TvZ: Optimal Turret Placement

If you have played any TvZ game you should realise by now how important turrets are in the mid game to defend your mineral lines from mutalisks. Most people usually drop two turrets at one side of their gas, and one at the end of a mineral patch- while this is perfectly good, there is always room for improvement.

I did testing a long time ago since I was unsatisfied with how quickly my turrets got killed, and tried to find a way to exploit the short attack range of mutas. I found a little trick that allowed turrets to be close together, but not get hit by the glaive bounce. It's a small improvement you can make to your building placement - Starcraft 2 is after all is a game of small pieces, the best players do the little things better than the rest.

The mutalisk attack at zero upgrades do 9 damage and then an additional attack from "glaive bounce" which attacks a nearby unit for a third of the damage up to 2 times. The range of the Glaive bounce is important, since turrets that are built nearby to each other can be killed of quicker due to the additional and avoidable damage done by the glaive bounce.

As Terrans, we want turrets to be close together so that both turrets always attack at the same time as quickly as possible, but we do not want to receive bounce damage from being too close. If you know what the radius looks like you can place multiple turrets in the most efficient locations Here is what the radius looks like:

The radius of the Glaive bounce is quite interesting, it attacks any unit shown in the diagram above, if the centre of the unit touches one of the black dots, it gets hit by the glaive bounce:

Now if we build our turret outside of the black dots marked in the radius diagram, we can avoid bounce damage all together:

These turrets are positioned as the 'L' shape you would use when moving a Knight in Chess, I find this is the best position to place two nearby turrets, since the turrets start attacking mutalisks coming from all directions sooner than the other possible squares to place the turret. By placing turrets in this 'L' shape, you are getting the most efficiency from your Missile Turrets.

This may seem like a small improvement, but it makes the difference between a turret that survives due to having more time to react to repair in time or even an extra mutalisk kill. If you can get into the habit at placing all turrets like this, you will develop a positive habit that will set you apart from other Terrans in TvZ that even most pro gamers neglect to do.