Turtling as a Terran

## **Turtling**

Turtling is the strategy that you should never aim to do. To describe it briefly, it is where you sit in your base, waiting behind your gates for the zerg to slowly kill you. However, thanks to recent additions to the game such as the Ion Cannon and Siege Tank, it is possible to actually win like this, though it is a less than exciting game for all involved.

Of course, one should never start the game with the intention of turtling, since it is always beneficial to initially expand and attack in order to secure more income and damage/slow down the Zerg. However, it is many times the case that you are unsuccessful in those strategies, and are forced to retreat to your base.That is when you may employ these turtling tactics. While turtling, there is two ways to win, and three ways to lose. I will start by covering your victory conditions, which you should always be working towards while turtling.

### **Support Victory**

Well as the name implies, you just send your energy to allies, bubble when needed etc. pretty straight forward really. If you actually saved some of your army when pulling back and the Zerg is ignoring you in favor of another player, then push out and stab the Zerg in his back!

### **Victory through Ion Cannon**

While turtling, it almost always gets to a point where, since the Zerg has control of the entire map and thus has vast amounts of resources and space, there are almost infinite streams of heavily-upgraded brutalisks coming towards you, making it impossible to expand even the smallest amount. Luckily, since the invention of the ion cannon, there is no need to. As described on the Ion Cannon wiki page, each hive needs 5 ion cannon blasts to be destroyed. That means, to win, you need to use 10(9 maybe?) ion cannons to destroy both hives. That may seem like a lot, well that's because it is. If you are the only one alive, and all the other terrans are dead, it will take a *very long time (between 1 and 2 hours!)* to win with this. That is why it is recommended to have 2 or more allies who can help by firing their own ion cannons. All you need for an ion cannon is 40,000 energy and 500 mineral. Some people believe it to be beneficial spending your first ion cannon taking out some of the zerg's production and income, but that substantially increases the time it takes to win, and time is your enemy while turtling. Also the Zerg can just rebuild what he lost in a few minutes, so don't do that, go for the kill.

Now we will move on to look at some of the many ways to lose while turtling, and what can be done to prevent these.

### **A Simple Death**

This is a somewhat easily-prevented, yet surprisingly common, way to die while turtling, and it is simply not having strong enough gates and not having enough units repairing them, such that the zerg just breaks your Walls (use walls not gates; half the surface area = half the damage ... kind of) and kill you. Luckily, this is much easier to prevent than the other methods the zerg has of killing you. Keep in mind, however, that a Zerg has s lot of time to coordinate multiples of his methods simultaneously.

The primary way to protect your Walls is through the construction yard. This yard should be placed where you would otherwise have your farm, because it has a tendency of dying if placed on either side of the cliffs. Make sure it's aura encompases your walls. This can, and should, be further upgraded by linking 4 defenders to the construction yard, giving the construction yard a more substantial damage reduction effect. As a side note, these defenders should be positioned such that they can repair the gates as well as your scvs. However Defenders cannot simultaneously repair the same target, so any more than 4 is simply a waste.

Secondarily, you should get a lot of scvs. I about 4 scvs might be enough, however have more ready as they have the tendency to die. If you use Gates because your a Bob, then you can abuse the repair range of the SCVs, basically, they can repair through the ledge, so you can place 2 scvs next to the gates, and if they are ordered to "hold position" there, they will be able to repair the gates regardless of the height difference.

This next way is probably the least-known method of protecting your gates, but provides a substantial reduction of damage. This method is Shock Troopers. As you may know, Shock Troopers may be upgraded in the armory to reduce the damage of any zerg unit in the radius of their attack by 60%. If you combine this with the upgrade to double the blast range of the shock trooper weapon, even a few shock troopers should be able to give all zerg attacking the wall a 60% attack reduction, or, if you are short on vespene for the splash upgrade, just make enough troops.

Another thing that should be mentioned is upgrading your walls at the construction yard. This requires an increasingly large amount of vespene, but you should still do it as much as possible to ensure that your walls are not broken. If you are solo-ing the Zergs then you will probably need about lvl 35-50 depending on how the Zergs feel.

### **Artillery (Ravagers)**

The zerg artillery unit seems to have been designed specifically to counter turtling, due to its extremely long attack range and relative immobility. If the zerg aquire enough ravagers, they can kill almost all of your units from long range, allowing them to break into your base. Fortunately for you, you have siege tanks, which have an even longer range than ravagers. The zerg can have up to 50 ravagers at a time, so you will need plenty of siege tanks (you should have between 3 and 8 depending on how the Zerg is assaulting you), but it is easily possible to avoid death by ravager. The tricky part, since you don't have vision of anywhere outside your base, is knowing where to fire the tanks. One trick is that after the ravager barrage has hit, the ravager will briefly become visible to you, which you can use to kill it, so always be watching around your base when a ravager fires in order to be able to see it. A second method is your tech lab's Scanner Sweep ability, which grants you vision of a large area for a short period of time. This has the advantage over the previous method that you can fire preemptively, and destroy the ravagers before they have the chance to attack. However, each charge you use from your tech lab is more time you need to spend charging your ion cannon, so you don't want to do this too much, but not doing it enough is suicide, a fine balance should be met. The third method comes from the siege tanks themselves. Each seige tank blast gives you vision of the area that it hits for a short amount of time, so if you have enough seige tanks, which you probably don't, you could just fire randomly outside your base until you find the zerg, then concentrate on that location. Siege tanks need 200 energy per shot.

### **Hydralisks**

Hydralisks are perhaps the hardest thing to deal with, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, their layers. Presuming the zerg doesn't have vast numbers of hydralisks just sitting around, they will probably be investing in both "Hydralisk Spawn Size" upgrades, making their hydralisks spawn with three layers. You can expect to be facing hydralisks with maximum layers depending on your opponent. This makes it difficult because each hydralisk (or group of hydralisks) will need a few tank blasts to kill. Ideally, you don't want to fight hydralisks with marines, because by the time they get close enough for that, they can cause a lot of damage. However, this is often necessary anyways.

To make it more difficult for hydralisks to get to you, you should try to limit the spread of creep to your base. Hydralisks slowly die off of creep, so if you can kill all creep tumors and Nest that your find within the range of your tanks, then any hydralisks that get to your base will be sufficiently weakened, and should be able to be killed with some combination of tanks and marines. Although ideally you don't need to shoot them at all, as that costs Energy.

### **Spine Crawlers**

Many zerg players will try to make spine crawlers next to your base, but these can barely be considered a threat, since they can easily be taken out with just about anything and also they cant actually hit anything valuable from outside your base. Unless you didn't read this post yet and put your Construction yard out in front.