Starcraft: Enslavers Walkthrough and Strategy Guide

Starcraft: Enslavers is a bonus campaign located in the campaign directory of the Starcraft maps folder. It is set shortly after the events of the main game. A notorious pirate, Allen Schezar, has found a way to control a Zerg cerebrate. You must defeat him, his militia, and his pet Zerg swarm.

The Enslavers campaign is marked as "Veteran level". This is no exaggeration: it's significantly harder than anything in the original game, and its five missions range from tricky to near-impossible. The computer cheats on a ludicrous scale, giving itself huge awards of bonus resources while you struggle to keep a trickle of income flowing. Nevertheless, it is possible to win.

This campaign has a fork in the storyline. If you aid the Protoss in "Playing With Fire", you then play "The Rescue" followed by "The Final Blow". If you ignore the Protoss and kill the cerebrate, you play "Assault on Aiur" instead.

There is already a strategy guide out there, but it assumes you have the Brood War expansion installed. As the missions came as part of the original Starcraft release, I wanted a strategy guide that used only the original units.

Contents

Mission 1: Schezar's Scavengers

Immediately head west and kill the three marines guarding the resources, and get busy building a command center, refinery, and a couple of supply depots. As soon as the command center is complete, get it churning out more SCVs. When you've got around 8 SCVs gathering minerals and a couple gathering gas, build a barracks. Build a pair of bunkers to guard each of the two bridges, then get an engineering bay and place a few missile turrets around the coastline. You'll get some minor harassment from enemy units while you're doing all this, but nothing too severe at this point (at least if you build a few spare SCVs and leave them near your bunkers for emergency repairs). Air attacks will mostly come from the west and northern sides of your island, so concentrate your turrets there. Then climb the tech tree to get siege tanks with siege mode. Two or three at each bridge should do. At this point you'll want to build a few more SCVs to gather resources faster.

Your next job is to secure more resources. Build an armory, then build 4-6 SCVs, 6 siege tanks, 6 goliaths, and 8-12 marines. Directly north of your base is a mineral outcrop that is defended only by a couple of sunken colonies. Dropships make it a little easier to get your forces over there without running into enemy troops or Zerg sunken colonies. Build yourself a new command center here, and surround it with tanks, bunkers, and missile turrets. Don't skimp on the defences; this base will get hit frequently from here onwards. At this point, you should probably get a starport and start building wraiths; they're useful for discouraging enemy siege tanks and spotting for your own.

Now you can work on eliminating the Zerg. There are two Zerg bases: purple in the northeast corner (directly east of your new base), and orange (to the west, surrounding Schezar's base). For the sake of not having to fight on two fronts, I prefer dealing with the purple base first. Use a force of 6-8 siege tanks, 5-8 goliaths, a few SCVs for repairs, and possibly a few wraiths if you've built up to a starport.

The purple base is up a ramp behind a sunken colony, and so it's tricky to get a line of sight to bombard it with siege tanks. Anything getting to the top of the ramp will immediately draw lots of enemy attention (beware of the ultralisks!). Air units can make it a lot easier by acting as spotters for your tanks, but be careful of the spore colonies.

Now that you've cleared the eastern part of the map, it's a straightforward case of building up your forces again and rolling west to crush the orange Zerg and Schezar's Terrans. You'll want to take a science vessel with you to detect cloaked wraiths and spider mines, so build yourself a science facility now. If you run out of resources, just move your secondary base to the spot where the purple Zerg were. You'll encounter heavy resistance as you cross the bridge to the orange base, but if you use half your siege tanks at a time to cover the advance of the others, and keep your wraiths close, you'll make it across.

Speed is more important than upgrading your troops in this mission. Buy cheap firepower upgrades such as U-238 shells and level 1 infantry/vehicle weapons, but you probably won't have a lot of minerals to spare for higher-level upgrades.

Time to complete: about 2.5 hours.

Mission 2a: Playing With Fire

First of all, start churning out SCVs and gathering minerals. Use Magellan to scout the island you're on: you'll find the only land bridge is to the west, and there's a vespene geyser far to the east.

Your immediate priorities are to defend the base and climb the tech tree to siege tanks. Build about 8 SCVs to gather minerals, then use the next couple to build a refinery and bunkers to guard the bridge. Build an engineering bay and defend the rest of the coast with missile turrets. There are three main spots the enemy will attack: the bridge, the northern tip of the island, and just west of the vespene geyser. Enemy attacks will grow larger as the game progresses, so you'll need to keep building more turrets to keep them at bay. Then build your academy and factory with machine shop, and start making tanks. Build more SCVs as necessary for repairs, building more supply depots, and hauling resources.

While you're starting your base, an overlord will drop a few zerglings nearby just to mess with you. Stay frosty.

You may want to build a second command center just for the refinery, as the vespene geyser is an annoyingly long way from the mineral deposits. If you don't, it takes a lot of SCVs to keep the gas flowing at a reasonable rate.

If your objective is to rescue the Protoss, don't bother attacking the Zerg at all. Your defences should hold them off, especially if you keep a few SCVs around for repairs, and a few goliaths for anti-aircraft support. Enemy siege tanks will sometimes attack your main base from across the bridge. When this happens, Tom Kazansky is useful for attacking them while spotting for your own siege tanks.

The Terran forces are along the eastern edge of the map. Build an armory, a starport with control tower, and a science facility with physics lab. Now build an attack force: 5-6 each of siege tanks and goliaths in dropships, a couple of battlecruisers for air support, and some SCVs for repairs and construction. The battlecruisers are particularly useful here, as the Yamato gun can one-shot a missile turret while staying out of its range. Take Magellan with you as well, in case of cloaked wraiths or ghosts. Fly your assault force north from the vespene geyser and destroy the brown Terran base on the island. Then set up your own base there to take advantage of the extra resources. You'll want a couple of bunkers, missile turrets around the coast, and a few siege tanks to bombard anything that gets close. One thing that may happen is the red forces landing some reinforcements by dropship: expect ghosts, tanks, and goliaths.

Now you can attack the red Terran base to the north of your new base. Use the same sort of attack force as before. The Protoss captives are in the far northeast corner, and the mission will end in victory as soon as you get to them.

If you don't want to help the Protoss, carry on and attack the Zerg. The cerebrate is right in the center of the map, in the middle of the central island. The Zerg also have two outposts: one just across the bridge from your main base, and the other at the top of the map. The computer will keep trying to rebuild the outposts if you destroy them, so you might as well just assault the main base in the center of the map. The northern tip of the Zerg island has poor air defences, but there's a hive there. The south of the island has better defences, but has the advantage of being close to the ramp up to the cerebrate. As you can just Yamato-gun the spore and sunken colonies, however, landing at the south of the island is not particularly hard. The mission ends in victory as soon as you kill the cerebrate.

Again, I prefer to prioritise speed over troop upgrades in this mission, but there's certainly no harm in building an extra armory and chasing upgrades once you've got spare resources for it.

Time to complete: about 2.5 hours if you rescue the Protoss, or 3 hours if you kill the cerebrate.

Mission 2b: The Rescue

There are 3 Terran bases on the map: red in the northwest corner, brown in the southwest, and purple to the east. You start in the middle of the map, with no buildings but a sizeable force. You will have to move fast and multitask to get the best results.

Don't attack any of the bases with a direct assault: you'll just get wiped out. However, one of the bases, the brown one, has an exploitable weakness in its defences.

Send one observer directly west, so you can use it to scout the northern boundary of the brown base. It's best to leave it just outside the brown base entrance, to give you early warning of red and purple assaults. While you're doing that, send the rest of your air units south and slightly to the east (not directly south, as this gets you attacked by a turret), until they reach the water at the bottom of the map. Sticking close to the border of the map, fly west and you will come to one of the stasis cells, surrounded by three missile turrets. Try not to alert any of the goliaths lurking in the base while you do this, as they'll be a significant nuisance. Use Magellan to put a defensive matrix on Kazansky and one of the scouts, and send them in to take out the lower two turrets one at a time (you can send in the other two scouts afterwards, while the first two aircraft are absorbing the damage). You can then destroy the stasis cell, which will free the Danimoth and two probes.

You now have an arbiter backed up with a science vessel. This is a powerful combination: the arbiter will draw fire as the only visible unit, but the science vessel can protect it with a defensive matrix.

In the cleared area, immediately warp in a nexus and as many pylons as you can afford. Don't put them too close to the ramps, however, as they'll be spotted and attacked. Take the Danimoth and the other air units slightly north, and take out the SCVs and any nearby enemies. You can now use your probes to start gathering more minerals. You can use your air force to mop up the handful of enemies scattered around the base, but be careful not to stray too far: the north of the base is full of missile turrets, and you'll also need to guard your probes from attacks. You can also destroy the barracks, command center, and refinery, which will let you build your own assimilator.

While you're busy, your main force will be fighting off occasional raiding parties from red and purple. Your next priority is to rescue them before they succumb to attrition. Climb the tech tree until you have a robotics facility, then build two or three shuttles. Immediately use them to ferry your main force to your new base. If you're quick and alert, it's possible to rescue all of them, but don't worry if you've lost a few.

Now build a reaver. Use the Danimoth to cloak it, and it can bombard the siege tanks and bunkers at the base entrance.

From here onwards, you can proceed like a normal game. Clear out the remaining buildings from the brown base, and build a force to assault the other two bases. I like having a couple of reavers, half a dozen dragoons, a few zealots, and a couple of templars, with the Danimoth and Magellan providing support. Don't delay, but beware of leaving your base under-defended: you should warp in a shield battery and a few photon cannons to help protect your base while you're busy.

I prefer to attack the red base first, as they tend to send siege tanks and battlecruisers, which I find more annoying than the purple base's vulture and wraith attacks. Approach carefully with cloaked reavers, and you can blow up the Terran bunkers before sending the rest of your troops in to clean up. The base is also heavily spider-mined, so keep Magellan nearby to spot them. Be careful of your hero units at this stage of the game: it's frustrating to be winning the mission, then suddenly fail it because one unit got overwhelmed.

The stasis cell at the red base holds the Warbringer, a hero reaver. You'll probably be running low on resources at the southwest base by now, so warp in a nexus, pylons, and photon cannons here, and get busy gathering minerals.

Now take your forces to the southeast of the map (those shuttles from earlier come in useful here, particularly for the reavers). There's a barracks protected by a missile turret in the southeast corner. A little further north, there are two ramps down to another barracks protected by a bunker and missile turret. These will all be fairly straightforward to destroy.

Once you've done that, you can head north again and walk into the main purple base through the back entrance. As before, watch out for spider mines, and beware of the multiple factories and barracks that will be churning out troops to harass you. The final stasis cell contains Mojo, a scout pilot.

Time to complete: about 3 hours.

Mission 3a: Assault on Aiur

This is a tough one. You're going to get hit from all sides, almost from the very start.

Make a bunch of SCVs and set them to work gathering minerals. Send your goliaths and tanks to defend the three entrances to your base. Build a refinery and start gathering gas. Put a machine shop on your factory and research siege mode for your tanks. Also start building more bunkers and missile turrets around the entrances to your base. Start upgrading your marines at the engineering bay and academy. Upgrade firepower before armour, as most of your marines will be in bunkers anyway. Put another siege tank or two at each entrance.

Build a second factory and a starport with control tower. Now it's time to prepare your first attack force.

Build 6-8 tanks, 6-8 goliaths, a few wraiths, and some SCVs for field repairs. Take them directly east with Magellan following for backup. You will find the brown Terran base. Be careful - there are siege tanks behind the bunkers. With cloaked wraiths as spotters, your tanks can destroy the bunkers and missile turrets while staying out of range of brown's tanks. Once the missile turrets are gone, the tanks are vulnerable to your wraiths. This is the only brown base, so once you've destroyed it you've eliminated brown entirely from the game, making your life considerably easier. Return your forces to your base and repair them.

Next, build a comsat station on your command center. Build a second command center, science facility with covert ops, and a nuclear silo. Arm the silo while you research personnel cloaking and ocular implants. Build a second science facility with physics lab, and build a couple of battlecruisers while researching the Yamato gun. Whenever you get a spare moment, build a couple of armories and start upgrading your vehicles.

Then attack the Protoss just north of your base, making sure to take out the photon cannons and observers around the bridge. This should let you sneak a cloaked ghost across the bridge. Then drop a nuke on the temple, instantly taking it from 3000 to 1000 HP and clearing out any defenders from around it. Now bring up your battlecruisers, and you should be able to destroy the temple before the Protoss can stop you.

Once the temple is destroyed, the Protoss can't warp in any more troops or buildings, largely eliminating them as a threat. You may get one or two further Protoss attacks, but from now on you can now concentrate on attacking the Terran forces.

Go back to where the brown base was and establish your own expansion base. This may be a tough task, as red will likely attack while you're getting your defences set up. Expect to face battlecruisers, wraiths and siege tanks. It helps to park your tanks near one end of the bridge, and place a cloaked ghost on the bridge to spot for them. This will let you bombard enemy siege tanks as they approach.

Your expansion base should be ringed with bunkers and missile turrets - air attacks may come from any direction. Build a barracks and a factory with machine shop. This avoids overstretching your supply lines when you assault the red base.

This base will now be your staging point for the final assault. You'll need 6-8 siege tanks, 6-8 goliaths, 6-8 wraiths, a science vessel, a squad of ghosts, and some SCVs. If you've still got a battlecruiser or two, bring them along too. Once you're ready, head east across the bridge, destroying the bunker and missile turrets as you go.

Use the ghosts to scout for the rest of your force. They can sneak ahead to find out what you're up against, spot for your tanks, and lockdown any troublesome enemy vehicles. The science vessel is for detecting enemy ghosts, which will also be doing their best to lockdown your vehicles as you advance. There are also a few spider mines around, so remember to keep the science vessel close to the rest of your forces. Use the air units to scout the tops of the walls in case there are enemy siege tanks up there.

As you go through the entrance to Schezar's compound, you'll encounter two barracks and two factories. These are the main manufacturing facilities. Beyond those, up a ramp, there are three starports defended by missile turrets. Take all of these out, and most of red's manufacturing capability will be gone. Head around the south side of the raised area that had the starports - there may be a couple more factories here. At the eastern side of the base, you'll find the resource-gathering facilities, defended by bunkers and missile turrets. There'll be another barracks here, and probably a factory too. There are two more command centers with nuclear silos in a small annex to the east.

You'll need to destroy every red building to complete the mission. There are some buildings outside the walls: a bunker defending every bridge to the base, and a barracks defended by three missile turrets at the southernmost tip of the base.

If you run low on minerals before completing the mission, set up another expansion base by clearing out the Protoss just north of your main base. This may provoke another Protoss attack, but by this point they won't have many troops left. If you need even more minerals, try the cluster in the far northwest corner of the map, or the ones on the headland south and a little east of the Protoss temple site. The latter is particularly lightly defended.

Time to complete: about 2.5 hours

Mission 3b: The Final Blow

This mission is not even remotely fair. The computer gets the Torrasque, an 800-hitpoint ultralisk that respawns mere seconds after you kill it. Before long, it will also start spamming you with hordes of ultralisks and mutalisks from the Zerg, and squadrons of tanks and battlecruisers from the Terrans. This mission is not a fun challenge, more a way of inspiring you to invent new swearwords. It is a horrible, bloody, brutal meat grinder of a mission. I genuinely and seriously recommend doing something less masochistic, such as stapling your own body parts together.

Still here? Oh, fine. Right then.

First, a meta-game tip. If you feel things slipping out of control or you start to freeze up, pause the game. Take a few breaths and re-evaluate your position. Maybe get a snack and a drink. This gives your brain a chance to recover from the panic, and you'll make better decisions as a result.

The terrain for this mission is the same as for mission 3a. Most of the western half of the map, except for your base, is colonised by Zerg. There are two Zerg forces, orange and purple. The eastern half of the map is Schezar's base. The cerebrate, which you need to kill to stop the Torrasque from respawning, is in the main orange base near the middle of the north edge of the map.

Your base has three entrances. You'll need a couple of bunkers of marines at each of them, eventually backed up with siege tanks and photon cannons. I find photon cannons slightly preferable to missile turrets, as they can also attack ground troops and don't tie up an SCV during construction. On the other hand, they're not repairable like missile turrets are. See which one works better for you. You should also build air defences at the northwest corner of your base, as the Zerg like to send mutalisk swarms this way.

The Torrasque will come from the north and usually attack either the top or middle entrance to your base. You can get some breathing space in the early part of the mission by using the Danimoth to trap the Torrasque in stasis. This lets you move in reinforcements and repair your bunkers. The Warbringer is particularly helpful until you get siege tanks.

The first thing to do is set your probes and SCVs gathering minerals, and churn out more until you have about 8-10 of each on gathering duty. Then keep churning out SCVs. You'll want a couple of them at each base entrance to build and repair bunkers, and a couple more for general construction work.

Build a second barracks and two factories with machine shops. Start churning out marines, siege tanks, and dragoons. Put about 3 siege tanks and two bunkers of marines at each entrance to your base. Then build an attack force of 6-10 more tanks and around 6 dragoons, with a couple of probes and about 4 SCVs.

Take your attack force north with the Danimoth and Magellan, and flatten the purple Zerg outpost. If the Torrasque appears on the way, it won't attack if your troops are cloaked - but beware of overlords revealing them. Keep your factories making more tanks so that you always have a few in reserve - you'll need them to replace losses. Now quickly warp in a nexus, pylons, and a LOT of photon cannons (15 is a bare minimum). It is VITAL that you take and hold enemy positions in this mission - if you do not hold a Zerg position, the Zerg will quickly recolonise it from their other base. Not only do you need the minerals, you absolutely have to deny resources and hive locations to the enemy, otherwise you'll be overwhelmed. The advantage of Protoss rather than Terran bases is setup speed - you can warp in a lot of defences at once using just one or two probes.

While attacking, you should be moving up the Protoss tech tree towards scouts and templars, then arbiters. Send Mojo, Kazansky, and your existing scouts to join your attack force, and warp in a bunch more scouts. When you get templars, research psychic storm and put a couple at every entrance to every base - they're excellent at whittling down massed enemies, from mutalisk swarms to battlecruiser fleets. When you get arbiters, again, put one at every base entrance to protect your defenders. Arbiters are also extremely cheap (you will, at least, not be short of gas on this mission), so build some spares in case you lose any.

Bring up 3-4 more siege tanks to the new base and leave them there to help with the defences. Then take your attack force across the bridge just to the east. There's an orange Zerg outpost in the northwest corner of the map. Crush this one too. This one often has lots of scourges around it, so protect the Danimoth with a defensive matrix.

Orange will now bring in a lot of reinforcements by overlord. Shoot as many overlords down as possible with your air support and dragoons, otherwise you'll have ultralisks running amok among your forces. When orange runs out of reinforcements, warp in a nexus and pylons again, and place plenty of photon cannons all along the perimeter. You might also want to put a gateway here, so you can bring in reinforcements more easily. Again, bring up 3-4 more tanks and leave them in siege mode near the top of the ramp.

While you're doing this, attacks on your main base will be reaching a peak. You'll be facing mutalisk swarms backed up with guardians, zergling and ultralisk rushes, fleets of battlecruisers, and an irritating number of siege tanks. It's easy to get distracted when you're trying to take a Zerg position and build another base there, but keep rebuilding your defences! With your new bases, you should have enough minerals to keep replacing bunkers, missile turrets, and photon cannons. At some point, put a comsat station on your command center; you'll appreciate it when ghosts start making a nuisance of themselves or some wraiths make it past your missile turrets.

Take your attack force east now, to the main orange base. Stay near the north edge of the map, along the bottom of the cliffs when you come to them. You'll see a spore colony first, and beyond this are a hatchery and then a hive. Take these and the drones out, and you have crippled orange! This is a tipping point in the mission, and things will get easier from here on.

Northeast of the hive is the cerebrate, surrounded by spore and sunken colonies. Kill it, and never worry about seeing that %$*! Torrasque again.

If orange has any minerals left, bring a probe over and set up an outpost as before, while your force mops up the remaining orange buildings.

At this point, unless you've been extremely fast, red and purple will be running out of resources. Their attacks will become weaker and more piecemeal, and if you've been maintaining your defences you should have little trouble holding them off. However, the computer somehow keeps finding spare change for battlecruisers down the back of the couch cushions for a long time, so don't let your guard down.

If at any point from now on you need more minerals, there's another outcrop on a headland a little way southwest of where the main orange base was. It's lightly defended by a few sunken/spore colonies, but nothing much else. Once those are gone, be very careful of your spending. Once an expansion base's resources are used up, don't be afraid to abandon it and use its defenders to reinforce your other bases or your attack force.

The remaining purple base, east of your start point, should now fall relatively easily. This leaves only red to deal with. Each bridge to the red base is defended by a bunker, which may contain ghosts as well as ordinary marines and firebats. As usual, there are also spider mines scattered around and throughout the base. Keep Magellan near the middle of your forces to act as a detector.

Go east across the bridge from where the main purple base was. Destroy the bunker and turrets. Take out any siege tanks on the walls, and head northeast through the entrance to the base. This is red's main manufacturing area, with two barracks and two factories. Once those are dealt with, head northeast again up a ramp to destroy three starports protected by missile turrets.

Now go back down the ramp and work your way around the south side of the raised area where the starports were. You'll find the command centers at the eastern side of the base. The main one is protected by bunkers and missile turrets at the northeastern side on the base, and there are two more with nuclear silos in a small enclosure to the east.

During all this, you'll be getting harassed by whatever red can throw at you, including having dropships land troops behind you. However, if you keep under the cover of your arbiters, this shouldn't be too much to deal with.

Once you've dealt with the main manufacturing and gathering infrastructure, it's just a mopping-up job. You'll need to find and destroy every last red building to win. One notable thing to watch out for is another red barracks outside the walls at the southernmost tip of the red base, with three missile turrets surrounding it. Even though you've practically won at this point, don't squander troops - it's still easy to run out of minerals if you aren't paying attention.

Time to complete: about 5 hours.

Back to: