• How To Counter Zealots
• Starcraft 2 Protoss Strategy

The strongest opening in Protoss vs Terran is to throw down a nexus at your natural expansion very early on. You don’t generally want to get nexus first because that initial scouting reaper could get a little annoying so try out building a gateway and an assimilator first, but make the expansion before you start warping in your cybernetics core.

The Protoss vs Terran early game is one of my favorite things in Starcraft 2 (Heart of the Swarm or Wings of Liberty). As Protoss your goal is to take a safe but fast expansion to be able to deal with anything Terran can throw at you. Scouting is crucial and micro can play an important role in defending early aggression or in dealing some damage yourself. In this guide I explain one early game situation that can arise in a PvT 1 Gate Fast Expand – early marine pressure.

Check out the video above for a full guide to micro and strategy for dealing with early Marine attacks in PvT. It also goes over how to follow up with your own counterattack and how to bust a bunker with gateway units. In this article I’ll go over some other important points to know about this sort of situation.

• The usual strategy the protoss does vs another terran is to simply go into a Stalker build order at the beginning, and focus on pumping out a small number of stalkers, then switch over to getting some zealots in your.
• StarCraft II HotS Protoss vs Terran Build by Razgriz/RuneK. Works on any map. This build format will utilize Day9’s BO concept of building groups rather than buildings on supply, same with units. I even have variations branches and explain why to do certain things. This build is sentry-less, but still not easy. It works in HotS.
• The Protoss vs Terran early game is one of my favorite things in Starcraft 2 (Heart of the Swarm or Wings of Liberty). As Protoss your goal is to take a safe but fast expansion to be able to deal with anything Terran can throw at you.

Scouting with your first Zealot and Stalker is crucial. If you see a few marines and no Barracks add-on then you can assume the Terran is either looking to expand with some light Marine pressure or is looking to tech up to Starport or Factory on 1 base. Have your Stalker(s) hang out near the Terran expansion to find out which. If by 6:30 there is no expansion it’s time to head home to prepare for any drops or air attacks.

If your opponent pressures with Marines like in the video above then the best way to deal with it is to send Stalker out to meet him as close to his base as possible. Stalkers out range and outrun Marines so the more space you have the longer you can kite them. It’s possible to kill off a large group of Marines with only two Stalkers.

If you kill off a few of his Marines and scout his expansion then you can potentially follow up with a Gateway unit attack of your own. Simple take your expansion and make 4 Gateways total. A light 2-base 4 gate pressure can be enough to break the front of an under-defended Terran, especially if you can use a ForceField to prevent the repair on the bunker or wall.

Don’t over commit, if you sense you can’t break the front just pick off whatever you can and start teching to either double Forge + Twilight Council or Robotic + Colossus.

How To Counter Zealots

Helpful Resources:

• ZiggyD Coaching a 1 Gate Expand Build [Video]
• A General Guide to Scouting in SC2 [Article]

Early Game

Early game in TvP you want to open up with a depot, refinery rax build and then follow it up with a fast expansion. This is the safe and standard macro style which will allow you to get a reaper out early for some map presence as well as let your economy get online. Now there are some other options, for example, you could proxy a factory and then try to get some damage done with an early cyclone push because the cyclone is a very powerful ground unit. You can also do a fast cloaked banshee rush with a proxy starport, and in fact, you can also do that even if you do a fast expand, but the percentage play is to just open with the expansion right away and then go into your own early game strategy.

You are going to want to send your reaper across the map right away to maybe pick off a probe or two but more importantly get that crucial scouting information and find out what your opponent is planning. If you can get confirmation of either the starport or robotics facility that would be great because then you can make the right adaptations. If you do scout a stargate then you should expect an early oracle attack, possibly complemented by a few adepts as if the oracle is denied worker damage it can still jump on small groups of marines quite nicely and clear the way for the adepts to really get some work done. If you can’t get hard confirmation of either tech path you are definitely going to want to prepare for oracles because they are a very common opening and if you are caught off guard then it is game over. So this means a turret at one base and a widow mine at the other. Widow mines do one shot oracles and are very difficult to dodge unless you are a top-tier Korean player. If you want to get fancy you can opt for unorthodox widow mine placement in order to out level your opponent.

In terms of strong opening strategies for terran, you do have a lot of options. One really great build is to just do a simple 2-1-1, standing for two barracks, a factory, and a starport. The idea here is that you just pump out a lot of stimmed marines early on and go and do some damage before your opponent has a strong answer for marines like upgraded colossi. With any luck, you might be able to cancel your opponent’s third base and secure an economic advantage leading into the late-mid game.

Another option is the 1-1-1, which is basically just rushing up the tech tree as fast as possible so that you can get right away into the production of starport units such as medivacs or banshees. Cloaked banshees can be devastatingly effective during the early game if your opponent doesn’t have detection but they are a bit of a gamble because if you don’t do any damage then you will be a little behind and banshees do not scale well into the late game. If you are doing a 1-1-1 build you will want to swap out your reactor from your barracks so that your factory can do the double pump of hellions which are great for run-bys early on and will allow you to conserve your gas.

Midgame

During the midgame, you will want to utilize the mobility of dropships to harass outlying expansions while building up a strong composition of marines, marauders, medivacs, tanks, and vikings. Vikings are going to be necessary in order to take out colossi which would otherwise just rip your infantry forces to shreds. It is crucial to hotkey your individual unit types for maximum effectiveness. While drops are a great way to get value out of a small number of units you also want to be careful about bleeding forces off too easily because small losses here or there can make the difference when you do have a massive engagement later on. Make sure to get the maximum utility out of your drops by keeping everything alive as long as possible and going back for seconds and thirds.

Queueing up liberators to siege up in defender mode on an opponent’s mineral line is a nice low apm method of accomplishing some mid-game harass and forcing your opponent to react to you. If you feel that you are in a good position army wise then you will want to move out and try to take out one of your opponent’s base. Choosing the right engagement is critical to your success here. You do want to be careful about your troops getting too bunched up because a lot of protoss players are opting to include psy storm in their death ball and you will want to be able to dodge most of the damage from this spell. Make sure to focus fire your vikings on the colossi and don’t run too far forward with these units because you don’t want them to get picked off by stalkers or archons. If you are in an all-out engagement then you should probably go for it but if your armies are sort of just standing apart then you don’t want to go too far forward and lose your viking count or you will have no answer to the colossi. You also have to be careful about making too many vikings, because after the colossi are taken out these guys are pretty worthless, although the landed vikings helping out in a battle is always a pretty epic sight.

Positioning your tanks correctly and making sure to include a decent amount of marauders in with your forces is very important. During the mid and late game liberators become a crucial component of the terran composition and by leap frogging your tanks and your liberators things become very difficult indeed for your protoss opponent.

Make sure to stay on top of your upgrades, both the attack and armor upgrades that make your combat units more powerful but also upgrades like advanced ballistics that give your liberators more range. The advanced ballistics upgrade is a total game changer during the mid and late game.

Late Game

Late game TvP is all about cost efficiency and value. High tech units like ghosts and ravens become quite valuable as landing a few EMPs can completely negate the ability of templars to do damage and make the protoss units that much easier to kill. You will want to make sure that by this point you are producing off multiple factors and tanks so that you do end up with that higher tech unit composition and don’t rely quite as much on barracks production unless you end up in a massive engagement and need to remax as quickly as possible. Make sure that you keep up on expansions and keep putting pressure on your opponent’s undefended bases. During the extreme late game terran does have the opportunity of making multiple extra orbital command centers, which will allow you to not replace some scvs that die in run-buys or battles. These orbitals will also provide invaluable scouting information through the use of your scan.

Starcraft 2 Protoss Strategy

You have to make sure that when you do fight you are trading out effectively or winning battles by positioning your units correctly and micromanaging your forces for maximum effectiveness. Try to maintain control over the center of the map whenever possible and you can even set up sensor towers at key locations to provide constant information about any attacks or drops that might occur in your territory.