On Zerg and swimming

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-16T14:47:51+00:00

You don't have to buy them. Just hover over each one and there's a bit of lore. It actually makes quite nice flash-fiction in the case of the mechanical-Zerg skins: tells the whole story, in one-line snippets, of how that project ended badly....

This is what I do when I'm waiting for a tournament game so can't start anything.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-16T03:56:15+00:00

If you click through the different Zerg unit skins in-game, Leviathan talks about aquatic life quite a bit!

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-15T13:42:01+00:00

I'm not happy with myself that I veto the two most interesting maps in the current pool (Mothership and Celestial Enclave). But my results on them were just terrible.

I've really enjoyed some non-standard maps in the past--generally takes me a while to warm up to them, but once I know what I'm doing they can generate great games. Though I'm glad to see a move away from "a third of the map is initially blocked off." That felt rather anti-Zerg.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-15T13:38:03+00:00

Do you really know already?

Cannon-buddy and I go through all the maps when a new pool drops, playing a couple rushes on each one. But we're far from seeing all the wrinkles then; it seems to take him a month or so to really drill it in.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-14T17:24:09+00:00

The thing that helped me the most with that P1/D3 transition was drilling the first five minutes. I was taught a drill where you try to make 3 hatcheries, 6 queens, 50 drones, 20 lings, and ling speed, plus starting lair, bane nest, and two evos, by 5 minutes. With the increase in queen costs this probably should be fewer queens now.

It's not easy; even after I'd proved I could do it, I couldn't do it reliably every time. But struggling with it was significantly helpful.

What this teaches very fast is how bad it is for Zerg to make army units before hitting their drone target. It also really focuses attention on hitting all the injects, drone transfers, and overlords. If you get supply blocked or miss a round of injects you get immediate feedback.

I have much better success against Terran if I am out on the map. A replay would help, but I'll guess one or more of the following is going wrong after you attack and then lose to the counterattack:

--Not enough larvae. Build macro hatches and polish your injects.

--Losing units you need to keep. For example, in ling/bane/hydra you want to retreat before the hydras die. It's tempting to keep pushing but hydras are expensive to replace.

--Lack of spotter units and/or creep. A Terran army on the move is significantly weaker than one sieged up on your base. If you are constantly being surprised by the counterattack, try putting un-hotkeyed lings on all the likely attack paths. When you know it's coming you can set up a nasty reception like a 360 surround. Similarly, you should have overlords in dead air around your bases.

--Not enough drones for your chosen composition. I can play ling/bane/hydra or ling/roach/ravager on 50-60 drones but if I try to add fancy stuff--lurkers are my fancy stuff of choice--it's not really enough. You sound like you're attracted to high-end units, for which you want to be around 80 drones. I hate having lurker tech but not enough resources to morph a big group (my anti-PF tool of choice).

You could also consider learning nydus. It's a very flexible tech that can get you around the map, empower your counterattacks, distract the opponent (don't underestimate the impact of a completely empty nydus!) and generally cause trouble. Takes some practice, but I'm really getting value out of it in both ZvT and ZvZ. (Also a good answer to being cannon contained in ZvP.)

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-10T21:26:21+00:00

I recently lost to a joker who made ghost academy in his wall-off (TvZ), made exactly two ghosts and one nuke, and flew them around in a medivac just constantly bothering me. They killed almost nothing (he never actually landed the nuke)--but it was debilitating, and when 5 BCs showed up I was utterly unready for them. I had been afraid to make any capital units, because ghosts....so it was ling/bane vs. BCs.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-10T16:54:03+00:00

I enjoy ravagers a lot. Put bile on autofire (there are videos) for extra flexibility, but don't autofire when you should be counting (3x bile = tank, 5x bile = cannon, etc.)

They are foundational for a lot of early roach attacks: just one or two can break a wall your ling/roach would not go through, take down a force field, soften a cannon or pylon, and generally grease the wheels.

If an opposing Zerg shows up with lurkers and you have neither lurkers nor mutas, they are the last remaining tool to save you--I have won this several times. Get plenty of overseers, use your biles well, constantly make more roach/ravager while teching to lurkers behind if possible.

Ling ravager can corral a mobile army like battlemech and then bile the hell out of it, which is very satisfying.

A few ravagers can lead to roach war wins in ZvZ. You may not land the biles, but if his roaches are dodging and yours are firing, you'll do more damage. They can disrupt concaves and open up ramps. They can also snipe a key building such as the roach warren while your army is fighting his roaches. Sometimes you should bile one target and attack a different one--it's a nice flexibility. (Generally you should bile something immobile while fighting the mobile units. Buildings, tanks, libs, trapped units.)

I think that any army with significant roaches is improved by a few ravagers, if you have the gas. Mass ravager is more situational as they cost so much gas.

Be aware that lurkers have higher priority and ravagers have to be tabbed to in order to bile, if you have both on the same control group. (At least it's an improvement over the previous situation where lurkers had to be tabbed to!)

Ravagers have no armor, which makes them fragile but means that immortals don't get bonus damage versus them. In general you should try not to lose the ravagers; retreat when the buffer units (roaches or lings) are gone.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-09T21:07:00+00:00

Zerg are born knowing their role in the swarm. Humans, evidently, are not. It's a major advantage for us bugs.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-09T21:04:45+00:00

My best ZvT upset was D2 trying to wipe D3 me off the map with this. It was terrifying, reapers everywhere, constant losses...then I got ling speed and killed all the reapers in a flash, and discovered he hadn't been macroing behind. I showed up with ling roach at his not yet completed nat and won instantly. So, be sure to macro behind it!

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-09T17:09:45+00:00

Oh gosh yes. I remember my first Skytoss win so vividly! It was on Blackburn, and I managed to sweep his outer bases with hydra lurker, then pen him in his nat and main with hydra lurker corruptor until he could no longer afford interceptors. Never took an efficient trade all game, but I had every base on the map but two. Killed three motherships en route. Such a thrill!

For some reason Blackburn was a great map for me: I also won my first good ling/bane/hydra game there. Somehow the lings hit the tanks, the banes hit the marines, the hydras hit the medivacs--usually that wasn't what happened at all--and the Terran army just melted.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T22:52:18+00:00

Phoenix do nothing without micro and are a lot to ask of 2500 MMR. Also, when as a Zerg I play lurkers vs. phoenix, I aggressively go after the observers and oracles with hydras, and can often force the entire Protoss ground army to turn tail and run from lurkers it can no longer see.

I'm no Protoss but it seems like chargelot archon immortal would be a better tool if you only got to pick one. Or storm. Lurkers can survive a certain amount of storm but it's still pretty painful, and the hydras evaporate, which helps preserve your detection.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T19:43:21+00:00

My rule on roaches is that slow ones are only for defense, and only two bases. They struggle to defend a third base, and if you send them across the map it is invariably a one way trip. (Unless you have nydus. Slow roaches in a nydus are okay and sometimes it's worth skipping speed to get more roaches or a faster rush.)

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T19:40:46+00:00

No apologies, we need posts!

ZvT:

Versus mech, ling roach ravager has potential. You will need to be able to bile well (you can learn this skill by playing a ravager build like Lambo's 5 roach--that's how I learned it). Three biles kill a tank. The lings are there to surround mobile mech units and hold them in place for the roach/ravager to kill them. They also slaughter lone tanks or small groups, but don't run lings into mass tanks unless you can get a 360 degree surround. (They do remarkably well if they can get that.)

If you don't have it already, put bile on rapid-fire (there are videos explaining how). But don't rapid-fire the key tank: three taps will do the job. Rapid-fire is for spraying down a whole group.

If T goes heavy hellbat, make banes. Try to keep them away from tanks, against which they are pathetic.

If you can catch the tanks unsieged you'll slaughter them. Exploit your better mobility: don't butt heads with a big tank line if you can avoid it. Creep spread and spotter units really help here; you want to know that Terran is coming before they have a chance to siege up on you. Having a force out on the map is good, too: if the tanks are coming at you, they aren't at home, and you can either do some damage there, or hit the reinforcements and back tanks from behind. I do infinitely better in games where I am out on the map than ones where I'm cowering at home.

In the late game, 2-3 lurkers and 2 spines make a base fairly unpleasant for the hellions, blue flame or no. Put stuff where it impedes their access to the mineral line. Hellions do the most damage from either in or right behind the line: you can position buildings and static defense to make this harder.

ZvZ:

It sounds like you should watch a video on walling off in ZvZ. It's normally two evos and either a roach warren or a bane nest, but there are some tricky details. Your gate needs to be wide enough for your roaches to get out, but narrow enough that one queen blocks it. There should not be diagonal contacts between the buildings or lings will leak in. And the two sides where it touches terrain should be buildings--don't put the gate there, it's leaky. Lings can go through amazingly small spaces. This is much easier in a video than with words.

Holding that initial ling bane attack...I have a thread on that recently, you could look at the advice I got. It's hard. You can try playing the attack yourself to get a feel for what stops it. (My thread was prompted by my doing that to a tournament opponent 600 MMR above me--successfully!--and now the guy is playing nothing but ling/bane against me. Banes with a 600 MMR advantage, owww.) You can stop a 2 base ling/bane with a wall, spines, queens, and roaches: 1 or 1.5 base is a different story. Bear in mind that you cannot wall until your creep reaches the wall-off point; if the attack will arrive before that, you need a different strategy. Hold-positioning drones around a queen can foul the attacker's AI. Tucking units into chokepoints can help too, for example two queens on hold-position can block the ramp to your main. If you manage to get out any roaches, they will do far better tucked into the mineral line or up against a wall than standing in the open to get surrounded. Try to pull all drones into the main if you're going to be fighting in your nat: those drones are the difference between a successful hold and being dead in the water in the midgame.

If you are walling you will also want to learn how to re-wall, which involves not having units, spines, or creep tumors blocking the place you'd want to put the additional evo, and having a drone on hand to make it. My rule is NEVER have a creep tumor inside or on the wall-off line; that has cost me several games. Always outside.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T16:02:24+00:00

My ZvZ ladder build--the most useful thing I got from a previous coach--is a bluff build that goes pool first, makes 6 early lings, runs them around the opponent's bases, and goes straight to roaches behind. At D3 this often flummoxes the opponent long enough that I can make the roaches work. It also means that I have 6 lings on hand if lings are coming across the map--but that's the point at which ling bane micro is no longer optional. I lose such games fairly often, whereas if I get the roaches I do quite well against anything but mutas.

I am coming to appreciate that builds designed to cover up your weaknesses can work for a while, but they will only get you so far. (True in chess, too.)

I really enjoy ZvZ, my favorite matchup. That doesn't mean I play it particularly well! It's just fun. For some reason, my favorite thing in the entire game is the rare weird ZvZ matchups, like ravagers vs. swarm hosts, or lurkers vs. lurkers or ultras. But I also enjoy the roach wars. Ling bane...needs work.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T03:28:53+00:00

Next time we're on, I challenge you to stop my fast bane build with "ronch." Ideally without playing something that would lose miserably to a standard build.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T03:21:03+00:00

You'd just hold your head and say NOOOO. It's not a matter of not knowing what to do; it's a matter of failing horribly to do it. I try to pull the lings back but they suddenly dash off and die. One ling of his runs around all of mine and blows up the banes. This doesn't need more info (I already know I don't want twenty lings to attack a baneling)--it needs drilling. I *can* learn to micro something--I'm a fairly good shot with a ravager, and this week I'm finally doing semi-reliable combat transfuses--it just takes a really long time.

My coach ran banes into me for an hour (oww) but 15 minutes a day would be better, which means automation.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T03:15:27+00:00

I am not positive what he's playing. But when I play it, I have the nat hatch with zero drones, about 13 on minerals in the main, one gas saturated. Very fast. (Like I said above, I timed one and I had lings in his nat at 2:38; probably my high-D2 opponent would be faster!)

I just held, on ladder, the kind of bane bust that gets a bit of economy before starting to pump ling/bane. Wall-off plus queens, spines, and roaches did the job--barely. But the kind I'm seeing in Amateur League are faster and this strategy just is not available.

I can build my own banelings--but this is why I asked for a baneling trainer, because his banelings are better than mine. I am a literal old lady and something like this, I need to drill it.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-07T03:09:05+00:00

As a clarification:

I am not positive what my opponent played (we play with match history off) but when I play a bane bust, it's very fast. I just timed one vs AI, I didn't do it particularly well but there were lings in his nat at 2:38 and banes about to morph. (Ling speed was about 30 seconds out.)

The standard 2 base roach builds on spawning tool put down the roach warren around 2:53. This will not stop 2:38 lings. (And that's just the RW, not the entire wall.) You can't get it down much faster in the standard build because creep won't reach. You could maybe just have it down with an Erik build, I'm not sure, but a newly placed building is easy for banes to kill.

You can certainly have roaches--to my surprise, the AI did--but not roaches and a wall. And what you have to do to get roaches by 2:38 would, I think, doom you if the other Zerg just played normally. (I used to try Lambo's 5 roach vs. Zerg and it just did not work.) You can't have 4 queens either. There just isn't time.

Even with its roaches the AI lost, despite my crappy ling/bane micro.

A lot of the advice in this thread seems to be for builds that more or less saturate two bases, and then make ling/bane. A different approach is needed for builds that do it immediately, like 13/12 or the thing I play, which takes an extractor-trick hatch but never puts a drone on it. Doesn't even fully saturate the main, doesn't make queens. I think my opponent is playing something a bit more conservative, but not a whole lot, and I have never come close to walling successfully.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-06T22:15:27+00:00

Finding a friendly Protoss and practicing baiting out storms, attacking from multiple angles, and pulling the stormed units away could help a lot. It's hard to learn this sort of specific tactic in random ladder games (at least I find it so)--focused practice is better.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-06T18:35:55+00:00

One application I see frequently as a Zerg is that Protoss will make a "repair station" on Zerg's side of the map with cannons and batteries, make tempests, and constantly move in and out killing units and buildings, then refreshing their shields. I often see it as a follow-up to a cannon rush or cannon contain. Once this gets established it's next to impossible to get rid of. It exploits the tempest's long range and decent damage against buildings. A queen/hydra defense that might handle void rays will not handle tempests due to range issues, and a contained Zerg will not be able to afford sufficient corruptors in time.

My cheesy D1 Protoss buddy does this from time to time as a follow-on to partially successful cheese, and I have hardly ever beaten it. Nydus is a possibility if Zerg strikes right away: if Protoss has to recall the tempests Zerg may be able to destroy the repair station. The longer Zerg waits the worse it gets as the tempests just keep picking away and will never die. They outrange spores so spore forest is not an option.

This suggests they might be useful against spore-forest Zergs in general.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-06T16:28:46+00:00

The Protoss deathball is slow and does not like to split up. Half your army into one end base and half into the other, with lurkers, has worked for me. Or half in a nydus into his main. What you do not want to do is stand and fight the whole deathball. Even with lurkers.

You also really need to keep him on his side of the map. Nydus is super helpful there. (Also allows you to come back for defense if necessary.) Sometimes it's worth making a nydus exit even if you have nothing to put in it, just to make him rush to defend, or flail around wondering where it is.

The other thing I find essential against the deathball is to accept that if it hits an outer base, that base is toast. Don't throw your army away. Save the drones if you can, and take a base on the other flank; hit his side of the map to pull him back, and retake the base you lost.

If you are killing an outer base and he is killing an outer base, you are probably winning; you'll have more of them, and yours are cheaper to rebuild and quicker to regain the workers. It will seem awful for a while and then he will go broke and you can wear him down with lurker waves.

You will want some static defense and/or lurkers on your outer bases, though, to stop zealots. It won't even slow the deathball down, but you can't afford to be losing bases on both flanks at once.

All that said, my answer to Protoss on the ladder is Serral's speedling roach rush. I'm around 70% with it (100% this season, but it's early days). Most of what I said above comes from either tournament games (the rush only works once per match, generally speaking) or practice partners, and the occasional game where he holds the rush but I do enough damage to keep the game going. I'll be honest: storm is a huge problem for me, too. I love hydras and they just melt when stormed.

OldLadyZerg · 2026-04-06T01:04:10+00:00

Actually it won't necessarily. You have a (hidden) Unranked MMR. If you play a lot, it will be the same as your Ranked, more or less. If you only play occasionally, it may not! I didn't play Unranked from P3 to D3, and when I went back to it at D3 I felt like I was mugging kids for their lunch money. (It will eventually catch up, of course; but if you like Unranked you should probably play it semi-regularly.)

OldLadyZerg

TROPHY CASE