Tuesday, 6 of May of 2025

Tag » Tech

Protoss Scouting and Detection

In this article I will look at the options that Protoss has for scouting and detection and the challenges and advantages those options present. I will talk about what I have found to be effective and how I am dealing with problems I have been having with detection.

Every race in Starcraft 2 has its own unique methods of scouting and detecting cloaked units. This presents a challenge for new players, as there are multiple options available to you and the best one to use is often not so clear. Protoss has a few obvious and a few not so obvious ways of scouting. Much of these are simply personal preference but some are more effective in certain match ups than others. Detection, however, is a bit more strict in its use, specifically Photon Cannon placement. Below is what I have learned to be the effective ways to scout as Protoss as well as the best ways to use your detection options.


Scouting With Your 9 Supply Probe

Use that scout and count those drones.

The ‘standard’ time for Protoss to scout with their probe is at 9/10 supply. Typically, this probe warps in your first Pylon and then heads off to the opponents base. For ease of scouting I set this probe to a control group right at the start of the game (control group ‘0’ is my scouting control group). What this Probe is looking for is the key. First off he wants to eliminate the possibility of your opponent doing a ‘cheesy’ or all-in build. Signs of these types of early builds include:

  • Vs. Zerg – Very few Drones and a Spawning pool indicates a ‘6 pool’ Zergling rush or similar.
  • Vs. Terran – 2 Barracks and no Refinery indicates a possible ‘2 Rax’ Marine rush.
  • Vs. Protoss – 2 Warpgates, no Cybernetics Core indicates a ‘2 Gate’ Zealot rush.
  • Vs. Protoss – Empty Protoss base, or only a Pylon and Forge indicates a Cannon rush or Proxy gateways. Go scout in and around your base!

The second objective of that Probe is to identify what your opponent might be planning. There are many small things that you might see that can indicate what your opponent’s plans might be and there is an excellent list of these things on the Team Liquid forums here. Please check them out. While this scouting is important do not let it maintain all of your focus. There is nothing worse than knowing exactly what your opponent is doing but not being able to do anything about it because you have been to busy scouting too build anything.


Protoss Scouting Options

Scouting options for Protoss begin limited, just Probes, Zealots and then Stalkers, but as your tech level increases those options increase exponentially. I will simply list the options that I have heard of/discovered, if you know of any more please let everyone know in the comments section!

Hallucination

Hallucinate is available from the Cybernetics Core and you can begin research on it as soon as your Warpgate Tech is finished. Hallucinate allows you to use a Sentry to create a hallucinated unit of your choice. And your choice will almost certainly be to hallucinate a Phoenix to scout your opponents base. There are two nice things about this tech: firstly, if you are not planning on getting air units a few hallucinated air units can force your opponent to build unnecessary air defences. Secondly, you can use this to scout throughout the game without any further financial cost. Note: Do not attack with the Hallucinated units, they don’t do any damage and your opponent will know that it’s a fake!

Observers

Observers are almost a necessity later in the game, and can be a very effective way to scout before then. Often Protoss will settle for just getting one Observer to scout the opponents base/keep an eye out for cloaked units. Observers are cheap, quick to produce and are cloaked. So get lots of them, you can have one at your opponents front, one at each edge of their bases to watch for drops/air unit harass and one checking for your opponents expansions. With the vision provided by your observers and by having units on Xel Naga watchtowers you will be able to instantly shut down any harass or drops before they do any damage.

Phoenix

Dark Templar can do more than just kill workers.

Phoenix are quick to produce, are one of the fastest moving units in the game, have good harassment capabilities (especially against Zerg) and can provide excellent air superiority. With a few Phoenix it is possible to scout and harass your opponent at the same time. A drawback of using Phoenix for scouting is that their costs will weaken your ground army production by a decent amount. By using them to harass your opponent you can negate this somewhat.

Dark Templar

In a similar fashion to Phoenix, Dark Templar (DT) can harass and scout at the same time. Since they are cloaked, your DTs can just wander into an opponents base and scout before popping over to their mineral line for harassment. DTs usefulness for scouting your opponents base is limited if your opponent is prepared with detection. They can still be extremely useful for watching your opponents front and delaying enemy troop movements (as your opponent cannot move out without first getting mobile detection).


My Scouting Experiences

I have had personal success with using lots of observers, particularly against Terran. I find that I am able to shut down drops much better and can keep Terran contained much more effectively with the mobile vision provided by the Observer. Keeping Terran contained provides me with the extra confidence I need to dominate this matchup. PvT is currently my best matchup as Protoss, and I believe it is due to having excellent vision at all times. When I lose that vision is usually when I lose.

Against Protoss opponents I often use Dark Templar to scout, contain and harass and I have had decent success with this approach. I have found that it is necessary to also get Observers in PvP due to the increasing amount of players that seem to be using Warp Prism harass. I feel that PvP is currently my worst matchup and I need to work on maintaining good vision to overcome this hurdle. I may experiment with using Hallucination in this matchup.

I typically use DTs and Observers against Zerg, but I have had success with the Phoenix approach in the past. Zerg can, however, react very quickly to DTs if they are at Lair tech (if not DTs will be the end of them). As such I think I may lean more towards Phoenix in the PvZ matchup in the future.


Photon Cannons

Tucking a Cannon into the minerals like this will help those probes feel safe.

Its good practice to put at least 1 Photon Cannon in each of your mineral patches. This is mainly for the detection they provide but they also act as a deterrent for any light harassment. For as long as your army is fairly close to your bases this will be pretty much all you need. Once you expand more or start to move your army out it is always a good idea to put up extra cannon in the back of each base. This will effectively defend you from any harassment or counter attacks that may come.

I have had many, many games in the past where I have ended up trading bases with my opponent due to a counter attack drop in the back of my main base. I have also lost a lot of games due to cloaked Banshee harass. After I started putting up one Cannon in each of my mineral lines cloaked Banshees have not been a problem. However, I am still having trouble remembering to throw up those extra Cannon later in the game, and it has ended up costing me a few wins.


Do you have any other tips or strategies that you use to scout/detect with Protoss? If so, share them with me below!


Starcraft 2 Economics

In this article I look at the four most important economic principles in Starcraft 2 and their place in the lower levels of play. Having a good knowledge of these concepts will help deepen your understanding of the game to the benefit of your play as well your appreciation of top-level players.

Strategy and economics go hand-in-hand in Starcraft 2. For those of you who are unfamiliar with economics; economics is not just related to money but also to production and consumption. These things are the basis of some of the most important concepts in SC2. These concepts are: spending all of your resources, the idea of constant production, the relationship between tech and army size and the idea of expanding. In this article I will introduce you to these concepts and explain why they are so important.


Spend!

Dual forges can help you spend that extra money.

There is this feeling that carries over from other games or perhaps even from life where we think that having a lot of resources is a good thing. One of the first things to do in Starcraft 2 is to destroy this notion. Your resources are not points! If you lose a match with 2000 minerals in the bank you should immediately know why. To further clarify, 400 Minerals is too much, 500 and you should start to panic!

Having trouble spending your minerals? Make sure you are:

  • Building workers.
  • Building army.
  • Expanding.
  • Researching upgrades.
  • Putting pressure on your opponent.
  • Building more unit producing structures.
  • Building static defences.
  • Not getting supply blocked (Build pylons/depots/overlords early and often).

If you get to the bottom of the list and still have resources, great! Now repeat those same steps.


The Idea of Constant Production

This is the first and probably the most important economic concept in Starcraft 2, and probably in other real time strategy games. You should be constantly producing both workers (SCV’s, Probes & Drones) and army units non-stop, back-to-back for the entire game. Constant production will help you both spend all of your money and get more (to spend).

Workers

From the very beginning of the match you should be constantly building workers. The optimum (saturation) amount of workers for one mineral patch is 3 per mineral patch and 3 per gas geyser. Thats about 36 workers in total. But don’t stop there, keep producing those workers. Once you have an expansion every additional worker you have produced (and probably a few more for greater efficiency) can be transferred over to begin mining immediately, giving your income a boost right away. Eventually there is a point where you will want to cut worker production, generally you will learn this point when you will get killed because your army is too small. I have found this point to be anything greater than 90 workers, on three active bases. Any more than that and I have found that my economy is much greater than what I can spend and that my army is too small.

Army

Unlike worker production you will almost never want to cut production of your army. If a unit producing structure is not currently doing anything then it is a waste of resources. You should train yourself to cringe whenever you notice that you are not building units from a building, I know I do whenever I watch my replays. In my article on ‘Getting Used to the Keyboard‘ I wrote about the idea of producing units whilst in battle and the advantage it can give you. If you can manage to do this without any pause you will find that you will be able to reinforce your army enough to overcome most opponents regardless of how well they control their army. Zerg players are known for doing something called a ‘300 food push’ where they are able to rebuild their army almost as quickly as it is destroyed.

Focusing on constant production alone can improve your play more than anything else can. It should always be in your mind and you should even play matches where your main focus is simply to produce non-stop. If you are having trouble maintaining constant production then I highly recommend you check out Day[9]’s Daily #132 where he talks about ‘The Mental Checklist’. Remember not to be too hard on yourself, even the pros miss a worker sometimes.

Note: Don’t queue up units, those queued up units cost resources that could be spent on other things. If you have the money to queue then build another production building and build from it.


The Idea of Expanding

It takes a while for an expansion to become valuable, at the moment this one is still a 400 mineral loss.

Generally speaking, expanding is a good decision as it effectively doubles (for each expansion) your unit production ability. If you were able to build constantly out of four unit producing structures on one base you will be able to do the same with eight on two bases. Each expansion also adds two more Vespene geysers that can be used to build a higher tech army. However, there is one additional thing to note.

An Expansion is a Long-Term Investment

An expansion costs a decent chunk of minerals, and those minerals could have been used to add more units to your army. So if you spend those minerals on an expansion you must be prepared to wait for the return on your investment. It is a good idea to expand when you are being aggressive, but if you were planning on trying to kill your opponent with your attack those minerals would have been better spent bolstering your force. So have a plan before you begin. Do you want to put all of resources into one powerful attack to crush your opponent? Or do you want to expand and play a longer game with the intention of out producing and strangling your opponent? It is very important to make this decision and not to sit somewhere in between.

I will cover the topic of expanding in a future article as knowing when, where and how to expand is difficult to learn and requires a detailed discussion.


Tech vs. Army Size

A small high-tech Protoss army faces an overwhelming low-tech Terran army.

How you spend your resources is almost as important as how quickly you spend them. It’s important to know that there is a direct relationship between level of tech and initial army size. In the beginning of each match you have only limited resources, specifically, 2 Vespene geysers available to you. This creates a a situation where you must make a decision to either have a larger army or a technologically superior one. Generally, a larger army is better than a smaller one, but higher tech gives you more options. With a higher tech army your objective will be to take advantage of your opponents weaknesses (such as exploiting your opponents lack of detection to harass with cloaked units) in order to buy yourself time to create a larger, more effective army.

How This Changes in the Late Game

As you move towards max supply you should begin to favour more expensive, higher tech units instead of the basic units. This will ensure that your maxed army is efficient, that is, more durable and useful. Day[9] discusses this concept in great detail in his Daily #249. It is important to realise the difference between the early stages of the game where you make the decision between a large army or a high tech one, and the late stages of the game where you almost certainly need to be favouring higher tech units.

My experience is that at the lower levels army size wins out over a teching opponent more often than not. Prior to writing this article I played approximately ten matches in which I built mainly Stalkers and Zealots in mass quantities whilst expanding and investing in upgrades. I won 80% of those matches, which is unusual because my win/loss ratio is usually around 55%. I am going to continue to test this method and I may end up writing an article on my findings.


Spending all of my resources and constant production are two things which I am struggling with. I always seem to end up with over 2000 minerals! But practicing Day[9]’s ‘Mental Checklist’ is seeing me steadily improve.

Which of these topics do you have the most trouble with? What have you done to improve?


Thanks to FaDeMeatex and the rest of SEA BattleNet for their input into this and other articles. Feedback is always appreciated.