How To: In Utter Darkness Brutal

Most people who have issues with this mission are probably wiping around 2300 kills.  What you need is 2500 kills.  I’ll explain the whole thing in case you’re doing something fundamentally wrong in the beginning.

Round 1 – Dark Templars

To start make an extra 10 probes.  Take one of your current probes and build a dark templar archive and a robotics facility.  What you are going to want to do is make two more colossus.  The four colossus you have will be on the edges close to the openings on your base.

The dark templar archive is the key to this whole thing.  You are going to continue to spam dark templars until you turn blue.  Go ahead and build 2-3 more gateways and convert them all into warp gates.  For about 20 minutes you’ll be spamming W, S and click.  The key here is that dark templar are strong against armored units, do well against zerglings/roaches and with enough of them you can lock the enemy out of damage range.

At the onset of the match you will gain access to Arun’s fleet.  Arun’s phoenixes are particularly nasty against air forces and you will be using these to do two things: destroy detectors and knock off offensive air units.  The only thing that stops the mass DT strategy is every now and then a wave will come in with a detector, it has to die immediately.  Your nimble fleet of phoenixes if properly used will last you well into the end of the match BUT you will get void rays to support as well.

Round 2 – Void Rays

The dark templar strategy falls apart roughly around 15 minutes into the match.  This is when the Templar Archive you’ve been protecting submerges into the ground and the enemy starts using tones of air rush with 2-3 detectors per wave.  Your dark templar are not useless just yet.  You can still use Arun’s fleet to knock out detector’s and have your DTs clear out all those heavily armored units.  This will fall apart roughly around 2300 kills simply because the enemy builds way too many detectors.

So moving back.  15 minutes into the game you are going to swap up production from dark templar to void rays.  Void rays are very potent when they are fully spun up and it just so happens that a lot of the zerg units have lots of health (especially the brood lords).  You may even want to lay down a couple of starports to speed up your void ray fleet.  For now you will have carriers, phoenixes and void rays in one mega air fleet.  Your dark templar are still going to be doing there thing and you are still going to be using your old nuke detector strat.  Just now you’ll have carriers and rays to support.  You will most indefinitely value void rays mobility when the zerg start splitting up their attacks on different sides.

You will also appreciate this fleet when dealing with nydus worms that if not single targeted down by your fleet will over-run your base.

Okay so you’re 2300 kills into the match and the MOTHER SHIP has showed up.  You’ve probably by this point lost your three fronts and are now operating on one front.  Make sure to select all of your new mothership units and move them into your base… otherwise you’ll lose a bunch that are just set to run out to the front.  Your dark templars should be in your base at this point too.  Move your fleet out of your base.  Yes you are abandoning your base.

The image above shows the location that you should have your fleet.  As you can see my entire base has been destroyed by this point and I’m 50 kills away from win.  I should probably bring up that your dark templar are very useless at this point and they’ll all just get instantly killed by detector packs.

So move the dark templar to the back of your base and merge all of them into archons.  Archons will be able to kill 6-7 units before they die (better than nothing).

The key to this location is that ground units cannont attack you so they can only use air against you.  As you can see on the right there are packs of hydralisks trying to get at my units but they simply cannot.  When the enemy sends in his brood lords (it’s dumb but he does do it), detectors, mutalisks, and corrupers your void rays will instantly kill them with full powered up beams.  Your carriers will give them the time to charge up by deploying their interceptors (all of which will die and your carriers will become useless unless you’ve banked up some serious crystal, I didn’t).

In normal mode the game just keeps going on.  My buddy tried this strat out and hit 3,000 after going AFK for 70 minutes.  At 2500 on Brutal your ships sort of just blow up and the mission ends.

After Thought

This mission favors people who are very good at macro and micro.  You have to micro manage your units to win individual battles (nuking detectors, running troops that are weak against certain types of units).  At the same time you have to produce new units and get them ready for battle.  If you can simply have good reaction times on the sides that the units are coming from and make good decisions on when to split up forces the first part of this will be easy.  Once you get to air rush part you’ll be laughing.