Did Tassadar’s Sacrifice Make Sense In Context For Anyone?

The objective of the final mission of StarCraft is to reduce the HP of the Zerg Overmind’s outer shell to zero. Once this happens, regardless of how much of the Zerg base or forces you’ve destroyed, you go to a cut scene in which Tassadar sacrifices himself to ram the Overmind and kill it. According to his dialogue, this is necessary because your forces have been severely weakened in the process of cracking the outer shell. Naturally, how much sense this makes depends a lot on how the mission went. If you were running low on resources, you may have indeed pushed a carrier fleet through the perimeter and ignored incoming Zerg reinforcements to reduce the Overmind’s shell to 0 HP while being pretty much tapped out for any base-clearing operations.

On the other hand, if you’re neurotic about leaving survivors, you might have scrupulously killed everything before allowing your units to target the Overmind and end things, making Tassadar’s final dialogue pretty much exactly the opposite of true. I’ve got eighteen carriers, man! Not only is the entire Zerg base cleaned out, but I could go clean out another base of similar size right now without even producing any more units, to say nothing of the fact that I have three active resource-gathering bases.

This is an inevitability of RTS gameplay. Besides unsatisfying cheats like auto-respawning destroyed buildings or units in the core of the Zerg base so that it’s impossible to clear the base before taking down the Overmind (StarCraft II is more prone to doing this kind of thing to guarantee that the map resembles what it’s supposed to be in the story no matter how much effort you put into clearing it, and I hate it), you can’t prevent the player from overkilling the mission to the point where Tassadar’s sacrifice comes across like nonsense. For example, in the eighth Protoss mission of the Brood War expansion, you are supposed to capture and defend a temple long enough for some psychic ritual to kill all Zerg on the planet Shakuras. There are three Zerg AI, one in front of the temple and two behind it. The two behind the temple have considerably larger and more heavily defended bases. It’s certainly possible to wipe out the Zerg completely making the psychic ritual at the end seem kind of ceremonial, but the most straightforward way to complete the mission is to leave the largest, toughest hive clusters alone and focus on securing the temple.

But it’s not just possible to do this sort of thing in the last mission of StarCraft 1’s core campaign, I strongly suspect that it is the average player’s first experience of the mission. Sure, they probably don’t bother clearing the entire Zerg base before hitting the Overmind down to the last building, but they probably do clear out all the active defenses and only avoid destroying ultralisk caverns and defiler mounds because those are tech buildings, not unit producers, and they’re not necessary to the objective, so why bother? They still end up in a position where their army/fleet is completely stomping Jormungand Brood (and Tiamat Brood, if there’s anything left of it).

The only reason you’d end up doing the thing where you rush your attackers in to hit the Overmind without destroying the defending swarm and spore/sunken colonies is if you’re either speedrunning or you don’t have enough resources to plausibly take out the whole Zerg base, so you go straight for the objective and hope for the best. Nobody speedruns a game on their first try back in 1998 when you couldn’t stream a gimmick like “blind speedrun of [game],” and the mission has such a gargantuan amount of resources that you can’t really lose by running out. You either get your base overrun because you weren’t able to harvest and spend those resources quickly and effectively enough, or else you have everything you need to create 24 carriers and 24 battlecruisers and a dozen siege tanks and a dozen arbiters to cloak them all (you have both a Terran and a Protoss base and they have separate supply count, so the maximum size of your army is immense). That would take a long time and there’s not really any point when the Zerg base can be cracked with much less, but the resources for it are there. There’s six empty resource nodes on the map and one of them is a mineral patch big enough to overcome the Overmind’s defenses at least five times over. That one absurdly mega-huge resource patch could probably pay for the last three or four missions combined.

That’s not to say the mission is extremely easy, because you can still get overrun, but I find it pretty unlikely that the average player wasn’t in a position that ranged from slightly to extremely advantageous when Tassadar sacrifices himself on the grounds that their position is super precarious.

Also there’s a weird bug in the AI of both of the last two missions where the enemy just gives up once you’ve penetrated their base. Drones stop harvesting resources, reinforcements stop getting brought in. It’s like the Overmind saw my carrier fleet rip through the spore colony perimeter and said “well, can’t do anything to stop that, guess I’ll just die.” The StarCraft 1 AI isn’t smart enough to produce counters to enemy units it spots, so it’s kind of right – trickling in hydralisks and mutalisks stands no chance of defeating the fleet, what he really needs to do is amass lots of scourges and defilers (the Brood War AI does this) even then it’s questionable whether he can trade effectively with my infinity minerals. But it’s still weird to see the AI go afk.