Campaign - brutal difficulty (keep it spoilerfree)

anyone else find that survive for twenty minutes mission early on a blast on brutal?

I mean, this is the first survival mission in an rts where I could not just build up a force and mop up the comp's base on. It had me struggling pretty hardcore.

Hardest missions so far are the ones in Zeratuls vision... the fourth one (the future without Kerrigan) was a bitch to beat. Kept getting about 1,900 kills after Artanis warps in and then I would die... And I'm playing on hard... guess my strategy of just making cannons and high templar to warp into archons later was a fail strat

2 bunkers in front with 4 scvs with auto-repair somewhere near them on both sides. Marines inside + 2 maras for slow on archons. Later, put 2 planetery fortresses down @ east to block your ramp + expand to another mineral field.

Put 4-5 tanks behind bunkers on both sides.
Make MnM for Anti-Air + scouting the ruins for +protoss tech points.
When you get to use the laser yourself on anything you want, immediately hotkey it to a free hotkey. Kill every immortal and colossus you see with the laser. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
Fuck the archons and templars, they'll crash on the bunks.
When the door drops below 1400 hp(or maybe it was 1900?), just keep killing the door. Don't try to kill the units any more, it's useless.

One of the easy missions if you don it right

I didn;t bother with helions or even bunkers at all (actually I made 1 bunker at each side at the start cuz well he said so ) You will never get hold of managing repairs well (and they cost too). I just massed marines, firebats and medics at around 2:1:1 Just keep your forces cohesive so firebats dont run away from medics. Firebats make the most damage but you dont need way too many just a healthy number (if you bought the upgrade for them before it certainly helps), they are bio so medics keep em alive and rest is marines to shoot big guys, straglers and help take down buildings faster. You can really afford to stim all the time. Just make 2 big chunks of bio balls and should be fine. Can also do the kill 15 buildings at night achievement.

Helions are pretty fail. I know it's the theme of the mission but...
The are mechanical so they slowly die even with extreme micro, wile you can attack move with you bioballs
If you repair you have to keep SCV close and waste minerals, and those SCV are not working and prone to dieing
They are pretty bad vs buildings anyways

Build Marines and Medics and make sure stim is reasearched.

Just build marines and medics. Wall off your chokes with depots and bunkers if you want, I did, I don't think it really helped. Just make sure to have lots of marines and medics. Keep stimming as much as you want (esp last 30 seconds of each night wave) When day breaks just run your guys out, stim and kill as much as you can, and run back in when there are 30 seconds left.

BRUTAL. :O

15/29 missions complete on brutal now. I feel so pro. But seriously, ouch, I heard going ghosts/tanks is good for the odin mission but this jackass just dies so fast, and they always focus fire repairing scvs.

First thing is don't panic. There are 3 entrances to your base. The enemy will come in waves 1 entrance at a time for a good part of the game.
Start by queueing up more probes and putting down a 2nd forge + robotics bay so you can train colossi.
Hotkey all your ground forces together, and hotkey all your air units together. Watch the observers closely. You'll see the enemy massing in front of them before attacking. Move your army to protect the cannons. Don't cross the bridges.
Keep making colossi and keep up all the upgrades both air and ground. Non stop. Also, try to replenish your phoenix numbers if any die.
I started to float on minerals around the 16th minute mark before the archives achievement, so I walled off the south-eastern bridge with lots of cannons.
When the hybrids will start coming, lift them up with the phoenixes and focus fire. Do this on the ranged ones preferably, but later on use it on all the hybrids you encounter.
Finishing the archives bonus mission should be a cake-walk at that point. I was floating on around 5K mins and 200/200 food army worth of colossi/phoenixes/voids.
Once the archives submerge, retreat to the higher ground of your base and start to wall off with cannons too.
If you start losing units, make colossi and void rays. No more phoenixes.
At this point you should easily have 3-3-3 ground army and 3-0 air army. When I killed the 2500 necessary, I just kinda gave up after that. I didn't build anything any more. The enemy needed another 25 minutes to finally beat down my whole army :/. The corruptors and mass mutas come waaaay too late for the Z. Before that, the heroes+ void rays are unkillable.

A good tip to keep SCVs alive when repairing (esp on brutal) is to have a medic nearby them healing them as they repair. They are worth their weight in gold and saves loads of SCVs.
Also Maurauders with stim are useful at chokes in bunkers (esp. the drilling mission) with he concussive shell upgrade. They slow the first unit down, so the whole column slows whilst the seige tanks blast away and take em out

I lose a minimum of one marine, insta-gibbed on the first static encampment, and usually enough that I lose the second marine on the next encounter (if I'm lucky I can hold that one death until the second real group, NOT the large scripted re-enforcement event where it autosaves). Best I've ever come out of the reinforcement event is Raynor + 6. By the time I kill the 4 guarding the one holo-billboard, and the 7 + the vehicle at the people, I've never had anything but Raynor still alive. The people will get me through to the 3 vikings, but by then I'm out of people, Raynor almost dead, and gg.

I am a-moving, and I try to exploit the 1 extra range of Raynor. I guess I need to build some almost "fortified" positions & use Raynor to lead them into the traps or something.

I move to hard - and its a complete cakewalk (of course) - I think I had Raynor + 10 alive at the end LOL.

BTW - I am not looking for help on this...I WILL eventually get better (Beta I was a high Silver/low Gold player, so I know I've got a lot of learning still to do)

Required tech:
increased medic healing, but you got that first anyways, because you arn't a retard.
Suggested tech:
all techs for medic marine firebat
(I didn't have FB armour, and it would have made it even easier...)

Put 2 supply depots on each of your 2 starting enterences, so they are on either side, making a 1-depot wide empty spot.
Hold position 2 firebats per enterence right in the choke, and put a medic behind each of them.
I had 5 racks, 4 with reactor 1 with tech lab since I had the tech to allow medics without the tech lab. I just pumped straight medic marine, while maintaining 2 firebats/door. I lost 2-3 firebats and 10 or so marines, total, through the whole mission, mostly to the spine crawlers
Put spare depots on the south debris wall in prep for it getting busted down, with the same gap in the middle (putting a sunken depot just makes pathing to stand on it annoying)
During the day clear out wherever you want, you'll have so many medic marine just stim your way through the buildings with 2-3 groups. I didn't get the timing achiev, cause I had to wait for night to get the 2nd infestor cause I forgot about it.

1st archive is a piece of cake. Take the 2 medivacs and all the rines you got and go to the mercs. FF the archives, it falls. Take everything back to your base. Wall in with a bunker and 2 depots or a bunker and a barracks. Fill said bunker with war pigs. and put 3-5 scvs behind to defend it. That's it for base defence right there or add 1-2 tanks.

Lift rax or submerge depots and move out with 1-2 sieges and a handful of mnm + medivacs kill the nyuds ASAP, after that go to the cliff east of your base. Get everything on high ground and just wait for all the patrols to die. Add vikings, more marines (assuming medics don't die) and another 3-4 medivacs. Maybe some tanks too if you're not used to doing these surgical attacks.

Once that is done ferry everything back to the ground level but on the Zs side. go a little north kill the spores and all the crap that's there, and siege your tanks up right by the cliffs. FF the 2nd research centre with tanks.

When that's done you should have a sizeable army of vikings/tanks/mnm + a few medivacs.
Go back to the cliff from which you ferried your units down.

Get everything into the medivacs and send vikings+army in medivacs to the brutalisk. Try to avoid the random hydras along the way. Kill the brutal or not. Your choice. Once you've made the choice, go a little west. There will be a good landing spot with 4 spores around, but it's as close as you'll get to the 3rd archives.

Send in vikings 1st to tank the spores while the medivacs unload. After they unload, change the vikings into ground form. Kill the spores and move up to the hive+3rd RC. siege tanks so that they will hit the centre. put everything around the tanks so roaches won't take pot shots at them. Depending where Kerri is, either FF the RC or don't. If she's already by the centre (very rare) just FF the centre with everything you've got. stim the rines, siege the tanks, attack with vikings. It will fall if you're army is big enough.

The 3rd (?) mission I think - the 30 minute holdout against the zerg - I somehow managed to pull off a "victory" with a floating CC being attacked by a swarm of mutas with exactly 235hp left at the timer expiry. THe day/night mission I got just massacared Night #8, had one supply depot left & about 5 units. Managed to take out the last 12 buildings before Night 9.

I waited until I had tanks to do this one. The hardest trains are the super-fast ones - getting a bunch of Diamondbacks and focus firing is the key. Use tanks to kill the marauder packs before they become a problem and get some vikings for the last train, to clear away the banshees. Not the hardest, but I had to redo that last train a few times.

Probably the first truly hard mission, the key here is to deal with problems before they arrive. Wall off with bunkers and siege tanks and get SCVs patrolling for repairs. When you get manual laser control, deal with Colossi, Immortals and finally Archons - in that order. Colossi are only a threat due to their sight-giving aspect, while Immortals will chew up your defenses. When Templar start appearing, use tanks to snipe them - this is vital. For air waves, kill Carriers, then Void Rays, then Transports. Your ground defense can handle anything warped in, but not void rays eating your tanks.

Some found this easy, some found it hard. The key is in the tip they give you about high ground - personally I had most success using tanks and marines, landing them on high ground and clearing away spore turrets and the like. For the first Data Core, well, just drop marines. For the second, drop on the high ground to the northwest of your base, clear away the spore crawlers, then land on the low ground. Move behind the data core with tanks and use medivacs to get sight, kill it from below.

The final one is the trickiest, and you just need to take some shots from spore colonies to get there. Land tanks on the high ground just outside the base (again, bring some marines for AA) and clear a safe patch on the ground, then push forwards. Use tanks to focus down the Data Core and marines to keep the area clear.

This one gets covered a lot, the key is to get a second forge and upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. Build nothing but colossi for the ground, and get pheonixes and void rays in the air. Use excess minerals to make cannons. When the hybrids come, use lift to render them harmless (ranged ones first, then the melee ones when you get more pheonix). This should make it much easier. I started making more and more carriers towards the end, which seemed to help a lot, too.

This one seems to cause pepople trouble. The key is aggressive banshee use. Build lots of them as soon as you can and repair damaged ones. Towards the later bases, get some vikings in the air to counter the 'toss air. Use a few tanks and marines to defend your base, and when transferring to the last base, get a medivac or two to ship units up onto the high ground.

The 3rd (?) mission I think - the 30 minute holdout against the zerg - I somehow managed to pull off a "victory" with a floating CC being attacked by a swarm of mutas with exactly 235hp left at the timer expiry.

Spamming pure colossi/phoenix with upgrades is getting me killed far faster than if I spam zealots as well, but with zealot spam I simply run out of resources and die around 1300-1500 kills. Without the zealots my colossi slowly die out, and I end up getting murdered by the pure zerg attack that comes from two directions at a time early on.