Starcraft – What’s the best strategy for beating the “Welcome to the jungle” mission from the Wings of Liberty single-player campaign

Ok so I ended up beating it. 100%!

Here's a video of someone else beating it on Brutal with a different, and possibly better, strategy than I describe below.

Again, there are probably infinite ways to do it, but here is how I did it:

• Heavy use of save and load. Save before Kerrigan shows up and after she retreats. If you lose too many units (like 3 BCs to Kerrigans stupid magic hand wave instakill bull), then reload.

• Take out the Nydus worms as flying units are easy to deal with

• Build BCs to make use of Yamato cannon on Kerrigan and the Leviathan (the giant flying guy).

• Build Marines and medics; make use of stim.

• Build a few Science Vessels to help with healing your BCs. Build them early.

• Build, and never stop building, SCVs. Trust me, I had the research that lets me train 2 SCVs at once, and I NEVER stopped building them. You need them for repair and to keep up with the mineral gathering.

• Keep SCVs near chokes to repair

• Construct flame towers near the choke. If you didn't get flame towers, build a few planetary fortresses at the chokes and have a bunch of SCVs there to auto-repair (no seriously, it'll work, lots of HP, lots of splash damage).

• Construct a few flame towers sporadically in your base to deal with random drop pods.

• Construct Barracks at each choke point to serve as a wall between incoming enemies. This also helps keep Kerrigan back.

• Get as many ship and infantry upgrades as you can. Do it early.

• Make use of mind control towers. Build them early on the left and the right sides.

• Use mind controls towers to grab as many brood lords and Ultralisks as you can. Broodlords are imba and you want to make use of the infinite infantry they can provide. Mind controlling Ultralisks is amazing too. Especially if you have medics there to heal them.

• Build a mind control tower and turret behind your mineral line to mind control brood lords that attack from behind. Mind controlled units will NOT be affected by the nova blast (lulz)

• Make sure you have mind control energy when the big ultra push happens toward the end of the mission.

• Save a Nova blast for when the Leviathan attacks. It will decimate you otherwise because it constantly spawns Mutalisks and Broodlords

• If Kerrigan or the Leviathan isn't around when you needed to nova blast, then it's likely that you need to reload a recent save. Though don't Nova blast too soon when Kerrigan shows up. The blast has limited range, and you want to wait for the next wave of flyers/worms that quickly follows her.

• Just before the Leviathan shows up, start cranking out some vikings to deal.

• The drop-pod research is useless. Get the Tech-reactor research.

• If you ever lose too many key units or structures (especially in the beginning), reload from the last save. It will end up costing you the mission in the long run.

• Tanks don't work so well because Kerrigan's area of effect attack can easily clean out 4-5 tanks and there's not much you can do. This makes units like BCs more cost effective because they can get out of the way.

• Buildings work great at attracting Kerrigan's focus. She will spend her energy doing an AoE to the building and not doing it to your units. Also, keeping a building alive is much easier against her because they have tons of HP and huge surface area to repair

• Don't use supply Depots at your choke. They do not have enough HP or surface area to repair. You aren't going to leave your base anyway (not with units that don't fly that is...)

You're falling into the trap of "What would be good right now." This is a mistake when evaluating strategy. Any choice at this stage will necessarily be too late as it requires a time and resource investment that can't be made instantly. Instead I would suggest the following:

Void Rays take a long time to build and represent a substantial Vespene investment. This should allow you to produce as substantially larger army against a Protoss player focusing solely on Void Rays. A small investment in defensive structures will keep off a small force of Void Rays, however any larger force of Void Rays is better handled by direct assault on the Protoss base as you can produce a more cost effective force.

Bear in mind that a Protoss player investing in a gas heavy strategy (like Void Rays) will have an excess of minerals. The result is that their defensive force will largely be made of Zealots. Take this into account. Additionally, they are also very likely to expand as expansions are made out of minerals and provide excess gas very quickly.

Finally, I recommend better scouting. Seeing an early second Assimilator is a tell-tale sign of a Void Ray rush.

A word to Protoss players: A Void Ray rush is not a sustainable strategy, neither are mass Void Rays before you have a Mothership out. However, Void Rays do complement a Tier 1/1.5 force very nicely, especially armored units with High HP.