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For those having him at masteries already: which do you think are the best?
- Life regeneration could have a meaning if going mech, but otherwise with timed units, and bunkers regenerating already, reduced cooldown on infest structure seems much better
- Cooldown reduction for calldowns.. half and half, or do you think one is so much better to deserve all the points? Aleksander may be more powerful, but mastery points there max at -60 secs, while Apocalisk has a better "return of investment" at -90 secs maxed
- Longer duration for timed units seems like a great deal, especially to hoard them and attack at the right moment. However they rarely survive much in a fight to see another, so maybe having some civilians get the volatile explosive perk for additional burst may be better? Not being at 15, I've tried the volatile ability just using tanks, and was not much impressed by it, actually..
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Currently on Infest CD/Apoc CD/Duration. I've mostly ended up ignoring his factory/starport outside of tanks on Temple/Oblivion Express/Miner Evacuation, and infest is another powerful calldown where the mastery makes a significant difference in your usage. I like Apoc because it's more generally useful, if it were possible to know things like "Enemy comp will be air" before the mission I'd pick aleksander then but otherwise Apoc is "good enough" vs. air units while easily soloing enemy bases. I've got duration because it makes a difference for early rocks AND is powerful late game when you spam 200 marines.
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Yeah, 100% agree with what ChaosOS says above. The only thing I do different is divert just a few points from infest cooldown into health regen just to have some small amount of regen for those rare times I do use tanks (Temple/Trains).
I think Stukov is perhaps the best commander in the game for defending multiple locations at once. I was having a hard time on Lock and Load trying to hold each control point with bunkers while also maintaining a sizable pushing force, then I just realized I could just leave a single barracks at each control point and spawn an army at any of the 5 positions instantly any time I needed. 20 marines + the broodlings from infesting the bunker shuts down pretty much anything or at least hold it off long enough to spawn another 10 marines or send some reinforcements.
The map I've had the most trouble with is Vermillion Problem. Like others have said I like to bunker/barracks up the middle island and then send out waves to clear the areas, but the ramp choke points and winding ground paths really cut into the mobility and combat effectiveness of bunkers and zombie swarms. He doesn't really have a strong air army that can traverse the map freely and while his diamond backs are fast, they can't attack into a defended area without zombies to soak most of the damage for them.
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I took the same trio. Apoc reduction seems the clearest to me - rather have one ability on 210s cd than 2x 300s cd. When it comes to mutations, can spam Apoc "whenever" and save Aleksander for toughest times.
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Got all my stukov achivements! Now I don't have to worry about playing him again 
His infested design is pretty neat and unique, But I really don't like any of his factory or starport units. He also has some blatant weaknesses in his anti-air and fighting AOE compositions. I wouldn't call him horrible, he's just rather subpar and there are stronger commanders to use for any situation.
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He has libeators, 7 range marines and turrets that can move. I never found air to be a major issue. I agree with you on the factory and starport units though. Not really fun units to play around with in my opinion. In almost all my stukov games I went for mass marines with double e-bay ups. I would rate him below Vorazun and Nova, but his bunkers and his immense (almost free) pushing power makes him a very allround commander so I'd probably rank him the third or fourth strongest commander.
My main issue with the mass marine strategy is that it requires so little apm even on brutal. Just save up your resoures, move your barracks up and push the objective with massive waves. Oh, and both Alexander and Apocalisks are completely broken.
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I just hit level 10 with Stukov and I'm really enjoying his style so far I have to say. Sending hordes of zombies (who are probably chanting "Imhotep" if you listen closely) at your enemies is simply appealing to me. 
I didn't know that you could uproot the turrets too. This is just getting better and better!
What exactly are the queens good for?
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Never lost so much with another commander in the first levels... mech proved to be totally garbage. I then tried going bio with bunkers, and it was quit better, but without a competent ally, things may still get gloom.
Then I started going just marines, and man, they really pack a punch!! Just upgrade them, and summon hordes as needed. On missions where you have to defend a position, you can also morph some tanks or create some bunker mid-late game, but they are not really needed.
It's true that bunkers are more cost efficient, but they require to root to create units and regenerate (and they are so bulky, and need to be placed one by one). But what I liked less is that they require too much time to generate new units, while with barracks you can create marines in a blink of an eye.
Anyway, once I got my two calldowns and refined the marines strategy, everything was quite easy.
Regarding the opening: I played my last levels with a Nova ally, and since she easily handled first minutes, I just used to go:
- max SCV at 15
- CC at expo
- double gas
- first overlord
- rax
- factory -> lab on rax
- send first civilians to clear expo
Then I saturate bases and get all the upgrades before adding 3-4 rax and going all marines.
In the meantime, if my ally needs help, usually infest and calldowns are enough, with at worst an handful of marines.
Mid games you are flooded with resources, and you can morph wave after wave of deadly marines.
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I think the big annoyance about him is that there's no gas drain. There's no need to really take 4th gas, maybe it speeds up the upgrades a bit early on, but I often had 5k gas in the end. I even tried massing queens, like 30 of them, but I never ran out of gas. Sure, Raynor has the same "problem", but at least he has the option to go BCs. Stukov didn't really have any reasonable way to make gas army that would have any advantage over mindless rax(/bunker) strat. I think they really need to balance him a bit: make the units stronger and waves/marines a bit weaker.
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Stukov is definitely really strong when you set him up right. Either he or Zagara has the biggest difference in strength between level 1 and max level. The difference between his zombie army with and without all the upgrades is basically night and day. And I saw someone earlier say that he's bad at splitting up his attention (probably because of the singular direction towards the psi emitter) but I disagree; I think he's one of the best at splitting his attentions. At times I'm dealing with three fronts at once; mass zombies + marines in one direction, calldowns in another, and my mobile army in another. It's true that the zombies are relatively unreliable because they come in discrete waves, but enough barracks in the right place can give you a quick panic army really quickly. And his calldowns absolutely put the other summoning calldowns (hyperion, war bots, etc) to shame. It is a little annoying that the psi emitter can divert zombies you don't want it to divert; I think changing the eggs' rally point from move command to attack-move would be very helpful.
I'd say that Stukov is the commander that requires the most planning ahead of any of them. Which maybe means it requires the most knowledge of the missions. If you don't have things in place when you need them, you can be in big trouble, though his calldowns help mitigate this effect tremendously.
I never use banshees or diamondbacks. I think those are his most useless units. What I think would be the bees' knees (though it might be OP) is if they switched banshees with medivacs, which can pick up tanks in siege mode. Then I'd go infested tankivacs every game. Also I wouldn't mind a buff to the queen, and bumping her gas cost to 200 to compensate. Maybe make fungal instant cast and higher range, like the campaign infestor (I don't know why it isn't like that).
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I'd agree on most missions pre-positioning your army is enough to make up for its terrible mobility.
I'm also struggling for reasons to do anything but rush +3/+3 colonist/marine except to spend my huge bank. I find a handful of diamondbacks kinda useful against air comps where pulling units down so colonists can attack them is very helpful. Anti-air (in between big marine swells) seems a big weakness and his liberators are complete trash. Like they're not just weak, they feel bad to use because of their awkward fire time combined with almost no instant damage.
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The problem with his libs is that they're so damn useless en mass without individually microing their fire, since they'll all just dump the mini plague cloud on the first unit they come into range of.
I'm definitely at the point where I've given up on his factory and starport unless I need detection, mass marine/bunker is just too strong
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After playing a bunch of games, I honestly have to agree that anything other than bunkers/marines is a waste. It's good to build a few super tanky bunkers, but just maxing civilian ups and 3/3 ASAP while moving a few barracks to critical areas will already win against anything that isn't mass air+aoe. Bunker's help buffer against AoE, protecting a bunch of squishy infested while also being beefy as fuck(except when banes are involved...)
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Stukov seems to be the ideal Commander for me.  Just moving the Psi-Emitter around and the waves of zombies kill basically everything slowly but over time everything falls to the infested.
But I get a little performance-problem with Stukov, that I have not experienced with any other Commander before: the framerate drops down to around 20FPS sometimes when there are a lot of infested, broodlings, creep and cloak (Vorazuns pylons) around. The machine is quite good for SC2, Xeon E3-1231v3 @ 3.4GHz + GTX970 always delivered a full 60FPS at maximum settings, no matter what was on the screen, be it hundreds of zerglings or mass-cloaky units with a protoss mothership. The Left2Die-Missions in the Arcade where even bigger hordes of infested appear are also no problem, just when playing Stukov the framerate goes to hell...
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With my old computer I had FPS problemsd in lategame 4v4. And I had a great Video card. It improved when I changed CPU. I noticed that SC2 is heavily reliant on CPU regarding units in game.
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I always had problems before with coop because of shitty cpu (and low ram?). A good Stukov who spawns tons of infesteds is a whole new tier of problem for me. I have an intel core i3 530 for reference which is between recommended and minimum I believe with only 4gb ram.
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SC2 doesn't require a lot of RAM, perhaps faster would help though. Single thread CPU performance is the most important. I got to 4 fps today with Stukov massing infested under Dark Pylons with my 4460 (3.2-3.4 Ghz). I don't think Blizzard can do much at this point, but the cloaking tanking FPS is little strange.
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So what would be an ideal CPU for SC2? And I dont talk about those beasts that cost an arm and a leg 
Are there any CPU for around 180-200 euros that can handle those brutal coops without much frame drop?
btw I am asking because I want to make a motherboard/cpu upgrade and I m totally pc blinded
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I have a i5 6600K, and never a single problem. It may be just a bit over your budget, but since I have no issue at all, you can consider it as a upper threshold you can safely stay a bit under, to save some cash.
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On December 19 2016 05:08 Malhavoc wrote:
I have a i5 6600K, and never a single problem. It may be just a bit over your budget, but since I have no issue at all, you can consider it as a upper threshold you can safely stay a bit under, to save some cash.
Same here, very happy with it so far!
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EPT
