Using the master archives in HotS and LotV made chasing achievements much easier. Why can’t I have the same thing for WoL? It can’t be that hard to make a tab that lets me pick from max possible credits and research.
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WoL Master Archive cannot work in the same manner as HotS ot LotV for a simple reason.
WoL’s mission order is too flexible.
Under the right circumstances, you can have Battlecruisers and Tech Reactor on Agria, Meinhoff, Tarsonis or Redstone III.
Trust me, it’s very possible.
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If you check one of my Q and As, you can get an idea how to pull it off.
Even upgraded Siege Tanks or Goliaths can be kinda hillarious in early missions.
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That sounds fun though! It would give me a new play experience a decade into playing the game.
New achievements for the campaign, and ridiculous difficulty if you used the wrong missions order in WoL where other campaigns don’t punish you thanks to Master Archives system, justify bringing this back to attention.
Hopefully my search did bring me the most recent topic about this.
So…Wings of Liberty Master Archives when? 
Like mentioned above, unlike Hots and LotV, in WoL the number of mission order permutations is immense. Considering the available units, the available upgrades, the available mercenaries, the available research and the available credits, it makes creating a master archives a statistical nightmare.
However, I’ve often though that modifications to the in-game archives could achieve something that was fairly close to a master archives. Since the order is fixed in the in-game archives, it eliminates the permutations problem. Thus, any selected mission could have all the purchased mercenaries, upgrades and research that was available at that time refunded, which would give the player the option of respending it on what ever was available at that point in the campaign.
A simple example. Playing through a couple of the early missions and counting totals:
- For Liberation Day - nothing available
- For The Outlaws - nothing available
- For Zero Hour - nothing available
- For The Evacuation - 5 upgrade choices, 100000 credits
- For Smash & Grab - 8 upgrade choices, 1 merc choice, 200000 credits
- For The Devil’s Playground - 10 upgrade choices, 1 merc choice, 2 research options, 310000 credits.
From here, you finish Devil’s Playground and would like to experiment with different choices. You go to the in-game archives, select Devil’s Playground. Once there, the option to refund your previous choices returns the 310000 credits and the 1 research point to reallocate how ever you want. But, it’s limited to only the 10 upgrades, 1 merc and 2 research options that were available at the time of Devil’s Playground.
Or, you could decide to redo Smash & Grab. You get just the 200000 credits (no research was available yet) and only the upgrade choices that were available at that particular time.
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This is a good idea.
Another way of doing this is to provide enough credits and research points up to the earliest available point for that mission. Kind of like the opposite of how HOTS and LOTV is done.
Im pretty sure there is a bunch of saves some dude did that covers basically every mision with the most choices possible. The only downside is that once you load a game, you need to buy/contract/research everything you want, but beats doing the campaign again.
It’s actually not that complicated, the restrictions are:
- The Mar Sara set of missions can’t have upgrades/units unlocking because no access to the Hyperion at that time
- Missions within a set (Colonist, Artifact, Covert, Rebellion) can’t have units unlocked later in that same set.
- Missions unlocking an unit can’t have upgrades for that unit
- Credits can probably just be ignored. If not, then it’s just the max amount of 2.250.000 (according to a GameFaqs guide) minus the earnings from next missions in the set (it’s assuming that set is played after all others but before Final (Valerian)). But just ignoring credits seems better.
And that’s all.
Besides those restrictions, all units and upgrades would be available at all times, since that’s what replaying with the right mission order would provide.
Actually, having even less restrictions could be interesting/funny.
Still not as OP as the fully upgraded Queen of Blades with roaches, hydralisks and mutalisks on Char, IMO.
Regardless, mastery archives’ purpose is exactly about all this — get all units and upgrades possible for each and every mission. If this is technically achieveable (with no cheating, yaknow) by using separate saves for every mission… hell, why not just implement this straight into the game?
Because it was not conceived with that in mind. Also HotS is freaking easy regardless of composition. Order of HotS is irrelevant unless you play for achievements.
Yeah, this is probably the biggest reason. I’m not sure because I have never looking into its code, but the mission structure of WoL suggests that in order to make an archive there need to be quite a heavy modification.
How about just add option to play either version of All In after campaign is over? I mean, every other choice mission gives the option for the alternate in archives.
Picking a loadout for all techs and mercs before All In would make sense.
You’re supposed to have done that before Gates of Hell 
The idea is to have the Air and Nydus versions to choose from.
Yes, but you would have already beaten it. So it wouldn’t matter if you have Tech reactor on agria. You beat the game it unlocks everything and you can simply buy upgrades and lab items on the mission screen.
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Yea I cant really see the technical difficulty.
Do it like with HoTS.
Have whatever would be the max available upgrades/mercs/research for each mission, with simple tick boxes to choose.
If you want to have tech reactors on agria, tick a box.
The point of the master archives is to let you play around.
You can make it silly easy, or super hard. Just tick/untick upgrades.
Win WoL on Casual.
Play for achievements and Brutal with all the Tech.
Yeah. Makes sense.
MA was not intended for this Mass Effect like order.
…like you could do anyway?
You can complete WoL on casual, then hit the archives button just before All-In, and replay all missions on Brutal if you want.
And you can do that with master archives that little bit easier on LoTV & HoTS.