r/allthingszerg

I'm pretty new, started last year but took a long break. I've been watching Winter's bronze to GM from 2022, and have gotten to 2,346 MMR, and gold 3.

This match was going pretty even, Marines marauders and medivacs vs my roach Hydra. I was having a hard time pushing through his tanks on the high ground, and he also started making thors. I decided to make 2 vipers, and consumed on my gas extractors (idk if that's the best choice to consume, is there like a list of best to worst consume options?).

In the first engagement he pushed with MMM and a thor. He was starting to lose the battle, and the thor was about to get away, but I abducted it into my army and killed it. I don't think it had that much impact, but that was the first time I killed a unit with abduct. Sadly, one of the vipers died. I built 3 more to go up to 4.

Later on, I tried a push into his base and threw down 4 blinding clouds in the area. I killed all of his thors and most of his Marines, leaving only a dozen left, yet I still lost pretty much all my roaches and hydras. I still had a ton of larvae and resources left though, so I quickly remaxxed. Didn't lose any vipers too!

He went on the offensive with some Marines and medivacs. Only my roaches were done training, so I had no AA apart from parasitic bombs. I managed to land one when they packed up the Marines, which brought them down to almost no health. I managed to get off another one, which killed 2 medivacs with all hands on board.

Then, I went to deal the final blow. They had gotten back to 4 thors, but had no other support. Blinding clouds meant they didn't do much damage to my ground army, but I mismicrod my low health vipers and 3 died. After the thors died, there was nowhere near enough of his army left to defend, so he surrendered.

I'm pretty proud of keeping the vipers alive through several battles and managing to make use of all of their abilities.

It's really not.

The other races can get their tech while macroing and attacking.

You can't attack them because they can be fully walled off before you can even attack.

Zerg has to macro literally as hard as they can without dying to 1 adept/reaper/harass.

just to have a chance.

and then you need 90 supply of drones while they chill at 60 with better armies.

zerg is the hardest race.

Hello my fellow camrades!
I was quietly laddering today, chill and such, then I took a punch in the throat :
- 8 gateway
- Zealot charge allin
- Warping at 4m30

I know that I was a little greedy etc. but even with the right scout I honestly don't know how to counter that, or just staying alive...
I usually take a defensive roach warren at 4m, but with that timing I wouldn't possibly be ready...
The replay : https://sc2replaystats.com/download/27257848

If you have some advice to give me I'm all ears :-)
I am diamond 2, and at 40 years old I don't want to improve my APM, just to find a good response

Just a wall of race whining. And I'm also curious to hear from other Zerg players which matchup(s) you dread. Zerg is by far the race that feels the most intuitive to me, but ZvT makes me want to race switch to Protoss and pray that I don't hate any PvX matchup more.

I'm low Diamond, so I obviously don't have a deep enough understanding of the game to say with any level of authority what's balanced or not. I'm not claiming that anything in StarCraft in particular is technically imbalanced, but I will say that literally every single Terran unit feels like it was designed to be as tactically powerful and unfun to play against as possible. Each race has some examples of this, but Terran is the race where the smallest number of units/supply, can utterly lock you out in the game, or even just kill you.

There's such a ridiculous variety of openings Terran can go for, and they're all really strong if you don't have the correct response. Look away for 2 seconds, Hellions slip into your base and your drones are dead. If you're not watching the minimap, a medivac will drop Widow Mines and your drones are dead. A single Liberator completely shuts down an entire mineral line and has a chance of getting lots of kills if the Terran puts minimal effort into distracting you while it happens. A single Medivac full of the cheapest units can pick up and go back and forth between your bases and cost you tons of mining time or drones, or units. Even if you REALLY want to keep the Terran out of your damn base and you load it with static defense, too bad, they can just scan your base and see everything without any risk. In ZvT, no territory is truly actually yours, because Terran is designed from the ground up to allow them to just walk in and dig their heels in like parasites.

In preparation for all of these threats, you fly an Overlord in to scout. You're basically guaranteed to lose that Overlord unless you invest precious resources into Overlord speed. And then of course, Terran can just sit on their two bases macroing all day. Doesn't matter if you have twice as many workers, bases, and army as they do, because they only need a few units to hold off your army, and once they expand, MULEs are free and they mine way faster than the Drones that you had to spend your minerals and larvae on. There is no such thing as "behind" for them unless their macro is several leagues lower than yours, or you manage to do devastating damage to them. You macro up and throw Roaches at their wall, but the Terran has 10 supply of Tanks situated way out of your reach, which makes it so that you could never actually win, even if you manage to break the wall and step inside for a moment. So you try to keep them from taking a third, but it turns out with the Tank's near-infinite range, it only takes a few to leap-frog their way out of the natural and zone you out. The defensive tanks around their third don't have the natural ramp and choke to protect them, so you prepare a big force with Ravagers and bile them down. But it turns out the third is a Planetary, and they can just repair it to keep it alive unless you have an utterly overwhelming amount of forces. Oops, I forgot to build my safety spores because I was distracted fending off the Hellions -- cloaked Banshees show up deal devastating damage. Oops, my scouting Overlord didn't get far enough into the base before dying, so I never saw the Fusion Core -- 2 Battlecruisers casually fly in and wipe every single Queen I've made, plus several Sporecrawlers. And of course, even if I do have an overwhelming defense prepared, they can still one-shot my Queens and teleport out to safety for free. What's that, the 3-base Terran is starting to make Thors? Alright, Lings are apparently supposed to counter those. Nope, the Thors are being protected by Hellbats and Siege Tanks that vaporize all my Lings like a fart in the wind. Alright, I'm on 5-6 bases, I can make Brood Lords. Nope, the uLtImAtE Zerg air unit is actually just casually defeated by the Thors very easily because they SOMEHOW also have Tank-like range. The fact that Medivacs can transport EVERY TERRAN GROUND UNIT no matter its size at rocket speed is utterly insane. Units that take up more than one of the Medivac's 8 slots should slow it's movement speed. I'm honestly surprised you can't put the Terran's building in Medivacs.

And that brings me to the 2 Terran units I hate the most:

Cyclones: These just feel awful to play against. Not fun, not interesting, not exciting. They have way more range than your units, and they move way faster, and they can hit ground AND air, and they do an insane amount of damage, and they can deal that damage while moving. I feel like one of those qualities needs to be entirely removed from the Cyclone for it to make any sense as a unit.

Widow Mines: The holy grail of units that shouldn't exist in StarCraft. When the Terran makes Widow Mines, I either have to just make peace with randomly losing enormous amounts of lings, or I have to watch everywhere I go and move really carefully (NOT a luxury I have when I'm inside the cartoonishly huge range Tanks/Thors/Cyclones). Widow Mines are perhaps the most egregious unit to exist in StarCraft, because simple unit AI can wipe your army. I said before that I'm aware my skill level is too low to talk big about balance, but in this one specific case, I don't care if you're Serral, you're wrong if you think it's totally fine for the AI of a low-tier unit in an RTS to be powerful enough to wipe significant portions of army with zero micro or effort. In fact, Serral himself has lost quite a few extremely important games where Widow Mines simply killed too many of his units for him to have a chance. In this one particular case, I declare that you're flat-out wrong if you think that it makes sense for an idle unit (essentially static defense on crack) to be so powerful that 7K+ MMR pros lose their armies to it. That sort of power is something shouldn't exist in an RTS, or at least only be relegated to ultimate units. But no, you can produce them two at a time from the second building a Terran makes, and they cost very little. Zero effort for a huge threat. Zero-effort units that sit idle should either be very expensive and locked behind significant tech, or they shouldn't do enormous damage to ground AND air. I could grant that Widow Mines aren't overpowered on paper, but the counterplay costs attention and micro that even the pros don't always have the bandwidth for. They should never have been added to the game.

In conclusion, I'm not saying that these don't have counterplay or that they're necessarily overpowered. Obviously if they were insurmountable, there would be no such thing as pro Zerg/Protoss players. But what I am saying is that Terran is suspiciously loaded with scummy tactical utility that requires disproportionate effort/investment/counterplay to beat, and are just unfun to play against. I really dislike that the answer to a lot of Terran strats necessarily requires spellcasters (which are unwieldy for low-level players) or to catch them from multiple angles (which isn't a guarantee even for GM-level Zergs). Zerg and Protoss both have units that pose a significant threat even in small numbers, but those units are generally locked behind more expensive tech commitment (e.g., Archon drops, Lurkers) or simply come later in the game. Terran gains access to most of their units by default quite early in most builds, and a huge amount of their early/mid-game revolves around trying to deal massive damage with tiny amounts of units. I hate Terran. It's a scumbag race for scumbag players.

Which matchup(s) makes you want to rip your hair out?

But why Tactical Jump of battlecruisers are not a tech to upgrade that requires research? That will give (not godlike ranking) players so much time to react/scout and fair game to a late scout and also it will be more appropriate for a T3 unit, right?

Also how the hell it is the only unit that can "jump" to unscouted areas?? why? If there should be balance then recall or nydus should have a similar ability.... is just unfair..

Terran just need to do a simple cheese to delay you exp (force units) and build up behind closed doors... and then jump turning a cheese fail win...

Sorry again... tired of this bcs openings just because I enjoy zerg and all of the early game openings it always favouring other races... as I mentioned it is just frustration but damn...

I’m struggling with unit controls, I need some tips. this is my set up:

F1 to F5 for base cameras
1 hatch, 2 defensive/creep queens, 3 lings,
Alt for all army
sometimes I use 4 for mutas or spell casters
QWE ASD ZXC and spacebar for unit actions

my issues:
I find that 4 is too hard to reach
I forget to ctrl click from caccon to add to unit controls, sometimes I just Shift+3 after producing without CTR clicking and then I see larva/drones/overlords in my army or moving to the frontline

Was thinking of changing my control groups to be
123 and QWE, and figure out the rest…

what do you think? any tips?

I am a former top masters and wanted to share the build that got me there, I have 3 different variations that hit off different timings, this is the more macro friendly version. My goal is to disrupt the Terran build, scout what mix of units they are creating, and take map control.

This is an example against a top diamond Terran, and it is even possible to win a perfect game (no units lost) with this build. Every scan costs a Terran 200 minerals in mules, and I exploit that with this build.

Build Order:

14 Extractor
13 Extractor
15 Extractor (cancel)
15 Extractor (cancel)
16 00:42 Hatchery
15 00:46 Overlord
15 01:03 Spawning Pool
14 01:05 Extractor
19 01:49 Queen
21 01:50 Zerglings
22 01:54 Queen
24 02:07 Roach Warren
24 02:21 Overlord
24 02:25 Burrow
24 02:28 Overlord
25 02:35 Creep Tumor
24 02:46 Roach
26 02:47 Roach
30 02:47 Roach
30 02:47 Roach
32 02:53 Roach
34 03:05 Roach
38 03:11 Roach

If anyone is interested, here is where I almost pull off a perfect game against a top diamond level Terran using this build.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdbuPoCEf-c

So, I was able to not forget creep and inject in this game somewhat. And I was able to somewhat reach 49 drones in 5 minutes but only 54 drones in 6 minutes. I just want to know if what I can do more improving my inject and creeping on this game or some macro aspect. Like, is the way I take gases like too late or not thats all. It would be very helpful if anyone can point some fundamental mistakes that I need to tackle in my level still cant play rank though 3 more wins left.
I'm still focusing in injects then creep.

replay: https://sc2replaystats.com/replay/27250359

So, I just started playing yesterday as zerg. I was able to like be comfortable with the build order(neuro build simple zerg guide) I followed first 3 mins of the game. The problem is whenever I get attacked by anyone around like 4 mins to 6mins I kinda crumbled especially when a marine raid or something. I found in Reddit that a ling/bane should be used against this but I'm unsure whether should I switch my build order depending on the races against as I'm still struggling at macro aspect >5mins. so should I just stick with the simple zerg build or do I need to learn another build against different races?

(D3) I need help with making a PLAN & analyzing this game. Made a lot of mistakes bc im not used to Natural block so I wasn't sure what to do and panicked. I got hit by this same build a couple weeks ago with no clue what to do, so knew it was going to be an annoying game. Tried to play it out even though I was far behind to see what was going on. 1-base protoss, natural block, proxy warp units, lots of small harass with random units. Fellow swarm, please send help.

1. Before, When blocked -> Take 3rd, 2x drones. This time I tried, When blocked -> SP
2. Move 2nd OL to 3rd base in case of cannon rush.
3. 3rd OL to Natural
4. Inject -> creep to try to connect bases.
5. Lings attack pylon, but too slow before he puts down Gateway-block.
6. Tried to micro to make the most out of my lings, but did it poorly.
7. I tried to skip 4min Spore to save money, but it ended up a bad move.
8. Not sure when to build army vs drone.