Zerg Hex Forum

Hello! This is mostly information aimed at newer to intermediate players of how to get through the first few minutes of the game, both in high and low-pressure situations. First, let's outline the opening moves for low pressure situations

Minute 0 Double click your SCVs, right click them directly on top of the gate, open the gate, then build the 2 geysers closest to your base. Send your 3 marines out. This should all happen in the first few seconds. Queue up your third geyser if you're playing a corner, build an SCV and a Fruit Farm right in front of your Command Center. If you are playing Middle, it will be better to stay on 2 gas a little longer to see if you're going to take the focus.

Minute 1-5 Always spend all your gas on Fruit Farms for right now, they're far more efficient than Sheep Farms for their price. Make sure to watch the minimap to determine who is taking pressure. DO NOT BUILD A FOURTH MARINE   You do not need a fourth marine to hold starting spawners. You can perfectly hold starting spawners with no damage taken with 3 marines and a little micro. Instead, autocast reapers and rally them directly onto your rock. This will give you more income, as well as a very efficient defense if Zerg ever swaps onto you. Do this until you have 5 reapers, afterward spend all your minerals on upgrading your geysers. Build 2 more SCVs a few seconds before the rock dies, have them hug the rock. The second it goes down, build a geyser and 1 Fruit Farm.

Minute 5-8 Ideally, you will have all your geysers upgraded at this point. Start spending minerals into generator upgrades, building a few extra marines for safety. Send your reapers to clear your gas blockers. At this point, you should be mostly full with Fruit Farms, so start building some sheeps in the back of the base. Saturate the safest Fruit Farms. In an entirely 0 pressure game, your income should be 225-250 minerals per minute.


Alright, let's get out of this angelic world with absolutely no pressure at all. If you're eating a full spawner supply + capacity at minute 0, here's how to mitigate damage as much as possible. Before, your priority list looked something like :
1. Macro
2. Build the right things
3. Watch Zerg to see who is eating focus.

Now, it's like:
1. Don't lose units - Micro
2. Macro
3. Don't lose geysers
4. Don't run out of energy
5. Build the right things

If you are in a situation where you are fully focused from minute 0, meaning that most spawners+capacity is built on you, you will have to accept that you're inevitably going to lose some geysers and Fruit Farms. Your first unit out should be a Shock Trooper. Its splash ability helps deal with F2s and it's relatively efficient. Afterward, autocast reapers. Why? A reaper is 2x efficient compared to a marine at this point in the game. Marines will scale better later, but the priority right now is holding. Your future potential will be limited more by losing geysers and fruit farms NOW then having extra reapers LATER. The most important part is to not lose ANY unit. Every unit lost is a loss of minerals and gas on an already limited income, as well as DPS which is incredibly precious. You should still focus on building Fruit Farms, as it will let you get more military out quicker - they can occasionally tank vs units like creepers as well. You will definitely have to swap into Sheep Farms earlier for lack of space. Do not save for an armory in this situation. The gas/minerals will be much better spent holding now, especially if you're at the point of breaking. If you spend gas on armory/marine upgrades when you're already going to have a limited income, it'll force you to lose more ground, geysers, and farms.

General Defensive Tips:
1. If you are at any point overwhelmed, simply play one gas or go back to the high ground. A one-gas situation is preferable for obvious reasons. Simply play support for the rest of the game, use walls as your main defensive tool, focus on improving your mineral income and generator as much as possible, and waste as little energy on defense as possible. Bubble/stasis cannon/ion for your allies.

2. If it's an infestor rush, use your reaper jump ability to surround and force transfuses out of infestors. Poke some extra damage out by using the shock trooper ability on clumps if you have the energy to spare. You can also use the jump to dodge volleys and avoid losing units. Do not be afraid to trade hp with infestors. As long as you don't lose units or let him farm energy, it's absolutely fine.

3. KEEP MACROING. You will never be able to hold without steadily increasing your mineral income. While losing units is priority number 1, keeping your resource bank as low as possible will absolutely help a ton.

4. Walling. Walling a side can be incredibly useful, especially if you're on middle. Make sure to have SCVs repairing so it doesn't die. Building single walls is also helpful. 1 wall each on all 3 sides significantly increases your vision range, giving more time to react. Putting 2 walls with 1 tile inbetween and your units far behind will force Zerg units through a 1x1 choke. Put an SCV inbetween so the Zerg get stuck.

Ok, let's look at a more optimistic situation now. Let's say that your teammate, perhaps named Mada, eats focus for the first 3-5 minutes of the game, but then Zerg swaps all his spawners to you. This is perfectly holdable. Your rocks should be dead at this point, letting 5 reapers come to help defend. Your mineral income will be much better, letting you pump out way more units. The Zerg spawners are further away, meaning less units are arriving per second. At this point, just hold 3 gas, build an armory once you feel safe, and kill him. If you've been constantly macroing, it really won't be that difficult to hold a swap in pressure, especially with scouting walls or MIA calls. This also applies to getting only a few spawners built on you, though there will be one important difference: After your first 5 reapers, build marines+generator upgrades instead of extra reapers. You'll be able to hold without the excess firepower and it'll scale better with armory upgrades.

What not to do
- Collapse like a deck of cards to 2 extra ling spawners, cry, and flame teammates
- Waste time flaming Zerg/teammates while you lose every single unit you've ever owned
- Stop watching the minimap, have 0 vision, then wonder why there's 50 ling spawners and 10 infestors rallied onto you
- Casually bank 200 minerals and 100 gas while wondering why it's impossible to hold
- Let your battery commit sudoku as you forget to change its patrol path away from the massive horde of lings
- Let your reapers/marines commit sudoku as you forget to change its rally path away from the massive horde of lings
- Let your units get entirely surrounded by units moving at 1/2 the speed
- Run out of energy while you let 2 full batteries in the back have a smoke break
- Let infestors farm onto your walls for 10 minutes
- Save up for a tank while your ally is focused, then lose it to lings

You're halfway there WMaster. Soon, Terrans will have so many new and interesting playstyles for Zerg Hex. I can't wait for patch 10.0 where I can click a button. get dressed, go out to eat, then come back to a win screen 45 minutes later. Truly revolutionary. In fact, you should just make the defensive barrier go all the way around, so people can enjoy Zerg Hex as it was meant to be played: a peaceful farming game where both sides watch their unit number tick up.

On a more serious note: In Changes Take 2, you said this

In my opinion there should be no problem with some suboptimal strategies as long as it introduces some unique traits. I think the term noob trap is used a bit too loosely, in my eyes a trap would only qualify if it serves a similar purpose, has similar traits and has a lower effectiveness for its combined tech, train and maintain cost compared to something else. Perhaps options without any contribution towards winning could also be considered a trap, but generally these are rare. I think allowing for some new but suboptimal playstyles would be good for strategic diversity. Some might say they would have less enjoyable games due to their allies being not as effective as they could be. But who’s to say that they have not chosen the most effective strategy for their specific skillset. Suboptimal strategies can also become the most optimal when considering counter play, although there is still to improve upon that matter.

as part of your reasoning for these changes. Intentionally putting in strategies that are clearly suboptimal in the place of niche-but-useful strategies is awful. Siege tanks had a fairly effective, if rare use before. Now, they're clearly worse than any other option in the hands of a skilled player. This does the opposite of increasing strategic diversity. You're essentially removing an option for skilled Terrans while preventing unskilled Terrans from ever improving beyond the limits of the tools they have. A player who spends 200 games playing with Siege Tanks will never be as good as one who spent 200 playing normally. This is a noob trap, where you're providing an accessible option to newer Terrans which will ultimately limit their skill and contribution to the game. There are no cases where a decent player will use a siege tank in its current iteration.

Marine overcharge should cost at least 150 gas, it's just as important as penetrating and shatter yet it's 4-5x cheaper. It provides similar dps increases and is essentially as impactful as penetrating for pushing.

I'm not sure what you are into boy, but your head need some oil check.

I dont understand why ppl still cry about roach. It is now the same as tankling was: eco cemetery.
I recon you refer to that Excel sheet some guy made, and the conclusions yall made that roach is the best unit.

This is wrong on so many basis, that i cannot even express.
Let me explain with this:
It's like you saying Ace is the best card in poker. It is true, in a sense, but you miss the whole point of the game. The game winning mechanism in the game is not having the best card, but having the best combinations of cards.

Same here:
The excel made only a rough estimate on how much energy it takes to kill zerg units. This is while not a negligible part of the game, but that is not the whole point.
It never calculate about how much time it takes to kill a unit. What is the range of the marines? How much MS the zerg unit has? If it can reach / kill any of your marines.

I still dont understand his calculation with shattering. You just cannot calculate that into single unit killing. PERIOD. This is the whole point of it: it damages nearby units too. If you are talking about single unit, or single spawner like the excel does, you cannot calculate shattering into. The whole idea is wrong and the whole equation is wrong there. Maybe i am missing something, really correct me if im stupid.

I mean dont misunderstand me, i'm not shitting on the kid who made this, rather than shitting on you for taking it as face value, and make statements like: cAlCuLaTiOnS sHoWn ThAt TaR rOaCh Is BeTtEr ThAn PrImALs AnD uLtRas

The excel is OK until calculating how much energy is needed to kill a single unit. Everything after is based on wrong equation, thus completely wrong.
Stop shitting on roach. She suffered enough.
Roach is love
Roach is life.

Read the spreadsheet again. The spreadsheet assumes that shatter is always bouncing to its max extent, so it's maximizing the marine damage as much as possible. Shatter does 1/2 dmg, bouncing 2 times, effectively doubling marine DPS. Roaches conditionally outperform Primals and Ultralisks vs Veteran and Elite Marines. That is all that the spreadsheet is saying. If you want to bring in other factors, like Roaches moving quicker then Ultralisks and coming in at a lower tech level, you aren't exactly swinging it in favor of the Primals and the Ultralisks. Finally, you can not call roaches an eco cemetery while also ignoring that Primals and Ultralisks cost more, both in supply, tech upgrades, and overall spawner cost. If you want to adjust this to cost, Roaches are generally more efficient at tanking Terran DPS then spawners which come in at a higher armor level.

This seems like an arguement that could be comparable with melee 2v2's. Sure you can play with random partners, but you have no gurantee that your partner isn't actually a gold leaguer who just cannon rushed his way to Masters 3 and as soon as that doesn't work, he's useless. If you actually want to be competetive, find a partner. Or, get out of 2v2 and do 1v1's. Maybe some players would enjoy an actual playable 1v1 version of hex? I'm not sure, could start a poll or something...

This is a poor analogy. In melee, your random partners will at least have a similar MMR to you. Even if it's someone who only cannon rushes, it's someone who will be fairly good at cannon rushing. In Zerg Hex you're essentially getting random teammates from all across the ladder vs random enemies all across the ladder. The problem here is, if you roll too many bad teammates, there is no actual way to win the game. In ladder, a masters player can probably easily beat 2 golds or platinum, in Zerg Hex there is no skill-based mechanic that will ever let you reasonably defend a certain amount of pressure. The issue here is that in Zerg Hex, hard focusing certain players is one of the most viable strategies, you can easily expect 3-4 terrans per lobby to be useless. This creates unfun gameplay for both terran/zerg. Zerg has to get lucky in getting lots of useless terrans, terrans have to get lucky and hope their teammates don't afk and casually float 800 gas off an income of 200/min

2 major issues come with using Hydralisks for defense before the late game:
1. Very high cost
2. Low survivability/sustainability

Even with good micro, hydras will have their HP slowly chipped away by shattering laser making it very hard to effectively defend with them early to mid-game. Small numbers of hydras can take 30 seconds of Zerg income or more, yet take so long to build up layers and health again that they are hardly better than just building more spawners or infestors for more transfuses/energy drain. At best, you have to hope that the Terrans just aren't paying attention so you will have enough HP to defend more than a few attacks. The only point where they become viable is late game, where they become very cheap relative to Zerg income and you can easily mass them to defend or siege down players. By giving hydras more HP regen, it will make them more viable in the early-medium game and give Zerg another microable unit to help defend without making them overpowered in the late game.

Just a small QOL suggestion which will save 2 seconds for Terrans at the start of the game.

also I just noticed - it wasnt 6 dmg and some speed... it was 11 dmg and speed 3 (as u can see on second 11 on hive).. and u want zerg to not be able to do anything with literaly tens of thousands spent on ups XDDDD
no comment

Having both hives selected leads to a small visual bug where the upgrades are added together, so it's atck 5 and speed 3.