I’m new to Terran since a few weeks and Diamond with zerg/toss. I’ve currently managed to up Terran to Platinum now. I have a good 80% winrate against terran and toss, but I honestly believe my winrate vs zerg since platinum isn’t above 5%. I really need some legit advice how to beat zergs. I’ve tried many different builds, but I can’t make any of it work. I’ve mainly tried the following:
- Reaper rush, make 10 reapers and harass with those while expanding (works like a charm against toss/terran). When against zerg, they just die to zerglings and queens.
- Expanding and defending bases until late-game units. I easily manage to hold off the zerg from my expands with planetaries, tanks, turrets, etc. However, by the time I have 4 bases, the zerg has 10. I try harassing but and basedrop is immediately spotted by creep and lings with 1000000% movement speed make it impossible to get a proper basedrop. Eventually I just die to brood lords who siege down my base.
- Mass bio doesn’t work for obvious reasons.
- Tons of split basedrops worked up to platinum but with queens and zerglings I can’t make it work anymore. 12 medivacs full of bio split over 4 or 5 bases doesn’t even allow me to kill 1 base, they immediately die to the insanely fast moving zerg units and queens.
- Battlecruisers worked once, but once they’re scouted the zerg easily deals with them by getting hydra/corruptor.
- Killing bases on foot with a bunch of tanks and bio is my best working strat atm, but after I kill 1-2 bases the zerg can easily deal with my army, and then continue to destroy my base, or they just assault my base and sacrifice some expands (they only cost 300 anyway).
- Tried the infamous Cyclone/hellion combo. They just wipe instantly to the immense size of the zerg army.
- Tried thors, too costly, take too long to build, and can’t deal with roach/hydra well enough at all. By the time I have 3 thors up, the zerg has over 8 bases, and therefor over 500 larvae and 20k minerals. Should I wipe his army, he has it back up almost instantaneously.
I’m running out of options, and am hoping from solid advice from terrans that are able to beat zerg at platinum / diamond or better
If you ware looking to improve your TvZ and are in a low league, I would suggest that you play mech because bio is mechanically demanding - and a players lack of mechanics can just lose them the game in certain engagements - while mech is so much more positional/strategical. When in Plat with terran I would not do any fancy mech play (battle mech is mechanically demanding - hence I would term it as fancy mech play) but just the stock standard: make hellions, tanks and thors. And when you go to late game against zerg with mech, you can transition into Thor-Liberator or Battle Cruiser-liberator-raven. With OK macro and a proper build order you will be able to get to D3 with terran.
In regards to your statement that your zerg opponent is on their 10th base while you are on your 4th, I would suggest that you have a major strategic/build order problem because (from personal experience) in these lower leagues your zerg opponents do not have the mechanics nor the knowledge to exploit the advantages that their race provides them with, and this allows a passive terran who is following a build order and hitting their production timings can just outgrow their zerg opponent (in a recent game I had with my account as I played on Korea, I was able to get a maxed out mech army while my Plat Zerg opponent only had 100 supply).
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Furthermore, when learning a new race and when you have the desire to significantly improve your play, I will say one thing: when you are below masters level you are going to want to avoid doing these “cheesy strategies”, like massing 10 reapers and harassing, because you are not going to be able to develop your fundamentals for that race, and eventually you will reach a league where people have the mechanics, game knowledge, etc. to shut your mass reaper build down hard, and when you are going to be forced into a macro game against these higher level players you are going to be a fish out of water and are going to hit a thick, hard wall. For example, I remember this D2 player that I use to meet all the time. In every game he used a cheese. And whether he wins is completely determined by the success of that cheese. But the problem this guy was encountering in this league was not that he could not cheese players, gain a significant advantage and then make them leave, his problem was that his opponents were at a too high of a skill ceiling for him, and no matter the amount of damage he could do to his opponents, he kept finding that they could just drag the game out and use their vastly significant mechanics and game knowledge to beat him in long macro games. In order to solve this problem he started to play pure macro games, but the guy fell all the way back to square one and found himself stuck in P3-P1 for a very long time.
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