Starcraft 2 Tips and Strategy: Spreading Creep
Starcraft 2 may be one of the hottest games in the gaming industry today. Today, I am going to talk about one of the most basic thing that all Zerg players must know- Spreading creep. Although it may be an easy task players often neglect it. Below I will show you how creep brings advantages to your own units, how creep can be a pain for your opponent and how to spread creep quickly.
I have enough creep as I can build all my buildings I want on it, so why spread creep?
In starcraft 2 tips, the creep is not only to house your buildings, it actually allows your unit to move faster on it. Different Zerg units actually gain a different percentage of bonus movement speed when they are on creep. This actually can determine a whole lot of difference if you can win a battle or not. A few advantages are:
1) Your units can get a easier surround at opponent units.
2) Your units are harder to kite when they are on creep since they are faster. (Kite means using longer range unit to continuously stop attack and run causing shorter range units to die without even shooting back once)
3) A faster reaction time to defend or counter attack as your units can move quickly back to base to defend the base.
Furthermore, creep gives sight to the player. Anywhere the creep is spread out, the player can see. This allows the player to notice once enemy units enter the creep area. Simply saying a well spread creep around the map give Zerg player a “map hack” advantage.
So how does creep can be a pain to opponent players?
In Starcraft 2, creep not only allow you to build your zerg structures on it, it does not allow any other races to build building on it namely Terrain and Protoss. So if you can spread creep to places where they would like to place their building. It will be a pain to them, as they will need to kill the source of the creep, wait for the creep to disappear then build the building they desire. A simple example is using an Overlord and Generate Creep at expansions that your opponent may want to expand to. This will greatly hinder your opponent expansion timing and allowing you to know when your opponent is expanding.
Ok so creep is cool how do I spread it quickly?
In Starcraft 2, there is more then one way to have creep spread out. Lets look at some way how creep can be produce:
1) Building Hatchery
2) Spawning Nydus Worm
3) Using Creep Tumors
4) Generating Creep using Overlords.
The most basic and economic way is to spawn a Creep Tumor and spread it out 1 by 1. However this may be too slow. So what I recommend is to make a Queen for Creep Tumor production. Producing as Queen only cause 150 mineral and is a relatively good early unit for defending and she have 3 abilities including producing Creep Tumor. Having a queen just for Creep Tumors mean you have more then a lone Creep Tumor spreading creep meaning the creep spreading will be more quick and swift. They are also a lot of much more creative ways you can spread creep in the game like building and canceling a Hatchery leaving a small area of creep where you can plant a Creep Tumor.