An easy way to do this is mass up vikings and banshees (no ground units). Keep hopping bases and making units, you can easily defend your bases with cloaked banshees and vikings.
When you are ready, you can fly your forces towards the 4th relic and then straight up and demolish the artifact.
If you want to be really cheap, near the end of the mission (when the fire wall draws near), lift your facs/raxes/starports and fly them to the right of the map (where the last relic is) and just wait along with your banshees and vikings. The toss base will be demolished, including his HT's and most of the units. Right before the fire wall reaches the artifact fly your banshees to demolish it (and the cannons shooting at you) and your vikings will easily cover you from the few remaining protoss air units.
First base: Pump banshees non-stop, be proactive with them and clear the first 3 relics and the bottom expo by the time the second attack wave comes around. You'll have to pull back to help with the first attack. Obviously repair any weakened banshees (<- important) Expo to the bottom if you want, or just transfer buildings over when have to. Should be 4 attack waves overall.
Second base (bottom right near second relic): Move here when you have to, keep pumping banshees. As soon as you land on your bottom part here, start clearing out the main protoss base. Float your factory up to the north so you can get advanced warning on when the protoss moves out to attack you. You'll again have to do picking attacks here and bounce back and forth between defending and attacking, but you should be able to clear them out without many troubles.
Third base (Protoss old base): Build a second starport here with reactor and start pumping vikings from this one. Use your banshees to clear out the northish expo if you expanded earlier, and mine from both these at once, if not, don't bother. Takes too long to establish otherwise. Keep up the defense while you bring up your viking numbers (Don't go crazy, 8 or so should be enough, as long as you don't lose too many being silly). Keep pumping your banshees from your first starport. Should be at a very solid air army by now. When you feel comfortable (or feel able to snipe out the warp prisms in 1 hit), start moving into the south protoss base. Clear this out and move over for the final push.
Forth base (Second old protoss base): Again here, start pumping more banshee's and vikings. Use your barracks to pump a small force of marauders if you're having trouble dodging storms, and use these to snipe them before you move in. Clear out the last relic and start moving into the main base, being sure to avoid the storms as best as possible. As said in other posts, here you can sit back and wait against the edge of the map for the fire to destroy part of the base if you want, or you can be a man and take out the base with force.
If you have Science Vessels by now, you won't be reading here for help...
Base 1 Location: As soon as you get your first base, get a few more SCVs, start producing more banshees and quickly add on a second starport (as far to the right as you can get it in your first base) keep making additional banshees. Cloak your banshees and clear the 3 nearby artifact areas. Watch the minimap, you can see a group moving out of the top left toss base, thats the signal to come home. Mine from this base as long as you possibly can. When you've cleared all of the artifact spots its time to start working towards base 2.
Base 2 Location: Base 2 has 3 pylons total, 2 in the middle 1 up north. Start in the south, cloak and snipe the two pylons in the middle. Clear the base as fast as possible from that point. Float all of your buildings over and establish yourself. By the time you've landed the flame should just about be consuming the merc building. At this point I spent mins to get the 3 merc vikings, they do wonders with AA for the rest of the mission. Keep producing more banshees and an occasional viking. Essentially now you need to clear out the spot just a tiny bit east of you (don't go too far, you'll go into the base) and then push south and there should be a small min patch there.
Base 3 Location: Clear out this min patch to the south east of your 2nd base. It only has a few cannons and units. Don't go too far east or you'll wind up in a small protoss base. Mine here for a while, land your starports as far to the right as you can and resume producing banshee/viking. Time to start clearing out the protoss base immediately to the right of you, this is Base 4.
Base 4 Location: You'll have to fly around and dodge some storms, but pretty much if you've been getting your bases fast enough and have been producing from 2 starports the whole time you shouldn't have many problems. Once you've cleared it, move on over from Base 3 and as usual put the starports as far right as you safely can. This is the final base you get, don't move out until the fire is almost going to burn your CC. Keep producing air units like mad. When the fire is almost ontop of your CC it's time to lift it. Lift your rax and fact at the same time, send them as far to the right as possible. Meanwhile just a little bit east of your position is the 4th artifact, go ahead and clear it out and grab it.
Race the clock: Now if you've been doing well you have enough forces to just outright crack what is left. Favor the right hand side as much as possible and push north through the toss base. You should fairly comfortably kill what remains including the temple. I believe I finished the mission with 8-10 banshees and 3-5 vikings and a few scvs before the fire was in danger of hitting the temple. If you haven't been doing well you should wait a little longer and let the fire do as much work for you as possible. Just don't wait too long or else you're boned.
I think this mission took me 3 tries, one time I just failed miserably, died getting base 2. Second time I died while I was taking base 3. Third time I managed to finish.
I just made banshee and some vikings, go to de bottom right where there is a relic, with at least 20 banshee, go near the edge and kill the cannon u will find, scan and kill the observer over the temple, use your cloacked banshee to do the rest. Quite easy, only problems is dodging storms really...
On August 20 2010 07:03 Kaboomerang wrote: Just Get Science Vessels+Mass Banshees+6-8Vikings, the the Vessels healing damaged banshee(get vandium armor upgrades) you won't lose any.
this. I got the attack upgrades, and I also wiped out half of the last base. to be fair, I did it with full research.
Marine/medic/viking/banshee with some science vessels works pretty well if you have the tech reactor. You just have to make it a point to kill the colossi before they do significant damage- marines will clean up everything else up.
It takes a while longer this way, but once you have a significant force, you can just roll through everything.
I've done it multiple times on brutal, but I''ve always had a main force of banshees.
It seems this mission is very exploitable with cloaked units, so I backed up the banshees with ghost/spectre and wraith instead of vikings.
You will be pretty low on money, so you can't just a-move your force in this mission and remake it if they die. Here are a few tips:
If you have orbital command, use mules to mine the minerals faster so you can move on to other mining sites more quickly and thereby having a greater force at the end of the mission.
If you went for raven use the pdd to minimize damage to your units.
If you went for science vessels, make them early on and use them to repair your force instead of scvs.
Watch out for storm! Especially near the temple at the end. If you get hit by storm I recommend you retreat and repair before going back, but try to snipe them while cloaked. As usual, near the temple try to take out the detection fast, there is an observer for detection also and not just cannons, so snipe it if you can. Also be aware of the cannons behind the temple which may provide detection to nearby units if you get too close.
Also if you feel like a baller, make a lot of shadow ops when mining the last base and nuke the temple to hell
I ended up making a whack of Banshees and Vikings, flew them to a safe spot on the extreme right edge of the map as I massed more and more. I got resources for massing units by taking easy expos. I skipped any large fights that would reduce my force.
From there, I waited until the wall of fire moved across the map. It wipes out all defenders, including the majority of those guarding the artifact. When the wall of fire did enough damage to the defenders, and was nearing the artifact (I think it even lowers it's shield), I just skimmed north along the edge of the map and took it down.
There's a blind spot if you kill all the cannons on the way to the artifact, you have to get it just right. I didn't think to take a screenshot of it.
When you have to move your base, move to the closest base, NOT the protoss base. Squeeze out 2 or 3 more Banshees then move out.
Basically I run my banshees in along the very top of the map and once I get to the far right edge, I start killing cannons along the way. Usually have 8~ banshees left at this point. 6 of them die because the blind spot can only fit 2, but the 2 left kill the Artifact before they're out of energy.
I recommend saving your game as you fly in and experiment yourself for a little bit to find this blind spot if you're having trouble doing the mission "honorably".
This mission is really, really easy as long as you're quick enough with expanding. After you kill the first Protoss base, you should always be on 2 bases. There's one right down the ramp of that base, one to the south and another one when you kill the next Protoss base. I muscled my way through with tanks + m&m, but I'm pretty sure most unit combos would have been good enough as long as you mine out the entire map.
edit: I also did it pretty early, without OC or tech reactors. This mission really shouldn't be a problem, just don't be overafraid of the fire. It's pretty slow.
Fastest way to do it is simple: Build as many Banshees as you can off of your first base (like really use all the gas, build the Starport on the right ledge of your base so the Nova reaches it last). Build maybe a bunker against the incomming forces, but with cloack you should be fine.
When the Firenova reaches your base, build Banshees as long as you can! When you run out of gas/time save the game and look for a way to the top right corner of the map (there are some cannons there so you will lose some). Kill the cannons behind the target structure and after that the target structure itself. Pretty cheesy and easy =)
I just played it with a standard tank-viking-banshee-merc build. It works fine. Don't get too many banshees; they are pretty useless I found as the tossers have tons of detection. Get 2-3expos running at once with vikings and tanks and turrets to defend. And then just slow push your way to the thing you have to destroy. Don't forget upgrades.
I did this really early so I didn't have many units and I was hoarding my money so I had no upgrades or mercenaries. I wanted all 3 Protoss relics so I could sell research for cash for All In so I couldn't use the back door exploit. After several failed attempts I ended up buying both Goliath upgrades and pushed with mass Goliaths with SCVs repairing on the final base and it worked surprisingly well.
I used a similar method for killing the structure, but I did the opposite of a speed run, really. I wanted to get all the research, so I did some base hopping.
Mined out the first base, then moved to the second mini-base to the immediate right. Didn't kill the protoss base, just floated over to the base below it. Brought marines/scvs/etc. with a single medivac. When I did this transfer, I also made a Tech lab with my Factory and made a viking during that cycle. Kept massing Banshees. Eventually, I floated my Factory at the bottom of the map and to the right side of the map to the immediate left of the last Research, bringing my Viking with it. Made a Tech Lab on the Factory, made a Siege Tank, then Siege Moded up. Lifted the Factory for sight, and the tank kills the Templar, then I just landed my Viking on top of the Research and moved my Factory a bit lower to be safe from counterattack (eventually, it was my only surviving building.)
That little spot of non-detection was such a relief. I kept microing to keep banshees alive and it was getting annoying.
EPT
