In this mission you are introduced to the Brood Queen.
Brood Queens have a heal which is autocast on low health targets and the ability to expand creep through creep tumors. Once a creep tumor is down you can click on the creep tumor to spawn a creep tumor from a creep tumor (further expanding your creep).
The autocast heal and the creep expansion are key to the strategy I deploy on this mission.
Note that Kerrigan’s hard hitting ability (Q) out ranges bunkers. One shot from this ability will make a bunker burn and once it starts burning it will inevitably be destroyed.
Open the map by destroying the bunker to the northeast, east, and the two bunkers directly north. Each only needs one shot and they will burn and grant you four easy kills towards your 15 required building kills for the achievement First Strike. While you are at the eastern base you can snag two 100 crystal caches.
At home make sure you are non-stop building drones and throw down a second hatchery for double production. You will want to cap off one vespene geyser full of drones and all of your minerals full. When you get 200 minerals (after building your extra hatch) lay down your spawning pool and begin churning out brood queens.
The first wave will arrive and it’s a big one, more marines than you can currently handle. To deal with this lift them up when they are in range of your spine crawler. The spine crawler, your four zerglings and Kerrigan should be enough to deal with this.
After this you will be relying on Kerrigan, brood queens, and spine crawlers for defense using roughly the same tactic.
You will want to be nonstop pumping out brood queens from the hatcheries at all times. It is worthwhile to get the +1 ranged attack upgrade from the evolution chamber if you have the gas to spare.
With your queens place creep tumors and slowly start spreading your creep to the north and to the east. This will grant you greatly increased mobility, a key to defending and attacking from two fronts.
Once you are at about 8-10 queens you should attack the eastern base. It has a lot of marines and a tank guarding it. Make sure Kerrigan nukes down the tank fast.
The goal for this mission will be not to lose queens. When queens are low on health you can quickly click them and hit B for burrow or move them to the back. By doing this you will keep these very important aggressive caster units alive.
As soon as you free the zerglings/queens from this eastern base immediately run back to your base to defend whatever is coming your way.
Next with your new giant army you are going to march forward and get the lings/queens from the north. Note there are two crystal caches here for you. This one is much easier. Just lift up the enemies and they will die, focus down flamebats first to save some zerglings.
Rush home again. You should try and clear out terran units to the northeast that are blocking your creep. Kill them and expand your creep even further towards the northern base.
For some extra building kills you can have Kerrigan snipe out the bunkers at the eastern base, but it’s not necessary.
The primary at this point is to use her Q ability on the bunker at the northern base on the eastern flank (still following me?). Letting it burn will give you a huge advantage.
Back at home make a lot of spine crawlers 5-6 are good, an extra 3-4 at the north is great as well.
Once your creep is in range of the enemy unis march your spine crawlers forward and plant them on top of the enemy (this is called a spine crawler rush). As soon as your spine crawlers start planting hit A+move with your whole army forward and start owning the enemy. Make sure to lift up those thors they can be quite nasty. Q move thors if you have it up.
Continue to expand your creep as you push and make sure to move your spine crawlers up if they are idle.
The computer will push your northern flank and you will have to send a few queens to defend it.
Don’t lose too many queens on this push. You will need to destroy the entire eastern side of this northern base to get your building kill count, note that building extensions count as individual buildings. Once the spine crawlers are in range of them it will be very hard for the enemy to field infantry to deal with this.
It will be tight, make sure to focus fire down buildings with your army. You can sack your main base freely as long as you build a hatchery in a sneaky location.
If you get down all of these buildings (that is your queen count is high enough) you will have the achievement. You will also have Zerg Save the Queen for rescuing all those queens.
After this take the remainder of your army plus the reinforcements sent to you and march forward.
To make the push less awkward have Kerrigan snipe out the bunkers with her Q ability. Now you can simply march in and kill the cannon. the brood mother will show up to lend a hand… but your forces are more than enough for this.
Congratulations on getting hard achievements on Brutal!
Well the patch notes have been out for quite a while and the big clamor is on the fungal growth nerf. It’s a lot like the reaper nerf where 90% of terrans didn’t use reapers but the 10% that did were extremely loud about it.
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It looks like roach rushing is mostly over as a trend. The new way to go is like this guy:
Nothing a Good Bunker Won’t Solve
Posted in Blog Entry, Commentary with tags blizzard, sc2, starcraft 2, terran, zerg on November 22, 2010 by troublmakerA month ago zerg was dominating the ladder. They were roughly 60% win rate against terran and 55% win rate against protoss. After a month the meta game has set in ad TvZ is back to 50% and PvZ is back to 65% (in favor of protoss).
So what changed?
Well… Terrans re-realized the bunker… and zerg cheese stopped working.
After the patch came live two things happened:
Basically if Terrans could find a way to deny that fast expand or defend themselves against twice as many units they can get back in the game. The answer was quite simple: the bunker.
As said previously a bunker will protect you against any one-base play. You throw down a bunker, get double gas, keep pumping out of two rax (without addons) and try and get a siege tank out. Repair the bunker to kill off as many roaches as possible and push out with marines and two siege tanks. This allows you to get an expansion up and stay ahead. I say stay ahead because a zerg will be roughly 11 workers behind if he 7RR. With every single roach he makes after the initial push he falls another worker behind. It takes 5 rounds of spawn larvae for him to even catch up at that point. With your expansion going down he literally has no way of catching up without triple expanding (which is too risky).
Stop the fast expand is too risky… but it follows the exact same 2-rax FE build. The tactic has been around for quite some time but it was popularized by Slayer’s Boxer at Blizzcon against Fruit Seller. Ironically this tactic failed to win him the match, however the fundamentals were sound. The basic premise of this tactic is to wall off his ramp with bunkers so that he cannot reinforce his hatchery. From here you stream marines into the bunkers until the hatch is dead. If he’s foolish and is making drones you just kill the drones with your marines. Once the hatch goes down you simply return to your base and salvage the bunkers.
If you’re looking for a build order for this it’d go something like this:
10 supply
13 rax
15 supply
17 rax
17 bunker/bunker
If you haven’t gotten it so far you will be stopping SCV production temporarily in this play… also no orbital command. The orbital command gets delayed quite a bit. If you can salvage the bunkers after the hatch is dead you can afford an expansion. If you can’t salvage the bunkers you have to wait a little longer for that expansion.
You can still get out siege tanks and lay down more rax (getting stim is pretty good as well) and just keep following up with constant pressure. Suddenly the zerg player is far less of a threat.
The goal of the bunker in both of these scenarios isn’t to out-right win the match, it’s to put yourself at an advantage. You’re still forced to deal with the normal stuff.
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