ZvT Rule of 1-gas Ling-bane Style - PiG Daily #109

KeeN

• Race: Terran 
• Spawn Location: 1:00

LiquidSnute (Snute) - Winner!

• Race: Zerg 
• League: Grandmaster
• Spawn Location: 11:00

The Rule of 1-gas ZvT is a build that uses the bare minimum of gas to power up the huge production that Zerg need to mass muta-ling-bane in numbers that can rival the endless Terran bio-mine pushes. You will use a mineral-only defence of mass queens and lings to defend all early aggression and begin covering the map in creep. Meanwhile you use just a single gas geyser to get basics like upgrades started whilst all of your focus is on minerals. Since you focus so much on minerals you can afford to overwhelm aggression whilst massing drones and then suddenly explode into extra gas mining only once all 3 bases are fully saturated on 16+ drones on minerals.

This style jumps straight to the macro game where you have a big income and need to spend well. It will push you to organise your macro cycle and improve your spending. Creep spread is integral to the effectiveness of this style so you will need to focus a lot more on creep than you ever have before! Within a few games with this style you’ll find yourself with hordes of ling-bane swarming your opponent and relentlessly rolling over the top of their pushes… even when floating thousands of unspent minerals! As you get more experience you’ll improve your micro vs mines, learn when and how to use deadly counterattacks and to use any lull in pressure to grow your creep exponentially.

Build Order

17 hatch 18 gas 17 pool
Pull off gas at 100 for ling speed
3rd queen ASAP
3:30 3rd hatchery + back on gas
Then start nonstop queen production and put back on gas
Drone super hard
4:45-5:00 2xevo
Fast bane nest at 5:10 this game - being very safe vs a potential hellbat followup
@3-base saturation - take 5 gases
6:00 (your next 100 gas after 1-1 and bane nest) - Lair (very late this game because snute made 4 safety banelings because he wasn’t scouting, he was worried about a big hellbat-marine-medivac attack.
10-12 total queen count, 3 injecting, the rest as your defence/creep squad
4th base + macro hatch (double macro hatch until you get better at spending money) as soon as you have extra money. Should be around 5:00 in most games

2-2 is a bit late in this game because of late lair and an engagement distracting snute
Maximum 15 mutas: Huge focus on ling-bane
You can go corruptors or infestors → Ultras instead of mutas and this is still an ideal build for those styles. However mutas is the more common approach
In rare situations you can mass mutas very high off this opening and do big counterattacks with them’

Notes
Taking the gas: Many players struggle with the mechanics of quickly taking so many gas at once whilst keeping up miuacro. My favourite method involves bouncing between each base and resetting its drone rally to the minerals whilst dropping the geysers. This way your new drones popping will naturally spread across all 3 bases rather than all running to the 3rd and then having to send them back to your main and natural gas geysers.
Double Macro hatch
When you’re first getting used to the style you will need 2 macro hatcheries and a 4th base all much earlier than you would with other builds. It’s important to get these early because once you hit 66 drones you’ll have an endless hunger for larva to mass out your ling-bane armies
Dumping Queen energy
As soon as your macro hatches and 4th base finish you should que up your queens to “dump” a huge amount of injects all at once. This will turn these extra hatcheries into nonstop producing “larva-machines” without you having to learn an APM-inefficient inject cycle where you try to hit all 6 hatches.
Creep-spread
Don’t mass tumors - just 2-3 tumors in any one direction is more than enough - focus on spreading active tumors rather than throwing down masses of new tumors. This way you can get into a rhythm and do it regularly and APM-efficiently
Creep-queen hotkey and positioning
It’s vital you have a dedicated hotkey to your creep queens.
You need to manually target them onto medivacs in the earlygame
You need to be able to easily tell them to re-spread creep throughout the entire game
After you spread creep always use shift to que them to walk back to a safe area - if you leave your queens exposed on the edge of creep they can easily be sniped by stimmed bio when you’re not watching
Don’t let him pull you around - You need to stop them disrupting your macro so you can focus on your build and spending your income constantly
Jump under the medivacs with lings whenever you force them to pickup so they can’t just unload off the edge of creep and poke back in again.
Even small ling counterattacks that you don’t micro heavily can pull your opponents attention away, buying you precious moments to get your macro in order
Clicking small squads of ling-bane into a push edging onto creep is a great way to force a lot of APM and attention away from your opponent - as well as being an efficient way to set off widow mines before the main engagement
Counterattacks
From 150 supply+ direct engagements can become problematic as the marauder wall thickens and the explosive damage of the mines and marines becomes harder to overwhelm. At this point you want to use your mobility to gain advantage rather than attacking in a huge blob into a pre-spread terran army off creep.
Huge ling counterattacks of 50-100 lings have great explosive power. You usually want to hit the natural and try to get some lings into the main on top of the production whilst the rest overwhelm any units at the rally point and clear the natural mineral line. Even the best players will usually react too slowly to raise their depots in time.
You can add banelings in and roll banes into mineral lines however as it hits slower and takes more time to set up it’s harder to master these counterattacks

Stages of Learning:
Stage 1 - Refining the Opening
When you’re first learning you will struggle with building such a fast economy whilst defending pressure
Focus just on constant spending of larva and not getting supply blocked whilst spreading creep and defending
Drop evos, lair, bane nest, all around the same time when you have the spare APM and money - don’t stress over these being “late” once the economy building is natural you can work on getting these just right
Stage 2 - Rhythm
Stop at 66 drones each game - never go up to the ideal potential worker count of 75-80 drones. Only transfer drones to 4th base onwards as your bases mine out
Stay on muta-ling-bane and Lair tech all game. Never go Hive.
This will force you to focus on your earlygame buildup and simplify the mid to lategame
Allowing you to focus on your creep + production + engagement rhythm and your handling of mutalingbane.

Common Questions:
Isn’t your gas too slow? How will you get enough banelings or mutas to survive?
Lings actually more important
mutas/banes can help you defend the first few waves but you’ll be behind on production economy and won’t be able to keep up unless they mess up their spreads vs banes

I can’t spend my money - is this build too advanced for me?
Even GM players can’t spend their money when they first start learning this style - it just takes a bit of practice!
I regularly have gold-diamond players first learning this build floating vast amounts of minerals, but still crushing their opponents. Even though your spending won’t be perfect, following this build will push you into strong macro play and teach you to improve drastically at it