RTS campaigns are basically extended tutorials for how to play multiplayer. This is of necessity – there’s so much stuff in an RTS and the way it interacts with other units/buildings is so complex that it’s best to introduce things one unit at a time, and by the time you’ve done that, there’s not really any room left for anything else. In fact, StarCraft’s Terran campaign doesn’t even do a particularly good job of introducing some of the units because its first two stages are gobbled up with very basic tutorials for the game’s controls and resource gathering. Figure out what firebats are good for yourself, because their intro mission is focused on base-building (although it’s not that hard to piece together that they trade well with Zerglings, especially in a bunker – and to the extent that it’s hard to figure that out, it’s mostly because that’s an extremely niche role and one they’re not even that good at).
But starting in Terran 3, you learn how bunkers and vulture mines work for base defense with a defensive mission, Terran 4 is a no-build mission that doesn’t even require effective micro but it introduces the concept of no-build missions, I guess, then in Terran 5 you face an enemy base on an island with defenses laid out so as to encourage you to send wraiths over to clear a landing zone and then dropships to bring in a ground force to clear out the AA perimeter around the enemy base, on up to Terran 9 when you first unlock battlecruisers. I think there might be some upgrades you can only get in Terran 10, but either way, you spend pretty much the entire Terran campaign unlocking one unit at a time, with scenarios laid out so that the most effective strategy involves using that unit. They’re often even laid out so that the winning strategy of the previous scenario doesn’t work, forcing you to figure something else out, like in Terran 6 where the enemy’s air defenses are so thick that the wraiths-and-dropships plan is pretty doomed, but using your new goliaths works much better.
Starting out with the smallest, weakest units and then slowly unlocking the bigger ones is definitely the most satisfying way to structure the campaign. But so far as effectively teaching the mechanics goes, it’s the reverse of how you want it to work. The most straightforward Terran strategy is the one you unlock last in the campaign: Build a fleet of battlecruisers and roll over everything. Presenting battlecruisers as the capstone means that you come out of the campaign thinking of battlecruisers as just better than wraiths. They aren’t weak against ground units the way wraiths are, they’re bulkier and do more damage in general, and while they can’t cloak, their Yamato cannon lets them destroy missile turrets and weaken photon cannons from a distance, allowing them to counter their own counters. Wraiths are also a counter to unescorted battlecruisers, but it only takes one science vessel to reveal the cloaked wraiths, at which point wraiths only trade well in tremendous numbers.
There are things that can defeat battlecruisers, of course. Protoss arbiters with stasis fields can split battlecruiser fleets up, freezing some to reduce the number of scouts or dragoons required to get the upper hand. A few high templar psi storms can take out an entire battlecruiser fleet at the cost of just 5-6 high templar, and the battlecruisers will have difficulty getting away from the storms because of how slow they are. Zerg defilers can use dark swarm to make hydralisk swarms immune to air fire, and their queens can use ensnare to reduce already slow battlecruisers to a crawl, making it even harder for them to get away from the shielded hydralisks. Enemy Terrans can make cheap (albeit high tech, but no more so than battlecruisers) ghosts with lockdown to allow wraiths to trade favorably with more reasonable numbers or just give the ghost-user the edge with their own battlecruiser fleet. You can make nine battlecruisers and twelve ghosts for the same vespene cost (and fewer minerals and supply) as twelve battlecruisers, but the ghost-supported fleet will likely win the confrontation at the loss of less than half their ghosts and no battlecruisers (and if the enemy fleet doesn’t have comsat or science vessel support, cloaked ghosts will probably get away unscathed).
StarCraft doesn’t do a terrible job of demonstrating this in the one mission they have after introducing battlecruisers for the first time. In Terran 10, General Duke uses a ton of ghosts, which makes it unviable to use unsupported battlecruiser fleets to crack his base. Except he also uses a ton of nuclear strikes (also used with ghosts), which are expensive as Hell if they fail, so if you know how to defend against that, he’ll run himself out of vespene on futile nukes and you can roll over him with a battlecruiser fleet anyway. That map also has Arcturus Mengsk on it, but I honestly don’t know what his strategy is supposed to be. He uses a lot of wraiths and they do cloak, but nowhere near enough to trade well with a battlecruiser fleet, so as long as you bring a science vessel, you’re good. I guess he does teach players that battlecruiser fleets need a single science vessel supporting them to counter the wraiths.
But it’s still very easy to come away from the StarCraft Terran campaign thinking that the Terran strategy basically amounts to “build battlecruisers to win,” and it would be more clear that this wasn’t the case if battlecruiser fleets were one of the first things you got, rather than one of the last. Massed battlecruisers are the most straightforward path to victory, so start people out on that, and then show how that strategy can be countered and then the counters to those counters and so on.
While it would probably weaken the singleplayer campaign as an experience unto itself, the campaign would do a better job of teaching StarCraft if you started out making battlecruiser fleets, and then steadily got introduced to enemies with counters to this most obvious tactic, thus slowly making it more clear what the other units are for. Your first two missions would still be movement and base-building tutorials using marines and firebats because those units are easy to build, and the third could still be a defensive tutorial, although that one should definitely unlock siege tanks instead of vultures. It’s much easier to see how siege tanks are a vital part of Terran defense than vulture spider mines, like, sure you can see what a spider mine does no problem and you’ll want to try the new unit out, but the conclusion I and, I’m confident, most other new players came to after Terran 3 is that vulture spider mines don’t really do anything that a good bunker complex couldn’t do better.
The fourth (or fifth, if we’re still having a no-build mission for four despite a radically redesigned plot necessitated by this new order of introducing units) would give you a fully developed Terran base with all units locked except marines, firebats, and battlecruisers, and a massive Zerg (or whatever) base to sic the battlecruisers on. Put the base on an island so you’re forced to use battlecruisers to wipe them out. Maybe include dropships to also introduce the need to create expansion bases to feed the resource-intensive battlecruiser fleets. Have the plot dialogue stress (in the same way that things like building damage and creep got stressed in dialogue in early Terran missions from the game as it is – draw the player’s attention to its importance without beating them over the head with it) the power of battlecruisers, but also that they’re slow, both literally and in the sense that they’re at the top of the tech tree with a slow build time and a high resource cost so it takes forever to amass a fleet. “Fortunately, these mindless Zerg have given us all the time we need to bring our battlecruisers into position. Now we are unstoppable!”
Then in the mission after that, you either disallow battlecruisers completely for plot reasons or stress to the player that the enemy has more resources than you and you can’t win a straight-up fight, so you’ll have to be sneaky, while giving them access to ghosts and wraiths for the first time. Use dialogue (like what Kerrigan says in Terran 5 from the game as it is) to stress how detectors work, and the importance of taking them out. Either leave the player with siege tanks so they have an answer for missile turrets or else really focus on stealth by making the enemy defenses so heavily air oriented that they basically don’t even have bunkers and you can use ghosts to take out the turrets for your wraiths.
You can keep going down the tech tree and each additional unit further down will be filling a new niche – goliaths won’t feel like a replacement for marines, nor battlecruisers like a replacement for wraiths, because the weaker units are introduced in missions that spotlight the situations where they’re more useful than the stronger ones.
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