EPTCall Me Legion
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/zqTII.jpg)
Sorry; I couldn't resist.
Sorry; I couldn't resist.
I'll be honest: I wasn't too keen on the swarm host in the run-up to Beta. It looked exactly like something Zerg didn't need: another 'gee, I hope this works' mid-game three-base money-sink everyone would play with for a bit before giving up and rushing for hive behind a wall of infestors.
Then I started watching some streams, and I realised I'd been misled.
Starcraft 2, as you may have noticed, has a very well-defined visual language. All of the units look like what they do. Marauders are quite clearly tougher and more well-armed than marines. Roaches are more durable than Hydra. Sentries aren't suited to direct combat.
Parsing the Swarm Host with that same visual language, the Hosts themselves are clearly big fat helpless bullet-magnets, while locusts look... kind of hunched and downtrodden, like pensioners queuing for potatoes in an eastern bloc country to which Communism had been particularly unkind.
But appearances are, in this case, deceptive (and I think Blizzard should rectify this as soon as possible by redesigning the Locust graphics). Locusts are not downtrodden. They're a biological combine-harvester, and Swarm Hosts are not as cumbersome as they look either.
Three things in particular impressed me:
Mobility and Range
In WoL, Zerg is a race of extreme mobility: extremely good for 90% of the game, and extremely bad the moment they build Brood Lords. No other race is forced to hit the brakes quite so hard when the game runs long.
People say mech is immobile - and it is, when you're talking about repositioning your army a half-screen from where it is now. Lings - whoosh, they're there. Tanks - eight seconds of mechanical ballet. But across larger distances that fixed movement tax becomes less and less significant. Strictly speaking, mech is only immobile when it's pinned down and forced to deploy. The moment an opportunity arises to advance, it can cover ground pretty darn quickly.
Broodlords aren't like that. Their rate of progress is glacial even when unopposed, and despite being fliers often have to follow ground paths to keep their support close-by. They're undoubtedly powerful, but they're not necessarily the kind of powerful you always want to help you end the game.
Swarm Hosts occupy a nice middle-ground. They're mech-mobile: able to advance when the opportunity arises, siege up, present a credible threat, and retreat under cover of locust-fire if things aren't going so well. Splitting them up for multi-pronged attacks also isn't suicide.
Range is something Zergs learn to live without for most of the game, and here again Swarm Hosts buck the trend, trouncing siege tanks and giving the Tempest a run for its upgraded money. The range is such there's really no excuse for not burrowing on creep for a fast getaway, too.
Defensive Resilience
I watched a ZvP on Day[9]'s stream where my WoL-trained brain kept telling me 'Ok, it's over now'. But the swarm host core of the army, burrowed in an awkward position for the Protoss to get at, were able to hold the line. The Protoss overextended and quite suddenly found himself unable to chew the combined locust and reinforcement waves. Nothing conclusive, but definite glimmers of defender's advantage there.
Sheth's Swarm Welcome
I so christened a quite marvellous build in Sheth's stream chat last night (as my mild-manned alter-ego Jocelyn Sachs), and it dispels the biggest concern I'd had over HotS: that none of the new Zerg units would make the slightest difference to the first ten minutes.
Sheth's Swarm Welcome is a one (or possibly two) base queen/swarm host rush versus Protoss, and it catches your friendly neighbourhood forge-expander at a most inconvenient juncture. It's rather like the Protoss's own two-base builds, actually, in the sense that just before you were ready to finish pumping workers and build an army, there's something outside your base you have to kill (here swarm hosts and queens rather than gateway/robo units and a pylon/warp prism) before it snowballs out of control. Tick tock, tick tock.
I don't mind if Sheth's Swarm Welcome never makes it out of Beta as a viable build. I'm just pleased it happened at all.
Conclusion
I really, really like the Swarm Host. I like that they're positional and fragile, but with the mobility and range to avoid obliteration by the first stim-forward. I like that they can present a credible threat to expansions - even planetary fortresses - at a range that forces the enemy to come to you. I have no idea if they're balanced or not yet, but I hope they are, because Swarm Hosts look exactly like what Zerg needs.
