It’s not possible to block the expansion and expand yourself once Ravagers are out if you’ve cannon-rushed the opponent. Like I said, you’re more concerned about the protoss 1 basing you, in which they’re going to go double-gas themselves. You more than have enough time to get out that 2nd base.
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It’s really simple, as a Toss I can get up the second base and some decent defence with only minerals, and you are going to be desperately lacking income, trying to go Ravagers and expand, nearly impossible.
If they’re expanding, they can’t be pressuring you. They’ve ceded map control over to you, and you’re the one with the the capability to be aggressive at that point. They cannot get a nexus, a wall, and defenses up in time for your RR to be completely ineffective without sacrificing something (on top of the money that they’ve already sacrificed for the cannon rush), and in the meantime, you’re perfectly capable and able to expand yourself as the Zerg.
And again, you’re much more concerned about a 1-base follow up from the Protoss than you are an expansion from them.
Again, at this point the cannon rush is held, which was the whole point of the original question. You’re now shifting from “how do you deal with a cannon rush” anymore, to “How do you play the game against a protoss player”, which has so many variables and possibilities that it would be impossible to explain it at this point.
Suffice to say, the question has been answered.
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I could pull off this strategy with like 100 APM. Anyone could do it to you. To go Ravagers you have to sac 4 workers (Spawning Pool, Roach Warren, 2 gas) but I get chronoboost for free. It doesn’t add up.
Look, I can see that at this point anything I say isn’t going to convince you of anything. Sit in your bubble and complain as much as you like, but cannon rushes aren’t broken. You’ve been told multiple different ways of holding a cannon rush - by a few different people, no less (And with video proof!) - and have plenty of options once you do. It may not be the free win you’re looking for if you hold it, but it’s both holdable and balanced, as is dealing with any follow up from the toss. This will be the last response I write to you on this subject.
Frankly are far less problematic for Zerg than they are for Protoss or Terran since they can get in range of your main base and all of your tech structures; and while T can float their production away, they still lose workers if you have to evac your base, and your production capabilities are significantly slower and more expensive than it is for Zerg.
Protoss doesn’t even have the ability to float away their production structures like terran do, nor do they have the advantage of creep preventing building near you like Zerg do, but even they can hold and deal with cannon rushes and their follow ups well enough that it’s very much not broken, and very much not hard to hold.
There is several reasons we don’t see cannon rushes in pro play anymore, from meta changes to map changes to better scouting. In fact, on the rare occasions that they do happen, we actually see cannon rushes primarily in PvP at a pro level, and pretty much exclusively there nowadays.
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There we go. The argument is over. No-one can give a good answer to my relatively simple strategy. No-one can convincingly say why 16 Hatch was the dominant Zerg build for years.
Ah no i mean that hes only doing cannonrush. i think thats so lame. i do think he knows his stuff how to do it and wouldnt backseat him but people abusing stuff like that is giving protoss a bad rep. ofc there are dozens of ways to abuse a race but what sticks to people is cannon rush.
That’s not how it works. Countering Banelings, including keeping them out of the mineral lines of expansions, is a lot more work than using them. The fact that the workers can sometimes be protected when you have a lot of defenses already in place does not mean that the damage they can do is balanced regardless of the number, as you are trying to imply.
It should also be pointed out that the Protoss units that “can” counter Banelings are slower than them, and don’t do so particularly effectively. This means that countering Banelings is not only more work, but it may significantly lower the army supply that the player can actively use compared to the Zerg player.
It takes more work to counter Banelings than it does to use them, so you are just wrong here. You don’t need to have 400 apm to use Banelings against workers effectively, and at worst a low-level player might sometimes need an extra Baneling or two to ensure worker kills after that change.
The most affected players would be lower-league players of the other races, not the Zerg players.
Defending the bases becomes more difficult as you get more bases. This question actually works against guzamiester’s arguments in this case. There are multiple problems with it:
- Baneling runby’s are most often used later in the game, when players have more bases and more difficulty defending them.
- The upgrade change doesn’t have any effect until +2 & +3 are actually researched. By then, players will be on more than 2 or 3 bases unless they are so badly starved that they are almost certain to lose anyway.
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As a game designer who regularly rips her systems apart because some minor element is not working either intended nor in an interesting way, allow me to quote industry wisdom courtesy of Magic the Gathering.
Players like doing things.
Killing some workers creates an advantage. However, killing all or even half of a player’s workers creates a game state in which they must either immediately win before their army loses functionality to any form of attrition due to the inevitability afforded their opponent’s large mining lead. This is because they can no longer afford to both rebuild workers and lost army. They have lost too much of their ability to do things.
If, upon entering this game state, you don’t have enough army units to defend your bases flawlessly from an attack while you accrue workers – mind, during a time when the opponent could just as easily expand to approximately the entire rest of the map – you will lose. This collapses your decisions to a single point, which is not inherently bad.
What makes it inherently bad is that I have pretended there is a choice here. There usually isn’t - You lose 20 workers and go attack the enemy, but in the time it takes for that attack to do damage you will lose workers to a second strike, lose too much of your army because the opponent didn’t spend a whole lot of their forces on their attack so can still fight, or your opponent’s economy advantage allows them to just wall your army with numbers.
These are all problems directly caused by the same principle that underpins the Baneling and Widow Mine. They are nondecaying area of effect high burst damage units that are inexpensive because they have some other crippling drawback. This is excellent game design when used in army battles, because it forces you to mind the strategical situation of when, where, and how you leverage these units. Using them right is not trivial, using them wrong gives you no value, using them in middling manner means you’d’ve been better off with a different unit.
This is not excellent design when it pertains to how these units behave against workers. The nature of their attack and the response system meant that the game gave you no alert or warning that you were about to lose 10+ workers.
At many levels of play, people are absolute garbage at focusing enough on the minimap to notice drops. These are also the people who are going to be least likely to respond effectively to such an attack.
They are also the majority of your game’s players. Bluntly speaking, while balancing the game for top level play makes sense, balancing exclusively around the game’s state for 0.5% of players is foolish.
“Looks” correct, sure. But it’s awful from a play perspective.
Just like how it’s awful that Banelings one-shot Zerglings.
No, they don’t support your viewpoint at all?
Every race has a cheese that wins the game at 3 minutes!
This is not a Protoss thing!
??? No they don’t?
Build 6-10 pairs of Zerglings, rally them to a corner.
When you remember they exist, morph them to Banelings and rally them into a mineral line or queue-rally them to a wall then to a mineral line?
Do you need videoes of GMs failing to make proper walls on their natural? It happens a lot.
Even GM Terrans fail to raise their depots in time.
The build – even race – agnostic way to defend a cannon rush is to scout your base, and immediately pull 3 to 6 workers to prevent pylons / cannons from finishing or even being built in good spots.
The way that professional players protect themselves from cannon rushes is, in essence, because they know this inherently. You don’t get that good without getting got by a few cannon rushes, and then you learn how to deal with them.
And this simply isn’t the case. In roughly neutral post-cannon rush situations, Zerg is less stuck on one base than Protoss is.
Okay, so, point of order: You were going to get three of those things already. You need the spawning pool for Queens and for Lair and for Zerglings - basically to play the game.
You need more than one gas as soon as you are doing anything besides early rapid expands supported by speedlings.
You got like six.
You didn’t ask this question.
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I’m not reading through your wall of text because it’s probably not worth it, but I will respond to this. See the title of this thread? It is about Zerg winning the majority of tournaments. Do you know what they won alot of them with? 16 Hatch vs. Toss. That’s why it is highly relevant.
It really depends on where it’s placed. It also depends on how soon you see it. Pool timing can also affect things. If you have a drone on the map or not it can also affect things. It also depends on how committed it is. If it’s near the mains High ground and you can easily get in range with creep then you do spines. Depending on the commitment level it could be a single spine or five. I think five is the magic number you need to crack three cannons that have a head start and this is the best option if you are going gasless. Some Canon rushes even try to split the difference between the main High ground and the low ground. The idea being a cannon on the low ground covers for the probe as it builds cannons on the high ground. Spines are the best option in that case by far. Versus a three pylon one Canon Rush it really depends on how fast you see it. If you can pull drones before he’s able to get pylons down then that’s obviously the best way to do it but a more practical way is to just double expand and ignore the cannon. Versus the all in variant proxy hatch works amazingly well because he won’t have defenses in his own Main base. He usually saves himself with a recall and then you regroup and clear out the stuff in your natural. Another variant is to go mass long Bane but because you have a hidden Hatchery you can have way more lingbane than he’s expecting and you can in from an angle that he’s not anticipating. You basically surround His units and use the main links to clear out the cluster defense buildings. Ravagers don’t work as a surprise strategy, they are a Tempo strategy and they have a an extremely narrow window to make them work. They can work but they’re not my favorite. Another option is one based swarm host but that’s easily countered by a Colossus off the robo. A better deal is a spire. Literally nothing he makes off the robo is useful vs mutas. Etc, etc.
There are more variations that include 1 gate or 2 gate or stargate or hidden base from toss.
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I didn’t say it wasn’t relevant and I agree with your analysis that it has potential to be important to the topic in the title of the thread.
However, the question that Sentry actually was answering, which was also related to the thread topic by way of meandering, was in specific relation to how Baneling runbys are easier than cannon rushes, and then to how to respond to a cannon rush.
Neither of which are actually the question you are now talking about, which relates to specifically the 16 hatch, and also isn’t just about how the 16 hatch vs cannon rush works (which was also explained).
Then wallow? There were almost one hundred posts in the six hours. There was much said that I desired to reply to.
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I was complaining about zerg “balance” all the time since 2010 almost every day on the forums and nobody believed me. They was just calling me a troll, idiot, rioter, Terran player or DukeNukem 
Finally someone replied to actual topic of this thread. Thank you Duke Nukem.
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800 views and 4 likes. Lmao. On a board that will like literally anything that hates on zerg. Selling products online generally nets 5% likes to view eatio and it’s well known that selling stuff is hella hard. So I’d say most people really don’t care about premeir tournaments as far as balance goes. This makes sense intuitively because they care about their own ladder experience, they don’t give AF that serral beat another protoss when they, themselves, are getting wrecked by protoss in their own games.
Balance counsel could’ve gotten away with it as long as they screwed over zerg and only zerg because 1/3rd eould be for, 1/3rd against, and 1/3rd would be neutral. But now it’s 2/3rds against and 1/3rd for, and can’t get away with that long term. Even some of the fair minded protoss are against it now because it violates their moral code for how they treat other people. Imbalance fundamentally undermines the legitimacy of every win tgey achieve. They don’t receive respect for wins they earned. Theres lots of reasons even protoss will side against the current balance team.
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The fact that the banelings even got to the other side of the map is an achievement. That’s the point of RTS.
Yes it does. They have 30 hp.
Literally any armored unit. Each baneling costs 50/25. Actually, even light units are fine with splitting.
Citation needed.
Banelings aren’t free, especially in the early-game.
I thought we liked punishing low-level players. Also, another [citation needed].
Probably should’ve built more defenses chief.
I can’t believe, out of all the things to whinge about, it’s the Baneling. I’m not even primarily a Zerg player, I used to play Terran, and I never thought they were particularly strong. They are a cool unit. I actually thought they were on the weak side. I can understand the hate about alot of the HotS and LotV units, but going against the Baneling is ridiculous.
Yeah, getting your units to where they need to be to do an attack is one of the logistical challenges of winning a SC2 game. But you’re talking to people who view the game from the lens of bronze league where they turtle on 2 bases for 20 minutes and do one big maxed move out once 3/3 is finished. The lens they view the game through simply doesn’t have the clarity required to see the nuance of things like the logistical problems of unit movements. How exactly do I get banelings to the other side of the map & into a player’s mineral lines? To them, the answer is obvious, banelings can just do it, and they say that because they turtle on 2 bases and exert no map control. They make no effort to place any obstacles that might obstruct a zerg’s ability to get banelings across the map and therefore banelings can obviously just get into your mineral lines ez pz lemon squeezy.
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Said No one ever.
I mean either you are trolling or you are too inexperienced. Banelings being rather weak is a very hot Take.
Many zerg Players Just Go for ling bling Up into lategame and then add Ultras. dark demonstrates this often. Not even terran can stay on Low Tech this Long
They even reduced the damage against armored because you would See nothing else than banelings running into stalkers Killing everything they hit.
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It was a genuine question, not a bait.
How this: Can you at least agree, that having 3 fully fleshed out, fully different factions, with fully different macro mechanics and tech trees and units, that it would be functionally impossible for them all to be the exact same balance across all skill levels. Balancing for one skill level is difficult enough.
Yeah then go on explain.
As said before i was calling that you would just say “its wrong” but you wont state any arguments. Nothing.
Exactly. This was my take since the beginning. I actually said its an abstract concept and they only use it on pro level.
But your argument goes both ways. Those are 3 fully different factions. 1 human, 2 alien. It would be nuts to assume they have exactly the same representation across the board. And we cannot assume that, because we dont have random race selection (this is a fact). Especially in low level play they tend to choose the human faction. I think 99.9999% know the reason why ^^