The how to guide on beating a Zerg player in Starcraft 2.


The big one.
The most crucial part, and I mean most important part to almost any strategy, is that you continue to turn out SVC's out of your command center, non-stop. Here the way to look at it. You want to build a refinery and you have an SVC that's in production and almost completed. Right as the SVC is completed, you hit 75M, instantly, you put a refinery down - this means your command center is doing nothing, sitting idle, wasting precious seconds in the early-game, the deciding factor in most matches. Keep turning out SVC's and put them on minerals - when you hit around nine, you should have around 100M, so start constructing those depots. You're not screwing up if there's a slight pause in construction for a few seconds as the depot finishes, that's completely normal. Just doing this will put you in an extremely competitive environment mineral wise and primed for expansion. The only downside is that you can get hit by a small zergling rush - that's why I placing a engineering bay down, and upgrading to a planetary fortress off the bat, especially against Zerg, and also against other Terran on maps with cliffs overlooking the backside of the mineral line, as it will protect you from those dirty reapers.



Find out what that kid's been up to.
Initial scouting helps predict rushes and allows you to figure out what to do. If he's got no refineries and you see a spawning pool coming up, you should know what going to come. Don't spend all your time trying to micro-manage your scout around his base, but try to piss the opponent off by poking at his gathering line. Sometimes I like to sit dormant for couple seconds to make the enemy think I'm not focusing on my scout, hopefully, he'll send his whole his gathering line at you and you can kite them while he gets no minerals. PS, the kiting trick probably won't work on Matt Cooper. Don't try it if you're playing against him.



Expand your first base into a planetary fortress.
You can go either way, as the next bullet below shows, but this will allow you work on researching macro tech early and giving you the opportunity to move up the tech tree before creating units; as it will protect your gatherers from a small early rush. It's range and non-friendly targeting splash damage will actually take quite large groups of zerglings - I've personally seen it take out at least thirty of them with no other assistance, without receiving any significant damage. If at some point it does start taking some significant damage (which it shouldn't, this early in the game), put an SVC or two on it to fix it up, if at some point the enemy starts aiming for your SVC's, load em' up into your fortress (limit for the fortress is five, unless you research nanosteel frames, which bumps it up to a capacity of ten) and unload them on the opposite side for a quick repair before you get back inside - a major annoyance for any Zerg rusher. I've even actually lifted my walled barracks narrow to let a group of zerglings into my base to get destroyed by the fortress, it's quite funny actually!



Mineral Uprooting Limited Extractor
I'm pretty sure that's not what MULE stands for, but that'll probably work. The MULE is an ability that is called down from the orbital command. Orbital commands come in handy for gathering minerals quickly, and you can still beat a worthy Zerg opponent by starting off with one, it's a popular strategy for obtaining more minerals off the bat. A lot of people will argue that an orbital command should be the initial upgrade for your starting command center, yet, how many times have you died from a small zergling or reaper rush thinking "I wish I had built a planetary fortress instead.." - I mean the situation comes down to this. You can build a few units and wall in to counter the Zerg. This means sacrificing minerals to lower tech and possible repairs on your wall. That's completely fine, as you can drop a MULE down eventually and get your minerals back. In the end you will have slightly more minerals and more opportunity to expand. Here's a nice tip though. Remember, your initial command center can lift off.
You can always build an SVC or two, gather around 200 minerals, then build two refineries at your first natural expansion point, work quickly to get your planetary fortress up, and expand backwards into your original zone with no resistance. It's a useful strategy that I've used a few times on certain maps (primarily 1v1 maps with multiple spawn locations).