SC2Mapster

Act 4 is SO. VERY. HARD. there are videos of Jayborino playing through earlier version, they do not represent how the mod works now. i played on slowest speed because otherwise i simply cannot deal with all those attacks, the enemy sends so much more!
yet still... i kinda hope acts 5 and 6 aren't too different - for while the challenge during build missions is immense, it is carefully managed and the mission design is fun! i just hope the few hiccups that are present in this act won't be there in the following ones - like all heroes being melee and therefore dying easily to terran arsenal; and early macro having to be top notch else the first big wave ruins everything.
the story is very disagreeable TBH - everyone instantly assumes the worst and goes for the kill, - but the gameplay is solid and i play these for gameplay, so i will continue going through the missions.
mission 9 QTE bug: Artanis zapped the first barrel, for some reason walked back to zap the second one without actually shooting it, then zapped the third one and died seconds later. couldn't rewind - black screen, couldn't reload - saving failed it said every time during that mission.
mission 10 bug: the adept got stuck right in front of the second to last beacon. i assume something pushed her away? BTW, the mission was really enjoyable - i love Warp Harmonization and i love 9 range colossus!

mission 1: failed to notice a wall behind which the hydras hide. once i got the base, top door failed to open even once.
mission 2: easiest mission so far even tho i mostly failed to evacuate my drones and overlords the first two times. i covered the entire map with tumours, so they tanked for me nicely.
mission 3: couldn't find the ocular cortex objective. game froze for half a minute once i killed the last one on the list, the one that spawns banelings.
mission 4: burrowing erases all XP; primal hive is completely free outside of build time? also, primal hive often refuses to get planted where i order it and gets units stuck between it and other buildings. boss battle ended in 5 seconds because i made a literal wall of those anti-air worms. the backup hydras (i refuse to call them hydralisks just because you made a new unit with that name) were unnecessary, as well as the hives i crammed in there. hydras saw exactly 0 combat BTW. lings and Dehaka were dealing with everything.
Mission 5: i see the hive now has a cost. nice. the essence resource is too restrictive and attacking enemy bases only leads to the loss of income since they no longer produce more units to be "harvested" for essence. it was a very boring mission. couldn't even finish my upgrades. honestly probably would've been faster and easier to just hit the objectives with lings. thors aren't much of a threat - a small pack of ling hydra takes them down quickly, or even just lings. roaches are a waste of biomass - they're just a good target for tanks to blast and too expensive to use for tanking. evolution mechanic is cute, but completewly unnoticeable. i had near fully evolved hydras with ling cover and they died to tanks all the same in the few moments i was distracted.
Mission 6: why am i playing as a protoss mercenary in zerg campaign aaaaa why is there a protoss mercenary, how do we pay them even? how did we contact the guy in the first place? and it's a sneak mission too! i've skipped this one.
Mission 7: looks like main and bonus objectives are mistakenly listed under each other's categories? opening the gate was not optional at all to survival. suddenly a SUPER BRUTAL mission: i eco'd as hard as i could early, i kited with Stukov every free second and still both the defense and the offense nearly failed. i can't imagine when Stukov is supposed to have time to explore the facility - i cheated and opened the map at the end and there were more enemies and pickups, but there's no way i would've reached them. barely even saw them! and that's with a vision cheat! oh, and pacing: nothing in early game, very hard and micro-intensive mid game, dead late game. late game was me waiting 10 minutes doing nothing because i killed two zerg bases to the sides, yet they kept spawning units and dying to my defenses. i didn't appreciate that at all because i took one of the side bases and the game was spawning ultralisks on top of my hives. also, noticed that some buildings can be placed on creep and some can't. a bit weird. the new eco upgrade flips essense situation - now i have too much. i went from not building mutalisks because they're too expensive to not building mutalisks because i'm maxed and invested into wrong upgrade line.

Mission 8: funfunfun! still, some things could maybe be improved: Artanis says we stop for resting, but we only fight more during stops - maybe don't call it resting. afterwards, enemy air appears several times from the top side; they kill the radar, but don't try to kill the objective which would've been the obvious move. raptor lings attack several times, but i never noticed them get anywhere important? is that because our entire base is made of walls too high for cliffjumping? eco was easy: i made only lings before i could get both essense gain upgrades, then i had enough for hydras and turrets, and soon for mutas. managed to summon 3 melee and 3 ranged hybrids, could've gotten more, but i wanted to also toy with mutas. stole ally's minerals because they don't rebuild defenses anyway.
Mission 9: boss fight is broken because the orbs seeks targets. could sometimes bait them with spawns, but the boss could also just stun me and make me unable to summon or command spawns in time. the mission itself was fine. this two simultaneous maps design again, but at least now there's no time pressure, which also begs the question why do i have to control two parts at the same time? it only makes army management harder coz the F2 button becomes way less convenient. defence was cheap and easy, hybrids are unbeatable, made 3 radars to pump them out. the ones with psi storm are the best. super-thors weren't a challenge. hard to tell, but i think they don't attack while channeling a nuke? at least i didn't notice the few zerg i had explode like they did before a Thor starts nuking. channeling duration is also very long, so it's easy to dodge.
Mission 10: the dificculty suddenly returns! restarted the mission coz my first attempt was too bad. tried to see if i could do anything with the dark templars right away - nope. the second attempt was much smoother - better placed turrets, more lings, DTs kept close. ally's half of the map doesn't seem to have any purpose from the gameplay perspective, but i'm glad i don't have to control two bases at once.
BTW, none of the primal hives ever show worker count, had to count minerals and workers myself. economy overall is very feast or famine because of production and costs. never used a queen, but i could've during that stolen tank mission. otherwise i do scouting with burrowed lings and the other spell takes a while to gather energy for, so again lings it is until i can make hybrids or hydras.

Mission 1: a bit odd that technicians can't fire at infested even tho their weapons have separate damage stat for non-shielded targets. dominion, angry locals and enemies all being colored the same is slightly problematic. possibly bug: settlements keeps sending infested even after being cleared. boss fight was easy apart from the instant unmarked explosions that killed me twice. firebats were pointless - i made two and they died instantly to volatile infested that i failed to distinguish from other infested. without firebats i would've played differently and nobody would've died.
Mission 2: rewind and saving doesn't work. anti-xeno technician gets selected with marauders and has lower priority than them, making use of tehir turrets cumbersome. hated seeing Corelius here - he died once, mercifully close to the game's start, and was so often close to death afterwards, but his mind control is also essential to getting things done in reasonable manner. i disable his Charge, but he keeps dashing towards targets anyway. side objectives felt pointless - i had to spend so much on defenses while doing those that it would've been easier to just put that money into going for the main objective before attack waves ramped up until the point where i needed more defenses in the first place. mass marauders were perfect, made a few goliaths just in case and they were useful for anti-air. starting position feels weird - how did we get into the middle of a ship anyway?
Mission 3: fun start, then the headache of managing two different factions. but in the end, it wasn't hard.
Mission 4: another hero's psi storm says it does no friendly fire, but it actually does. overall a great mission! a defensive mission that isn't a timed defense inside own's base! but it ended kinda quickly - judging by how i took expansion maybe 3 minutes before the game's end and didn't even need it. found a cache of flying resources behind one of the starting rocks.

the varied mineral count in each mission and base is kind of annoying because it make me count both minerals and workers each time.
Mission 5: why are we protoss in a terran campaign?! invulnerability effect somehow makes units very big for the purpose of mouse aiming, so i have to find places on the ground very far away where i can click to move or a-move, very inconvenient. base in the top right corner has bottom geyser that clips into terrain, making it unbuildable. also, enemy reinforcements spawn there no matter what, please make them go away once the base is destroyed, or at least deliver them by some other means than instant simultaneous spawning. not that i needed the base much, but still. north-western outpost has one empty geyser for some reason. the mission was actually very fun, but i eventually narrowed my arsenal to colossus-stalker for range and anti-air. not much else fits or needed. the two heroes were set up perfectly!
Mission 6: after getting the base, top left corner of the map was revealed to me for some reason; few minutes later, a warp prism flew over there and was shot down semingly by it's own allies with a photon cannon. game froze for a minute at 5:57. and 6:57. and 5:57... i skipped this one. looked fun, especially air combat, but the freezes are too much. also noticed that the prism respawned and i gained vision of it and another one in the top right corner. there probably were supposed to be drops? curious why engines have such precise amount of hp: 6250.
Mission 7: it was fun, but uncertainty made me go extra slow. had mostly marauders and tanks, later added some thors and goliaths but they had almost nothing to shoot, and even later vikings for the canyon towers.
Mission 8, 9, 10: skipped, skipped, skipped. reasons: plain faction with no enemies that would challenge it to get out of basic DPS composition of marine-marauder-medic, plain defense missions where player is expected to just sit in one place until timer runs out, tanky hero with regen aura makes already dominant composition of MMM stand out even more, a story that is frankly not very good.