Can someone explain this to me? I keep seeing that infested terran are really zerg’s only AA option in the late game, but I would think hydras should do well in that role too. However, in my Zerg games I’ve noticed that my hydras don’t seem to do well against either carrier or BC builds. What is the reason for this? And what is the role of the hydra then?
Pardon the dumb question, platinum random player here would would have thought hydras were an AA option.
They absolutely are but they need supporting units. Against carriers you could fungal the interceptors and let the hydras do work. Against terran air all you need is a fungal and a para bomb (vikings) and BC’s get wrecked by neural with possibly a fungal mixed in.
You can’t just mass one unit as zerg. You need a healthy mixture of diffirent unit types to take efficient fights. Or you can be GAMETIME and make roach. Whatever works.
Well, there are two main factors:
Hydralisks are very squishy and vulnerable to high DPS units and splash. The supply that they are balanced around makes them relatively more vulnerable to both than similar units such as Marines and Zerglings; even though the two units mentioned have a slightly smaller size. Unfortunately, Hydralisks can’t simply be buffed out of that problem without causing serious problems in other match-ups. Specifically, PvZ would always break first no matter what type of buff you try because of Protoss has generally lower DPS and more inconsistent splash that comes out later.
Hydralisks don’t have long range, so they often have to move in close under fire in order to build up DPS–unless you use abduct to pull enemy air units to you. Various air units can take advantage of this to deal with Hydralisks using terrain or ground units to limit retaliation, longer range and/or stacking to pick off many of the Hydralisks before they can all get in range, or speed to pick off edge Hydralisks or small groups with limited retaliation. Unless you have an overwhelming advantage and space to push, you really need casters (either Fungal or Abduct at a minimum depending on what you are facing) in order to cover those weaknesses; and it is somewhat hard to justify the use of Hydralisks when Infestors can delete most air armies more efficiently by themselves and work much better with Brood Lord + Corruptor.
Hydra/infestor is great vs. mass BC as you can “teleport” via nydus so more speed than BCs.
I get what you’re going for but that’s just not true. Nydus isn’t that fast! It will be nerfed later on in the year you can relax with this stuff.
i don’t get why this also doesn’t apply to marines, marines fall into both of those factors but are great aa.
Marines are kinda like Hydras. They can be mass produced and the are terrible vs. splash damage like ultras, storm, collossi, tanks.
Marines and Hydras shouldn’t counter late-game air units alone as the air units are more expensive and have a way longer building time. (doesn’t matter if it’s BL, carrier or BC)
What about this: You’ve outplayed your zerg opponent and decimated his ground army and supporting units as terran. Only thing left are 5 broodlords shooting broodlings at your position. You have 3 medivacs worth of marines and a few marauders. You stim under the dbroodlords and snipe them. Suddenly the game pauses and both player hear a voice chat message (spoken by morgan freeman)
Correct - same as blink stalkers. I like that a lot. I was talking about a death ball though - sorry for the missinterpretation. (carriers + storm, BC + tanks, bl/infestor)
Oh I was just memeing. I understood ya. 
You were memeing but you’re not the only reader so thx, still.
The first factor does apply to Marines, but it is less of an issue because Marines are 1 supply units.
There are so many factors at play that it is hard to explain everything succinctly in a single post, but I will try to summarize it into three main points and the consequences that follow:
The first thing that you need to understand is that individually squishier units are typically balanced with more health and/or optimal DPS relative to their supply. This is because if squishier units are targeted sequentially, Marines will die quicker and lose overall DPS faster, so they need higher DPS, health, or both to compensate for that unless they have a sufficient range and/or mobility advantage to negate that need.
The second thing is that the collision area difference is not always as extreme as the supply difference–For example, Hydralisks in particular do not take up twice as much space as Marines. Assuming that a pack of units is hit and the splash radius is smaller than the pack, you will rarely find that 2 Marines would be hit for every Hydralisk.
Splash is rarely “efficient DPS”. Usually it comes in bursts that might take the same number of hits to kill units with very different health pools. For instance, an upgraded Tank can 2-shot a Hydralisk, but it will also take 2 shots to kill a Marine. It takes 2 Banelings or Colossus volleys to kill a pack of Marines, but only 3 to kill a pack of Hydralisks which are double the supply and more than double the cost because of their gas cost. The point is that there are practically no units in the game that inflict splash damage in low efficient bursts that would perfectly kill a lower-supply glass cannons better than higher supply glass cannons such that they always even out the supply difference. There was an attempt to do that with the Shredder Mine in HOTS alpha; and that unit was scrapped because the unit was excessively strong against Banelings, Zerglings, workers, Marines, etc in that order such that it could not be balanced to be useful against tougher units without completely invalidating them.
When you consider all 3 factors, there are a lot of individual variables involved (how people split, how shots are distributed, misses, whether the splash area is larger than the clump of units being targeted, etc), but basically you end up with cases like this:
At the end of the day, because of the Hydralisk’s exact health, collision size, and tendency to be split, moved, or transported out of the way compared to Marines; Hydralisks end up being more vulnerable to most forms of splash in practice. Marines may be more likely to survive in the numbers they need to deal with air units (or other threats) as a result.
The fact is, hydras have 0 armour and fast low damage attacks. This makes them bad against high armour enemies like carriers and BCs, and bad against fast attacking units like carriers and BCs.
Because:
Range difference, Hydras must get close to the enemy army so that all of them can shoot at once, meanwhile they are under heavy fire while they are moving
Air units scale better in late game engagements because they don’t body block each other, so a simple a-move is enough to make them all clump and have all of them firing at the same time
Hydras counter BC/Carrier cost per cost but NOT supply per supply, in late game supply is more important resource than cost because everybody is maxed out and have a resource bank
Hydras combo well with vipers, just keep your hydraball ready and abduct the expensive units one by one, if you do it correctly the abducted units die instantly.
Hydras and vipers do hard counter carriers and bc. It is in fact extremely difficult to fight hydra lurker and vipers with terran. If you don’t take out the vipers you can’t win the engagement.
Hydras are not supposed to counter BC/Carriers. Corruptors do.
Because someone at blizzard has a twisted sense of humor and thought it would be funny to take zergs tier 1 aa core unit and turn it into a tier 2 unit. But then they were like hold on why stop there, lets make it so expensive that you need 5 gasses to afford a decent number of them, and then since we’re on a roll here why dont we make them so squishy that by the time you can afford them they are useless for a timing attack because splash damage wrecks them.
A good Terran/Protoss won’t let you get away with yeeting their units. They probably would have Vikings/feedback to try and kill your vipers