Usually (or very often), good Protoss players, after building a Robotics bay, build observer and put it to opponent base.
From my perspective if you know Protoss build Robo you should care about that observer.
How do I most effectively deny this observer?
The most often I play Terran and there are few ways for that:
- Scan your choke and kill observer with marines. This can fail if observer is not in the scanned screen. That also cost you 50 energy (270 minerals). Observer costs 25/75… if we take gas/mineral exchange rate as 2.5 – it is pretty good price for killing observer…
- Build Engineering Bay and build few turrets. that costs 150+x*75… also not too bad. This will take time, but could be also useful in a long run (detect DT or other observers, some defense against phenixes and VoidRays).
- Build Raven (if you have StarPort with tech lab). That costs 100/200 – a little bit expensive for observer hunting, but you could later use Raven for PDD, etc…
- Anything else?
Questions:
- What is the best way to hunt observers?
- How to deal with opponent observers if you play Zerg?
- How to deal with opponent observers if you play Protoss?
Thanks a lot!
Best Answer
Terran: If it's in your base, probably just make a turret, it ends up being cheaper than a scan. If you want one in outside your base then maybe consider ravens if it fits with the rest of your strat, otherwise just scan.
With Zerg probably overseer. You mentioned what if you don't have a lair? The question is why don't you have one? There are legitimate reasons, like you're going for a big early-mid game push with low tech, that's fine, but then by the time they get an observer it's usually too late. Otherwise you usually have a lair about the same time or before they get observers. Remember it's Pool -> Lair, whereas it's Gateway -> Core -> Robo so that's higher in the tech tree.
For Toss, having your own observers is generally good anyway, but unless you're going air, you should have a forge at some point to upgrade. (Actually that applies to all races, except maybe Terran if you're going Mech in which case you're upgrading from the armory) If you are going fast air, then that's probably just bad luck that they saw it, but I haven't seen many toss go air since the void ray changes.
Before you do any of that though, you should determine first off, are you actually trying to hide anything? Are you going to be doing anything that would make your opponent change their plan based on seeing it. If not, then maybe you can just let the obs sit there for a while. Don't need to take time to deviate from your normal plan to stop them from seeing something they could've guessed already without seeing.