Tips for beating SC2 Brutal Campagin

I've just beaten the entire campaign on brutal difficulty (including the alternate branches) and figure I'd share tips from some of the harder missions in case anyone is having trouble.

Everything is protected by a spoiler tag, so you can avoid the ones you don't want to see.

The Dig

This mission sucks. The key is using your laser cutter to kill enemies. Target templar->colossi->immortals in that order. You might need to target archons too in the early game. Always target the first wave that comes out first, as waves that come out after it pause for longer before attacking. DO NOT WASTE BEAMS ON REGULAR UNITS. You'll get stuck having your beam shoot a ton of stalkers when it could be speeding up the map or hitting more valuable units. All the regular ground guys die to siege fire anyway.

For the southeast, I walled in the area north of the expansion with planetary fortresses, siege tanks and scvs. The area to the northwest is much harder- bunkers and siege tanks were the best I could come up with. Remember to manually target templar that avoid your beam with your siege tanks.

I tried breaking the protoss with attacks to get the building kill achievement, but it proved far too difficult. Just wall in.

The Great Train Robbery

The key here is the diamondbacks. You get a few to start, and you should immediately seek out the other diamondbacks on the map with them (they're fairly easy to find, as they reside on small plateaus around the sides of the map).

With your main ground army that isn't a diamondback, go NW of your base and clear the expo. You'll need this soon enough.

The first few trains can be handled by diamondbacks alone.

The next few trains you can bunker up at the and hold down with a bio army and diamondbacks at the intersections of the North/Middle tracks and the Middle/South tracks.

Once the hellion death squads show up, salvage your bunkers and retreat into your base. Go after the train whenever a patrol isn't about to run into it. You will most likely need to focus fire the train exclusively, ignoring the guards, in order to kill the train before you run into another patrol. Make sure to pick up the salvage afterwards.

This mission could be more or less hard depending on what units you have available. I did this with only diamondbacks and bio (no tanks or air) but it was pretty tough.

Smash and Grab

In this mission you have two main threats: Colossi and Void Rays. The scouts do poor damage against ground, and their standard gateway/immortal units aren't anything that bio balls can't deal with.

There's no special trick or super useful unit for this mission, at least not when I played. I did it with all standard bio balls (marines, marauders and medics) and goliaths.

When you're starting out at your first base, don't bother with bunkering up and defending. Just get a critical mass of bio units (MMM) and then push out. Stop only the seals that are near your base. Give them the ones that are on the other side of the map.

After you take the middle base, then you should get some bunkers and tanks down.

The key points are targeting, positioning and keeping your goliaths alive.

Targeting

-Always aim your goliaths at Void rays first, as they do much more damage over time.

-Use Marauders and goliaths to take down colossi quickly.

Positioning

Keep marines, medics and goliaths away from colossi. Colossi two shot marines/medics and you have to repair goliath damage. Use marauders to tank their damage instead.

Let your bio units soak up damage from air units while your goliaths use their superior range to take them down. Healing is free- repairing is expensive and micro intensive.

Keeping goliaths alive

Goliaths are super expensive compared to the bio units. Keep them near the back of your army and use them against air and colossi (they use their anti-air attack against colossi). If they get low on health send them to the nearest base where idling scvs can repair them. If you're going to lose a fight, leave the bio units behind to buy the goliaths time to escape.

Don't forget to expand to the middle position as well. That should be your main base of operation with turrets, bunkers and 3-4 scvs that are just idling that will autorepair injured mech units coming back.

In Utter Darkness:

This is the final defense scenario with protoss. For starters, get tons of colossi and keep your phoenixes alive. Colossi are good units in general, and you need the phoenixes to kill the brood lords that harass you occasionally.

In order to survive, WALL OFF YOUR BRIDGES WITH DARK TEMPLAR. They don't get detectors for about 5 minutes, then get them infrequently, then often. When they do get detectors, run in your flyers to snipe the overseer, then rebuild the dark templar immediately. Once you get to really late waves, wall in with a dark templar wall and a zealot wall right in front of them. The zealots will buy you time to kill the overseers before the reach your DTs.

When your lines start falling, withdraw to the inner base where your mothership spawns. Hopefully you have enough carriers to do some serious damage. Fly to the southwest corner of the map (the enemy units will congregate there) where not all the ground units can hit you at once, and the overseers take longer to get to you. Keep killing units, sniping overseers as they come.

If you're having a lot of trouble getting those last kills, spam right click on all the zerglings, who will die much faster than other units.

All in:

The final mission, this one has you holding out for a pretty long period of time against waves of zerg.

[i]The key here is that you MUST kill the nydus worms around the map.[/i] They appear with boxes around them on your minimap and spawn orange colored zerg instead of the standard purple. You CANNOT hold out against them- I tried, really, really hard with siege tanks, bunkers, scvs, planetary fortresses, nukes... not possible. Thankfully, killing them isn't that hard. I did it with Battlecruisers, but banshees are probably better.

When Kerrigan comes out, she has 1500 hp and some sort of weird unlabeled damage resistance. Battlecruisers are the most effective unit against her, but she'll auto kill a few of them in every fight.

I suggest bunker walls with MANY scvs repairing and siege tanks for support.

When you use your final artifact blast, get all your units onto the high ground with the artifact. Before this happens cover the platform with supply depots and wall off the entrances with barracks (you will probably have plenty of excess minerals). This will prevent mass nydus worms from appearing on the plateau in the closing seconds, which will otherwise kill you.

If you have a problem with a mission I didn't list here, post it and what issues you are having and I'll add my suggestions.

Guide to The Lost Viking minigame

So once you start playing the campaign missions, you'll get access to the Cantina and be able to play "The Lost Viking" minigame. It's a scrolling space shooter, reminiscent of similar games made in the 90s.

In case you're wondering why you should play it at all, it's a nice distraction and there are achievements to be won. You get an achievement for scoring 125,000, 250,000, and 500,000 points in it. The game itself is somewhat fun, albeit very repetitive.

I got 500,000 points on my first try and it takes about an hour and a half. It got pretty difficult to fight the boredom near the end, but I knew what I was getting myself into. You can't check achievements in game, so either memorize the score benchmarks or pause the minigame and alt-tab to look up the score levels.

Quick guide:

The best weapon loadout I could find is the double plasma + double drones. Plasma is way better at killing bosses and keeping drones alive allows you to deal with normal enemies.

Your main weapon is either the dinky default gun, the side missiles, or the plasma. Both of those can be upgraded once by picking up the same upgrade again. For example, pick up the "side missiles", then pick it up one more time to have the upgraded version. Future pickups don't do anything.

If you're using the side missiles and pick up the plasma, you will switch to level 1 plasma. Same thing if you have plasma and switch to the side missiles.

Item drops are random, and rotate over time in a set sequence. The order is: side missile, drone, plasma, bomb.

You can hold two drones at any time. More drone pickups do not do anything. If you get hit by most weapons (some boss attacks instantly kill you), it will destroy one of your drones. If you have no drones left when you are hit, you die.

If you die, you drop your main weapon upgrades as pickups.

Bombs clear most of the screen of enemies and projectiles and give you a short duration of invincibility.

Almost always use a bomb instead of risking a hit. Losing drones drastically hurts your ability to deal damage, ESPECIALLY in boss fights.

Boss guide

The carrier (first boss) is very straightforward. The interceptors don't do anything for most of their life, but fire a few projectiles before they retreat. Then the carrier fires a constant rotating beam. Start out in the middle, then pick a side and move that way when it starts firing.

The corruptor (2nd boss) has tendrils that instantly kill you. Using a bomb will destroy tendrils headed towards you and make you invincible. Strafing away from the first tendril almost always is safe. It also will rush you with an instant kill ability.

The last boss has several difficult to dodge projectile attacks, and on harder difficulties fires a bouncing blade. I'd make sure I have bombs going into this boss fight- usually only 2 or 3 is necessary for a pretty easy win. Just blow the bombs before projectiles hit you.

Interesting Protoss cheese on Desert Oasis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGC0tiErMdw&feature=PlayList&p=222391E9E52F4406

It's a game with Machine (Z) playing against Idra (P). Idra won the first two games against Machine playing ZvZ, then changed to Protoss for this game.

Idra sends his probe to Machine's base and builds a pylon right outside his ramp. Idra then walls in Machine with a forge and a gateway using perfect placement, then puts down a couple cannons around the outside of Machine's (one covering the ramp, the other able to hit the end of the mineral line. He rallies his gateway into Machine's base and begins producing zealots.

Machine starts building spine crawlers within range of the cannons (standard anti-towering strategy- WC3 players will remember this) and spamming zerglings.

The cannons finish, but Idra can't hit anything with them as everything is on high ground. However, his zealots that finish building are used as vision, allowing him to attack the drones with the cannon.

I won't go through the rest of this game, but I thought this was a really interesting "cheese" tactic that's possible against Zerg especially (lack of early ranged units).

As for counters to this... Machine could have scouted a little earlier and seen the pylon (it's in a really obvious spot by necessity) and blocked the building placement using drones. Banelings would have been a risky "all-in" strategy but could yield huge gains. They do 80 damage a hit, and the forge has 400/400 health compared to the gateway's 500/500. Ten banelings (assuming none died- you'd probably want some extras) would instantly kill the forge and nearly the gateway as well, allowing zerglings to clean up. That would cost 500/250 to pull off, not including the backup units to finish the job, but would strongly swing things in your favor. It's still very risky though. The best option here would be to block it from happening.

This game was played back in March 20, fairly early in the beta (about a month in). I think the timing for forges and cannons are changed, but it's still a possibility.

ZvP: Baneling bust against Forge Fast Expand

MLG Slush vs. InControl Game 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJJB3gBcW_s

In this game, InControl (as Protoss) leads off with a pretty common one gate into forge fast expand.

Slush puts out a normal timed pool and extractor, but as soon as he sees the forge builds a baneling nest and starts massing banelings.

After watching the game, I think this is a great example of how Zerg can punish opponents who assume that the Z is fast expanding as well. This kind of opening is extremely common when the P player declines to put early pressure on and instead wants to keep the economies even.

If you look at the timing and the layout, there's really nothing InControl could have done to stop that without advance warning of the banelings, which he couldn't get while maintaining control of his front. This obviously works better on positions/maps with smaller rush distances as the banelings will kick in before the enemy has a large enough army. On Blistering sands this could be really tricky if the opponent walls in with gateways, but if you were really dedicated you could send in the banelings in the junction between the two gates in order to blow up both at once (with enough banelings).

More random zerg notes...

Infestors can cast infested terrans while burrowed. Units cannot pass through eggs, and thus they can be used as a wall off or to block movement. They also can draw siege fire to friendly units.

Roaches two shot zerglings when they have a +1 upgrade advantage over them- important in ZvZ if you plan on using roaches.

Would you kindly...

"Would you kindly..." is the code phrase used to make the main character of Bioshock 1 do whatever the speaker wishes.

How sweet it is...

Finally in diamond, after 37 games of being in gold. I placed in gold after I lost one of my placement matches to a 6 pool rush. On scrap station. By a random race player. When I tried to expand first.

That sure taught me to never expand...

I've decided that at lower divisions, "cheese" happens MUCH more often. At least half of my wins have to be against fast pool, baneling all-ins, bunker and photon cannon rushes...

Ugh.