There is a major flaw in the storyline which I don't get.

Raynor and Taldarin went to Braxis to un-infest Stukov with a Protoss serum. It was successful, and he became human (Also, notice how Taldarin and Tal'darim).

Now, why the hell does Raynor already knowing that a cure exists for the zerg, side with Hanson, when he can just talk to Selednis, who is Artanis' main executor and get the serum? Seriously, wtf.

Oh, and being 14, I found the doctor to be cute. :-_-:

EDIT: Threw in a Metzen quote.


Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 6 2010, 12:46 pm by Vi3t-X.

Yes, pretty bad plot hole there, viet.

Hanson's bubble-gum lipstick, clear elfin face and "oh cry on my shoulder Jim!" shtick really annoyed me. So cliche. She oscillated between being an intelligent scientist woman to a 22 year old know-nothing bimbo.

Also, playing the campaign through again a second time on Hard, it is now clearer to me that the Zerg invasion is because Kerrigan is after the artifacts, and once you take out Tyrador (destroying the computer cores, the mission where Kerrigan first shows her bogeyman-face) the news report indicates that the Zerg have pulled back in their invasion. However this really wasn't made as clear as it should be, and Kerrigan just says she's after the artifacts because she "knows what they're for", but never elaborates any further with what she wants them for etc. It would've been interesting if Kerrigan had said she was going to use them against the Xel'Naga or something, or some copmletely different purpose to what the terrans were apparently wanting them for (money, and later as a way to cure Kerrigan).

Also interestingly, if you have captions turned on, during the Tyrador mission Kerrigan says "I know what you and 'Dr Narud' are doing" or something like that, but the important part is that Dr Narud was in quote marks and her voice has a mocking stress on his name - it seems she knows that Narud is Duran.

Duran's a shapeshifter?

Also, upon replaying the Prophecy missions (now I have Zeratul's portrait too ), Tassadar said he never died, and never would, and that the Overmind was a good thing.

Tassadar also references that he is Protoss, so if everything he says is true, he has to be a preserver (and even then, official novels stated that no preservers made it to Shakuras, so how could there even be preservers?)

Confusing.

----

Also, Blizzard got lazy, so goliaths shoot Lanzer Torpedos (aka Viking rockets).

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 7 2010, 2:20 am by Vi3t-X.

She was pretty until I went to youtube and watched the ending that results when you help the protoss purify Haven (I saved Haven when I was doing the campaign). Now I can't think of her without thinking of her infested form, which actually IS terrifying. Why couldn't they have made Kerrigan more like that?

Also, anyone else found the Tauren Marine entering an outhouse and rocketing into space? Hint: Zero Hour

Yes.

I'm no Blizzard employee, but I think it's because Stukov's infestation was artificial, by Terran scientists, while Kerrigan's infestation was by Zerg.

I hope Blizzard doesn't see this and steal my plot hole patcher.

Eh, anyone know how Im supposed to kill 4 hatcheries on the Zero Hour mission on hard? The only real strategy you can use on that map is spam marines and medics, which isnt effective when the enemy has roaches and spine crawlers. I had to focus most of my units on base defense too, and I came very close to getting wiped out. Any tips would be helpful (especially from those people who have beaten the whole campaign on brutal lol).

Just constantly train more marines and medics along the way as you attack. Make sure you don't have at least 100 minerals, and you have a lot of SCVs gathering resources. Spend everything on more units, and upgrades. Additional bunkers if necessary. That also means, create 2 marines at the same time with Reactors, and create medics on Barracks with Tech Labs. And set rally points to your army that is gradually getting larger. You should focus fire on specific units like roaches, hydralisks and spine crawlers.

As for hatcheries, there are three of them very close to each other at the west side of the map, beneath/south of the spot where you rescue additional marines. You will find two more if you proceed north. If you can, try to find the Tauren Marine.

I think I had way too many resources left over, as I only used the 2 barracks they gave me in the beginning. I had my troops fully upgraded, but that doesnt do much because "fully" at that point is lvl 1 lol. I think I attacked the western hatchery cluster just as an attack force was emerging, and I got wiped out by a load of zerg at the cliff choke. Ill look out for the tauren marine as long as its not hostile lol.

I had 2 bunkers on each side of my base, but I still ended up falling back to high ground during the final onslaught. Even then, they broke through that choke and I had to fly my command center away. Timer ran out as a group of mutas were about to kill my CC lol. How many barracks do you suggest building on that map?

Krazee gave some good tips, but I'll try to answer by roughly following map flow.
At the beginning always spam SCVs until you have saturated your resource gathering, 2-3 scvs at boths sides of the base building and repairing 3 bunkers each side and 1 scv building depots almost all the time. This scv should build another barracks and the engineering bay when your economy allows it (or is it preplaced?).
Whenever you can upgrade and build marines & medics, roughly in a 2:1 ratio. Using one hotkey for all barracks you can spam troops without looking at your base.
If you are just going for the achievement you can ignore the bonus objectives. If you have a bit of time, however a group of 10/15/20 is capable of rescuing the 3 marine groups with (almost) 0 losses which nets you some free marines. When you go out of your base always wait until after an attack on the side you're exiting.

When you have an attack force of 25-30 units wait until after an attack on the left side then unload all units from the bunkers and set each barrack's rally point ON a different bunker and assign all 3 barracks to the same hotkey so you can refill the bunkers easily while you attack. Then with your ~40 units march straight north and you'll find an enemy base with 2 hatcheries. As it's situated on low ground it's pretty easy to take with that many units.
When you've finished the first base get as many units as you can (including western bunker crews) and attack the western base at least 3 minutes before the mission ends. The hard part is getting on high ground with as few losses as possible. Micro helps a lot here. Attack move until the first marines shoot, then move forward a bit, attack move for a split second, so all marines in range shoot again once, then move a bit again, and so forth, until most of your troops have cleared the ramp. Kinda like goon micro in SC1.
Then just overwhelm the zerg base. Don't forget to spam units until to get your bunkers filled up again. 3 Bunkers + 3 scvs on each side are easily enough to slow the final zerg assault until Horner arrives so you can concentrate on your attack.

Just a warning: The eastern base cheats. Seems to spam unlimited units. Don't try to take it.
The Tauren Marine is just a friendly Easter Egg.

I went after the western group of 3 hatcheries first, with a troop of about 50 marines and medics, probably about 5 or 6 medics but a greater number would probably be better. Always leave your base *immediately* after the zerg have attacked and you killed them all, luckily I had a game save just as a horde was approaching my base so that made it easy to start over if I needed to. Once you've pushed up onto the high ground, just hang back and pick off the spine crawlers and any other units that come forward while slowly advancing. Make sure you attack-move into their base, rather than attacking individual buildings, because the broodlings come out from dead buildings and can do quite a bit of damage if your marines don't automatically target them for you.

Basically keep building marines as soon as you have the minerals - if you manage that, you shouldn't have a problem defending or taking out the bases. Build 2 missile turrets on either side of your base to deal with the mutas.

I left to take out the base at about 9-8 minutes left, and was finished with about 4 minutes left. I re-grouped with reinforcements and sent about 40 M&M to assault the top bases, which are much less defended than the western ones. As you only need to take out the hatcheries, I basically took out their defenses and then attack-moved to their mineral line, and finished it off with a minute or two to spare.

Also note that you can be cheap and save your game, then go all-out getting an achievement even if it means you won't be able to finish the level. Once you get it, re-load to your earlier save and continue playing the level as normal, and you'll still get your achievement. Obviously this doesn't work for the achievements where you must finish the mission in order to receive them, such as 'complete within x time' or other achievements that are intrinsically linked with completion of the mission (eg 'don't let tosh get down to below 100 hp'). You can use this same reload cheese to get the armoury and mercenary achievements - save game, buy up all the upgrades for the achievement, then load back.

Next time, Ill just try going all out on offense, as Im just trying to get the achievement, not necessarily win the mission. I think my major mistake was using too few units. I had nowhere near an army of 50 when I attacked (I think I had closer to 20). I noticed I often had extra minerals left over, which probably isnt good on hard mode (and worse on brutal, which is gonna be too much at the moment). Im so used to the "auto-queue" feature in supreme commander that queues up more units when some of them finish lol.

Thanks for the tips, guys. Ill try them out on saturday and (hopefully) succeed lol. I was never good at melee-type games in SC1 (reason why I chose normal instead of hard for "starcraft veterans"), but hopefully I can change that for SC2 lol.

EDIT: Another thing, for the armory achievements...I have plenty of old saves, but none of them with stockpiled credits to get the achievements. Load one and play a few levels on casual without buying anything?

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Aug 13 2010, 5:57 am by modmaster50.

Yep, that'd work.

Note that the 'starships' armory upgrades are damn expensive. I'm playing again through on Hard, and my next mission is the first Char one. I'd saved up 700k in credits, but that still wasn't enough to buy out all of the starship ones (I hadn't purchased any prior to that, as I just didn't need them in the missions).

Finished the campaign on brutal for the first half and hard for the other half.

The only mission I had fun with that wasn't a chore was the final Protoss mission and the secret mission. It's just my taste but I would have preferred if their were more melee missions that were legit melee missions. Thats me 'just sayin'.

I'm pretty sure it's been sad 4 times now but yea. Characters were pretty stale. The only ones that stood out in my opinion was Tosh, Horner (the best), Warfield, and Swann. It would have been better if Matt was Raynor, A more sisnister Raynor was Tychus, and if a more intelligent Tychus was Mengsk. It would have been even better if hero units were thrown into battle at little bit more often instead of once or twice besides Zeratul. I guess I say that because if they were on the field they probably would have had a lot more dialogue, which is something I would prefer instead of non prerendered cinematics. The regular cinematics were so boring too. We never get to see anything besides red/blue marines with their visor down when seeing back ground units that aren't Hero characters.

Yea the Warfield cinematics were trash just for the sole fact of blizzard turning it into a 1v1 against Warfield vs A zerg (or two). When I went in to rescue Warfield I went in their with a thor, 2 seieg tanks, hand full of marines marauders, Jacks Revenge and medivacs. I wasn't expecting my actual units to show up but I think a small company of RANDOM units to have shown up would have been nice. It would have been nice to see marauders and reapers in those cinematics. Even starcraft1 had firebats, marines that didn't use gauss rifles but other weapons like a rocket launcher, and marines with their visors up.

The biggest problem I had with Starcraft2 was the voices for everything. The only in game voices that are memorable are Artanis (they left him his voice alone it seems. Which is awesome), Thor, Siege tank, SCV, medic, and marauder. Everyone else including the entire protoss race sounds as if their voices went through so much post processing it's riddled with a mechanical and distance feeling. The Protoss advisor even sounds like he is on the other end of a football field with a megaphone. Starcraft1 had better voices.

In the end I was pretty dissapointed. I missed they days when their I had paragraph after paragraph to read in the mission briefings that fleshed out the story in general and the current situation. Everything made more sense that way. The cinematics and such were really the best way to go about it instead of reading a wall of text but blizzard failed at it and tried to make it into an action movie with just action and no bad plot hoping the dual silenced pistols and black tight leather clothes would make up for it.

I'd be satisfied if some blizzard PR guy comes out and recognizes that Wings of Liberty wasn't as good as it should have been. If I knew blizzard understood that they missed up a bit here and there then I couldn't care less about it anymore. As long as they realize their mistakes I'm cool with it :3

Also um... So about all those Protoss heros you meet up in that final toss mission. Were they in the novels or something? Or was the pheonix hero and voidray hero completely new?

6.5/10 @ SC2WoL

Also for the terrazine mission, like a couple of other mission. You can beat it by spamming the unit they are introducing for that level. I spammed all goliaths with 2 factories for an easy win. I had even harvested the last canister but didn't bring it to my cc just so i could spend a good 5 minutes collecting all the research points in that mission.

Also. Let's discuss some of the Research options we've taken? And how they are better then other choices ;P

Regenerative bio steel!
Pretty much the only must have. All other choices are pretty much up to you and your play style. Most of the time I chose the option I didn't choose in the first run.
Oh and slowing down zerg is neat too. MCing is useless because you can't MC Kerrigan (the only time you'd actually need it). Besides I always prefer upgrades that I don't have to micro myself, especially on brutal which forces you to fastest.
I did neither use predators nor dropships - ever.
I preferred science vessels over ravens though because of free repairs and in the campaign I often just have not enough resources.

I picked pretty much the same research options the second time through, 'cause they just seem 'obvious' as to which is best at each stage.

Shrike Turret vs Fortified Bunkers (bunker turret or bunker +150hp)
Planetary Fortress vs Perdition Turret (command center turret or flame turret)
Predator vs Hercules (panther robot vs massive dropship)
Cellular Reactor vs Regenerative Bio-Steel (+100 energy vs regen HP on mech)
Psi Disrupter vs Hive Mind Emulator (slow zerg vs MC zerg)

Ultra-Capacitors vs Vanadium Plating (5% reload vs 5% HP)
Orbital Depots vs Micro-Filtering (drop-pod depots vs +25% faster vespene)
Automated Refinery vs Command Center Reactor (no SCV for vespene vs train 2 at once)
Raven vs Science Vessal
Tech Reactor vs Orbital Strike (train two of each units at all buildings vs barracks have 'warp in' like protoss Warp Gate)

I picked Fortified Bunkers, Perdition Turret, Hercules, Cellular Reactor, Psi Disruptor. Then Ultra-Capacitors, Orbital Depots, CC Reactor, Science Vessal and Tech Reactor.

Fortified bunkers seems a lot better than the turret, especially with the no-brainer 6 slot bunker where you already have enough firepower, especially when you throw tanks in behind.
Perdition turret simply because the comsat upgrade on the CC is much better than the planetary fortress, and if you're actually letting enemy units get to your CC in the campaign then you're doing something wrong.
Hercules dropship because the panther is effectively exactly the same as a firebat, so what's the point? The hercules is very useful on the Tyrador mission, where Kerrigan is destroying the buildings, otherwise you have to use medivacs which is painful.
Cellular reactor gives sci vessals and battlecruisers a lot more energy so they can use specials more often. Regenerative bio-steel is very compelling though, but sci vessal repair can do the same, and it is pretty cheap to repair units anyway.
Psi Disrupter because MC has a very short radius (according to my flatmate) and really the only thing worth using it on is ultralisks, which you can kill quickly with big bunkers and tanks with damage upgrade.

Ultra-Capacitors, but really the choice here is very minimal either way. I figure a good offence is better than a good defence.
Orbital depots because I really HATE building supply depots, and this makes it even faster than protoss! Supply was generally always a bigger bottleneck for me than vespene, and with this you could easily take 1 SCV and build 8 depots and then just forget about it.
CC reactor seems like an obvious choice, because vespene nearly always only takes 3 SCVs anyway, so you aren't saving much. But being able to pump out SCVs very quickly gets your minerals and gas online much faster.
Science Vessal, because Raven seems fairly pointless in SP. Mainly used in the mission where you get BC and have to destroy the ripwave generators thingies on the Xel'Naga ship - just use BCs to take out the generators and have 3 sci vessels escorting them for easy repair. Obviously useful in other areas too - didn't bother with irradiate at all.
Tech reactor! 2 battlecruisers and 2 thors/tanks at once! Having 2 barracks units built at once and walking a short distance is better than calling-down barracks units, I think (assuming build time is the same - it may be shorter, but still think tech reactor on factory and starport is far superior).

For research I picked:

Protoss:
Ultra-capacitators - I prefer an extra kick to the attack speed than having a bit more hp, but thats just me
Orbital depots - Because I am a lazy person . This way I can build and forget, or just make them when I run out of supply.
Auto-refineries - Again, because I am a lazy person . This also lets me place my SCVs on minerals from the start. I never had to queue up so many SCVs as to warrant double building.
Raven - They gave def matrix to the BC, so I dont need sci vessels to cast it on them. I didnt end up needing detectors at all during the campaign, which is odd. Im beginning to think the sci vessel could have been a better choice.
Tech reactor - saves time and resources since I dont need to make multiple factory buildings. Also, podding down 1 unit at a time doesnt seem too effective in battle.

Zerg:
Fortified bunkers - The demo video showed how lame the auto-turret firepower is lol
Perdition turret - They can prevent enemies from getting to my CC in the first place lol; prevention is better
Predator - It looked cool, and neither really fits my noobish terran strategy, which is mass BCs until the enemy is dead
Regenerative bio-steel - Since I tend to prefer using mechanical units, this helps keep them in good condition during prolonged assaults (also since I didnt get the sci vessel for the repair ability, this will help my BC fleet). And...again, also because Im a lazy person
Psi-disruptor - Helps hold chokes against massed zerg assaults, especially paired with the perdition turret. Also actually does something without you having to micromanage it.

On my first playthrough on hard:
Zerg

• Shrike Turret (Just for additional firepower, always had SCVs by bunkers for repair + fire extinguish upgrade to fill the role on defense without the +150 hit points. They're good as anti-air if Missile Turrets are absent and the marines are not enough.)
  
• Perdition Turret (Found this useless until the last level)
  
• Predator (I thought it looked pretty cool, but redundantly useless. Siege Tanks and Hellions are far more effective)
  
• Regenerative Bio-Steel (Self explanatory, mechanical units self heal if SCVs cannot keep up [Such as Diamondbacks on The Great Train Robbery])
  
• Psi Disruptor (Didn't necessarily use this until the last level. Pretty effective)

Protoss

• Ultra-Capacitors (Offense is the best defense...)
  
• Orbital Depots (Just to loosen up macro and build up forces much faster)
  
• Automated Refinery (Loosens up macro, frees 3 to 9 SCVs)
  
• Raven (Just a pick, but hardly used it)
  
• Tech Reactor (Double everything is nice)

On my second playthrough on brutal:
Zerg

• Shrike Turret
  
• Planetary Fortress (Far more effective than Perdition Turret, effectively replaces bunkers with Siege Tanks behind them in certain levels. Want to repair your defense? Pump out SCVs)
  
• Hercules (Amazed how much Hercules can carry)
  
• Regenerative Bio-Steel
  
• Hive Mind Emulator (Amazing building, it increases micro management. Build a lot of them everywhere and mind control Mutalisks, Brood Lords, Ultralisks and Hydralisks. It only takes 50 energy per Zerg unit, and has a total of 200 energy per building. That's 4 mind controls per Hive Mind Emulator. Simply overpowered tool, especially at the last level. Increase your already powerful Terran force with a large Zerg force backing you up. Lacks cooldown, so it's very effective and will make life increasingly easy.)

Protoss

• Ultra-Capacitors
  
• Orbital Depots
  
• Automated Refinery
  
• Science Vessel (Just for healing. Built plenty of them)
  
• Tech Reactor

Plot wise, that would be retarded... Why? Not only it would make the mission significantly easy with her overpowered abilities and two to one hit kills, but the entire swarm is under her control. If you "mind control" her, then you own the whole Zerg swarm. And then the ending cinematic is completely unnecessary. That's like an auto-win button. If that happened, Heart of the Swarm expansion would not make any sense...

I used it and it's very overpowered. Rape Kerrigan with 12 to 24 (or more) Brood Lords.

Edit:

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 14 2010, 10:21 am by KrayZee.