I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out how to combat a fleet of 30 battlecruisers, and I just was never able to figure it out. It didn’t help my opponent constructed 2-3 Fortresses at each base with a surrounding layer of anti-air turrets and just kept sitting the fleet on top of bases.
Even when I was down to my last 10 vikings with my base pretty much destroyed he still refused to leave his base…
Mass Thors (remember to change to single target mode). Thors prioritise air units over ground units and they will make quick work of any air units. You may want to shift-queue attack commands on different BCs if he brings along some Vikings / Shees to ‘soak up’ Thor shots (many Thor users make the mistake of just A-moving).
Another option if you have enough APM is to mass Vikings accompanied with a Raven for Anti-Armor Missile. The thing is that Vikings are quite paper and you must remember to kite and stay at a distance to snipe. You may need to stack your Vikings up so that their shots line up (since they will all be in range of the BCs at the same time, instead of shooting one by one as they come into range).
If someone is turtling, T has something unique that newbies love to use but it is not that often used in higher levels of game play - Nukes. Just queue up 3-4 Nukes before engaging with your units. Their attention will be diverted elsewhere trying to find the Nukes while you are hitting their main army.
Just remember to shift-queue commands for your ghosts if you want to keep them alive.
This is one of the strengths of T, especially a mech T. They are able to turtle better than any other races. When it comes to such situations, you need a few things in order to win:
As long as you have these 3, it is pretty much impossible to lose to a turtle T because they will eventually run out of resources to re-max and have a smaller army than you.
Thanks very much for the advice! The last time I played the game seriously was back in Wings of Liberty, so I still had the mindset that Thors were horrible (I still remember mass marine being a thing, guess it’s not so great these days).
My strategy was to mass Vikings so that if I could pick off even a few cruisers while losing a small amount of mine, it would be worth the trade while I also had more mining bases than he did. I also had some Banshees to do base harrass, but it was impossible with the sheer amount of anti-air turrets he built. So I tried to counter with marines and cyclones, and he just doubled and tripled up on planetary fortresses.
I didn’t even think about ghosts, but he used them against me and kept nuking me (I could never tell where he was launching the first nuke, but I usually was able to detect the second one he would use in the same place and take out his ghosts).
But at one point he scanned my base, teleported the entire cruiser fleet in, and destroyed the entirety of my production. I still managed to fight on for another 20 minutes after that, constantly poking at him and taking out one or two cruisers while raiding his bases with walking vikings, but he managed to nuke my rebuilt base and my depots and then I couldn’t build anything more despite having around 2k of each resource still in the bank.
I guess I was so focused on trying to win an air battle that I didn’t think of trying to focus more of a land battle.
BCs are basically ‘armoured reapers’. They don’t do a lot of damage, but they have enough armour and HP to sustain the damage (thus dealing more over time).
Actually now that you have mentioned, mass cyclones with upgrade works wonders as well. The only minor issue would be that you need to micro them. Similarly, if he constantly stacks up his BCs, then maybe even mass Libs might be possible. However, all these adds a lot of uncertainty as compared to just Thors which will straight up win any air unit in the game.
Mass rines are quite a hard counter to BCs because they don’t have enough HP to sustain their DPS. As for Shees, they are strictly only for that early game / mid game harass. They don’t scale well into the late game because they are too paper.
A way to counter ghosts is to not only have standing units (just a cyclone, for e.g.) but also too have sensor towers. Even if they get sniped, those few seconds of knowing your enemy’s positioning makes a world of difference. I am sure that by now you understand that T v T is more of a positioning game than anything. Being out of position can not only cost you your army, but possibly the game.
This is common, and actually it is likely an indication that he isn’t a good enough player. It is good that he bothered to scan, but that doesn’t change the fact that he shouldn’t have used TP to go across the map (unless he knew where your entire army is). TP should more often be used for escaping rather than avoid walking over to the enemy’s base. Otherwise the BCs will be sort of “stuck” while waiting for it to have a cool down. In such situations, you need to weigh between the damage you will sustain walking back home, vs how much damage you can do if you swing into his base instead.
Another possible workaround to prevent BCs from escaping is to use the Raven’s Interference Matrix. Each Raven has enough energy for 2 shots, and just a few will suddenly cut his army strength by half easily.
I think you did good to aim for picking away bit by bit rather than trying to slam your army into his defences. However, what probably cost you the game is overly focusing your production in your main only. It is important to have production everywhere else (preferably as far from your base as possible), since BCs are very slow moving.
Anyways, hope that in your next encounter with such a matchup, you’d be equipped with what to do. 
All the best.
Yeah I’ll admit that TvT caught me by surprise, I’ve played 5 games since I came back to SC2 multiplayer and I’ve had 4 games vs Protoss. At least I was able to deal with the infamous canon rush everyone keeps talking about is OP by spamming reapers and annihilating his mineral line while sniping all of his pylons to knock out the production.
Yeah I’d say my micro isn’t great (I’m a bronze player) but it’s probably better than my macro unfortunately. I was also a bit confused as cyclones are a new unit for me and I saw they could fire on the move but they seemed to not always consistently do that. Plus they got knocked out from like two hits of a planetary.
Maybe, I’m personally not a fan of liberators. He actually tried to do liberator spam early on to wreck my mineral line but my marines easily chased them away before they could set up.
Okay so Thors it is. It’s funny cause I liked Thors a lot when I played during Wings but I remember them being really bad. I gotta find my liking of them again.
I thought that too but again, he would never fight me away from his bases. That said, I never did a full marine build, but I did have 1/3 vikings, 1/3 cyclones, 1/3 marines. It worked sorta okay but I hadn’t researched all of my tech just yet so my ground forces lacked damage and armor.
That’s a shame cause Banshee is literally my favorite unit. I’ve tried some Viking/Banshee builds before which were actually pretty successful vs protoss till they went mass High Templar and just kept storming over and over.
Ah… yeah I should’ve used them myself. My opponent had sensors all over the map which I could never get to unfortunately.
I can definitely see that happening. I got overconfident at one point when he was teleporting on top of my army and I thought I could take him. He ended up destroying my entire army, even though he lost most of his battlecruisers. Again though, I was able to take out two of his bases but I never managed to attack his main base where all of his production was.
In the end, I tried to play a war of attrition seeing as how he refused to engage me except for the one time he attacked my base. I figured taking out his cruisers over and over would work but I also mis-microed my army into a nuke at one point and that didn’t help either…
Thanks a lot for the advice! It was really frustrating losing this game, especially since my previous games were all pretty quick, most of them with me losing but that’s fine, my opponents macroed well and built an army that managed to outgun mine. Guess I just felt cheated for this one because it was so long and it seems like such a cheesy strategy…
if you can scout it early enough, 55 or so liberators with 3 weapon upgrades and a raven (for aam) will kill the battlecruisers so fast that it almost crashes the game, though the liberators will cost slightly more vespene gas that 33 battlecruisers
but if you have a poor computer or internet, the liberators might actually kill so hard that they cause problems, i got down to 2 fps the last time someone spammed battlecruisers, and my computer isnt that bad.
Don’t let them get to 20 Battlecruisers!
It will usually be obvious with cursory scouting that they are going mass BC. You’ll see lots of tech labbed starports w fusion core.
A good counter is vikings and ravens. Ravens are important because they not only disable the BCs from firing, allowing your vikings to target fire them down, but very importantly, eliminate their ability to jump out after sustaining damage.
They will kill you with mass BC strats if you allow them to fly in, deal damage and then jump out and get repaired. That’s a very cost efficient strat. The ravens prevent them from doing this. If you have 3 ravens with some banked energy they can disable 6 BCs. 10-12 vikings will decimate the entire fleet without taking much damage at all.
Along with that, build a tonne of turrets around your bases & production. That helps a lot with jump ins, and will significantly slow them down. They have to target fire down the missile turrets or else they will sustain significant damage & loss. If they jump in, put your scvs on auto repair (alt-R) or target repair turrets also.
Along with that, you can build a bunch of stimmed marines. Marines by themselves can’t counter mass BC. But along with ravens and vikings, stimmed marines they can actually deal a lot of damage and are supply & cost efficient (low gas usage). And cyclones with damage upgrade and thors can also be very good, but again, it works best if they can’t jump out and you have ravens.
The best way to deal with planetaries is a whole bunch of tanks, which outrange planetaries. Target fire down the SCVs first on mass repair, but that’s not needed if you have enough tanks. However, you have to kill their fleet first before doing that. You can take 4-5 tanks to seige a planetary though along with your ravens and vikings to counter the BC jump in defense.
You need to be a little wary though of them counter attacking by jumping BCs to other side of map when they see your vikings and ravens are on one side of map. Being aware of when they are on jump cool-down can help. THis is the hardest thing.
However, this is really only an issue when they’ve massed a huge amount of BCs. Most players will attack earlier in the game with 2-3 or 3-4 BCs. Turrets, ravens and vikings can easily deal with that.
Cheers,