Can You Beat StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty As A Pacifist?

after finishing up the deathless series i thought it'd be fun to try the reverse this was a terrible idea nobody has successfully completed pacifist starcraft before and it's pretty obvious why rts is not made for pacifism so welcome to the story of the hell i decided to put myself through for no real reason the rules are simple no killing enemy units or buildings unless they're required objectives no intentionally attacking enemies i'm not responsible for the actions of my allies and play on normal because there's no way that this is even vaguely possible on anything more difficult liberation day is the start and it's already rough after running past the first few packs of enemies comes the allied drop pods i don't grab them fast enough and my forces brutally murder an innocent dominion marine and i have the first reset in my next attempt i managed to slip by without a kill next is the truck i send jim into tank pull him back at the halfway mark and charge my marines through after entering the dominion facility a group of unaffiliated civilians show up and start firebombing the dominion taking advantage of this unrelated chaos i slip one marine into the corner and take out the dominion headquarters while a viking kills everybody that's waiting for the potty the headquarters dies and 5 kills we need to talk about score screens before we can truly get into this run they're incredibly inconsistent sometimes killing objectives counts as kills sometimes my allies killing stuff counts in this instance the ai civilians threw firebombs and got five kills and they counted every time something like this happens i will briefly go over what happened because it's a little bit interesting one thing i find really charming about youtube is how you can click on a video and come out the other side with an incredibly in-depth understanding of something that will never impact your life at all today you're going on the world's most comprehensive master class on how scv repairing works i can confidently say that without the ability to repair buildings and mechanical units this run would be strictly impossible enemies will attack and repairing their target is the only way we can contest them i'll save the graphs for later but basically the cost to repair building from 1 hp to full is equal to 25 of the building's cost this means that high hp cheap buildings are ideal to wall with barracks are pretty decent for that reason as soon as the first attack hits my income will slowly diminish as more enemies show up more repairing will be required eventually repairing will cost more than i have income i'll run out of money and die fortunately on the outlaws the enemy only attacks once at the nine minute mark and with only two marines i can take my time i build up 150 supply army head out and bring my barracks to support the objective is a bit tricky here i must eliminate every dominion building without damaging a single unit the enemy marines hurt but the hellions are the worst i can't micromanage my units to avoid fire and not attack at the same time once i reach the bunker of death i get it burning and move on if i killed it now the enemies inside would start chasing me as i target fire every building the terran shred through me i get cleaned up with a single enemy factory remaining it's low all i have to do is get a burning i land my barracks and start producing marines this doesn't go well i run out of money all my barracks die and the factory survives but i have one final hope this mission has a special trigger if the player loses all of their suvs jim flies in a dropship with a bunch more to help out i take the reinforcement boys load them into the command center and float over to the factory they will die but the factory will burn down before the dominion can kill my command center before you ask yes every single mission in this run is going to be this painful there is no happiness here only suvs medics and pain normally zero hour would be the exception in every challenge run i've ever done this mission has been an absolute joke here is where it gets his revenge after destroying my heretical missile turrets and grabbing the money on the map i set up my wall the majority of the mission is fairly unexciting my goal is to get the ramp so clogged with zerg that it gets to a point where enemy reinforcements just can't attack for the most part this works really well unupgraded zerglings don't kill buildings quickly but there is one problem eutelis yuda's rain on my day for a few reasons obviously my wall isn't gonna help much against these flying units on top of that their glaive attack bounces to two additional targets this kills my scvs the answer i came up with is a giant pile of medics this puts me in a very weird mini-game through the rest of the mission as the muta number increases i have to make sure that each one is targeting a different medic otherwise my forces will die this means i have to jiggle my medic ball around occasionally until the mutalists change their target to something that i'm happy with as i do this i find the most annoying roadblock in the run for some reason hydralis specifically will randomly decide to stop attacking my buildings and kill my workers it keeps happening other ranged units don't do it that often but hydras will decide that one suv in particular is going to have a bad day and just murder them there doesn't seem to be any real rhyme or reason as to when this happens most of the time a few suvs isn't life or death on zero hour it absolutely is i get broken and die after reloading a couple times i keep going and the hydras are randomly nicer and then i run out of money and die anyway after losing about 10 times with one minute left i take a step back and reflect on my strategy engineering bays are slightly cheaper to repair than the barracks i was working with it turns out that over the 20 minutes that extra cost added up and ran me dry i decided that i have to fully reset the mission and build two engineering bays in the wall instead of one with a combination of an improved wall good hydraulist luck and better medic blob micro it's still not enough to hold the wall as the zerg bust me i do the only honorable thing a taran can do lift all my buildings and float to the corner of the map with one command center and one barracks alive the timer expires and i can move on i was really excited for smash and grab when i was planning out this run normally when trying to race a zerg to get to the artifact fending off both protoss and zerg forces is a pain but this time having two enemies is great most of the time my starting forces don't get to do much but today they have a job i charge the protoss force that normally attacks at the one minute mark and pull them over to the zerg where a spinecrawler takes two of them down thanks kerrigan smash and grab was a nice reprieve from the insanity of the run this time i get to taste that sweet cheese i lift my barracks float them over to the arena at the end of the mission and prepare my wall back at home once my barracks arrive they land and start producing marauders after getting about 20 marauders and medics at the objective i lift off my command center drop scvs on the bonus objectives and take out the stone zealots without issue and another score screen problem two kills that's a weird one there are three stone zealots so what's going on here after testing for whatever reason the first two stone zealots count as kills while the final one doesn't sure starcraft you do you between missions i get both medic upgrades there are very few upgrades in this run that actually do anything but not needing a tech lab is great for the early game and increased healing is gonna save me many times throughout this run i head to devil's playground next the speed run of this mission only takes a few minutes i figure i can do something similar my strategy is pretty simple i grab my reapers and send them to other rescueable reapers taking small detours on the way to grab money pickups as one reaper makes it to the next group i can keep the chain going the zerg attack pretty early here and i thought it was going to be a problem but they didn't hear the evacuation order for the lava and unfortunately they couldn't make it out in time this led to the tragic loss of many beautiful animals i tried to use a barracks to give the bonus objective brutalist a lava bath but he was having none of it this is the first of many bonus objectives that i have to skip in this run my laboratory research is going to be permanently lagging behind after the lava recedes my reapers jet through the zerg bases and grab all the money that i need the evacuation is a bit of an oddball here missions normally are divided into two categories repair things until i win or run past stuff and snipe the objective escorting a third party across the map presents a few challenges but has a nice upside they have guns unfortunately they kinda suck but if i can keep my allies marines and apc alive they will be able to kill things which is very neat the first escort is a free win i produce medics and the single digit number of enemies that strike are cleaned up by the ai but the next waves won't be that easy my plan is to hold each attack path the zerg can strike repairing all three of them simultaneously this doesn't work i get broken and die one base income and single sav production wasn't enough to sustain these walls i'm gonna have to get a bit more creative in my next attempt i try walling with command centers despite costing almost twice as much per hit point to repair the command center has a couple perks first is the included suv production second is that the command center can fly meaning i can slowly let enemies through when they need instead of building them up forever the downside to getting these command centers running is speed i cannot produce enough medics to finish the first escort wave the apc is destroyed and only 6 of 10 civilians manage to make it off world and then something weird happens the second escort comes and goes but only a couple zerglings attack the second wave generally strikes from three angles with more units and multiple hydrolisks i think the game determines the size of the attack not on which escort is happening but how many colonists have escaped this means that i lost so many colonists that the game thinks i'm on wave one still this is incredible one would think that i now need a sixth escort to get over 50 colonists since they come in batches of 10 but that isn't quite correct the fourth wave sends 12 colonists and the fifth sends 14 meaning from here 5 escorts will give me what i need this was not at all planned i didn't know about this game state of being so bad that you redo the level 1 attack but it's really helpful this process continues the game looks at the third escort sees only 16 colonists have been saved and sends level 2 attack instead of level 3. at this point pressure has been so low for so long that i have a ton of medics and suvs so i do the escort with no trouble after this wave completes there are groups of enemies at each of the walls so i try lifting my command centers and to my surprise with no escort to hunt down the zerg just go home this mission is blessed the final two escorts aren't easy but they're not horrible either i use an enormous blob of suvs following the apc to create a force field around it repairing scvs have a lower targeting priority than attacking units meaning the zerg will try to get to the apc and ignore the suvs though if you do this long enough the zerg will wisen up and start to attack but it buys enough time that my losses are minimal eventually i do lose my walls and can't rebuild them because of the creep spread but because the zerg don't send the correct waves and peace out instead of attacking me with their army after the convoy escapes i can start preparing for the next wave straight away somehow everything just worked and i have no idea why feeling confident i decided to head to the great train robbery this was a poor decision the entire mission's mechanic is that i'm limited on money this makes repairing against the early attack waves take almost all of my income this would have been more manageable if i had an army to work with unfortunately the mission's unlocked unit is the diamondback the diamondback can fire while moving and it hits like a truck the six that i rescue around the map keep killing people despite being on a move command but without their damage i can't kill the trains without the escort taking me down after a few resets i change up my strategy if my minerals are tied up in repairs i'll go for a gas heavy unit and if i can't fight the escort i'll just ignore it i head back to the hyperion and get the kd8 charge upgrade for the reaper this ability targets the ground and explodes after 3 seconds dealing massive damage with this incredible ability i learned that the radius is enough to hit the escorting forces as well nope i'm going to outbreak to get some better units heading here was a good decision i thought outbreak would be a monster of a mission but it ended up being pretty easy the first night was by far the scariest i start with next to no income and could barely afford to repair against the infested damage but the zombies are limited in a big way during the first night they're all melee no matter how many there are only a fraction of them can hit my engineering base once the sun rises the zombies spontaneously combust and i'm clear for a while the buildings on the mission have light armor but annoyingly the anti-light fire bat in hellion can't actually be used here each building also spawns broodlings when killed the area damage of the fire units would accidentally kill them so i go mass reaper the reapers are great against the buildings but have issues with broodlings who shred through their poor hp i suck it up and accept the reaper losses the mission has another impossible bonus objective two investors that provide one zero research each despite being the cause of this infestation i have to let them live once my economy is going it's a pretty simple process of mass producing during the night and queuing attacks against buildings during the day welcome to the jungle is a mission that i never look forward to it's hard but i do have a trick if you've watched the wings of liberty glitch video you know what i'm about to do here after messing up a blob of medics i send my scv to the gas geysers on the left and start collecting cancel each once and boom the enemy defense waves won't try to help the mission is halfway done and it only cost me a few medics welcome to the jungle is a mission whose difficulty scales very high over time getting half of the terrazine early means that's much less of a problem at the 12 minute mark i pull everything that i have including my suvs and command center to the mid-right and harvest the final three terazine my medics will die but the extraction process will end before the protoss can kill my extractors once the terrazine is harvested but not delivered i yolo my remaining forces into the bonus objective and move past a surprisingly reasonable mission after the mission is completed i do something that i've never in my challenge running life done before i head to the laboratory and get one of the worst upgrades in the game vanadium plating this upgrade is so bad that despite being the durability upgrade your army survivability is almost always increased more by its competing ultra capacitors because dead enemies can't do damage well today attack speed is useless and 51 hp scvs are on the menu feeling confident i decide to head to the great train robbery this was a bad idea the escorts continue to kill my reapers i run out of money and my walls are broken by enemy attacks after losing a few times i feel stuck the only other planet i can go to is the dig where there's a zero percent chance i can win with my current tools after thinking i come to a realization about what i need if only i could get it right now each planet in starcraft 2 has prerequisites to unlock in this case if i want to unlock the spectre i have to finish welcome to the jungle and then complete two missions i have to go back really far back i open my saves and return to the end of mission 5 losing half of my progress in the run i head directly to belshear redo welcome to the jungle then the evacuation then outbreak this leaves me where i was with the dig and trains as my two options this time accompanied by new folsom which i promptly get stuck on i only have tosh who's supposed to dismantle the enemy defenses for ai rayner to beat if the rules allowed me to deal damage to enemies without killing them this would be easy if i could attack enemy buildings it would be simple but with the current rules i'm out of luck tosh is useless i tried running past stuff but failed i tried using tosh to tank for jim but siege tanks weren't interested in that and then i tried going to the nova mission and had no luck there either at this point my stream was ending for the day and i was really frustrated i was facing three missions which all looked impossible that night i had one final idea to test if it didn't work i was considering calling off the run so i left the mission running overnight it turns out that after only four and a half hours jim will figure out how to win on his own and it only took him over 3 000 kills thanks jim the spectre is an incredible unit for many reasons the ultrasonic pulse ability can stun enemies but deal zero damage permanent cloaking means that the spectre can move around unharassed and most importantly the spectre can use hold fire to put his gun away finally i can have someone on the field who doesn't shoot people feeling confident i head to the great train robbery this was a great decision a mixed force of diamondbacks inspectors crushed through the first train as i build up a spectre force i then managed to kill four whole trains without any issues and then my base died it turns out that killing a train without taking down the escorts causes the now unemployed escort army to rush my base there was too much i couldn't repair and was broken but not before getting about 20 specters i lift my command center flee to a high ground position and rely on my standing army to finish things off and they nail it the spectre does bonus damage to the armored trains making quick work of them after my base is dead my hunch that the ai couldn't find my command center was correct and the entire army decides to come hang out with my spectres instead this is really annoying and makes moving my army about much more of a chore once the trains are speed boosted i utilize my spectre's psionic lash ability generally this skill is difficult to get value out of due to the high charge up time but here it absolutely deletes the trains it's awesome after dodging the final train's raven and sniping it the mission ends with 21 kills at this point i can't even begin to explain my hatred of this mission i thought that maybe my diamondbacks accidentally killed something but there's no way that they killed 21 somethings then i thought maybe it was the train cars but there are 5 cars per train for a total of 40 why would it only be 21 after extensive testing i found that it has something to do with the trains shared health pool every train car that is damaged counts as a kill while any car that is not attacked in any way doesn't this was a really weird one but it's sort of neat being able to troubleshoot these absolutely bizarre and completely pointless bugs i hope you like spectres because we're going to be seeing a lot of them for a bit safe haven's next and it's actually depressing how simple this one is make a spectre send it to a point with no detection and attack nexus 1. proxy of barracks down south floated into the protoss base and make another spectre attack the southern nexus once nexus one is down send that first spectre to the middle nexus and click on it once a purifier is vulnerable vikings outrange it and win what a joke also the purifier mothership counts as a kill just so i can be a bit more disappointed with the mission after safe haven i finally got into 10 zerg research this gives me the planetary fortress because nothing says love and peace like upgrading your main building to have a giant gun let's head to cutthroat and teach colonel orland the meaning of pacifism instead of fighting orland for 6 000 minerals i take the easy path i lift off my buildings build an engineering bay and float over to my opponent i nestle my command center right up against orland's planetary fortress and make my own and then proceed to win the mission in under 4 minutes it's just that easy with cutthroat complete engine of destruction unlocks i knew this mission would either be totally impossible or a free win after tychus blitzed his way to the odin with only medic support i rally suvs to repair him for the rest of the mission and he wins after that i head to media blitz to hopefully continue my odin luck i could not beat media blitz so i head to the dig another mission that i've been dreading this mission is required for campaign completion so i have no way to avoid it and more importantly a huge trove of research in the protoss missions is behind the dig i know the first three protoss missions are free wins making it very appealing first is a no build segment which gets me running past some gateway units finding a field of photon cannons would shred my forces and finally a couple of stalkers to put on the pain by the time i reach my base i have next to nothing left and even worse one of the stalkers from that sequence is attacking me in fact after restarting a few times it's impossible to not be attacking me i'm gonna have to spend the next 25 minutes repairing this mercenary compound the next bits of the mission are rough to figure out requiring a very precise build order i place defensive engineering bays in front of the entrances to my base while i start spectre production the protoss attack hard and fast so i can't dilly dally each specter gets his attack turned off and then holds formation making a wall i finish the wall on the north side but spectre production is slow and it's not all i have to do air raids will eventually come there are no void rays on this difficulty but there are warp prisms once deployed each prism will spawn units forever so i have to wall off the drill with buildings while finishing my second spectre wall this worked for a bit but once the second air raid arrived there were too many protoss i couldn't handle the pressure and died i played with the idea of dropping structures under every wart prism to block their ability to warp in but many of them are on unbuildable terrain so that idea is broken the warp prisms will kill me if they deploy that's a fact so i have to passively ask them to stop deploying in my next attempt as the prisms come in i tried stunning them most of the time in starcraft ai commands are fairly robust for example if you ultrasonic pulse in attack wave it will continue on its merry way after the stun wears off this is apparently not true for the warp prism event once the stun expires the warp prisms simply hang around for the remainder of the mission the only problem is that the prisms arrive quickly and from many angles if one deploys it's game over this is where i get to use the technicality because we're not playing on brutal the default game speed isn't actually faster it's normal i generally play on faster because that's what i'm used to and that's what ladder plays on but as far as blizzard is concerned that's not correct i drop the game speed land the mind blasts and then return it to faster and move on i generally don't like changing game speed it's the first time i've ever done this in one of my runs but the entire thing was so absolutely disorienting that i needed the help once the prisms are disabled i get to wait normally there are bonus objectives to get protoss research from zellnaga vaults but at this point bonuses are just a sick joke that i'll never be allowed to have because my pacifism apparently extends to inanimate ancient artifact storing vaults eventually some long zealots walk over my specters and start causing trouble but the single target damage is low enough that i can repair through it until the door is broken with the dig done zeratul arrives gives me a rock and tells me to get some protoss research from his memories i kindly oblige the first three protoss missions are quick easy and have troves of research 10 zerg and eight protoss research will effectively double what i currently have as i blink my way through whispers of doom without a care in the world i pass the brood lord section and reach the arena [Music] the arena has the only non-objective required kill in wings of liberty the giant grand games community spent hours trying to figure this out the mission has always felt a bit broken to me there are many parts that can be completely bypassed with blink we looked for every way to gimmick our way past this encounter eventually checking the game's triggers to confirm that it is required there's no getting around it in order to progress the ground units here must be killed i was so close to having my precious research i was this close to greatness but my hopes have been dashed and my day has been ruined i head back to the hyperion not knowing nearly enough about zerk biology damn the mobius factor is not special nor particularly beloved destroy three datacores and rescue the stranded allies but for a weird reason this is one of the most optimized missions in starcraft 2. when the 10th anniversary achievements released the new achievement on mobius factor was bugged it was a speedrun achievement but because of poor design it required the player to finish the mission faster than the actual speedrun route at the time furious at being unable to get their achievement a huge number of people crowdsourced ideas to optimize this mission breaking the world record at the time i can't exactly do what they did but any mission that can be finished in three minutes is not going to involve much killing the first data core is a joke i fly my starting troops over grab the nearby allies and target it down some mutas do come to play and unfortunately i have to lose a bait medevac as i evacuate the second core is incredibly teasable i grab a reaper in the medevac drop it behind the core and he kills it without issue well there was one issue he kept killing this random cocoon doo dad every time that i dropped him causing a bunch of resets that was pretty rude for the final core i move my medevacs around the map find the stranded allies sneak to the objective and squeeze my infantry behind the core to target it down oh and the bonus objective it's a brutalist again and i can't kill it again great in every challenge run there's a key mission one that rises above and beyond the rest of the run in difficulty complexity and time required to beat like the end of eternity and night elf deathless or the crucible in zerglings only but pacifist is a whole nother beast we will have not one not two but three insane missions and media blitz is first after fleeing for four and a half minutes during what's supposed to be a sneak attack i get a base and the insanity begins well not quite the insanity actually began a while ago i spent about an hour and a half making cracks at this mission when i initially unlocked it but concluded i just didn't have the upgrades to do it at the same time i scrapped it and came back later with a plan there are three main problems in this mission the first is the levels of enemy aggression the mission is designed around the odin crippling at least one of the enemy bases each base alternates attacking and if all three are alive they strike quickly and often the second problem are the broadcast towers themselves their objectives i have to hold for one minute each and they're positioned inside of those enemy bases with a legion of pre-placed defenders and spawn-in reinforcements and the third problem is money i have one base with a fairly light mineral load the other two expansions on the map have already been claimed by the dominion and i don't think they want to share i tried and failed a lot of different things here i honestly had too many ideas to explain but most everything i tried failed in the end this is what i came up with for each broadcast tower i start by dropping two additional command centers i'm going to need a few suvs here meanwhile i tech into spectres and the hercules simultaneously and then the attacks start to come the beginning isn't that much helions don't deal high damage to buildings but it marks the beginning of a permanent resource drain once i've filled two hercules with a combined 60s cvs i head off to my first target this tower is the most accessible of the three instead of being nestled near the edge of the map it's quite vulnerable i send the odinnin as a distraction while the hercules charges the objective once he arrives the suvs power drop and use advanced construction to make an engineering bay and then they repair and this is where the money issues start there's a weird quirk with starcraft 2 that causes repairing to sometimes be considerably more expensive when a building is repaired it takes one quarter of the price to go from one hp to full this means an engineering bay takes 27 hit points per mineral but there's a problem if an suv repairs less than 27 hp it still costs one full mineral no matter how little repairing is done that means when there are many little units attacking an engineering bay and many suvs are required to repair it it'll repair one or two hp repeatedly and take one mineral every time this drains my resources quickly but it was worth it the engineering bay holds the broadcast completes and my second hercules never even had to drop reinforcements the second tower is tricky in another way i can't afford to do the mass repair strategy three times and this base has siege tanks who will slaughter my workers so i have to mix it up i go with a group of specters the plan is to infiltrate with cloak stand on the objective and finish it off unseen there's only one problem the enemy has detection and i can't kill it but there is a workaround this base has siege tanks who will slaughter my workers i scan the area to reveal the nearby turrets and then drop mules one at a time next to them the enemy siege tanks blow them up and then the splash damage from the attack hurts their own missile turret after enough mules the turrets start going down around this time the pressure against my base is getting high reaper's anti-building attack is difficult to repair against and banshees do a lot of damage as well once the turrets have been demolished by the enemy's reckless attacking i move my forces into position and show off once again why i got the spectre instead of the ghost the defense waves always spawn one raven to detect cloaked units i move to my specters to intercept it and chain stun it with ultrasonic pulse until the upload completes at this point i have two of three objectives done and i'm broke my mineral fields are depleted and i have no money to make an engineering bay or to repair i'm dead unless i grab my suvs and hercules lift one of my command centers off and head to my opponent's base for the remainder of the mission i share the base with my opponent they aren't a big fan of this idea but i managed to get them attacking my orbital command instead of scvs so it's a net profit for the final objective well this happens power build power build power repair you hold position here come on come on come on baby come on more mules stop repairing these guys for a bit less guys on repair is more efficient repairing i repair each other keep dropping the meals keep dropping the mules yes i hate that mission media blitz was absolutely insane and of the three super difficult missions in the run it was by far and away the easiest oh no at this point in the run i'm desperate for research normally by now i would have 25 points in both protoss and zerg laboratory research having both maxed out but because of the plethora of bonuses that involve murder and being unable to do the protoss missions i'm sitting at 10 protoss research and 15 zerg in a desperate attempt to get some more i head to the optional secret mission piercing the shroud this is a no build mission and it's going to hurt my first major problem are these doors jim's breaching charges are slow and clunky getting through the first two doors leaves my forces almost completely dead the first reset fest is this hallway there's a computer terminal on the far side of it with inventory all throughout the only solution i found to this was to use the zerg units from the previous room i run gym in front with medics and marine following they deserve onto the first couple infantry and take them out after passing a large group i head up the ramp and sacrifice my marina spotter in the next room i can release zerglings zealots or ultralisks to fight i pick the zealots sneaking past during the chaos now i'm in a bit of a bind the garage is next which is remarkably well defended i can't just waltz through it i also need the first protoss relic which is in the room currently infested with zealots but both of these problems might cancel each other out i used jim's tanky dad bod to pull the zealots into the first section of the garage they take down a viking a tank and some marines the final garage dive is insane the ares warbot is supposed to act as a time summon to help me through the area which i guess it's still going to do but it's not enough alone i gather up the rest of my zealot buddies pull them with me activate the areas to charge and the combination of the warbot's health and zealots provide exactly enough tanking that jim can hide in a corner like the hero he is after about 20 failed attempts to finish off the section our hero chaotically charges in circles through a room reaches the reactor objective blasts it and then dies the things i do for protoss research after trying again with a slightly improved route jim takes a generator down weirdly increasing his kill counter by one despite being a building and then the escape sequence begins i walk out of the facility normally there are a bunch of pieces of rubble blocking the paths but because i can't use any of the weapon pickups that i grabbed on enemies i can vaporize these blocks with no issue i remember to pick up the protoss research on the way and jump into the hercules and as is tradition by now the kill counter bugs out zero enemy units killed four enemy units killed by raynor dorrs and the reactor are apparently considered enemy units but only on jim's personal kill count supernova is another for protoss research and with the tools i have it should be a pretty easy win i wall off my ramp build some hercules dropships and send my units on a sprint to grab the bonuses once the hercules are complete i grab the siegebreaker mercenaries and charge up to the top side of the map once there i drop this low ground ravine siege up my tank and kill the objective giving me one kill remember in wings of liberty deathless where the cinematic at the end kills off units and counts as units lost well it looks like that applies to killing enemies as well i redo the drop match the escape button to skip the cutscene completely and end with zero kills maul the void is really annoying not because the mission is hard but because the intro segment is dumb the refill generator does damage over time to unshielded targets to get to the rest of the mission i must kill three stalkers and the generator i tried to be cute here reducing the stalker's shields to zero and letting the field do the rest of the work but for some reason the game gives me the credit for these kills that's not fair my plan for the mission itself is simple and pretty fun i wall off my ramp build a couple of battle cruisers and rescue the dark templar on the map for bonus research i then pick them up into hercules stealthily move my force down the bottom of the ramp and distract the protoss with my battle cruisers while i doom drop the dark templar onto the objective it works really well but i am still salty about getting credit for the three stalkers that i didn't actually kill the second nightmare mission is gates of hell the mission has a very interesting mechanic where i somehow have to get up to 100 supply without oh i lost already yup the enemy attacks at the 18 second mark and never stops this isn't even a problem of my army killing stuff it's a problem of actually getting fortifications up in time i spend the first 40 or so minutes on this mission figuring out where each enemy attack wave comes and then walling it off exactly before it arrives in order to fund this i had to grab every mineral pickup around the map and send much of my starting army to grab it which reduces my supply by quite a bit that's a problem because the entire objective here is to get to 100 supply the mission is very similar to zero hour but on steroids generic zerg units attack my walls and i have to build a giant pile of medics to distract the flyers that will eventually kill me the problem is the matter of scale i have less mineral fields than on zero hour and there's more mutilisks luckily i have four engineering bays sitting around so getting my infantry armor upgrades is pretty accessible at this point i have to reach 100 supply to cause warfield ship to land in the mission to progress normally rescuing allied drop pods is the easiest way to do this but i can't go anywhere right now each drop pod force is gonna get slaughtered and i can't do anything about it during this learning experience i get slaughtered over and over the zergs start banking up a huge number of mainlings at each wall if they wiggle around enough and start connecting i just die i reset and hope it doesn't happen again medics are a nice unit to be building here they're actually the lowest mineral per supply unit in the tarin arsenal allowing me to more reasonably hit that 100 supply mark while i defend i take up to spectres gates of hell has a weird quirk to it if you lose all of your buildings but still have units alive the game keeps going everything must die for you to be defeated my plan is to drop spectres with orbital strikes on warfield side of the map and then take out the nidus worms with side lash while cloaked after about an hour and a half of attempting this mission i miraculously managed to reach 100 supply with a single spectre across the map and learn that as soon as he attacks the nidus the enemy sends in an overseer to detect him after a bit of testing and refinement i find that if i silash the nidus and then retreat the overseer will eventually reset this is great my base may be gone but my two specters can slowly eliminate the objective if each lash costs 150 energy and each spectre needs a total of 9 lashes for me to win the mission and energy regenerates at 0.56 energy per second that means i'll win at the 50 minute mark annoyingly the enemy attack waves might not be able to see me but they do know exactly where i am they walk over to my specters and surround them and now i can't move so that's cool at this point i'm over an hour and a half into the mission but i have a solid save where i'm stable enough to change up my build order and still survive to the 100 supply mark i end up on a strategy of building two spectres across the map and then finding money for one more spectre on the base side my logic is that the enemies will see the spectre near my base and then hug that one instead of my useful ones while they wait out that 50 minutes to win this works great until i learn that the zerg sends overseers at the 18 minute mark and i need a new plan i then chain reset this part for over an hour trying to figure something out anything i go long past the normal end time of my stream determined to end this today and then what i find might be the dumbest thing ever you see this pillar right here if you use orbital strike to deliver a marauder onto it it can attack two of the nidus worms without being seen remember when the spectres would attack the niduses and the overseer would come the overseer that can absolutely spot the high ground it turns out he just doesn't care if it's a marauder he's on break the marauder finishes off two of the nidus's on his own and with only a single worm for the specters to take down they easily finish off the mission after a quick three and a half hours in order to honor this brave marauder that made the impossible possible i let twitch chat name our champion thank you maurice the marauder you are someone we should all strive to be gates of hell was pain and it's obvious that all in is going to be suffering and sandwich between them is shatter the sky as the penultimate mission of this exceptionally difficult run is only reasonable to assume that this is a dreadful slog but it's not it's really easy one of the easiest missions in the run there are four coolant towers around the map each is defended by a progressively stronger group of enemies which is good because the first coolant tower can literally be killed by the two starting banshees in this safe spot the southern tower is well defended against air but has a glaring weakness i use orbital strike to deliver a marine right next to the objective and the defending scourge and corruptors can't hit it after fortifying my flanks with engineering bays i send four battle cruisers to the anti-ground platform ignore the few hydrolysks and only have a single platform remaining this final objective takes an astonishing six battlecruisers to take down shatter the sky was the calm before the storm i spent over 15 hours working on pacifist all in it is without a doubt the most difficult thing i have ever attempted first off why the nidus version instead of air well air is completely impossible there are too many stacking mutilists and brood lords hit like trucks and eventually the leviathan arrives who will rapidly spawn flyers forever resulting in a quick game over the first challenge i faced was getting to the two minute mark attacks don't come as quickly as gates of hell but with five paths to defend i can't get my fortifications up quickly enough after a lot of trial and error i ended up memorizing the attack order dropping an engineering bay down each of the lanes at exactly the time the attack arrives and using the constructing scv to repair it while back at home i get my walls set up i also drop two additional command centers that's the magic number for all in with two extra mules you will be able to mine out the map almost exactly when the mission ends maximizing yield the enemies at my wall are pretty damaging but the real problem are the nidus worms if i can't find an answer to them i will lose i didn't actually go into this mission with a plan for the nidus worms in fact i came here with pretty much no plan whatsoever here is a map of the knight of spawns starting at five minutes and every few minutes afterwards the enemy spawns one nidus in the orange area one nitis in the green area and two outside of my base each of these unload enemies every few seconds as long as they remain alive my first thought was to create a trap starcraft uses seed-based rng similarly to most games if you save and reload without restarting the mission the random results you get will be the same my plan is to wait until the nidus are about a minute away save the game and then watch where they emerge reload the save and then build a jail around the area creating a hole exactly the size of a nidus worm it'll have no room to unload and be dormant it turns out the units aren't actually loaded into the worm on this mission but instead are spawned via trigger in the nearest open space to the worm teleporting across buildings or any other gap in my testing i did learn something though if a nidus is supposed to spawn in a spot and that area is blocked it'll instead spawn in the nearest two by two open space this means i do have the power to manipulate the nidus spawns this brings me to my second plan force every in-based knightis to spawn outside of my base i map out the perfect build order for the first five minutes of the game building a network of mercenary compounds around my base blocking the majority of spawn locations looking at the spawn map again my goal was for the orange zone niduces to naturally spawn on the left or right side a two-thirds chance while the green zone knight is spawn close enough to my wall that the nearest legal location is outside i have to reset a few times but it works the first wave of niduses are dealt with and i have a full force of suvs repairing the walls and a perfect economy after holding on for a few minutes the second wave of nidus is erupt and the niduses aren't unloading after some investigation i found that there are three zerg players on the map west northeast and northwest the nidus worms won't spawn any more units when the northwest player is supply-blocked i don't know why this is and i don't care i might actually be able to beat this mission this is great i've been doing the math and if i had to get the correct rng for every knight of spawn it would have been about a 1 in 500 chance with a full mission reset every time it failed this makes things much more reliable than that with this strategy i managed to survive all the way until my next problem kerrigan and what a problem she is i can't let her attack my buildings kerrigan does 150 damage per shot to structures at best this drains my cash rapidly but more likely she just kills the building this is technically against the rules but i have to kite her and this is where things move a little bit away from reality and get theoretical in no production wings liberty i talked about my idea to kite kerrigan both marauders and reapers can attack kerrigan and then get away before she can respond in theory if i were to use an unupgraded reaper to attack kerrigan and kite her perfectly around this rock and then wait for as long as possible to pull her again she will regenerate all of her hp before taking damage a second time it's an infinite kite this is required because at the 18 minute mark kerrigan unlocks the area damage spell razor swarm as soon as she gets this if she's attacking a wall she will kill my suvs and i will die so how hard is it to kite kerrigan for the entire mission this is what the game looks like near the end to reach the 30 minute mark it took my computer well over an hour to process due to the sheer mass of units i'm getting below one frame per second and to cap everything off there just isn't enough money on the map to repair until the end of the mission it's not even close if i want to beat this mission i'm gonna need the most gimmicky cheese in history here is my plan i do the same night as strategy as before and then place buildings on the entire high ground area near the artifact with the exception of the exact top of the ramps i then re-roll until the nidus worms erupt from those areas creating a perfect wall to the artifact this wall would be owned by the enemy so they can't attack it nor can they pass it the first four southern knightisses must also spawn in a wall on the low ground so that hydras can't attack it from there if i get all of these knight of spawns i can then lose everything and the zerg cannot touch the artifact so what are the chances of this happening the first knight is that spawns on the outside of my base and each high ground nitis each have a one in three chance of spawning in the correct location there are seven of them and in testing four low ground nituses have about a one in two chance of spawning in the correct location the odds of getting the exact knight of spawns that i need without fail are 1 in 34 992. well that's pretty crazy but at least it's a number that fits inside the confines of human understanding right nope then i learned the most devastating truth of all the game has a system to prevent nidus worms from spawning next to other nidus worms if it rolls a location near one it will re-roll up to five times to find a more open location this means that seven of the eleven nidases i need to make have to make their role five times in a row all of this together results in requiring me to get a one in three chance 22 times in a row and a one in two chance 16 times in a row without a single failed roll between them so what are the odds of this happening one in two quadrillion 56 trillion 589 billion 122 535 424 assuming every trial run goes perfectly except for the rng of the nidus and the average reset takes around 12 minutes that means that having a 50 50 chance of getting these odds would take 47 billion years so is it possible to beat starcraft 2 wings of liberty as a pacifist yeah eventually thanks for watching if you think i don't upload enough and want more giant ground games content consider checking out my daily uploads channel giant crank games archives it used to be a place where i just dumped my twitch vods but recently it has evolved into a place that i play custom series for youtube if you're looking for challenge run content the modern mindhawk made a special gauntlet of wings of liberty challenges that are obscenely difficult for me to play through and if you're looking for something a bit more casual i'm also playing through mass recall a remake of starcraft 1 in the starcraft 2 engine both of those are linked in the description below with that said i hope you have a wonderful day and i will talk to you soon peace

Channel: GiantGrantGames

Views: 931,045

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Id: w8tvzZbXV-s

Length: 46min 3sec (2763 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022