Next, we upgraded our Hive, which allowed us to evolve our Queen into a bigger, meaner version of herself. This unlocked the Deep Tunnel ability, which lets the slow-moving Queen instantly travel to any Zerg base structure, just in time to defend our fledgling expansion base from a Protoss attack. At her mightiest, the Queen can take down an Ultralisk in a one-on-one fight.

As the battle went on and tech levels increased, we made heavy use of the Zerg’s new emphasis on units that turn enemy units against their owners. We sent an enemy who’d massed Protoss Carriers limping back to his base by attacking with a group of Corrupter air-to-air units that, instead of simply destroying enemies, infests them and turns them into stationary turrets that fire on former allies until the units are destroyed or the turrets expire. Then we snuck a few burrowed Infesters into a Terran base and spewed Zerg-juice on their command center and barracks, infesting them for a short time and causing them to automatically spawn a dozen Zerg-infested Marines that wiped out their SCV harvesters before they knew what hit them. That’ll teach our opponent to forget to build base defenses with stealth detection!

Before too long our Zerg successfully overran the Terran and Protoss enemies with a swarm of Zerglings, Roaches, Hydralisks, Mutalisks, and Ultralisks. It was quite a sight! After spending several hours with the bugs, we’d say it’s likely that the Zerg are going to end up being our favorite faction once again. Nothing against the Terrans or the Protoss, but we’re a sucker for a truly unique and drastically different race.

Apr 16, 2008