TvP Concepts guide (Part 1 of 3(?))

Disclaimer: Concepts in this guide are a general guideline, not an absolute rule. They likely won't apply in all situations, or at all skill levels. There are likely some lies in this guide, or not entirely factual truths, or generalities that have exceptions not explained. If some things that I say don't feel like they apply to your rank, then you can ignore them safely. The useful information likely is in what you haven't thought about or are unsure about. The idea behind this guide is to get you to focus on what matters and to learn how to think about the matchup. You will need to use your brain. Individual results may vary.

Build Concepts

Early game (First 7 minutes)

Broodwar Economy 101 The two most important facts about broodwar economy are the following:
1. A mineral patch can only be mined by a single worker at a time
2. A mineral patch is most efficient when mined by one worker.
Additional workers produce diminishing returns. This has several important implications:
- It's important to split your workers at the start of the game, even if you didn't get your initial split right.
- The first 9 workers should work different patches
- When transferring workers from the main (9 patches) to the nat (7 patches), if you have 16 or more workers on minerals, you want to transfer 6 (+worker building cc) to the nat to reach 7 workers at the nat, and leave the rest in main. If you have less than 16 workers, leave 9 on the main and transfer the rest to the nat. Some maps have 8 patches at the nat. Just increase the numbers here by 1.
- When scouting, we want to scout after each patch is being mined, so 13 scout for factory FE, and 12 scout for rax FE (because there's no gas)
- The earliest we should take our 2nd gas is when our natural when every patch has an scv mining.

Opening tank vs opening vulture
When you open tank:
1. You open shop into tank
2. Generally should be paired with bunker or wall, since you don't have a good way to defend zealot builds otherwise.
3. You are threatening a tank push of some sort. Generally, the faster your tanks, the more threatening the push is.

When you open vulture:
1. You get 1 vulture out on the map initially, followed up by shop. You can go into tanks after or continue building up to 4 vultures
2. The one vulture threatens a couple things:
- If opponent shoves all goons forward immediately, you can run into their base for free probes. If you do this, you need to be making a tank behind it and expecting them to send their goons forward.
- If opponent shoves most goons forward to hit bunker, you threaten to lay mines behind the goons and killing the forward goons with a tank push. Additionally, until observers are out, they cannot reinforce the forward goons or back away safely. Just be sure to try to place your mines in the retreat path.
- When mines are done (~around 5 minutes), you can lay down mines for vision and defense (and occasionally offense). You want to place mines in the following locations, and a mix of all of these is preferable to dumping your mines in one spot.
- Directly in front of your opponents base
- Where the opponent is likely to place their third. Make sure to place one mine on where the nexus should go, and another in the path from their natural to their third.
- The direct ground path between your base and Protoss base. You want to spread out these mines, instead of laying them in clumps. - Directly in front of your own base
- As goon count increases, it's harder to contest spots with pure vulture. Therefore, you want to try to get mines down in the hardest places first (in front of their base and at their third) and work down the above list. You can contest 1 goon with 3 vultures pretty easily. Contesting two is sketchy,but at 5 minutes, they should only have 3 goons if they went an expansion, which means you should be able to search an angle elsewhere. It is not worth it to lose vultures just to get mines down. Finally, you can choose to expend more mines when Protoss sees where your mines are (particularly around the third). The reasoning here is that some Protoss can defuse your mines without an obs. Laying them tighter makes this more difficult.
- These mines can tell you when and how they take their third and when they have observers (if at all). If you get mines down in front of their base, this will clear this first before doing anything else with the observer.
- Remember you have 3 mines per vulture to dump. You can save a mine if you are going speed and want to threaten backstabs to kill 1 goon (3-4 vulture hits + 1 mine hit) later. If you don't plan on doing this, just dump all your mines.
- After laying your mines, you can pull back to your base if you're suspecting drop, or heal them, or scout around for proxies if you suspect it. If they're healthy and have speed, hiding them somewhere in the middle is just a good flexible position (come back to your base for a drop, or position for a runby)

Whether you open vulture or tank doesn't really affect the next couple of units that you make from your factory. You can follow up tanks with vultures and vice versa. Even with tank pushes, a lot of the times the goal is just to place down mines. Just make sure to do what makes sense with your unit composition.

Engineering bay and turrets Engineer bay takes 38 seconds to build and a turret takes 19. If you need detection ASAP, build engineering bay. If you need anti-air ASAP, build engineering bay. You can think of turrets as extra unit production, just vs air units.

The downside to building engineering bay is you usually will delay academy, which makes you find out what tech route Protoss is doing later. This is why progamers like to build ebay, then decide if they want to build turrets based on the information at hand. If they can skip turrets, they try to pull the academy timing forward. If you aren't sure what's happening, always build turrets.

When and where should I build turrets? When and where you build turrets depends on how protoss opened. Walking dt without an expansion hits the fastest – you’ll need a turret at your natural just before 5:00 for 1 base walking DT. Walking DT after expansion hits around 6:00. DT drop with range +3 goons after FE can hit at 6:30, and shuttle reaver after FE with range can hit at 7:00. For either drop you need a turret at each mineral line near your gas.

You can build a turret ring when you need to keep a shuttle out at all costs (generally situations where you don't have much ground army, or they rushed a reaver relative to your build). In older styles you can also build a turret ring to keep obs out, but is quite expensive and not seen much these days (although rax fe can afford it)

Academy
Academy takes 50 seconds to build, plus 26 seconds for scanner. You generally want to build academy when Protoss isn't threatening anything in particular. Academy is generally paired with armory so you can get goliath to kill shuttle/reaver or obs.

Academy has the notable downside that you delay your worker ramp by 4 workers, as there is an opportunity cost of 2 workers per scanner. However, scanners are cheaper than SCVs, so in situations where you want to bank money (such as adding factories) you can build scanners to avoid wasting command center production.

I think cases where academy is preferred:
1. You want to deny your opponent vision early on
2. Protoss cannot tech quickly, and you have excess minerals (you can also choose to delay scans).

Similar to ebay, you can also choose to delay scanners if you want after building an academy in some builds. Additionally, if academy is your only source of detection, you generally hold off on scanning until you have 75 energy banked up or so before your first scan.

When to ebay block
Ebay block is when you build an ebay in Protoss’s natural where they want to put their nexus. You build the ebay but don’t finish it so you can cancel it later. The purpose of the ebay block is to match your expansion timing with Protoss. This is useful if the following conditions are met:
1. You know that Protoss wants to take an expansion
2. You are unable to currently take your expansion due to a threat
3. You have minerals for an ebay without hurting your build

The classic situations where you may encounter this is if you get gas stolen and they open gateway without gas, or they do a zealot opener and have skipped range.

Make sure you hotkey your ebay so you can cancel it without looking at it. Cancelling it to get your own command center faster is fine as well. Not cancelling your ebay because it got killed can be worse than not ebay blocking at all.

When do you need siege mode by when going factory FE?
The short answer is start it by 6:00 (+20-30 seconds maybe) against any sort of FE by protoss, and ASAP vs 1 base if they are moving out with goons. The longer answer is:

If you are opening tanks, and you continue to build tanks, you can fight any goon production that they produce off of a FE until their 2-3 gate goon production comes online, which is around 7 minutes.
If you are opening vulture, you should be able to mine the path between your two bases if they produce goons, so you don't need siege mode until observer is out, which is around 6:00-7:00. If you've started siege any later, you may find goons attacking your bunker. In this case, you want to leave most (or all) of your tanks on the high ground and repair bunker and stall until your siege is done.

If they are one base, you want siege ASAP, if you don't know what they're doing. In cases where you can track their goons and they aren't sending goons across the map, you can consider opening mines (this can be troublesome if they open very fast reaver, though). If they don't attack for a while, walling off your natural is generally good (in case of speed zealot nonsense). Be sure to scout well in this situation.

Middle game:

Here's the cost of some relevant buildings in terms of cost/second: Vultures : ~4 minerals/s
Goliath: ~4 minerals/s, 2 gas/s
Tanks: ~4.75 minerals/s, 3.2 gas/s
SCV: ~4 minerals/s
Scanner:~ 2 minerals/s
Machine shop: ~2 minerals/s, 2 gas/s

This means when you're in low mineral situations, you can build scanners, machine shops, vultures, goliaths to get resources back. This also means in situations where you build pure vulture, you tend to bank more resources than you would otherwise. Note that vultures tend to cost more supply per second than other units, so you can also view them as more expensive than goliaths, sometimes.

General production principles:
2 base = 7 factories at most
3 base = 9 factories at most

You can support 1.5 tanks per gas technically. However, we generally want less than this in the early-mid game because we need to spend gas making more factories/getting upgrades. If we want to delay upgrades, we can do 2 shop tank production after getting all our factories. If we want to rush upgrades, we stick to 1 tank production until +2 has started. Once we hit 3 gas we can go to 3 tank production. Once we hit late game, we can go up to 4 shop production if needed.

Generally speaking, 5 factories is a good number to be on to secure a third, and 7-9 is good for securing a 4th. General factory progressions tend to be from 1 => 2 => 3 => 5 => 7 => 9 or 2 => 4 => 6 => 8.

Terran has trouble taking bases in the matchup, but the good news is that once all Terran's infrastructure is up, you don't actually need much to sustain unit production. You just want to sustain at least 2 base mining at all times. More bases is better and lets you mine out slower, but isn't strictly necessary. Having more bases usually also comes with the downside that it's more area to protect.

How many workers do I need?
On 3+ base, 60-65 is a good number. On two base, 50 is a good number, though you can get away with much less if you want to all-in.

When to build depots
Early on, your depot timing is relatively set. If you are on 2 factory production (tank goliath), you need 1 depot production continuously. (You may need to build 2 depots sometimes if you are making continuous vulture + worker.) Above 2 factory production, build depots 2 at a time. When in doubt, build more depots. It is slightly unoptimal to build more depots than you need. It is far worse to be supply blocked for an extended period of time

What to do when you get supply blocked:
Prioritize tanks over vulture, prioritize workers if the situation is ok. If you can add scanners/machine shops (up to 1/base), you should. Otherwise, build buildings that would come next in your build order. Finally, you can also trade off relatively low value units if you can get a neutral trade.

Build matters...but also doesn't matter
It's far more important that we spend our money on workers and units without getting supply blocked than it is optimizing our build order. Optimizing our build order only helps when we need to solve a specific problem, or we can already make stuff very well. At the end of the day, Terran all kind of wants the same stuff, so you just need to make sure you can make nonstop worker, nonstop unit without getting supply blocked. Making stuff and spending your money should allow you to hit C rank at a minimum off of it alone.

If you find yourself with extra money, just spend your money on anything. Make sure everything is building something, then just slam down buildings.

When benchmarking vs other players, if you find your unit count lacking, you should look at two factors:
1. How well did we make workers? If we aren't making workers, we either are:
- Not building workers even though we have money and are not supply blocked. In this case, it's probably best to practice by setting a 13 second timer and building scvs on that timer.
- Not building workers because we're cutting for units/buildings accidentally. In this case, pay attention to how you spend your money, and try to make your build consistent.
2. If we have money and workers, it's likely we aren't getting production buildings down when we need to.
3. If we don't have money but we have workers, it's either because we need to work on building more depots, or we have other inefficiences with our macro (too many idle workers, too many queued units, etc)

At lower levels, having a build is good because it's an optimization problem that has already been solved for you by better players, and allows you to have a consistent factor from game to game. However, it is also true that we have an opponent, and sometimes they don't let us do what we want to do. So, whenever things go off the rails, just make workers, don't get supply blocked, and spend your money is something you can't really go wrong with.