StarCraft: Herakles

Herakles is a StarCraft: Brood War singleplayer campaign. It takes place in an alternate timeline and offers a new take on all three races.

It's a micro-only campaign (aka you only control a small number of units, no base building etc.). Everything is meant to be more realistic, so the unit balancing is completely-different as well. (there are in-game info flags which show the stats of newly-introduced units in each map)

The missions are short, but sweet (at least the first few are). There are some story-only maps that flesh out the universe as well.

The campaign features a handful of new music. All of the default Terran, Zerg and Protoss music, as well as the title screen music, has been replaced with. Some missions have some one-shot tracks to establish the mood as well.
(For a full list of credits, see the "Credits.pdf" file included in the download package).



Humanity has sent colonists to different sectors of the universe. One sector in particular was a true Wild West with no unified government or law enforcement. Adam Mitchell wanted to change that and formed the Herakles Army.
The various mining barons, thieves and mercenaries feared that they would be losing their jobs if Mitchell is serious about bringing law and order to the sector, so they formed the Hades group.

A war broke out between these two factions, and the Hades group won in the end. The entire sector is now under the control of the Big Five (the five most powerful leaders of Hades).

The campaign takes place four years after the Herakles V.S. Hades war ended. You follow Christopher, a mercenary who is getting involved in the aftermath of the war, as well as makes contact with other alien species.

• November 3rd, 2017: Half of the campaign has been finished (first four chapters out of eight). I plan to finish the other half of the campaign within the next 3-4 months.
  
  
• January 10th, 2018: The campaign is on hiatus until further notice.
  

Place the files "Herakles.exe" and "chainwmode" in your main StarCraft folder, where the "StarCraft.exe" file is located.

Place the "Herakles" folder (located in the "Maps" folder) in Maps/Brood War.

Click on "Herakles.exe".

Once inside the game, open the maps via "Play Custom".

Note:
If you wish to play the game in windowed mode, drag & drop the exe file onto the "chainwmode" file. This will force the game to be opened with W-Mode.






Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jan 10 2018, 7:37 pm by azureguy.

Nice to see more campaigns being worked on. Best of luck finishing it up!

I'll give it a spin sometime soon, and report back here with feedback (and bugs if I find any).

How's progress on this?

I'm currently busy with helping out another team finishing their campaign. Herakles is meant to be something I do during the downtime - and downtime ended in November. I anticipated this, which is why I said "within the next 3-4 months".

Expect something in early 2018 at the earliest.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 4 2017, 8:09 pm by azureguy.

I've only played the first two maps so far. It was a while ago and didn't note down the issues I've encountered but the two things I remember are:

- On the first map, we're taught to explore the map for alternate paths. However, on the second map, doing so pretty much only leads you into dead ends and unnecessary fights with enemy guards in most cases.

- The boss fight appears impossible to win if you don't save ammo for the hero's special ability. Since there's no way to replenish it, you have to restart the whole map and refrain from using the hero's ability.

Usually these dead ends lead to a repair station. Otherwise I tried my best to have the same amount of enemies and combat encounters, but just in different group constellations.

The amount of optional paths are rather low in Chapter 1-4, I'll admit that. I was planning to do bigger maps starting with chapter 5, when all of the heroes are introduced and the player got used to the enemy types.


That's the point. You have to save your heroes' special abilities, so that you can use them when it's truly necessary. In case of mission 2, you're supposed to learn that Christopher's plasma cannon should be saved for tanks.
Other units and heroes can recharge their energy at repair stations and crystals, but Christopher's weapon is the ultimate tool (it one-shots everything), so it's limited for balancing reasons.

But I admit that the tank boss is kinda bad. If this were Starcraft II I could design something more lenient and dynamic, but that's the best I can do with Brood War. I'll try to make any future boss more interesting, and just stick with normal encounters otherwise.

The problem with this situation (the first time you play) is if you don't conserve ammo, you have no idea that you've already lost, and are thus wasting your time with a game where your defeat is guaranteed.
The part where you're given the choice to go down a path guarded by an enemy tank seems misleading to me too. In my opinion, it kind of hints at the player that it's OK to use the plasma cannon at their discretion. Especially since it's suggested that it's the safest path to take, if I remember correctly.

It should be designed in a way that still makes the map worth playing; punish the player for being careless by making it harder, reduce their odds of overcoming the obstacles but don't take away all possibilities of winning, especially if the player can dig themself in that hole so early in the mission.

I'll reduce the health of the tank boss, so he doesn't require five plasma cannon shots to be killed.

Btw, did you try out the other maps? I avoided doing boss fights in chapter 2-4, so maybe this is more to your liking.

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