SC2 HOTS Brutal Campaign: Mission 3 Rendezvous – With All Achievements and Secondary Objectives

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!

Strong Terran Opener vs Zerg

Well I’m finally back on track and ready to talk shop… about TvZ.  TvZ is often regarded as the single most imbalanced matchup in the game.  Who it is imbalanced for depends on who you talk about.  Zergs for example complain that the terran turtle is too hard to break and requires too malicious of planning.  Terrans on the other hand feel that infestors and brood lords are too good of units that give too high of rewards for little effort.

But, what I’ve come up with is a tactic vs Zerg that has not lost yet.

I will say before I go on that this tactic will require a decent amount of micro.  I usually do this well with 100-120 APM but it can be pulled off all the same with 50-60 APM.

The Unit Composition

Siege Tank
Marine
Hellion/Banshee

How do We Get There?

The details for timing are below in the opening build order.

So as far as strategy goes you will be scouting with your 12 supply SCV.  Nothing is happening before this that you really need to see.  If you are getting 6pooled your SCV will die on the way and you can cut SCVs and finish off the wall fast.

When you get to the zerg base with your SCV check for a spawning pool.  If no spawning pool is going up then check the natural for an expansion.  If there’s no expansion, check for the spawning pool again.

As a form of tactics if your barracks is down and there is still no expansion, throw up a bunker where his second hatchery would go down.  This will change up your build order slightly and will cause you to lose out on a hellion or maybe a slightly lagging supply depot.

You can now use the bunker as a scout.  What attacks the bunker will tell you what sort of cheese this zerg is going for.  If your bunker is only getting hit by a couple of zerglings you know that he is going for roaches.  If your bunker gets hit by a lot of zerglings he is going to try and banelings bust you.  If he is attacking it with zerglings and drones he is actually trying to expand.

Every now and then you will run into zergs who don’t follow this pattern but you will be able to tell what they’re doing based on their unit composition.

If you feel any of these cheeses coming on throw up two bunkers. and have a couple of SCVs ready to repair the bunkers.  You should also throw up a couple of extra supply depots since you will lose some and will want to continue producing.  You will want some hellions out, especially if he’s going roach.  But you will want your reactor on your rax pumping out marines to go in those bunkers.  You want those few hellions if you smell roach because you want to goad him into attacking into your bunkered position.

Continuing on as if there was no cheese and the zerg expands, you will want 4-6 hellions for harassment.

I like using 6 some people like 4.  Basically the more hellions you have the less marines you will have in your opening push.

So once you have all of the hellions you want (4-6) you will go to the enemy base with them.

Most zergs are prepared for hellions and will make 3-6 spine crawlers.  What you want to do with your hellions if you cannot get into the natural is pick at queens and try to bait him into building lings.  You can pick at lings as well.  Just make this zerg spend money!

You will have had a tech lab building on your rax while the reactored hellions were coming out and with your starport you will be building banshees.  Banshees are always great in TvZ because a few banshees make you cheese proof and put the honus on the Zerg to turtle it up.

Sometimes you can win the game right here.  Sometimes zergs will only have two queens up and you will have three cloaked banshees, he won’t have a chance.  You want to assasinate his queens at all else.  Queens double up production on each hatch.  If you get some drones, that’s great.  If you force him to mass spore crawler… that’s amazing.

You can use your banshees to pick at almost anything.  If you pick at some spine crawlers as well that’s great.  If he is spending all of his money and drones on static defenses it reduces the chance of him getting down a spire.  If he gets a spire he won’t be able to produce a large number of mutas.

So while you were attacking with your banshees you were adding a tech lab on your factory getting siege tech and getting siege tanks with marines from the reactor.

When you get two siege tanks you push out and rally your new units forward.  You will do a small siege tank spread with marines in the middle.  Your banshees are now spotters for your siege tanks.  You can also use your banshees to try and bait his units into attacking into your sieged position.  If the Zerg is playing passively you can add bunkers in the forward position but you do want to slowly move up and push into his natural.

Don’t expect a GG out of this.  You can expand at this point if you choose to and this build is absolutely not an all in.  But everyone will feel you are cheesing and accuse you of all inning.

Opening Build Order

10-supply
11-gas
13-rax
17-factory
17-orbital
17-reactor (on rax)
17-gas
17-supply
21-supply
25-starpot
26-tech lab (on rax)

Final Tip

As a good habit you should be trying to get the non-retarded gas:

You should see here that one gas is slightly further than the other one meaning if you get the closer richer gas first you will always get more gas.

Retarded gas refers to the one that is ever so slightly further away.  If you get into a habit of choosing the non-retarded gas first you will gross 10 gas by the time you throw up your second gas.

Best of luck!

Patch 1.2: Zerg Macro is a Bug!

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.

There was a perfectly good reason for nerfing the infestor… they were too good.  Much like pre-nerf siege tanks.  They were used in every single match up with great success.  Basically at no point would you see a person make an infestor and anyone think of him as a noob.  There is no unit composition currently you can make that infestor isn’t strong against.

I think most of the outrage comes with that nerf tied in with the phoenix buff that’ll reduce build time.  At GSL phoenix/void ray play has become insanely popular.  One of the moments that just angered protoss was when they saw mass phoenix lose to mass mutalisk/infestor.  He fungaled all of the phoenixes in place which were doing a number on his mutalisks.  One fungal won him the whole match.

So now a lot of zergs are wrongly thinking that they’re in this situation all the time and that the only way to beat phoenix harassment was with infestors.  There are some better bread and butter answers to it.  What was ever wrong with hydralisks and mass queens?  Why did corrupters fall off the face of the earth?  Both of these units get used in end game PvZ anyway so why is it so problematic to make them?

The only place where it may make a big change is in ZvZ.  A lot of people open ling/bling or roach and then secure their expansion and push into muta/ling or hydra/infestor.  Hydra infestor is so good because hydras out range fungaled mutalisks.

ZvZ may just end up being who has more mutalisks to corrupters now :(.

Otherwise a pretty lackluster patch with very few things that will change game play.

Nothing a Good Bunker Won’t Solve

A 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:

1. Zerg roach rushed with no resistance but a hand full of marines.
2. Zerg fast expanded with no resistance.

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.

New Baneling Bust?

It looks like roach rushing is mostly over as a trend.  The new way to go is like this guy:

http://www.gomtv.net/2010gslopens2/vod/1216

His name is KyrixZenith and he is a legend killer.  He took out oGsEnsnare and StAce in GSL tournament, both of which are two very powerful and established pros.  oGsEnsnare was a top 8 last season.

The focus of Kyrix’ strategy was originally considered all-in because of how hyper aggressive the play was.  It starts off rather normal.  The zerg does a 15-hatch 14 pool. It starts getting odd when a large sum of zerglings start getting produced and double gas gets erected.  A baneling’s nest goes down and that’s when all hell breaks loose.

A typical baneling bust is 5 banelings and 12 zerglings.  Once you defeat the initial baneling bust it takes about 2 minutes for the zerg player to be able to do it again (if he even chooses to do so).  However with a 2-hatch approach the bust can be replicated over  and over and over.

It’s insanely hyper aggressive and it’s indefensible if you don’t have an early tank out or don’t successfully bunker rush the zerg.  I think Kyrix showed zerg what everyone else already knew… zerg out produce everyone else by leaps and bounds.