Does This Mutation Make Me Look Fat? Let's Play Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm

[The Glyphstone]

Have you played Wings of Liberty, at least?

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Have you played Wings of Liberty, at least?

Nope, no Starcraft 2 at all.

[The Glyphstone]

Nope, no Starcraft 2 at all.

Well then. At the risk of spoiling the hell out of the WoL ending:

Spoiler: Kerrigan

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Technically isn't infested anymore. A xel naga artifact was used to purify and free her from Zerg corruption, so while she still has the psychic ability to control Zerg, she is genetically 99% human again, hence her appearance.

So thats why her appearance is so drastically changed.

As far as the rest of our (canon) cast:

Izsha steers the Leviathan and is basically a Zerg adjutant, storing information and filtering signal traffic.

Abathur is the Swarm's chief geneticist/evolutionist, invented by the Overmind to hand-tailor Zerg evolutions to maximum effect.

Zagara is a Broodmother. They're oversized Queens that replaced the Cerebrates and fill the same role while being able to defend themselves instead of lying there like giant ugly maggots.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Well then. At the risk of spoiling the hell out of the WoL ending:

Spoiler: Kerrigan

Show

Technically isn't infested anymore. A xel naga artifact was used to purify and free her from Zerg corruption, so while she still has the psychic ability to control Zerg, she is genetically 99% human again, hence her appearance.

So thats why her appearance is so drastically changed.

As far as the rest of our (canon) cast:

Izsha steers the Leviathan and is basically a Zerg adjutant, storing information and filtering signal traffic.

Abathur is the Swarm's chief geneticist/evolutionist, invented by the Overmind to hand-tailor Zerg evolutions to maximum effect.

Zagara is a Broodmother. They're oversized Queens that replaced the Cerebrates and fill the same role while being able to defend themselves instead of lying there like giant ugly maggots.

Thank you!

[The Glyphstone]

Happy to help. And it's good you said something, otherwise a plot point in the next mission arc that's supposed to be a major twist would have left you incredibly confused.

[Traab]

Happy to help. And it's good you said something, otherwise a plot point in the next mission arc that's supposed to be a major twist would have left you incredibly confused.

Oh yeah! This is the part where,

Spoiler

Show

we discover the link between the starcraft and warcraft universes. Kelthuzad has taken on the form of abathur to continue twisting life in all the ways he enjoys most, and we learn that Grand Marshal Garithos has been reborn as mengsk and is determined to wipe out all nonhuman life in the galaxy, hence his actions with the zerg and protoss!

Thats an awesome mission.

[The Glyphstone]

I'm sure some people would consider that an improvement on the actual plot in places.

[Tvtyrant]

Oh yeah! This is the part where,

Spoiler

Show

we discover the link between the starcraft and warcraft universes. Kelthuzad has taken on the form of abathur to continue twisting life in all the ways he enjoys most, and we learn that Grand Marshal Garithos has been reborn as mengsk and is determined to wipe out all nonhuman life in the galaxy, hence his actions with the zerg and protoss!

Thats an awesome mission.

Hey! Heroes of the Storm is a great game with an amazing plot!

[Keltest]

Hey! Heroes of the Storm is a great game with an amazing plot!

Even if they didnt consult Thrall on it.

[The Glyphstone]

...since we're discussing plot anyways right now, not quite to the halfway point of HotS, what other plot craters should I be thinking about paving over? Hopefully I did an adequate job of both explaining Kerrigan's mindset/actions on Kaldir, and have set up an acceptable justification for General Worf-field's impending defeat.

Zerus can probably go unchanged, it does its job in the overall plot. Skygeiir Station functions okay, minor tweaks at best. I have...issues...with Space, but am curious if I'm alone on that before going in heavy handed on rewrites.

[Tvtyrant]

I'm not sure Warfield needs explanation. The Terrans never stood a chance against the Zerg, SCI and Brood War make that abundantly clear.

[noob]

I'm not sure Warfield needs explanation. The Terrans never stood a chance against the Zerg, SCI and Brood War make that abundantly clear.

The Terran stood a chance in SC1 if they coordinated and spammed more of their op "one mission tech" like the psionic disruptor.
If psionic communication is anything close to electromagnetic communication you just need a broad enough scrambler to make sure any psionic communication is impossible and the zerg minus the psionic coordination would be considerably weaker: they would need to reinvent radio without psionics (so a few weeks of Abathur tinkering with Terran radios while zergs gets mass mudered).
Then once zerg are communicating by radio, terran Ais would mess them up fast hacking any zerg with too old protocols and zerg would need to constantly be inventing new codes and updating their zergs then eventually they would need to make their zerg individually sapient to avoid hacking at which point it raises entirely new issues.
In practice psionics are a massive "a wizard did it" generator so blizzard can as well say "no it is not possible to confuse communication done with psionics if you wear a purple shirt" so the terran being able to beat zerg or not is extremely reliant on blizzard deciding whenever they should be able to or not.
All of this is irrelevant because terrans have a major flaw: when they invent something with plot device power they do not reuse it just like the protoss who can dig up as many plot devices as they want when they want.

[Keltest]

The terrans used psi emitters all the time in sc1 and BW, and the first two missions in the BW zerg campaign are dealing with the psi disruptor. If they don't get reused it's because they're hard to make, not because the terrains are stupid or anything.

[noob]

The terrans used psi emitters all the time in sc1 and BW, and the first two missions in the BW zerg campaign are dealing with the psi disruptor. If they don't get reused it's because they're hard to make, not because the terrains are stupid or anything.

Then stettman goes along and makes a cheap zerg control device in SC2.
I think the hard to make detail is just because they did not spend enough research budget in the engineering of the device itself.
That or stettman is unnaturally excessively skilled(in picking the right scientists for his team and in research).
Also some terrans knows how to build a mechazerg swarm so if terrans pools up their science projects they probably have the technology to just decide "Oh marines and SCVS? tomorrow we will use robots instead" (once you know how to make drone and hydralisk replicants making scv and marine replicants seems way more doable) and save massive amounts of causalities once it is deployed.
All along there is dozens of ridiculous techs that are used by only one terran group each due to a mix of the terrans being excessively secretive and of blizzard not wanting to just have the scenario being "Mengsk killed all the regular zerg through hax tech and now is fighting giant space zergs , the protoss and the rebellion instead because let us face it the non giant zergs are minor".
In fact despite the major attempts to make things balanced with each other to promulgate a specific scenario it can end up being "and so kerrigan forgot she actually had a swarm and did everything herself"(Kerrigan is absurdly powerful on her own) due to how ridiculous some things can be relatively to others.

[Traab]

It makes sense warfield lost, they only beat kerrigan in the first place due to the zel naga artifact which isnt on char anymore. Plus its doubtful that he had even remotely as many troops and as much tech to work with given his job was basically to wipe out stragglers and keep the swarm from reforming from the wreckage there. There might even be politics involved considering the way the whole invasion of char was done without mengsk permission in the first place.

[Tvtyrant]

Then stettman goes along and makes a cheap zerg control device in SC2.
I think the hard to make detail is just because they did not spend enough research budget in the engineering of the device itself.
That or stettman is unnaturally excessively skilled(in picking the right scientists for his team and in research).
Also some terrans knows how to build a mechazerg swarm so if terrans pools up their science projects they probably have the technology to just decide "Oh marines and SCVS? tomorrow we will use robots instead" (once you know how to make drone and hydralisk replicants making scv and marine replicants seems way more doable) and save massive amounts of causalities once it is deployed.
All along there is dozens of ridiculous techs that are used by only one terran group each due to a mix of the terrans being excessively secretive and of blizzard not wanting to just have the scenario being "Mengsk killed all the regular zerg through hax tech and now is fighting giant space zergs , the protoss and the rebellion instead because let us face it the non giant zergs are minor".
In fact despite the major attempts to make things balanced with each other to promulgate a specific scenario it can end up being "and so kerrigan forgot she actually had a swarm and did everything herself"(Kerrigan is absurdly powerful on her own) due to how ridiculous some things can be relatively to others.

I mean, Tarsonis is destroyed by a single psy emitter drawing ferals to the heavily armored capital of mankind.

Augustgrad is only even a siege because Kerrigan wants to reduce civilian losses, she could have destroyed the planet from orbit. Even the psy-destroyed could be taken out without Primal Zerg by just flying a Leviathan at it full speed and letting its dead body crush the platform.

[The Glyphstone]

I did actually just finish playing the Remastered Terran campaign, and it mentions Duke placing multiple emitters on the orbital platform. Presumably psi emitters have an exponential effect or something.

EDIT: And as far as the Swarm in general, I thought it was fairly clear that what Kerrigan has at her disposal in HotS is a pale fraction of the Swarm that defeated the Confederacy and the UED. Between the losses caused by the artifact, the female running off in every direction, and the various Broodmothers going renegade, she only has what she's personally corralled or bullied into obeying her.

[russdm]

I always thought that it was more:

The Overmind taking the Zerg to Aiur and the Overmind dying caused parts of the Zerg Swarm to get lost. Then there was the events of Brood Wars, everything in Starcraft up to the end mission.

Then there was the events of Wings of Liberty.

I figured that Char functioned as basically the Zerg primary base area, and that there were small groups elsewhere and as they got taken out, only the bunch on Char really constituted the Swarm.

Plus, At the End of Brood Wars, pretty much nearly all of the Cerebrates were dead and according to Zerg Lore-y, the dead cerebrate makes the Brood go nuts, like what happened with Zasz.

So, of the Cerebrates: Zasz is dead; Daggoth, who lead the second Overmind effort in Brood Wars, is dead; the player character Cerebrate made by the Overmind in Starcraft 1 is dead; the Cerebrate freed/made by Kerrigan was around near the end, might have died; the Cerebrates killed in Zeratul's little mission with the other Dark Templar are dead; the Cerebrates used by the UED and hanging around or at the second Overmind, are dead since they got killed in the same mission of killing the second Overmind.

So, wouldn't that make Kerrigan's Cerebrate, like the only leader for the Zerg besides Kerrigan? Wouldn't the Cerebrate-lost/less Broods have to be wiped out?

So, wouldn't that mean that the Swarm has taken some serious loses since the first Starcraft began?

[noob]

Why did the swarm stop using cerebrates and started using queens?
Queens are vulnerable to death by invisible sniper squad and death by spawn broodlings from old fashioned queens.
The higher mobility should be a defensive advantage that outweighs the vulnerabilities but it is not used defensively in the campaign (it is used by the ai queens to suicide themselves on your army then the zerg have to do the painful rebuild leader process)
They go and explain how they made the queens poor at moving out of creep so that they are less likely to betray and go rogue but I think the real explanation is similar to the following: whoever made queens did think "The mental processes needed for queens to send zerg to death when necessary makes them suicidal, they need to be kept in safe places under zerg control, let us give them a locomotion system that do not work properly out of creep"

[The Glyphstone]

Broodmothers, IIRC, don't suffer from the terrible non creep mobility of regular Swarm Queens. At least, the two I can remember in campaign as units move just fine off of it.

As far as the cerebrates, the official reasoning is apparently that they were unreliable due to their hardwired compulsion to grow a new Overmind if they didn't have one. I guess stealing more than one like Kerrigan did in BW wasnt practical. But Russ did also remind me that a dead Cerebrates brood goes uncontrollably berserk, while a dead Broodmothers brood simply becomes feral and can be reclaimed by another leader. Thats got to be worth something too.

[Traab]

Why did the swarm stop using cerebrates and started using queens?
Queens are vulnerable to death by invisible sniper squad and death by spawn broodlings from old fashioned queens.
The higher mobility should be a defensive advantage that outweighs the vulnerabilities but it is not used defensively in the campaign (it is used by the ai queens to suicide themselves on your army then the zerg have to do the painful rebuild leader process)
They go and explain how they made the queens poor at moving out of creep so that they are less likely to betray and go rogue but I think the real explanation is similar to the following: whoever made queens did think "The mental processes needed for queens to send zerg to death when necessary makes them suicidal, they need to be kept in safe places under zerg control, let us give them a locomotion system that do not work properly out of creep"

I dont think the queens were ever really meant to take over from the cerebrates fully. They were basically lieutenants or captains in the zerg hierarchy, kerrigan tells them what she wants done, they lead their segments of the brood to accomplish that goal. But when kerrigan was severed from the hive mind, they were the only zerg with intelligence that let them continue to command the zerg around them. So despite not really being designed for that level of control, they did so. The benefit of queens over cerebrates is numbers and replaceability. Its not a big deal if a queen goes down, another queen can replace them near instantly. Whereas if a cerebrate does go down, it creates havoc long term for the swarm in the region as they effectively are generals under the overminds commander in chief status so no others are nearby to pickup the slack if they die, and the zerg are mindless animals aside from these very specific units. So with no commander they turn feral like a pack of wild dogs without a master.

[Keltest]

The actual, out of character reason they stopped using cerebrates is because of an agreement between Blizzard and Games Workshop to "play nice" with each other. I dont believe there was an actual legal dispute, but the two companies clearly recognized the potential for one (Warcraft and Starcraft both started as proposed Warhammer games that were rejected and went independent) and hashed out some guidelines where Blizzard gets to continue using most of their stuff without issue, and Games Workshop doesnt become the most hated company in the world for trying to destroy the most popular RTS games in the world.

[The Glyphstone]

The actual, out of character reason they stopped using cerebrates is because of an agreement between Blizzard and Games Workshop to "play nice" with each other. I dont believe there was an actual legal dispute, but the two companies clearly recognized the potential for one (Warcraft and Starcraft both started as proposed Warhammer games that were rejected and went independent) and hashed out some guidelines where Blizzard gets to continue using most of their stuff without issue, and Games Workshop doesnt become the most hated company in the world for trying to destroy the most popular RTS games in the world.

While this does make for logical Doylist reasoning (assuming we are discussing the same Games Workshop that tried to copyright the chevron symbol, and sued a children's book author for writing about a "Space Marine"), I'm not sure why cerebrates specifically would be a casualty of such an agreement? They're one of the few things in the Zerg that I can't map almost 1-to-1 against a Tyranid equivalent; if anything, inventing Broodmothers makes them more Tyranid-like as a Hive Tyrant analogue.

Anyways...Heeeeeeeeeere's JohnnyNora!

Spoiler: Update 8: In Which Ugly Truths Are Rubbed In Faces, And Nobody Fades Away

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February 4th, 2506 (1 hour later):



Kerrigan wasn't wasting any time, rushing in with everything she had in the Bone Trench before General Warfield could set up proper defenses. It sure seemed that way, at least, as his troops were putting up only token resistance and falling back everywhere I looked.



Not that this seemed to bother him at all – I suppose you don't get to become a Hero of the Dominion if you fold easily under pressure, but I couldn't help but feel like the General was up to something.



“Is that all you've got, Kerrigan? I beat your Swarm once when it blacked out the skies, this won't even be a challenge. Hunting down your stragglers after I wipe you out will be the hardest part.”





Kerrigan looked like she meant him to eat his words, leading a massive horde of Zerg out of the trench and through the front gates of his first defense line.



“My Queen – General Warfield is moving his remaining fleet into position over the plateau, but they are too high to provide proper supporting fire.”



“Then let's kill everything here before they can change their mind.”



Even as more Zerg flooded onto the plateau from the plains below, Kerrigan's forces were going absolutely nuts on every Dominion building and vehicle they could find. Half the time, the base structures were completely defenseless to begin with, and they seemed to be made of cardboard and duct tape.



Here and there, the Dominion stopped to fight. They died every time, and I couldn't see why they were engaging in suicide defenses instead of just falling back into their bunkers. Kerrigan's horde was close to unstoppable, just rolling forward in a giant ball of chitin, acid, and mean.



“Warning! The Terran battlecruisers have launched-”





…

Well, that shouldn't have been a surprise, now that I thought of it. Of course battlecruisers can fire nukes, and with a whole fleet of them in orbit I'll bet the General had a lot to spare. Maybe this was the end; even Kerrigan couldn't stand up to a nuke, and he could drop them anywhere she massed up an army. But I'd forgotten about her own ace up the sleeve.



“Abathur, are the changelings in position?”



“All changelings mingled among Dominion forces. Terran fleet units thoroughly infiltrated. Can interfere with bombardment.”



“No, that'll tip our hand too early. Spying only for now – give me advance warning of his targeting coordinates. Zagara - this is vision. The swarm is many, but its lives are not meaningless. Sometimes, not attacking saves more lives in the long run.”



Zagara had brought some new monsters to the party as well; I'd seen bigger versions of these way back when the infested zombies attacked the Raiders, but even slimmed down they were huge and even uglier than they were big.



The glow hadn't even faded from the ground yet and Kerrigan was already moving out again. One of Warfield's decoy bases – I could see that's what they were now – had been built over a genuine mineral deposit, and now it was hers.





The battlecruisers fired another missile salvo, but this time Kerrigan knew where and when they'd be hitting. The explosions did nothing but leave irradiated craters, and she'd managed to make it look like a coincidence.



A strike team against Kerrigan's hive cluster while she was away seemed almost terribly predictable at this point. Kerrigan sure seemed to think so, as a huge clump of spine and spore crawlers were waiting to intercept the attack even before it got there.



The base they launched from didn't survive long enough to equip a second raiding force. Those aberrations Zagara had made were terrifyingly good at wading into bullets and chopping up tanks, almost like miniature ultralisks.



Medics and troops were piling into transports, and this time it didn't look fake at all. They had the presence of mind not to shoot at anything though, and for some small mercy Kerrigan wasn't hunting them down...yet.



A science facility had been left unguarded in the chaos, and Kerrigan demolished the place. A bunch of Zerg were set free from the labs where Warfield had been experimenting on them.



Meanwhile, that secondary hive she'd set up had gone into full gear under a lesser queen's guidance, building up an army almost as big as Kerrigan's.



Another science lab was tucked away on an island, where Warfield had probably hoped it might get overlooked. Kerrigan hadn't noticed it, but the swarm queen and her attack brood only saw it as another target to destroy.



The fleet kept trying to nuke Kerrigan, and she kept dodging. But the margins got closer each time; the General had figured out she was avoiding his shots somehow, and compensating.



“Now, Abathur. Set them all loose. Sabotage, murder, distractions, I don't care.”

The fleet fell apart. Battlecruisers started moving in weird directions. Two collided with each other, one's engines fired and rammed itself into the surface at full speed. From the point of view of an overlord, the troops inside Warfield's compound were in just as much disarray as random Marines began attacking their allies and smashing anything in reach.



The mayhem made it easy for Kerrigan to break through the defenses, hitting Warfield's troops in the back while they were trying to regain order. It was a massacre, but I kept myself watching. Someone had to see these people die who still cared, someone who saw them as more than meat for harvesting.





Warfield's command fortress was at the heart of the base, and the last thing to fall. It almost seemed like Kerrigan left him for last on purpose, and for all I knew she had.



I spotted that creepy broken-horned zergling who was always following her around skulking into the ruins after, and swapped my zerg-o-vision into it out of curiosity. Kerrigan had gone looking for Warfield, and found him – half-pinned under rubble, with a beam impaled through his armor. I'm no medic, but he wasn't walking away from that. Without the stims he would have been dead already.

Outside, the shuttles were trapped – surrounded by Zerg on the ground, with the leviathan looming above in the skies. Warfield begged Kerrigan to let them go. Swore at her. Told her she wasn't even human anymore, how they'd gone through hell to save her and she threw it all away. I wasn't sure if he was trying to reason with her, or convince her to kill him quickly, but she just stared until he said the magic words.



“What if Raynor could see you now?”



Kerrigan lost it. Armored or not, no human being survives one of her psychic crunchy blasts, and the zergling I'd chosen as a set of eyeballs was about two feet away. Definitely one for the highlight reel, and by highlight reel I mean I'll be seeing that in my nightmares for years. What was left of General Warfield crumpled inward around the crushed beam as she stared. She blinked a few times...were there tears running down her face? Her eyes closed, and the the panicked voices on the general's radio turned joyous.

I found the eyes of an overlord outside again. Zerg were falling back from the shuttles en masse, and even the Leviathan was moving out and away from the plateau. Sarah had given the transports a clear path to the stars, and they took it.

Aaaaand Voting!

Next Planet:
1) Zerus
2) Zerus

Baneling Evolution:
1) Splitter Strain: Spawns two mini-banelings on death, that then also explode for more damage.
2) Hunter Strain: Banelings can now roll up/down cliffs, and jump onto things before exploding like Raptor Zerglings.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Aaaaand Voting!

Next Planet:
1) Zerus
2) Zerus

I’m going to go against the grain here and vote for Zerus.

[Traab]

Splitters feel more thematic to the endless zerg swarm. A never ending wave of attackers. Hunters may be the best choice simply because they can hurdle over obstacles and hit their targets a lot easier, keeping them from being easily trapped in the middle of the horde and unable to attack. Also hopping over choke points to hit the units behind the blockade is nice. I go with splitters though. Extra damage is extra damage, and melting the enemy nigh on instantly once you manage to close the gap just feels right to me. Plus I love it when a unit dies only to split into two new units and keep charging forward. Again, it feels zerg swarmish. I can almost hear the "AAAGH! THERE ARE TOO MANY OF THEM!!!" coming from the terran trash.

[noob]

I vote for 1)Zerus: it seems like the first one to do according to the number.

[Keltest]

Im going to be a lone voice in voting for Zerus, and i think you should go for the Hunter strain. If youre going to be using banelings as kerrigan-generated (or regularly generated) anti-tank-and-building missiles, giving them more moblity and not having them get caught up on your zerglings and roaches is amazingly beneficial.

[The Glyphstone]

As an aside, what do people think of aberrations? As a poor man's UltraIisk they seemed surprisingly effective as tanks, and that 40 damage vs. armored is a whopper. But are they better than the 3 roaches worth of resources needed to grow one?

[Cicciograna]

My vote is for the splitting strain of banelings. The hunter is nice in that allows for the increased mobility, but there are other tactical solutions to overcome terrain obstacles. Also, I'm always a fan of moar Zerg.

[Traab]

As an aside, what do people think of aberrations? As a poor man's UltraIisk they seemed surprisingly effective as tanks, and that 40 damage vs. armored is a whopper. But are they better than the 3 roaches worth of resources needed to grow one?

I say no for a number of reasons. Especially not for story mode. The roach upgrades make them murderously effective in campaign maps, either slowing enemy units so you dont NEED a tank to soak up damage, or quickly creating broodlings or whatever they are to cause even more damage. You can produce them in bulk and faster than abberations, and finally, personal preference here, I dont like to get complicated with my builds. Im a roach/hydra swam kinda guy and it works really well for me. If I need a tank I have kerrigan. I also have multiple ways to eliminate the need for a tank by eliminating whatever is dangerous enough to make having one needed. Im sure there are times and places when using abominations makes sense but im just not a big fan myself. The only other units I tend to go for are brood lords and swarm hosts and thats less because they are awesome (even though they are) and more because I find it entertaining to use them in fights. Because, again, I see zerg as vast swarms of easily disposable units, and both are great for producing LOTS of said disposables.