Dimederwin
Member
This is the beginning of the strategy guide, if you guys like it I can add more to it to continue to help zerg players improve.
1. Introduction
2. Basics to Zerg
3. Larva injects
4. What to work on to get to promoted
5. Basics against Zerg
6. Basics against Terran
7. Basics against Protoss
8. Upgrades
9. Zerg end game
1. Introduction
This is a guide to help zerg players get better and learn about the things that they need to work on.
2. Basics to Zerg
The main difference about the zerg race is dealing with larva management. Decisions with larva can lose or win you the game. The other races only decide to make workers or not to, but zerg must decide to make workers or to make units. This decision is hard to explain exactly when to make what.
This larva management is very important early off, because everything, except for a queen, takes one larva. If you build a set of zerglings, it takes the same amount of larva as an ultralisk, and each time you build an army unit that is taking away one worker you could have had. This is one reason zerg players like to go straight to roaches or making more queens for early defense; roaches are stronger per cost of larva than zerglings, so you can use more larva on drones or queens which use no larva.
The first part of deciding what to make is scouting consistently. Use overlords to look inside their base, and use units, mostly zerglings, to check the front wall. One other important spot to keep a zergling at the xel’naga towers. On most maps, if you see your opponent leaving their base you have the time to build spine crawlers, and have them finish right before their units get to your base.
Early in the game, build mostly workers except for 4 zerglings when your spawning pool finishes to scout. As you get better, you can push out making any more units, if you are not attacked, until past having 40 workers, but I recommend start creating your army before that point until you get more comfortable with defending and scouting with so few units(start at about 25 to 30). When you start to create an army, keep building about one worker per hatchery until you have about 70 workers.
Another part of managing your larva, is making overlords to control more units. Like any other race you want to make supply before you need it, and zerg is no different. The easiest way to keep ahead of this is to build one or two overlords with each larva inject that finishes; with perfect injects, you will get about 7 larva during that time, so it just depends what you are building.
3. Larva injects
There are many ways to larva inject, but it really just depends on what you like. This is just a list of the more common ways zerg players inject, so just try them out and decide which one works for you the best. Larva injecting does not come out perfect with mana needed for it; larva inject is 40 seconds, and the mana needed take about 45 seconds to regenerate. Normally this is not an issue, but it can be a bit annoying the times you are exactly on your larva injects.
1) This is the way I find easiest, is to put all queens on one hotkey, hit inject, and use the mini-map to select the target hatchery. Only hatcheries can be selected, so even if you miss it just yells at you, and you will need to click on the hatchery again. Just repeat for each hatchery. Really the only big problem is when your injects are close to being perfect. When this happens, if only one of your queens has the energy for an inject your queen might start running off toward that other hatchery.
2) Another way is to change a hotkey, Global>Camera>Base Camera, to tab or another key easy for you to hit. This will allow you to rotate your camera through all of your hatcheries. You hit tab, select the queen, inject, and repeat for each hatchery. This can also be merged with the first by having all the queens on a hotkey; that way you don’t need to select the queen as you cycle through all of the hatcheries.
3) Third way is to put each queen on their own hotkey this way when you need to inject hit the hotkey twice, your camera will move to that queen, and you can inject on the hatchery next to it. Repeat for each queen.
4) The last way is to put each hatchery on its own hotkey. You hit the hotkey twice, your camera will move to that hatchery, select the queen, and then inject on the hatchery. Repeat for each hatchery. This is strategy allows you to be exact on the injects with all your hatcheries. Those that you will see using this method will keep an eye on the bottom center window that shows a bar for the inject timing, while they cycle through the hatcheries.
The last two methods have their advantages, but they also take up more hotkeys to perform the task, and, in general, are only useful up to about 3 hatcheries before there are just too many hotkeys being used.
4. What to work on to get to promoted
Like the other races, by far the best way to get promoted is to have solid macro. Make sure as you get minerals, you spend them. This can often seem to be difficult, but if you start to get too many minerals make a macro hatchery. Typically I have about 3 hatcheries per 2 bases. This is by no means a rule, but early off you will get a lot of extra minerals until you start spending them on more expensive units.
When starting a game use simple and safer strategies until you get comfortable defending early pressure. The strategy I would recommend you stick with is a 14 pool(make drones to 9, make an overlord, make drones to 14, build a spawning pool). Get zergling speed early, and expand to your natural at about 21.
One thing you should always be careful of, do not go by exact numbers of strategies until you get very good. Those numbers are for flawless execution of the strategies. Typically the best way to expand or decide when to build anything is when you have the minerals to build it without affecting your production. As your execution gets better, you will get closer to the numbers you are supposed to build them.
One last big thing to work on to get promoted is to learn the times to build drones and when to build your army. If you build your army too quick, you will feel starved for minerals, and you will not be able to support continued production of the army. If you build drones when you should not, then you will not have the ability to defend when you need to. It is a delicate balance, and something that will take time to learn the feelings of.
5. Basics against Zerg
Many zerg consider ZvZ their worst match up. I usually contribute this to how it feels playing another zerg player; if you are playing an equally skilled zerg, you will probably feel as if you are seconds away from losing at any moment. The game is extremely volatile. One other thing about this matchup is that you should expect early pressure and even put some on your opponent if you can. Do not expect a macro ZvZ, they are extremely rare.
Generally the best strategy is zergling/baneling into infestors. Roaches can be good for defense, but with a proper zergling early pressure they can attack you before you have the Roaches to defend. Mutas can be useful, but generally can be out at the time infestors will be, and they are useless to a couple of well-placed funguls.
The best targets early off can be the queens and drones. The drones will get you ahead in economy, and killing off the queen can really hurt their production, because they won’t have the injects that you do.
6. Basics against Terran
Fast expanding against a terran unless you are comfortable with it can be very dangerous. They can do a bunker rush and lose almost nothing even if they fail.
If you early scout with a drone, do a quick look around and then run out. Staying very long in the terran base will lose you the drone very quickly. If you do scout with the drone, check for a refinery. The refinery is an indication that there will probably not be an early rush. With the zerglings you get, you will want to poke at his wall off and see what you can see. You are looking for when he is expanding, his army composition, if he has a factory, and the add-ons he has.
When he expands, that is giving you time to expand and get more drones than you normally would, because he won’t have the units to attack. His army composition will tell you what you need to defend against. If you see a factory, you need to see the add-ons to know what is happening. Reactor on it means hellions; tech lab most likely means siege tanks, but can be thors.
One of the most common strategies against terrans is zergling/baneling/muta. Mutas are great for hit and runs on workers and key buildings. The best buildings to go for are any add-on, supply depots with a supply drop on them (that is 16 food gone for them), and upgrade buildings especially the armory (stopping thor production).
When dealing with the main terran army, the best general strategy is using mutas to take out any tanks undefended by marines. Zerglings use to surround marines and hold them for the banelings to blow them up. The best time to run in and kill the marines is when they are on creep, and some of their tanks are unsieged.
For hellions, use zerglings with speed or roaches. With zerglings, you want to surround them or else they can pick of the zerglings. With roaches, you use them more for preventing hellions from getting into your base, because without creep your roaches are to slow to defend against them.
Thors can be difficult to deal with. The best way to deal with them is to try to pick them off before they get many. If they only have one, you can magic box your mutas over it to kill it off, but with two or more it starts to become very inefficient with mutas. Zerglings do well against them, though they can get annoying when the terran has a big ball of units.
7. Basics against Protoss
Against protoss, it is very important to not only scout their bases, but also to scout for proxy pylons. Be especially careful on your early expansions against a forge FE protoss. They can build a pylon and cannon outside the vision of your building hatchery. Their favorite spots are generally behind the minerals, as it makes it difficult to get a surround.
Scouting with a drone against a protoss can be a huge help. If you are good at watching the drone and your base, you can scout everything he is building in his base until about a min after he finishes his cyber core. Zealots and probes cannot catch the drone, so you just keep moving him around. You can also steal a gas, because protoss is a gas intensive race. This can also tell you what he is building as he will send his first few units to kill the extractor.
Zergling/roach into infestor or mutas is the most common strategy. Infestors are more common than mutas, because the mutas are much harder to handle in this match up since protoss often have blink stalkers. You need the spire built regardless for the ability to get corruptors in case of colossus.
The important thing to remember in this match is to pick off small parts of the army as you can. As the protoss gets a true death ball, mostly of stalkers and colossuses, they become very hard to beat, but they don’t have the mobility you do. Use zerglings to do run bys on their mineral lines. Use your infestors to attack their front wall with infested terrans. Another big part is to always stay one base ahead of them.
If they do get the death ball, use your corruptors to take out the colossus, use the corruption ability and focus fire them down. Use infestors to fungal the stalkers preventing blink micro, and neural parasite any immortals, as they will cause the most damage to both you and them. Zerglings are better not to bring in right away, because the colossus will destroy them before they do much.
8. Upgrades
There is a lot of math involved in deciding specific upgrades, but I will cover the most important ones to remember.
vs. Protoss:
1) +1 Ground Carapace: If you are up against zealots, zerglings need to keep equal armor upgrades to their attack upgrades. One upgrade below them means your zerglings die to 2 attacks rather than 3.
2) +2 Melee attack: If you are getting banelings, having the 2 upgrades makes banelings one shot workers.
vs. Terran: There are not really any specific upgrades for using against terrans that make a big difference.
vs. Zerg:
1) +1 Ground Carapace: If you are going zergling against roaches. This prevents getting 2 shotted if the roaches have the +1 to the attack, but only the first upgrade will prevent this.
2) +2 Melee attack: If you are getting banelings, having the 2 upgrades makes banelings one shot workers.
3) +1 Missile Attack: If you are going roaches against zerglings. This makes your roaches 2 shot the zerglings instead of 3.
vs. All:
1) +1 Flyer attack: If you get mutas, always get this upgrade. The first upgrade makes each bounce do one additional damage, the other upgrades don’t increase the damage as much.
Though eventually you do want to upgrade as much as you can, a good way to figure out what upgrades to get first is to look at what you are going up against. If their attacks are low damage/high attack speed, get armor first; if their attacks are high damage/slow attack speed, get damage first. The reason for this is how damage and armor upgrades work. No matter what unit it is or what unit is attacking you, 1 armor reduces the amount of damage taken by 1 for each hit, so for high attack speed units this is very effective, but not so much if the unit has a slow attack speed. Damage upgrades increase at different rates based on the unit you are upgrading, some get 1 damage increase per level, and others can get 5 per level.
To explain this I will examine a tank vs zergling battle. I will only look at the numbers not the actually facts of the battle for this example. With the tank, he does 35/3 sec and if he upgrades his damage will be doing 38/3 sec, a difference of 1 dps. The tank will take 4/.7 sec or if he upgrades his armor 3/.7 sec. That is about 9% increase in damage or a 25% reduction in damage taken.
For the zergling, it changes a bit. The zergling takes 35/3 sec and with the armor upgrade will take 34/3 sec. The zergling will deal 4/.7 sec or if he upgrades his damage will be 5/.7 sec. This time the reduction of damage is only 3%, but the increase in damage is still 25%.
I hope this example helped give you an idea about upgrades, but remember regardless of the numbers, eventually you want to get all the upgrades. Just look at that battle in reality, though the damage reduction from the tanks is minimal for the zerglings, the armor upgrade will help against the marines which would be in the battle as well.
9. Zerg end game
When it comes to the end game there are two paths to take, and they are not easy to merge. Going for either brood lords or ultralisks. Ultralisks are better at open areas, and not so good with choke points or small areas. Brood Lords are good with cliffs and those smaller areas.
Brood Lords:
Best goes with infestors/zerglings or hydralisks/roaches. Infestor/zergling is the more common path to take with brood lords.
Ultralisks:
Best goes with infestor/zerglings or hydralisk/zerglings. Infestor/zerglings being the most common. If you are good with spreading creep, another good unit would be queens mostly to transfuse the ultralisks, keeping them alive longer.
1. Introduction
2. Basics to Zerg
3. Larva injects
4. What to work on to get to promoted
5. Basics against Zerg
6. Basics against Terran
7. Basics against Protoss
8. Upgrades
9. Zerg end game
1. Introduction
This is a guide to help zerg players get better and learn about the things that they need to work on.
2. Basics to Zerg
The main difference about the zerg race is dealing with larva management. Decisions with larva can lose or win you the game. The other races only decide to make workers or not to, but zerg must decide to make workers or to make units. This decision is hard to explain exactly when to make what.
This larva management is very important early off, because everything, except for a queen, takes one larva. If you build a set of zerglings, it takes the same amount of larva as an ultralisk, and each time you build an army unit that is taking away one worker you could have had. This is one reason zerg players like to go straight to roaches or making more queens for early defense; roaches are stronger per cost of larva than zerglings, so you can use more larva on drones or queens which use no larva.
The first part of deciding what to make is scouting consistently. Use overlords to look inside their base, and use units, mostly zerglings, to check the front wall. One other important spot to keep a zergling at the xel’naga towers. On most maps, if you see your opponent leaving their base you have the time to build spine crawlers, and have them finish right before their units get to your base.
Early in the game, build mostly workers except for 4 zerglings when your spawning pool finishes to scout. As you get better, you can push out making any more units, if you are not attacked, until past having 40 workers, but I recommend start creating your army before that point until you get more comfortable with defending and scouting with so few units(start at about 25 to 30). When you start to create an army, keep building about one worker per hatchery until you have about 70 workers.
Another part of managing your larva, is making overlords to control more units. Like any other race you want to make supply before you need it, and zerg is no different. The easiest way to keep ahead of this is to build one or two overlords with each larva inject that finishes; with perfect injects, you will get about 7 larva during that time, so it just depends what you are building.
3. Larva injects
There are many ways to larva inject, but it really just depends on what you like. This is just a list of the more common ways zerg players inject, so just try them out and decide which one works for you the best. Larva injecting does not come out perfect with mana needed for it; larva inject is 40 seconds, and the mana needed take about 45 seconds to regenerate. Normally this is not an issue, but it can be a bit annoying the times you are exactly on your larva injects.
1) This is the way I find easiest, is to put all queens on one hotkey, hit inject, and use the mini-map to select the target hatchery. Only hatcheries can be selected, so even if you miss it just yells at you, and you will need to click on the hatchery again. Just repeat for each hatchery. Really the only big problem is when your injects are close to being perfect. When this happens, if only one of your queens has the energy for an inject your queen might start running off toward that other hatchery.
2) Another way is to change a hotkey, Global>Camera>Base Camera, to tab or another key easy for you to hit. This will allow you to rotate your camera through all of your hatcheries. You hit tab, select the queen, inject, and repeat for each hatchery. This can also be merged with the first by having all the queens on a hotkey; that way you don’t need to select the queen as you cycle through all of the hatcheries.
3) Third way is to put each queen on their own hotkey this way when you need to inject hit the hotkey twice, your camera will move to that queen, and you can inject on the hatchery next to it. Repeat for each queen.
4) The last way is to put each hatchery on its own hotkey. You hit the hotkey twice, your camera will move to that hatchery, select the queen, and then inject on the hatchery. Repeat for each hatchery. This is strategy allows you to be exact on the injects with all your hatcheries. Those that you will see using this method will keep an eye on the bottom center window that shows a bar for the inject timing, while they cycle through the hatcheries.
The last two methods have their advantages, but they also take up more hotkeys to perform the task, and, in general, are only useful up to about 3 hatcheries before there are just too many hotkeys being used.
4. What to work on to get to promoted
Like the other races, by far the best way to get promoted is to have solid macro. Make sure as you get minerals, you spend them. This can often seem to be difficult, but if you start to get too many minerals make a macro hatchery. Typically I have about 3 hatcheries per 2 bases. This is by no means a rule, but early off you will get a lot of extra minerals until you start spending them on more expensive units.
When starting a game use simple and safer strategies until you get comfortable defending early pressure. The strategy I would recommend you stick with is a 14 pool(make drones to 9, make an overlord, make drones to 14, build a spawning pool). Get zergling speed early, and expand to your natural at about 21.
One thing you should always be careful of, do not go by exact numbers of strategies until you get very good. Those numbers are for flawless execution of the strategies. Typically the best way to expand or decide when to build anything is when you have the minerals to build it without affecting your production. As your execution gets better, you will get closer to the numbers you are supposed to build them.
One last big thing to work on to get promoted is to learn the times to build drones and when to build your army. If you build your army too quick, you will feel starved for minerals, and you will not be able to support continued production of the army. If you build drones when you should not, then you will not have the ability to defend when you need to. It is a delicate balance, and something that will take time to learn the feelings of.
5. Basics against Zerg
Many zerg consider ZvZ their worst match up. I usually contribute this to how it feels playing another zerg player; if you are playing an equally skilled zerg, you will probably feel as if you are seconds away from losing at any moment. The game is extremely volatile. One other thing about this matchup is that you should expect early pressure and even put some on your opponent if you can. Do not expect a macro ZvZ, they are extremely rare.
Generally the best strategy is zergling/baneling into infestors. Roaches can be good for defense, but with a proper zergling early pressure they can attack you before you have the Roaches to defend. Mutas can be useful, but generally can be out at the time infestors will be, and they are useless to a couple of well-placed funguls.
The best targets early off can be the queens and drones. The drones will get you ahead in economy, and killing off the queen can really hurt their production, because they won’t have the injects that you do.
6. Basics against Terran
Fast expanding against a terran unless you are comfortable with it can be very dangerous. They can do a bunker rush and lose almost nothing even if they fail.
If you early scout with a drone, do a quick look around and then run out. Staying very long in the terran base will lose you the drone very quickly. If you do scout with the drone, check for a refinery. The refinery is an indication that there will probably not be an early rush. With the zerglings you get, you will want to poke at his wall off and see what you can see. You are looking for when he is expanding, his army composition, if he has a factory, and the add-ons he has.
When he expands, that is giving you time to expand and get more drones than you normally would, because he won’t have the units to attack. His army composition will tell you what you need to defend against. If you see a factory, you need to see the add-ons to know what is happening. Reactor on it means hellions; tech lab most likely means siege tanks, but can be thors.
One of the most common strategies against terrans is zergling/baneling/muta. Mutas are great for hit and runs on workers and key buildings. The best buildings to go for are any add-on, supply depots with a supply drop on them (that is 16 food gone for them), and upgrade buildings especially the armory (stopping thor production).
When dealing with the main terran army, the best general strategy is using mutas to take out any tanks undefended by marines. Zerglings use to surround marines and hold them for the banelings to blow them up. The best time to run in and kill the marines is when they are on creep, and some of their tanks are unsieged.
For hellions, use zerglings with speed or roaches. With zerglings, you want to surround them or else they can pick of the zerglings. With roaches, you use them more for preventing hellions from getting into your base, because without creep your roaches are to slow to defend against them.
Thors can be difficult to deal with. The best way to deal with them is to try to pick them off before they get many. If they only have one, you can magic box your mutas over it to kill it off, but with two or more it starts to become very inefficient with mutas. Zerglings do well against them, though they can get annoying when the terran has a big ball of units.
7. Basics against Protoss
Against protoss, it is very important to not only scout their bases, but also to scout for proxy pylons. Be especially careful on your early expansions against a forge FE protoss. They can build a pylon and cannon outside the vision of your building hatchery. Their favorite spots are generally behind the minerals, as it makes it difficult to get a surround.
Scouting with a drone against a protoss can be a huge help. If you are good at watching the drone and your base, you can scout everything he is building in his base until about a min after he finishes his cyber core. Zealots and probes cannot catch the drone, so you just keep moving him around. You can also steal a gas, because protoss is a gas intensive race. This can also tell you what he is building as he will send his first few units to kill the extractor.
Zergling/roach into infestor or mutas is the most common strategy. Infestors are more common than mutas, because the mutas are much harder to handle in this match up since protoss often have blink stalkers. You need the spire built regardless for the ability to get corruptors in case of colossus.
The important thing to remember in this match is to pick off small parts of the army as you can. As the protoss gets a true death ball, mostly of stalkers and colossuses, they become very hard to beat, but they don’t have the mobility you do. Use zerglings to do run bys on their mineral lines. Use your infestors to attack their front wall with infested terrans. Another big part is to always stay one base ahead of them.
If they do get the death ball, use your corruptors to take out the colossus, use the corruption ability and focus fire them down. Use infestors to fungal the stalkers preventing blink micro, and neural parasite any immortals, as they will cause the most damage to both you and them. Zerglings are better not to bring in right away, because the colossus will destroy them before they do much.
8. Upgrades
There is a lot of math involved in deciding specific upgrades, but I will cover the most important ones to remember.
vs. Protoss:
1) +1 Ground Carapace: If you are up against zealots, zerglings need to keep equal armor upgrades to their attack upgrades. One upgrade below them means your zerglings die to 2 attacks rather than 3.
2) +2 Melee attack: If you are getting banelings, having the 2 upgrades makes banelings one shot workers.
vs. Terran: There are not really any specific upgrades for using against terrans that make a big difference.
vs. Zerg:
1) +1 Ground Carapace: If you are going zergling against roaches. This prevents getting 2 shotted if the roaches have the +1 to the attack, but only the first upgrade will prevent this.
2) +2 Melee attack: If you are getting banelings, having the 2 upgrades makes banelings one shot workers.
3) +1 Missile Attack: If you are going roaches against zerglings. This makes your roaches 2 shot the zerglings instead of 3.
vs. All:
1) +1 Flyer attack: If you get mutas, always get this upgrade. The first upgrade makes each bounce do one additional damage, the other upgrades don’t increase the damage as much.
Though eventually you do want to upgrade as much as you can, a good way to figure out what upgrades to get first is to look at what you are going up against. If their attacks are low damage/high attack speed, get armor first; if their attacks are high damage/slow attack speed, get damage first. The reason for this is how damage and armor upgrades work. No matter what unit it is or what unit is attacking you, 1 armor reduces the amount of damage taken by 1 for each hit, so for high attack speed units this is very effective, but not so much if the unit has a slow attack speed. Damage upgrades increase at different rates based on the unit you are upgrading, some get 1 damage increase per level, and others can get 5 per level.
To explain this I will examine a tank vs zergling battle. I will only look at the numbers not the actually facts of the battle for this example. With the tank, he does 35/3 sec and if he upgrades his damage will be doing 38/3 sec, a difference of 1 dps. The tank will take 4/.7 sec or if he upgrades his armor 3/.7 sec. That is about 9% increase in damage or a 25% reduction in damage taken.
For the zergling, it changes a bit. The zergling takes 35/3 sec and with the armor upgrade will take 34/3 sec. The zergling will deal 4/.7 sec or if he upgrades his damage will be 5/.7 sec. This time the reduction of damage is only 3%, but the increase in damage is still 25%.
I hope this example helped give you an idea about upgrades, but remember regardless of the numbers, eventually you want to get all the upgrades. Just look at that battle in reality, though the damage reduction from the tanks is minimal for the zerglings, the armor upgrade will help against the marines which would be in the battle as well.
9. Zerg end game
When it comes to the end game there are two paths to take, and they are not easy to merge. Going for either brood lords or ultralisks. Ultralisks are better at open areas, and not so good with choke points or small areas. Brood Lords are good with cliffs and those smaller areas.
Brood Lords:
Best goes with infestors/zerglings or hydralisks/roaches. Infestor/zergling is the more common path to take with brood lords.
Ultralisks:
Best goes with infestor/zerglings or hydralisk/zerglings. Infestor/zerglings being the most common. If you are good with spreading creep, another good unit would be queens mostly to transfuse the ultralisks, keeping them alive longer.
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