I complained about team colors in the StarCraft campaign, because the Terran campaign set up the expectation that these would be consistent and tell you something about the enemy you were fighting and then the Zerg and Protoss campaigns dropped that and it was annoying. Going into Brood War, there isn’t really any good reason to expect Zerg team colors to actually match up to specific broods or Protoss tribes to mean anything at all, because you already saw them not do that in the core campaign. But just for the sake of wringing an extra blog post out of the game, how well does Brood War treat team colors?
The Protoss campaign does better with the Protoss than we’ve seen so far. We see Velari Tribe yellow being overrun by the Zerg as we flee Aiur and wear Venatir Tribe brown to distinguish ourselves. When we first show up on Shakuras, we’re still wearing brown as “Protoss refugees” but switch to Sargas Tribe blue after hooking up with the dark templar. The colors here are rearranged a bit, but Protoss factions are also pretty scrambled in the plot, and pretty consistently brown means refugees while blue means dark templar. I would’ve preferred they actually rename the blue color the way they renamed white and brown from Confederate squadrons to UED wings, but at least brown and blue Protoss are used consistently.
The Zerg are completely mishandled, though. They could’ve dodged the problem that three out of the eight broods were destroyed in the original campaign by switching the names. Naming Zerg broods isn’t even hard, just pick a mythological monster and slap “Brood” on the end. Chimera Brood. Cyclopean Brood. Rakshasa Brood. Dagon Brood. Easy. But instead Garm Brood shows up again as Jormungand Brood’s main ally. Jormungand Brood’s cerebrate gets killed pretty quick, but we need to get that one out of the way so that Kerrigan can keep using Jormungand purple. If we needed a second cerebrate killed here, it could’ve been Leviathan Brood’s unused yellow color. The Protoss player is blue now, so they aren’t using yellow anymore.
It is a problem that the player is now blue, though, because it means that we can’t use Surtur Brood, and there are now five dead cerebrates, four of which were killed either immediately before or after the Overmind’s death and therefore cannot be replaced. Even if we assume the Garm Brood is a new cerebrate created to replace the last Garm Brood cerebrate (a name change on the brood would’ve helped communicate that better!), that still means Garm Brood is super definitely dead now because the dark templar kill them in Artanis 3, after the Overmind is dead and no new cerebrates can be created. Jormungand Brood is killed in the same mission, and we kill Baelrog Brood and Grendel Brood right before the Overmind’s death, which we know stuns the Overmind for a while both because we see that happen from the Zerg’s perspective when Garm Brood dies and because that was the whole point of killing those cerebrates in the original game’s Protoss 9.
After all the casualties the Zerg have taken, the only broods left are Tiamat red, Surtur blue, Fenris teal, and Leviathan yellow. Blue (or sometimes brown) is the player color for the Protoss missions, teal is used for hero units, so that leaves Tiamat and Leviathan. There are Protoss missions with three Zerg enemies (the last one, for example, has us facing all of Tiamat, Garm, and Grendel Broods – Tiamat is fine, but we can only replace one of the others with Leviathan). Garm Brood’s use is particularly egregious, since Garm is one of the two broods killed in Brood War Protoss 3 (along with Jormungand Brood, who needs to be gotten out of the way so that purple can be Kerrigan’s color going forward), and then they immediately keep using it. They even reinforce that each team color is a specific Zerg brood with a specific cerebrate in that mission by having two cerebrates to kill matched with two team colors.
If the dead Garm, Grendel, and Baelrog broods were renamed, that would free up brown, orange, and white. One of those will die with Jormungand Brood in the third mission, but that still leaves the other two to be Tiamat’s remaining allies in the rest of the Protoss campaign without even busting open the yellow team color, which Blizzard is for some reason loathe to do. The smart thing to do is to have the new white brood be Jormungand’s new ally in Artanis 3 in order to get them out of the way so that white is freed up for the Cronus Wing of the UED fleet, which is the player color in the UED campaign. Then use Leviathan and a new orange brood as Tiamat’s primary allies while leaving brown as the dead Grendel Brood, since that allows dead broods to show up in places like Aiur and Tarsonis where it makes sense.
The UED campaign mostly deals with Terrans, which Blizzard is always much better at keeping straight. The one time Protoss show up, it’s a rearguard commanded by Jim Raynor and Fenix, who use the blue shared by the Sargas Tribe of Tassadar’s old fleet and the Mar Sara militia who became Raynor’s Raiders, so that makes sense. The Zerg show up on Tarsonis and Aiur, both places where the dead Grendel Brood might have left forces and in the former case where the dead Garm Brood might have left forces. We know dead broods remain dangerous because Garm Brood’s primary hive cluster on Char was a problem that needed solving back when the dark templar killed their cerebrate, so it’s fine that dead Zerg broods are showing up on planets where they planted hive clusters back when their cerebrates were alive. Any brood could be on Tarsonis and the only brood that couldn’t be on Aiur is Garm.
The three broods the UED faces on Char are Garm, Grendel, and Tiamat, and Grendel could theoretically have remnants left lying around, but we went out of our way to kill all the Garm on Char back in Zerg 7, plus, these three broods are clearly supposed to be led by cerebrates gestating a new Overmind, not rogue broods left behind by cerebrate casualties in the Aiur and Shakuras campaigns. It’s the same three Zerg broods we saw at the end of the Artanis campaign, though, so the same fix for that works here.
Then in the Kerrigan campaign they completely give up, even with the Terrans. In fairness, there was absolutely no salvaging Kerrigan 3, where you raid the Kel-Morian Combine for minerals. The Kel-Morian Combine’s color is supposed to be teal, but that’s the hero unit color and you’ve got Fenix with you in this mission, so none of the six Terrans you fight in this mission wear the color they’re supposed to be associated with. Even if you removed Fenix, though, the fact is you’ve got six Terran teams on the map, you need them to be different teams to give them different AI that prioritizes different units, and a maximum of one of them can be the actual Kel-Morian Combine on the stats screen at the end of the mission. Maybe just cut Kerrigan 3 altogether, though, Kerrigan already has two more missions than Artanis or the UED (three more, counting the secret mission) and the Kel-Morian Combine mission is pretty boring. You face six enemies with individually very weak AI whose attacks are very easy to fend off and your only goal is to harvest 10,000 minerals, which you don’t even need a second base to get if you go full turtle to save resources. It’s way more fun to dump minerals into armies to clear out the map and that is expensive enough that you’ll need some expansion bases to hit the objective, but that approach is totally unnecessary.
UED forces are in Epsilon Squadron yellow for Kerrigan 2, though. Being a [Greek letter] Squadron, Epsilon Squadron is presumably a Confederate remnant. The Confederate remnants under Duran allied with the UED, so possibly this is supposed to indicate that? Duran himself turned out to be infested and betrayed the Confederates to Kerrigan (and later on turned out to be an immortal servant of the turbo-Overmind, but never mind StarCraft II), but the Confederate forces under his command were presumably not all infested defectors like that. Still weird to use Epsilon Squadron yellow when they could’ve just gone with Cronus Wing white (actually green on a snow map like Braxis, but still the Cronus Wing) or Atlas Wing brown. They used brown for the neutral Zerg, but neutral teams with no bases don’t show up in the stats screen with names, so they can be whatever.
What Brood War really demonstrates is that assigning plot-relevant names to the AI wasn’t a good idea unless you can edit those names on a scenario-by-scenario basis. Like, if every Terran faction had followed the [Greek letter] Squadron format and Alpha, Delta, and Omega Squadrons had never come up in dialogue, then the Terran campaign never would’ve set any expectation that those AI default names for different colors would actually mean anything, or that certain factions would always be associated with specific colors. If the campaign hadn’t suggested that each team name for Zerg had a specific cerebrate, then cerebrate casualties wouldn’t have made it harder and harder to find a set of colors for surviving broods. And on the other hand, if you could edit the AI name freely, then even in Brood War orange could be Garm Brood on Tarsonis to indicate it’s a remnant of a dead brood while being Ziz Brood or whatever on Aiur, Shakuras, and Char.
Although what these posts demonstrate is mainly that no matter how much I like something I’ll find it easier to wring 2,000 words out of improving comically minor details than to talk about how much I like it.
Chamomile Has A Blog 