Detailed report on the zerg, also written by Lord Norris. The following article was translated from Korean, so apologies for the bad English.

Comparing to Protoss and Terran, the change of Zerg is quite significant. Around the 20ish PCs here playing SC2, two sentences are heard of most: “Zerg airforce is so fxxking powerful!” and “Terran really sucks!”. Of course these noob opinions are of no value at all, for talking about balance or strategic possibility is quite of nonsense.

Only six non-Advanced building (which means can be build during Hatchery period). The new Queen is a totally different unit, which walks on ground and can be morphed when you can morph Zerglings (both requires Spawning Pool), though one player can only own one Queen at a time. When you upgrade your Hatchery to Lair and then Hive, Queen can upgrade (using mineral and gas) herself, and get stronger, larger and able to cast more spells.

Basic Queen can build three structures, Creep Tumor which expands Creep (this is the only ability to expand Creep besides using Overlord, for the old Creep Colony has been removed), Sunken Cluster which fires at enemy, and Shrieker which detects invisible units and enlarges Sunken Cluster’s range of firing. Queen can burrow. Upgraded Queen can use an ability to restore HP of Zerg units and buildings, 50 energy for about 100HP; also Deep Tunnel, which makes the Queen burrow and teleport to a Zerg building; Toxic Creep, which makes units on a certain area of Creep to suffer damage continuously. When you are at Hatchery stage, the Queen seems to be your only anti-air unit.

Zergling has not changed much. It can morph into Baneling, and deal a small amount of area damage in a small region.

Overlord loses its capability of transporting and detection, instead it gains two new abilities. One is Slime, Overlord can spit onto certain mineral deposit and engulf it with Slime, which stops workers from gathering mineral from it. This Slime can be attacked and is removed while killed. Overlord can also create an area of Creep under it, but it must remain still to channel this ability, and when the Overlord moves, the Creep it generated will dispear soon if no Zerg building is built on it.

Overseer is morphed from Overlord; it lose the Slime and creating Creep abilities to become a detector, and moves faster; its radius of sight is increased when it remains still for a while.

Roach, which is talked about a lot recently, is described as a kind of “melee assault warrior”, or to say “larger Zergling”. Its only ability, regenerate HP very fast, made it quite tough.

After upgraded to Lair you will be able to build Hydralisk, and it still can morph to Lurker;

Mutalisk still has bouncing attack and can still morph to Guardian, but no longer to Devourer: new ATA unit is the Corrupter, a technical unit which does not deal real damage but gains possession of the air unit it has “corrupted” enough; the corrupted unit cannot move, only has no or weak attack which looks like that of Corruptor’s, and changes appearance. I myself did not build Corruptor.

Infestor is another unit which combined “sneak in” and “hack you”. It can move while burrowed, and infest all kinds of Terran building, and produce infested Terran Marine after infestation is completed; these Infested Marines fights about the same as normal Marines, but move slower.

As Overlord quitted transportation affairs, Zerg has Nydus Worm as the new transporter. It has two forms; when it is build it looks like sandworm, but when deployed it looks just like a piece of sh*t. It cannot move after deployed, and can swallow very large quantity of friendly units—-I stuffed 24 zerglings, one Queen, several Hydralisks and Lurkers into it, and the yellow bar (which possibly is the capacity of its transpotation, but I am not that sure) under its HP bar only increases 1/10, so if I guess it right, it has nearly infinite capacity. The units in it can then get out from any Nydus Worm in “sh*t” form, or you can morph this one back to sandworm form, let it run to your destination and let it morph to Nydus form and vomit the units out. Whatever how many units it has swallowed, any of Nydus Worms killed will not get any of units they swallowed drop out. This seems to me that they are only entrances and exits instead of vessels, but here comes the question: where will the units they swallowed be, if my Nydus Worms are all dead?

Then is the Ultralisk. It is strong and powerful as reported earlier. It does cleaving splash damage. All in all, its power matches its size, and its size matches its name.

Evolution!

In this build, Zerg shows clearly a concept: Evolution. I noticed that nearly all Zerg units can evolve into new, more special or more specialized units, like Zergling, Overlord, Mutalisk, Hydralisk, Queen, etc. Zerg also has a very different upgrading system comparing to those of Protess and Terran, which more deeply shows the concept of Evolution. Everybody know that Protoss and Terran upgrade their units in ways like “infantry weaponry”, “airforce armor”, etc., and every upgrade affects many kinds of units; but Zerg is different, they evolve individually, usually one tech affects only one unit, besides Burrowing. For example, Zergling lv1 upgrade increases its movement speed, lv2 +2 to damage and +1 to defence, Lv3 +1 to damage and +2 defence. Overlord lv1 increases movement speed and defence, lv2 and 3 increases defence. Nearly all other Zerg upgrades increases attack and defence at the same time. This may save your expense on single type of units, but reduces tech relations between unit types a lot.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under News, Screenshots, Units. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.