He’s fun to have as an ally too. The things he says. I got carried on a couple mutations these past months from him. Apparently he can shell things from far away.
They should do a couple more commanders as good as they did Mengsk. I’d say either Selendis or Karass for protoss. For zerg, Overmind; he can have cerebrates as units.
To play optimally he’s constant apm maintenance, which can become a bit of a chore, unless you just sit back and shell
Dropping +terrible damage nukes is fun
Haveing the fastest eco spread, and most available play styles available includeing throwing nukes at everything and shattering enemy’s with eatth splitters, why would you not want to be the cause of mass destruction literally at the push of a button and in several different ways includeing call downs that dont take effort to bring to bear in full force and often
Mengsk is great. There you go you are convinced.
My advice:
-If you have troopers in bunkers, spread out your flamers and rocket guys. This makes a bigger difference than you can imagine. Partially empty bunkers do not make flamers and rockets weaker, being in the exact same location does.
-Lobbing missiles with ghosts and artillery is probably the best way to level. Make sure to always escort ghosts or at least bring medivacs (for escape) and be extremely cautious around battlecruisers since they cannot cloak normally.
-A bio ground army is nowhere near as good anymore since the nerf to medivac, engaging the enemy without the fear effect from contaminated strike is dangerous.
-Keep in mind that it costs 25% of a unit or building’s cost to repair it from the brink of death to 100%. In other words, mechanical elites are very expensive tanks/damage soakers.
So, did you buy him yet?
I have bought him years ago, I just did not level him up to 15 back then and found myself struggling playing him.
He is one of my last commanders I haven’t full prestiged (or even completed prestige 1) with. I am working up the courage to play him.
If you upload a replay, that would actually help us to help you.
Personally I made troopers all the way to 15. One or two BC’s gets added for extra flavor.
It’s a shame. Mengsk design himself is so creative. He deserves to come with his own map.
Back when co op was truly alive, they used to put out new maps, along with the new commanders. It was great.
If replay you want, replay you get but it ain’t pretty.
In short it is me, lvl 5 Mengsk, getting carried by my ally (Fenix lvl 1) on brutal.
I got no unit for the first 5mn+, am late on the mandate generation but waits until I have my biggest cooldown and hope this + my troops will be enough to take the easiest objective … but they aren’t and Fenix comes to save the day. After that I mostly cower and hide after Fenix’s army most of the game and the few times he does not tank for me it is a slaughter.
The game is ugly and I am lucky I got a good ally there.
EDIT: to be noted things I find difficult with Mengsk are
_ CC also has a rally for soldiers so I have to remember to use worker’s hotkey when I want my workers to go somewhere
_ plenty of low HP units (extremely vulnerable to AOE)
_ observer like unit which you need to siege up at each engage and then unsiege
_ an upgrade you want fast which is in the latest available building (core).
None of it is intuitive to me.
You seem to know the basics, if anything you should just watch Mengsk replays or keep playing to get used to it, I think you should’ve just gone for rocket troopers than sky fury, sky furies are more like giant killers than a dedicated anti-air unit even though they do the job well enough.
Here’s the replay, try to look for the first 7 minutes into the game especially, rest is optional.
Remember that this map is the one that you can get away being super greedy, other maps the second bunker goes to the ramp to defend attack wave.
So here’s how it goes:
This match I tried to mimic a low lv Mengsk to make it a bit easier to understand, so I removed my mastery points and prestige, didn’t used nukes nor Dogs of War to just show how it goes for the most part (you have no idea how my fingers were itchy to pop Zerg at 100 mandate lol), and tried to tone down the APM, though that didn’t work very well.
The reason why witness is very important for Mengsk is to spam calldowns and you will need it especially for Chain of Ascension where lack of detection can potentially kill you, you will learn to hate lurkers exclusivelly.
At lv 1-4, Mengsk is quite weak because there are no ways of increasing mandate generation, but at lv 5 and beyond you can do the build order like this replay, of course on contested expos you just focus on witness and medivacs, RoK you make all of your buildings at ramp to prevent surround on bunker.
In this replay I should’ve gone for ghosts instead of tanks, the emp also stuns mech units which is so good, tanks do well vs protoss but emp is easier to use for me.
Lastly, keep trying to use hotkeys so you avoid to contantly look at base, I tried to play low APM but if anything I made it low EPM Facepalm
Same map and with a Fenix ally as well oO’
I really appreciate you taking the time. I checked the replay and while there is still few troops the first 5 or 6 minutes there after there is a huge difference. At 7: you have 100+ pop and at 8:20 you are at 145. I checked my replay and I am respectively at 81 and 87 seems I had paused building trooper for a while.
When I first push at 9:30 I am at 94 supply. I am missing 40 pop including 3 upgraded medivacs. Clearly my army would get better with a better macro.
Yet still I noticed you were almost never the one to engage fortified area, you waited for Fenix to take the first hit before moving. Does it mean for pushing base I better rely on my ally with Mengsk (at least until ultras get added to the calldown)?
Don’t worry, even just by watching the replay I could feel the struggle when engaging bonus and last base not to use it.
You can definitely crack bases as Mengsk without call downs, you take Trooper losses, but when do you not? It’s just important that you use any Royal Guard and ESOs you’ve got.
That’s just lucky me having competent ally, usually when you want to push you use calldowns, pop dogs of war to be your meatshield. But there are many other ways to do it.
ESO can harass those bases so you just have air units to worry about, or make same said ESOs, around 6 just for the toxic calldown and use the fear CC to dive in. This calldown can also reveal cloaked units.
Another one that I was trying to do is siege tank push, you fight within the siege tank range, retreat if needed, I believe rank 2 it gets increased range.
There’s ghost emp, they don’t completelly break bases but EMP stuns mechanical units and can super cloak, so you can make siege tank/colossus useless for a moment, you can even mini-nuke them.
Under Prestige 2 you can break bases with Aegis guards and rocket troopers if you want, the exp gain is just that good.