How do you defend multiple attacks all at once? For example imagine you have an army or marines marauders medevacs and mines and then 15 mutas hits your main while at the same time some roaches hit your 3rd and a ling runby hits your 4th. Clearly you shouldn’t send all the army to deal with one threat assuming all this army is in one control group. So what do you do? Do you split the army with some quick box selecting and never press the control group again until the attack dies? Because if you press the control group and give an attack or move command then the part of the army that you just split will come join the main army. Do you quickly put let’s say the marauders on a separate hotkey and maybe the mines on a separate one so that you can give the proportional and adequate response to these 3 threats? You can say be prepared and leave mines or liberators at your bases and have map control with spotter marines and watch towers etc. but imagine you get caught in a situation where you weren’t prepared and all/most of your army was in one control group. What do you do?
It shouldn’t matter too much but my rank is Plat1 and I play all 3 races so I would be really glad to hear your solutions to this problem for all 3 races. Thank you very much
Keep two seperate armies on two seperate hotkeys. To this end it can be helpful to unbind the All Army Hotkey.
Keep scouting Marines/lings/ovis/observers/probes on the map to track army movement so you can be in position before the attack happens.
Don’t panic. If you’re out of position, pull your threatened workers to safety and move one of your armies to defend.
The exception to this is going to be Protoss. Protoss you can get away with a couple cannons and a shield battery or two for your 3rd and beyond. This will buy plenty of time to get units into position against more dedicated pushes while completely preventing small scale runbys.
In the scenario you described, assuming you have all your units on 1 hotkey/selected, ctrl click your marines and alt-bind them to another control group, send them to your main along with the mines that you will shift-queue to burrow right behind refineries and buildings. Or just box a group of marines/mines/medivacs and again alt-bind them to another control group.
Alt-binding will remove selected units from their current control groups and set them to only the new one, pretty useful for dealing with harass, I would try to get as familiar with it as shift or ctrl binding.
Send the marauders/rest of your army to deal with the roaches, your fourth in tvz should generally be a pf so repair should be able to handle the ling runby. If you have the apm you can boost your units in medivacs, else stim a group forward to pull aggro.
Ling runby’s: keep some mines, a bunker or 1-2 hellbats in base. Always have few turrets per base if you know he will go muta. Scouting or scanning and even Sensor tower are also ways to know when hes coming
And according to another thread that equals Mvp or MMA
Hey, OP. I play Terran, so i can give u some tip for TvZ like ur example.
First of all, usually T is aggressor in this match up. U keep pushing zerg, harass him in early/mid game. It is a MUST for TvZ. If u leave him alone, his economy will be too strong. So dont let him droning and teching for free. If u play like this, u will always keep him busy. If he send roaches and lings to ur base so he loses his own bases. Also ur agression is ur scout. Zerg cant hide his muta, he needs to defend. And muta costs a lot! He cant throw these resources (and larvas) and lose nothing, if u push him constantly.
Anyway if u play TvZ, its very useful to have some mines here and there against lings. Bunker with some marines is very good option too. Also at least 1 turret per base, it helps against burrowed roach run, for example. And planetary fortress at ur 4th is always help for ur defense.
Practice,create two control groups, one of them smaller than the other.When you are being attacked, you move one group and defend with it, then do the same with the other one.
The most important thing about this is the anticipation, always expect some point to be attacked, so when the time comes, build some static defense, if you see spire, put one turret or two inside your mineral line and near your raxes, if your workers are being attacked, just box the workers and right click on the turret and that turret will never die unless there are 20 mutas, you can also put one or two random mines among your raxes Z players hate the random mine shots when they are focused into your units. If you need extra safety, put one single thor and it will stop a lot of mutas if there is also some nearby turret and you can also repair it.
For the rest of attack types, anticipation, don’t be afraid of using sensor towers, sending marines to scout or placing random scout widow mines so you can know where the enemy will come, useful if you place them near your expansions, maybe you will hit some ling baneling runby if you are lucky.
Control groups can help but you may need to use some quick thinking and adapt the amount of units in them to exactly what attack they’re defending. It’s easy to lose games when you over defend somewhere and under defend somewhere else. And that’s why…
Map vision is so important and good predictions are huge. Just having a few units giving you a presence on the map can give you game changing intel. If an attack catches you completely by surprise you probably missed a scouting opportunity somewhere.
How to tell me you’ve never played Terran without saying you’ve never played Terran. PFs are, at their best, equal to cannon/battery defences; the caveat being they actually cost gas to make and both mins/gas to repair.
PF DPS: 28
PC DPS: 22.4
Adjusted for cost, PFs have .04 dps per resource invested.
Adjusted for cost, PCs have .1493… dps per resource invested.
A Photon Cannon by itself has 26.8% more dps than a PF when adjusted for cost; never mind that you can build 4 for the same cost as a PF. So realistically, pound for pound:
1 PF, 28 dps, 1500 HP.
4 PCs, 89.6 dps, 1200 HP.
A few days ago I vs’d a Terran who tried this in PvT, they were barely holding on to their nat, saw that I had expanded a ton so they attacked in 3 different locations with marine runbys and a double medevac drop after I started attacking.
What did I do? Pulled the boys so I didn’t lose 1/5th of my probes and started doing defensive warp-ins. Half blink Stalker half chargelot. Blink Stalkers focused the medevacs, chargelots 1-A’d the bio, didn’t even bother recalling, kept with the push too.
Ended up losing…I dunno…maybe 10 probes total, 2 Gateways 1 pylon and my robo bay. Sure it hurt a little but I was on 5 bases and 70 probes…it’s better to take a little damage and not panic than to screw up, attack too early with too few units and lose the defense.
No because it’s too variable; either way my later point of dps to cost makes it clear that is irrelevant. The splash damage it can do to the 2 additional zealots or lings is not 3.73…x the damage of the single target.
But, calculating it out, you get 59.44 DPS if every shot does maximum splash damage, still far…FAR below that of 89.6dps.
Yes. A PF is 550 minerals and 150 gas so a total of 700 resources, not withstanding Gas being more valuable than minerals.
A photon cannon is 150 minerals.
700/150 = 4.6…
So 4 Cannons and 1 Shield battery (100 minerals)
And that’s all minerals for toss, so it’s still cheaper overall.
There’s your basic arithmetic lesson for today.
On the shield battery.
Oh I agree, people in gold league and below make bad decisions and would pick PF over PC/SB.
I thought the argument was about reinforcing bases against multiple attacks. So there is a command centre / nexus to defend in the first place. meaning its just an 150/150 upgrade. so not really 4 cannons, not including the pylon needed btw…
Thats your basic logic lesson for today.
there is no shield bat in your calc.
it is NOT irrelevant.
Im not gold and i would NOT choose cannon over pf, lol.
You can pretend and lie all you want, i dont care. I think 90% would agree that a pf is better than 2 or 3 cannons, not to mention that you can just kill the pylon and everything is gucci.
EDIT: i ran a quick simulation and if a moved 10 zealots can barely NOT kill a pf but 10 zealots can easily kill 4 cannons. This myth has been DEBUNKED. I mean that was very obvious to everyone who played sc2 for more than 1 month…
