nihil architecture blogs

Yap, I actually play StarCraft II, as Protoss in fact, the one race full of whiners saying that Terran is OP. A stance with which I’m going to have to disagree.

Now, what’s often put forth is that there are no Protoss gateway units that can deal with marauders. Empirically if this was true then why don’t Terrans just always march in with only marauders at early game to take the game with nothing to stop them? Rationally it’s more subtle. A naïve error a lot of Protoss players make is too much faith in the Stalker, confusing it too much for the Dragoon of Brood War. Stalkers actually do only 10 damage per 1.44 time units, and 14 if the unit they deal against counts as armoured. This contrasts the zealots uniform damage of two attacks of 8 every 1.12 time units. For the marauder with 1 armour, this comes down to the Zealot doing 11.7 dps and the stalker 9. Of course, the zealot is melee and the stalker ranged and can thus be kited. But keep in mind that the marauder does double the damage to the stalker it does to the zealot because the stalker counts as armoured.

However, there is a crucial unit a lot of players forget, the Sentry, which is perhaps the one hard counter to the marauder the gateway has to offer. Keep in mind that the sentry is also ranged and does not count as armoured and more importantly, it offers an array of special abilities that do not only benefit itself but all units near it. Kiting becomes hard to do with a forcefield at your back. If you look at them, Sentries are extremely powerful units, their dps is very close to the Stalker versus unarmoured, and Protoss is the only race which gets a tier-1 spell-caster with impressive abilities at their disposal. Imagine if you could beat them without the Sentry? Surely then with the Sentry Protoss would be severely over-powered here? The sentry is your answer against Marauders, Zerglings and Roaches with force fields and against Marines and Mutalisks with the guardian shield. Of course, this requires some micro to pull it off. But then again, so does kiting and getting a good surround with Zerglings? Sentry does require click reflexes though.

Then the argument that’s often raised is Ghosts, who can EMP your units shields away and are supposedly too low in the tech tree. Yes, I agree that Ghosts are very low in the tech tree for their speciality and power. But don’t all races have things like that? When Protoss gets a cybernetic core down, it unlocks a plethora of upgrades including flyer upgrades. It allows for no less than three advanced structures to be built as well. And when we get the Robotics Facility down, we instantly get three units unlocked, and all three are quite specialized and powerful. The Ghost academy just unlocks ghosts. You might as well say that Zerg is OP because a hatchery is obviously superior to a nexus—we can’t really spawn like 7 probes at the same time, or things like roaches at nexus can we?—and costs less too. Of course, this is to make up for other deficiencies, such as that they can’t really spawn roaches at any other place.

The Tech Lab may not be required for the factory to be built, in the end, not getting one before it is a highly uncommon move, so you could say that after the Tech Lab they only have the factory and the ghost academy. While we have three advanced buildings. Of course, they get the orbital command and the bunker, but our turrets can also fire at the ground, and we don’t have to put infantry in them for them to function, of course, our turrets can’t shelter infantry either. Of course, the Tech Lab isn’t really comparable to the Core, its much cheaper and more easily built, but our Gateways don’t really stop producing when we build our Core do they? Also, we only need one, and not re-make it for every Gateway we put down. So in the end, Protoss has some other parts where our tech tree is quite luxurious.

The next thing of course is the dreaded MMMGV, the unstoppable ball of Marines, Marauders, Medivacs, Ghosts and Vikings, no Protoss army can withstand this, and depending on the size of this, I’d say it’s indeed very hard to withstand this. Just like an unstoppable ball of Zealots, Stalkers, Sentries, Immortals, Colossi and Phoenices is essentially unstoppable depending on how large it is. Especially when they think its twice as large due to all the hallucinations (people use this long not often enough). A way to stop either is simply having a lot of Dark Templar in your mix, for one. A huge ball of Brood Lords, Ultralisks, Hydralisks, Zerglings and Corruptors is probably unstoppable too. The issue is not as much how to ‘counter’ this as how to stop someone from getting such a deadly maxed-out army.

In the case of the more modest MMG versus High Templars and some gateway stuff, neither counters the other really, it’s just who shoots first, if the storms go down before the EMP does then Protoss wins, if EMP goes down before the storms and Terran wins. But again, having some Dark Templar in the mix here can really turn the tide.

Then there’s œconomy, say one manages to kill your workers, a really dirty trick like suddenly Infestors unborrowing near all your workers, and bam, a fungal growth, they burrow and unborrow again for a second and all your workers are gone. In the case of Terran your œconomy still has a drive with a sudden mass call-down of MULE’s. In the case of zerg, one spawn-larva later on all your hatcheries and you 21 drones back on track, but in the case of Protoss, you have to start from scratch, painfully chronoboosting Probes.

However, let’s say it’s in reverse, all your production facilities are dead in an attack but your workers and nexus remains, it takes only one probe of the line for a moment to get it all back provided you banked enough. Terran would have to keep 18 workers occupied, Zerg would just lose 18 drones to that. Or say someone suddenly heavily supply blocks you with some attack, Protoss, you just warp in eight pylons with one probe and sit back and wait as long as it takes for one pylon. With Terran you have to take off 8 SCV’s, with Zerg you have to sacrifice eight larva which could be other units.

I actually several times managed to become the victor after my entire base was raided while I was ahead in some sneaky thing like suddenly a lot of cloaked banshees appearing while I had a superior army and was wrecking the other’s base or a last ditch void ray effort or dark templar. You need just a couple of probes to survice to get yourself back on track if you’re Protoss and rebuild it all at your expansion or just a completely random place if you have the army to defend it until your facilities are back up. I once managed to get back from as few as 4 probes escaping the sudden sentry+dark templar warp in.

So why do people say Terran is over-powered? Even the statistics don’t really seem to back this up. Maybe it’s the parroting effect? Some people started to say it on the Battle.net fora and suddenly it was all over the place. Often when people start posts though complaining about it when you analyse the replay you find out that they made some severe errors and where behind in macro the entire time. Maybe with this new Terran is over-powered-thing, people have found a new way to blame their losses on?