Recently, in WCS America, there was a huge upset where pigbaby 3-0'd taeja. PigBaby made Taeja look free.
Part of PigBaby's success was due to his extremely large amount of observers, he pretty much had vision of his entire half of the map.
Also, he focused on lots of zealot stalker collosus with very good upgrades. I think that taeja lost due to not incorporating enough widow mines and or hellions/hellbats into his composition to handle the large amount of zealots.
However, Pigbaby's map awareness was insane, and Taeja was never able to get a drop off to do damage against PigBaby. At one point, PigBaby had 7 observers on the map.
So here is the question:
Poll: What is the correct number of observers to have against Terran?
4+ (38)
72%
3 (12)
23%
1 (2)
4%
It depends on how aggressive your opponent plays. (1)
2%
2 (0)
0%
53 total votes
Your vote: What is the correct number of observers to have against Terran?
(Vote): 1 (Vote): 2 (Vote): 3 (Vote): 4+ (Vote): It depends on how aggressive your opponent plays.
As many as you can, as Artosis often says. Especially if it makes you make less Colossus. What would you like more? Infinite vision and knowledge, or awkward tripods who trample shamelessly over your zealots and stalkers?
On July 06 2014 12:46 ZenithM wrote: As many as you can, as Artosis often says. Especially if it makes you make less Colossus. What would you like more? Infinite vision and knowledge, or awkward tripods who trample shamelessly over your zealots and stalkers?
Unless you have a very thigh and focused timing or you've seen shit-on of marauder coming, make obs. Z has "free" vision in the form of lings, overlords and creep. T has maphack and cheap or mobile units too (marines, reapers, hellions) P has to invest in obs or trow a zealots or risk a stalker/mama core. At least at my league T is quite bad a sniping them, just gotta watch so they don't walk into turret range.
*Of course it's if you don't go mass sentry or stargate, both of those gives really good map visions.
IMO it depends on your opener. If you go for collossus instantly you dont want to
spend too much gas to delay your Collossus/Thermallance/Blink
spend too much time on Observer-production to delay your Collossus which makes pressure/pushes by T in early-mid way harder to hold
If you go for Templar Archives for example, which kinda ran out of fashion because of mine>chargelot, things to consider are once again
Not investing too much gas because you need high amounts of HT to defend drops and fight cost-efficiently. Be careful not to delay important upgrades such as Forge upgrades or charge. 75 gas earlygame is more than you'd think.
I think people tend to not understand how much gas that actually is earlygame. Of course myself as a protossplayer, I'd love to have a billion observers. But with the productiontime on the robo as well as the 75 gas each, its not an investment easy to make. Especially because there's scans too. Gas is the problem, ladies and gentlemen. In mid-late game Observerproduction is probably underused tho.
^This. I pretty much agree with everything Shock mentionned. Personnally, it seems also very true that in mid-late game I could build more than just 3 observers
I need to watch Pigbaby's games because if he got many observers and beat Taeja with it, it's probably not a bad idea. However gas is really important early game and I'm not sure I can afford more than 3-4 observers in early game if I want to go blink colossus. Once you've produced 4-5 colossi using the otherwise idle robo to cover the map with observers can be very good though even if it slows down your transition to templars or eats on your stalker count or delays your upgrades.
It depends on the map, but generally 4-5 observers in the mid game should provide you with very good map vision. It's easier to get that many observers out without delaying any crucial tech if you go double gas at around 6:00. If you make 3 stalkers early on, that means delaying your gateways for a while. You can still get away with getting your geysers at 6:30, it's not as efficient if you want many observers imo, but doable.
EDIT: I used to get 5 observers and have a colossus out at 9:30 with one of my previous builds. Now I'm doing herO's build which gets a colossus out much earlier, so I stick to 4 observers. Less than 4 is pretty scary if you don't leave stuff in your main imo. You can always send a probe or zealot to the locations you lack map vision, or build a pylon there.
On July 06 2014 22:20 ShoCkSC2 wrote: IMO it depends on your opener. If you go for collossus instantly you dont want to
spend too much gas to delay your Collossus/Thermallance/Blink
spend too much time on Observer-production to delay your Collossus which makes pressure/pushes by T in early-mid way harder to hold
If you go for Templar Archives for example, which kinda ran out of fashion because of mine>chargelot, things to consider are once again
Not investing too much gas because you need high amounts of HT to defend drops and fight cost-efficiently. Be careful not to delay important upgrades such as Forge upgrades or charge. 75 gas earlygame is more than you'd think.
I think people tend to not understand how much gas that actually is earlygame. Of course myself as a protossplayer, I'd love to have a billion observers. But with the productiontime on the robo as well as the 75 gas each, its not an investment easy to make. Especially because there's scans too. Gas is the problem, ladies and gentlemen. In mid-late game Observerproduction is probably underused tho.
While it does delay tech, do you think that it is worth it for a terran to scan to take out an observer if the protoss is going for chargelot templar play? In this case, there is leftover gas and robo production time to get out 7 observers without hampering tech.
1 observer cost 100 resources, (granted, 75 of those are precious gas),
1 scan cost the terran 270 resources in the form of a mule. With each scan a terran uses to kill an observer, they essentially put themselves 170 resources behind the protoss. I don't know if this is logical for everybody, but it makes sense to me because I focus heavily on minerals in my style of play and minerals has the same value as gas to me.
Sniping observers has strategical value besides resource value. Terrans don't usually snipe random observers. In the middle of a fight, your observer gets sniped and then ghosts cloak. Toss has lost the battle and must retreat. Same logic with observers on drop paths on the edge of the map.
170 minerals ~ 2 zealots. 2 zealots don't change outcome of a big battle. Cloaked ghosts do