Ways to control your opponent.

One very effective strategy to gain the advantage is too attack him with certain units that force a building or training or action from him.

Example: If you simply get some Dark Templar and very obviously send them to a spot and start harassing, that forces your opponent to start building detection, thus wasting some resources and time in getting it. If you time it right, you can even attack him while he is in the midst of this transition. Attacking while your opponent is teching to a new unit, researching a vital upgrade, or building defenses is very important. You can catch your opponent off guard while he is waiting for that upgrade to complete before he pushes.

Another way I found was through a match a few weeks ago on Scrap Station. The ground distance to our bases was far, however I like to take advantage of the short air distance by sending in warp prisms to deploy and warp in troops. He saw this and began to build Missile Turrets, EVERYWHERE. I’m not talking about 2-3 here and there, I’m talking about at least 5-10 for each of his expansions (he had 3 by the end of the match). I didn’t have a backup strategy back then so I continued to try and do the same thing with little success. What I should have done is take advantage of the fact that he was pumping in at least 2k+ amount of resources for this defense and started just mass building units to try and break this Terran who was by now turtling. Its important to remember this key fact: If he starts mass building these defenses, he is not building units. With all those Missile Turrets, an army consisting of mainly Gateway units and Immortals could break the line and would have probably won me the game.

The game ended with him building up several Battlecruisers and sending them at me after I attempted to use a Mothership and Mass Recall inside his base.

The key to begin to start controlling your opponent is scouting. If you don’t know what he is doing through scouting or early aggression, it is very difficult to gain the advantage. I am interested to learn other ways of controlling your opponent. I’ve only played a total of 40 games so I still have a lot more to experience.

Mothership knows best...

So the Mothership has to be one of those units that are difficult to add to any build order or situation. They cost more than a Battlecruiser, have a built in cloaking field, can move and fire, and have 2 spells, Mass Recall, and Vortex neither of which can damage another unit. The Mothership acts a lot like the Arbiter from Brood War, however the Mothership packs quite a bigger punch and take much more punishment.

 The issue with the Mothership is that a lot of resources have to be spent just to get the tech into it. Not including the Cybernetics Core, it would take 450 Minerals and Gas to be able to build it. Add another 400 to build it and add 100 for the pylon to supply it. It’s a very expensive investment.  Now I haven’t tested this but people are saying in a battle against one Battlecruiser, the Battlecruiser would win.

The most popular ability it has is the Mass Recall which can instantly teleport all your units in a given area to your Mothership. Great for warping in behind those heavily entrenched Terran Turtles we keep seeing. But is the Mothership useful in other situations?


Here is an example of a match that I used this in. Mothership Madness

When a Terran masses 10+ Battlecruisers, how can they be countered? A Carrier Mothership Armada is a good way to take them down, but by the time you find out they are building Battlecruisers, you don’t have time to amass that big of a force. Your only option? Use your Motherships’ Vortex ability to thin the lines for a short amount of time, giving your anti-air force time to pick them off. If the Battlecruisers decide to run, then the ones trapped in the vortex can be easily surrounded and picked off optimally.

I have a hard time using them in any other match ups. The cloaking field can be countered by having a detector in the area. It can’t detect cloaked units itself so bringing an Observer with it is a must. It can easily be countered by multiple units such as Stalkers, Marines or Hydralisks. It’s slow moving and fires slowly. None of its abilities actually do damage. On top of all this, we can only build one. Now I’m no advocate of a super unit for every playable race, I’ve played Red Alert and Command and Conquer and know what that can do to a game. But some more usability needs to be added to the Mothership.

One thing I’ve heard being circulated around is to add the ability for units to be warped in to the Mothership, This sounds very interesting. We take the abilities of a Warp Prism and take away the transport. I think giving them the ability to power buildings is a bit too much, but perhaps the field is automatically generated like the cloaking field. This sounds like a good idea, but Starcraft 2 is still in its early stages. We probably haven’t seen all the many uses for the Mothership yet, and it will probably take awhile before we will.