Countering: answer what they have, not what you fear

Lesson

9 of 14

Watch

A written lesson, no video

Practise

A checkpoint、a plan for your next game

Everybody knows which unit beats which. That is not why players lose to counters. They lose because they counter too late, at the wrong army size, or by paying a bill that was never going to arrive in time. After this lesson you will know what a counter really costs, what breaks one, how to tell whose turn it is, and how to overload your opponent so their counter never gets built.

What you will learn

• What "counter" actually claims, and the three conditions that break it: scale, position and attention.
• How to price a counter as a bill, and why the gas line is usually the one that decides it.
• The pendulum: how the advantage swings back and forth over a game, and what to do on your turn and on theirs.
• How to delay their counter instead of racing it, and how to overload them with two things at once.
• The most common mistake after being countered, and what to do instead.

A counter is a claim, not a unit

When someone says a unit counters another, they mean a trade ratio: your minerals kill more of their minerals than the other way round.

A counter is a fight where $r > 1$ for you. But $r$ is not printed on the unit. It depends on how many there are, where they stand, and what each player does with their hands. So every counter you have been taught comes with three conditions attached.

Scale flips counters

The same two unit types can swap who wins as the armies grow. Two examples you will meet all the time:

• Zerglings and zealots. A zealot costs 100 minerals and has 160 hit points with shields. The same 100 minerals buys four zerglings with 35 each. In a narrow gap, one zealot fights one or two zerglings at a time and wins. In the open, twenty zerglings surround ten zealots and every zergling is hitting. Small and cramped favours the zealots. Large and open favours the zerglings.
• Mutalisks and marines. Six mutalisks pick off a handful of spread marines one volley at a time. Forty marines with medics, clumped and stimmed, shred any mutalisk flock that comes close. The counter is decided by the count.

At very large sizes a new effect takes over: space. Not every unit in a huge army can reach the fight. That is why late game armies lean on units that pack a lot of damage into a small area, and why a maxed army of cheap units often underperforms its cost. The flux ideas in lesson 4 explain the geometry.

Attention can beat a counter

A player whose army is on the wrong side of a counter can still win the fight by paying attention to every unit in it: pulling back the hurt ones, spreading against splash, focusing fire. It is expensive, and it only works while they are looking. So the answer to a player doing it is simple: make them look somewhere else. That is overloading, and it gets its own section below.

Price the counter

Deciding to counter is not deciding to build a unit. It is agreeing to a bill, and the units are the last line on it.

Take a Zerg with zerglings who has just found siege tanks and decides lurkers are the answer. At list prices, before one lurker walks anywhere:

Twelve hundred minerals is four hatcheries. The gas is the line that really bites, because gas comes in at a fixed rate from a fixed number of geysers. Ask what else that gas could have been. Then ask the question the bill actually raises: how long will it take to pay, and is the window still open when it lands?

If the counter arrives after the window shuts, you bought something correct and useless. Always price the other option: what is the cheapest thing that just holds through the window, and what would the same money do on the other side of it?

The pendulum: whose turn is it?

Over a game, the advantage swings back and forth as each side reaches its next piece of tech. Here is Terran against Zerg as a rough sketch. The exact order changes with builds, but the swinging does not.

The practical rule: know whose turn it is.

• If it is their turn, keep your army out of bad fights and build the answer. Losing units during their window is the most expensive thing you can do.
• If it is your turn, use it now. Attack, take a base, trade. Your window closes the moment their answer is out.

Good players also lie about the pendulum. A player who sends workers to mine at an expansion that was never built wants you to think their money went into economy, so you do not look for the tech they are really making. A player who kills every scout hides which way the pendulum has swung, and can even hide that they have almost no army at all. When you cannot see, assume their turn is coming.

Slow their counter down

The best counter to a counter is to stop it being built. If their answer is a bill, anything that delays the bill is worth as much as units of your own, and usually costs far less.

• Kill the worker that is walking out to start a tech building. It costs them the building's whole time again.
• Attack while their tech building is under construction. It is the weakest it will ever be.
• Force a defensive response during the minute they wanted to spend mining gas. Every second their gas is not mined moves their counter later.

Each of these pushes the gold dot in the picture above to the right. A player who kept an enemy from finishing one building can win the whole game with the time it bought.

Overload them: two things at once

A counter only works if someone is controlling it. Every player has a limit on how much they can watch at once, and you can use that.

• Hit two places. A drop in their main while your army pressures the front. Even a small second attack forces a choice: defend it and lose attention at the front, or ignore it and lose workers.
• Time it with your turn. Overloading works best during your window, when their army is already under pressure.
• Make the second thing cheap. Four zerglings in a mineral line, a vulture or two, a shuttle of zealots. It only needs to be too dangerous to ignore.
• Make them answer in the worst place. A second attack as their counter finishes pulls their new units away from where you were going to fight.

Lesson 10 puts numbers on why this works: your spare actions become their compulsory ones.

Common mistakes

• Doubling down on the countered unit. Their counter lands and you keep building the same thing, only better controlled. If $r < 1$ and nothing is going to change it, every extra unit is money spent at a discount to them. Good control of a countered unit is a slower way of paying.
• Countering after the window. Building the textbook answer to something that has already done its damage.
• Counting the units and forgetting the bill. The buildings, upgrades and time before the first unit fights often cost more than the units.
• Fighting at the wrong size. Taking a small fight your counter only wins at scale, or waiting until the size where it stops working.
• Fighting during their turn. Losing half your army inside their window instead of waiting two minutes for your own.

The moment the pendulum swings against you, the right play is almost never a better version of what you were doing. It is the next thing on the tech tree, or an expansion. The window belongs to them. The game after it does not have to.

Practise

1. Write the bill. Pick a counter you use often. List every building, upgrade and unit it needs, and add up minerals and gas. Compare the total with the cost of one expansion.
2. Time the window. In one of your replays, mark when your opponent gained an advantage and when it ended. Then mark when your answer was ready. Did it land inside the window?
3. Price the holding option. For the same window, name the cheapest thing that would have held, and what the money saved could have bought after it.
4. Slow the bill. Play a game where one of your attacks targets a building under construction. Write down how long it delayed them.
5. Test scale in the lab. In the Battle Lab, fight zerglings against zealots at equal cost, first at 4 against 1, then at 40 against 10. Watch the result change.

Checkpoint