4v4 Team Game Strategy - Part 1- Overview

Part 1 - Overview

This is the first series of post where I'll take on regarding Team Games for Starcraft 2, whether in the form of 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4. As all of you know team games are games where you play with your buddies often referred to as Arranged Team Game from Warcraft 3 or where you are playing with random players or Random Team. As stated in my previous article, I have posted on the topic regarding Arrange Team in Random Team. This is a new feature implemented on Starcraft 2, where you can have 2 players; you and your ally, and search using the 3v3 or 4v4 Search feature. This may be an advantage or disadvantage for you as the total MMR (Match Making Rating) which is hidden and not confused with your actual Rating Points where you see in your profile. The average of Team 1 will be close or equal to Team 2. Blizzard is trying to balance out the players of both side of the team. You can read more on this topic in my previous article.

Ok, so you and three of your buddies are ready to rock on the 4v4 Team Game League. What I'll focus on this article will the the general overview of strategy. Normally, a 4v4 game consists of 4 players each contributing 25% to the outcome of the game. This can be changed due to the strategies being used by each team.

If any of you are previous Warcraft 3 players, you should be very familiar with the 2 Night Elves and Undead team in 3v3; and or Orc, Undead and Night Elf combination. You may ask why are both of these two strategies so strong in the Warcraft 3 3v3 team strategy. The obvious answer is optimizing the strength of each races. Take the 2 NE + UD strategy for example. Both the NE players, will train a Keeper of the Growth and Priestess of the Moon and only mass Huntress for the rest of the game. What both of these players are doing is to train efficient and cheap units in the form of Huntress where Priestess of the Moon will synergize with the whole army giving the Range Aura for the whole army. Both the NE players will constantly feed the Undead ally with additional gold and lumber.

The Undead race is often considered a late game race. This race are strongest during the late game with high level heros for Death Knight, Lich and or Crypt Lord. With the additional income for the Night ELves allies, Undead can pretty much mass up Fiends, 2 or 3 Heros, Statues and Frost Wurms which is a fearsome army. Together with Huntress serving as a meat shield for the Fiends, while Fiends are used to focused down opposing units, a win can easily be achieved.

The whole point is Synergy being created. Lets come back to SC2. What we can translate from this to SC2, a combination of units such as Roach, Stalkers and Bioball can be really strong. The Zerg will constantly be pumping out roaches which only acts as a meat shield for ally units such as the Stalkers and Marines/Marauders. Trying to optimize the best strength of each races is the best strategy for every Real Time Strategy Game.

After you have played a 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 team games, you will mostly likely notice a huge difference between them. The most obvious will be the map difference. This will heavily affects the overall game. For instance on smaller maps, players are more likely to engage each other earlier in the game. 2v2 team game is considered more closely related to a 1v1 solo game followed by 3v3 and 4v4. In a 4v4 game, very often one team decides to just mass a type of units and to push up at enemy bases together which results in total destruction of enemy forces. An easy example is a map where 2 allies are sharing the same base. The opponent can decide to kill these 2 players together with their 4 armies. This is very devastating.

So in conclusion, try to work together with your allies by deciding what units are you getting at the beginning of the game. For example, u'll just type out Roach indicating a ground based army which is often followed by Hydra; or Bio often related to Marines+Marauders; or Mass marines; Stalkers or 4 Gate. Try to synergize as much with your team. You would not want all three of your teammates teching real hard to late game units such as Colossus, Banshee or Mutas together where your opponent will just roll over you when they push.

General Checklist on this part:
- Work together with your allies
- Decide your strategy
- Know what your allies are doing
- Synergize your army and Push together
- Try to help each other out, when they are requesting for Minerals or Gas

Stay tuned for Part 2.

Cheers