Most aspiring young Zerg players treat Banelings exclusively as straightforward ground units. Run them into the enemy, watch them explode. The end. They are effective in that particular role, but there are more creative and potentially more effective uses for them. Today we’re going to cover a pair of them: Baneling land mines and Baneling carpet bombing.
Many players just getting into StarCraft 2 don’t realize that burrowed Banelings are able to explode while underground. You need to trigger the explosion manually, but it’s a very good use of your units if you can do it well. Burrow is an extremely under-appreciated ability across young Zerg players as a whole, but this use in particular gets very little attention.
Once your Baneling is burrowed it gains stealth, meaning it’s hidden from view until a unit with Detection comes by, such as a Raven or an Observer. It’s possible to build a defensive perimeter with burrowed Banelings to catch your opponent’s offensive force off-guard. For example, a Terran MMM (Marine, Marauder, Medivac) bioball (an infantry-based army) marching toward your front door is a good target for Baneling mines. A few well-placed Banelings can route that attack entirely without any need for a significant battle. Eventually your opponent will field Ravens, Observers or Overseers to deal with those Banelings, but it’s very likely you’ve already routed their first couple of pushes on your base or forced them to buy expensive units (Ravens) where they otherwise wouldn’t have.
An alternate strategy is to set Unburrow to autocast on your burrowed Banelings. When an enemy unit comes in range, it will unburrow and rush that enemy automatically, similar to the original Starcraft’s spider mines.
Baneling carpet bombing is a strong technique, but it puts a large number of Overlords at risk if you’re anywhere near becoming supply capped. The Overlords used here should be surplus units; supply-providers that you don’t need, or at least are non-critical.
Banelings do an excellent job when they’re allowed a wide-open assault, but they are fragile units. A Protoss player with a large number of Colossi can likely wipe out all of your Banelings before you can ever come into contact with one of their units. A Terran MMM army can also reach the point, with enough Marauders, that your Banelings will have an extremely difficult time of getting in range to do any significant damage. The Baneling drop/carpet bomb is a good workaround for that problem.
The Baneling carpet bomb relies on you having your own sizable force in play as primary/distraction targets to meet your opponent head on. When the battle commences, you use Overlords (with the Ventral Sacs and Pneumatized Carapace upgrades) to fly over an opponent, and while still in motion, unload the Banelings directly on top of their army. Unless your opponent has enough anti-air to knock down all of your Overlords, your Banelings will be significantly more effective than if you simply tried to run them into the enemy force.
The carpet bomb tactic is much easier to understand if you see it in motion, so embedded below is an example video from PsyStarcraft.
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