[spoiler]Well, really now, every single character in the story that doesn’t grovel to Raynor has their own agenda going on. Tychus, Hanson, Tosh, Valerian, Kerrigan, you name it. The mystery isn’t if they have an agenda, it’s what that agenda is, when it’s going to come out, and what the motivation behind it is. The Koprulu sector is pretty much a crapsack universe where noone is to be trusted. Hell, in the first game, the Zerg can’t even trust other parts of the swarm, how suck is that.
Tychus isn’t interesting because of his betrayal. He’s interesting for how he comes to terms with it and ultimately rationalizes it to himself. It’s really not even a betrayal - he’d made his choice before the story even begins and at no point pretended he’d do anything different than what he wound up doing. That his course of action would eventually collide with Raynor’s sappy idealism was inevitable, but not particularly treacherous. After all, he could’ve just shot Raynor in the back and then completed his mission, or simply done it quickly without making a dramatic scene. The way it went down, it kinda seems like he wanted to be stopped.[/spoiler]
Crapsack indeed. Everytime I hear Koprulu I think “corprolite”. If you can’t even trust other parts of your hive mind not to stab you in the back, you’re in a shitty neighborhood. But Raynor keeps taking the bait. He’s a hulking huge beef-pile-like Charlie Brown, constantly getting the football pulled out away from him, and he’s too beefy to be able to reach around to wipe his own tears. The only protection he’s got is that he’s now so pumped up on steroids that he has no balls to get kicked in.
Maybe you are right. Maybe Tychus didn’t want to finish Kerrigan off, but also didn’t want to give Mengsk the satisfaction of killing him. So he played along, swallowed his pride, and gave Raynor the chance to save her. As far as the foreshadowing, he certainly wasn’t subtle about his situation, even to Raynor’s face.
There is actually kind of a technique to this mission. There are two useful observations: in all waves, the AI will shoot right up the ramp for the artifact instead of rampaging through your base, and you do not have to defend all four choke points where your forces are initially disposed.
I’ve spoilered some strategic comments below.
[spoiler]It’s actually less difficult than it looks if you did the prior mission to take out zerg air support. Pull back the position of your troops on the right so that they defend only one choke instead of two. Place planetary fortresses in front of both ramps up to the artifact. Their Ibrik cannons will maul anything that gets too close. All the better if you idle a few SCVs on the ramp to repair the planetary fortresses during battles. Place a crapload of siege tanks in the low ground right under the artifact. Whatever they don’t utterly pound, the Ibrik cannon and your token force at the chokes will take care of.
Save your artifact pulses for when Kerrigan shows up. Then you can focus fire on her with either marines and medics or Thors. Either works, though Kerrigan’s long-lasting psistorm is just frightful on your marines.
This is it, really. With a half dozen barracks and three or four starports, you should be able to churn out the units you need to crush the Nydus worms and keep both chokes fully supplied. Perhaps I’m just not a very good player, but in this scenario, I barely micro at all. I just let my base defenses do the work and keep churning out troops. I just micro the banshees to slaughter the Nydus worms and order specific groups of units to take out Kerrigan. Everything else more or less takes care of itself.[/spoiler]
ANother trick to the final mission: it’s really, really easy if you took out the Zerg auir support… and use Banshees. Banshees destroy anything that comes through.
I would posit it’s because your video card ischoking on the menus. If this hasn’t been patched yet I’d be surprised, though.
Go run rivetuner and see what happens to your video card - the symptoms you’re describing, particularly the transient state of the fuckedupedness, suggests overheating.
I was very unhappy with how the game ran with my ATI 4870x2 and i7 940. I kept hearing that the game didn’t need much to run on high settings yet mine was extremely choppy. It was awful. Then I disabled Catalyst AI, the part of the ATI driver that supposedly optimizes performance for a game automatically.
[spoiler]I also chose to take out the Nydus network. For “All In,” I ended up going pretty much all air for the defense of the artifact itself, with ground units and loaded bunkers covering the two side entrances. The most important thing in this mission is to take advantage of the enormous resources at your disposal - you have huge cashflow and supply from the get-go. The early Zerg attacks are pretty easy to fend off, so use that opportunity to tech up and start prepping your late-game defense.
Build a ton of turrets around your base - I made sure that I had good coverage all the way around, with extra turrets placed at the locations where the AI sends its air squads. I ended up with about ten turrets on the artifact platform alone. Once you have the turret network up, mutalisks become a virtual non-issue. Make sure you also build a squad or two of Vikings to snipe any Brood Lords, as they outrange the turrets significantly.
I used a fleet of battlecruisers, supported by three science vessels, as my mobile defense for the artifact, placing them pretty much directly over it. As a bonus, that placement also puts them nicely in range to Yamato the shit out of either Kerrigan or the Leviathan, whenever they decide to poke their noses into the fray. Kerrigan will usually be able to take out a good chunk of your side entrance defenses before your Battlecruisers can blast her, but that’s why you use the cheaper ground units there: (a) They soak up all the damage she causes, (b) slow her advance, and (c) are easy to replace quickly. You can completely replace a side entrance worth of Goliaths, Marauders, tanks and bunkered Marines in a minute or two, with plenty of time to spare before Kerrigan’s next spawn.
In the last few minutes of the mission, the Zerg go nuts, spawning more attack squads than you can likely deal with and dropping units into your base with those big green drop pods (aka “Nydus worms for the Nydus-less”). At that point, I essentially gave up on defending my base. Instead, I sent most of my SCVs up to the artifact platform and started them patrolling (for auto-repair), retreated my ground forces to the ramps, and focused purely on microing my airforce. As long as you have enough Battlecruisers and/or Banshees, plus some ground units to choke up the ramps, the Zerg ground troops will never make it to the artifact. Use your Viking squads and turrets to deal with the air attacks, and have the SCVs endlessly repair everything. That should buy you enough time to complete the mission.
Edited to add: Obviously, your strategy depends on what research options you chose during the campaign. My plan above relies heavily on the massive production you get from the tech reactor, as well as the science vessel’s repair ability.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]The radiation emitter that pulses a wide-area slow onto Zerg is pretty amazing, as well. With good coverage of those, it gives your tanks, vikings and goliaths a lot of extra time to pound the from a safe distance. The Planetary Fortress suggestion is a good one too, certainly you have all the time and resources in the world to build whatever you like. I’d taken the flame turret instead and it proved to be not very useful, too short ranged and useless against the ultralisks. The research and unit upgrade choices definitely play a large role.
My choice was to go nuclear. I was playing on Hard and determined to get that achievement where you fire off the Artifact only once, so I saved it as late as possible, somewhere into the 90% area. Until then the chokepoints would have the bigger waves softened up by a nice cleansing mushroom cloud or three. The only things that survive a nuke are the ultralisks, leaving Kerrigan as the major threat. The way she just casually dispenses of a half dozen siege tanks in one go is pretty terrifying. I hadn’t tried Battlecruisers, expecting them to fall prey to the same single-target-kill she uses on tanks, but if they’re immune to it, a Yamato barrage sounds like a really excellent solution.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Yeah - I chose the Hive Emulator upgrade and ended up wishing I’d chosen the radiation emitter instead. Not that the Hive Emulator isn’t awesome, but I’m just not good enough at micro to be able to remember to mind control the Ultralisks while simultaneously dealing with all the other crazy shit they throw at you in this mission.
I don’t think Battlecruisers are immune to Kerrigan, although I don’t actually know for certain. Psi-storms from High Templar can certainly hit air units too; I don’t see any reason why Kerrigan’s variant would be limited to ground. The crucial thing for me, and the reason I don’t actually know whether Battlecruisers are vulnerable, is that my ground-based defense of the entrance choke points meant that Kerrigan never actually had a chance to hit my cruisers. She was too busy attacking my Goliaths and siege tanks instead. The AI isn’t quite smart enough to switch to attacking the Battlecruisers immediately upon their arrival, especially if you order them to fire their Yamato cannons before they get in range (so that none of them fire their normal lasers at her, potentially changing her target priorities before you hit her).
IIRC, I didn’t ever allow her to get a single shot off against my air fleet. 10+ simultaneous Yamato blasts to the face will insta-gib even Kerrigan.[/spoiler]
Thanks for the hints. I realized I had skipped a mission or two and the crystal missions. Gonna have to redo all of char now, but the extra research and armory buffs should give me a bit of an edge against her this time.
[spoiler]I just finished my replay on Brutal, trying out the branches I skipped this time. The Hivemind Emulator, while I was initially skeptical, seems pretty darn close to an exploit here if you’ve taken out the Nydus worms. By the end of the mission I had a fleet of brainwashed Brood Lords, and they are outright incredible, since every Zerg unit, Kerrigan included, will all stop to fight the nearest enemy unit, even an endless stream of broodlings. With the flood of broodlings holding the ground, all I had to do was crank out Vikings to stave off the mutalisks, and the occasional medivac to heal up the broodlords. Wound up much easier than it otherwise ought to be.
Broodling swarms aside, it definitely seems easier to take out the air support. It lets you focus your defense on camping siege tanks around the chokepoints, and the Nydus attacks don’t have any counterpart to the Leviathan, which is pretty unpleasant.[/spoiler]
Wow facing the air attack rather than the Nydus attack isn’t even close. I doubt it was the extra buffs, but I just didn’t have to worry about the artifact firing. Just setting up a collapseable perimeter defense defense around the artifact was way to easy I could have held for another 50%.
Thanks to a series of disastrous games for my placement matches, I’m in the bronze league for 1v1. Anyone know how to get to a higher league? I’m pretty confident that I will get to the point where I can trounce this league, but do I have to get/stay at 1? Top 5? What is the mechanism like for promotion/demotion to another league? My google fu fails me!
The leagues aren’t anything special by themselves, they’re just 20% sections of your division. As your rating fluctuates, you’ll wind up classed in a different league sooner or later when you cross the threshold. There’s no specific process involved.