big fat L’s onto social media. If serral were crying about terran after losing in the first round of the world finals, I’d eat that stuff up like it was a buffet.
That’s definitely a cluster of medivacs. It’s not square enough to be a barracks.
Here it is h ttps://imgur.com/a/NTeKVbT Sorry Protoss players I have no sympathy if you can’t spot a 4:30 WM drop in 2024.
I feel personally attacked. DukeNukem has been correct all along. I used to laugh at players who built ultras after going lbh but now I wish they just spent all that money on banelings instead.
This is a 5200 EU terran, and he knows the truth about hydras:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/k0IoOaLcsck
Yeah, I was totally certain of it. Their minimap algorithm uses a quadtree, so in some circumstances it can combine a cluster of units into a single point, but that was clearly dispersed enough that it was multiple medivacs.
What’s amazing is that a lot of top protoss don’t bother to pull probes. I’ve watched them do it deliberately. I checked out maxpax vods and he will legit look at the mine drop, have an opportunity to pull probes, and will choose not to. They’ve nerfed the widow mine (and buffed chronoboost) to the point that it’s better to let cluster of probes die than it is to lose mining time.
Mine drops aren’t even hard. You just pull your drones. You send 1 drone to each mine. You build a spore a moment after the targeting line appears. 0 workers lost, 4 mines killed & 1 dead medivac.
