Co-Op Mutation #221: The Longest Night

15 structures left referring to infested structures left to kill before they would’ve won

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^^^ This. :slight_smile:

Indeed. It’s been a long time since I calculated it but essentially all missions have a time limit. Not intentionally programmed, but a hard limit on the game timer. There’s a very specific number of game seconds that a mission can last before it crashes out to menu. Iirc, the client uses a 16-bit unsigned interger counter which allows for 65,535 game seconds (not real life seconds). Turns out I didn’t remember correctly. It uses 16-bit signed intergers allowing for 32,767 game seconds before crashing out.

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Thanks for clarifying what they meant. Thought there was an additional fail condition mechanic in place.

2 ** 16 = 65,536.
So 0 to 65,535 game seconds if it’s unsigned (only non-negative) integers. That’s 18 hrs 12 mins 15secs, which is too long, the crash occurs in half this time.
If it’s signed integers, then includes negatives and goes from -32,768 to 32,767. That’s a max of 9 hrs, 6 mins, 7 secs, which is when the crash/end occurs; with no negative-time.

Since the engine was designed with ladder/pvp in mind, the draw-mechanic was probably expected to kick in well before this time limit was reached.

PS. If anyone reading this is wondering why the negative number is -32768 and the positive number is 32767: it’s so that there’s an equal number of negative and non-negative numbers. Zero is “non-negative”.

  • -32768 to -1 is 32,768 negative numbers in total
  • 0 to 32767 is 32,768 non-negative numbers in total
  • And whether signed or unsigned, the upper limit is 1 less than the “total possible” because it includes 0.
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Ah yes! It had been a long time since I had played around with the game timer. I thought that 18 hours seemed a little too long. Thanks for the clarification! I’ll fix it above.

Found CtG’s 9-hour run of DoN:

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I think this can sorta include Void Thrashing too. Even though it’s typically one of the fastest missions (not counting speedrunning shenanigans on others).

Here’s how:

  1. Do the mission as you normally would but don’t kill the last Void Thrasher; or leave more or all alive depending on your skill level (and patience).
  2. Keep aggro’ing the Thrasher with your armies so that it stops attacking the fortress and only attacks your forces.
  3. Make sure to only “move” your forces around it and never A-move or hold position or stop. So that you aren’t killing the thrasher.
  4. Unlike DoN, you’ll need to be active the whole 9 hours. Your ally and you can take turns aggro’ing it. Setup a ton of static def at the enemy wave spawn points, possibly with a secondary army to deal with those.

The thrasher keeps trying to attack your forces, your forces don’t shoot back and take minimal or no damage. And so on.

Would be a crazy challenge to do it with all 10 thrashers but probably do-able with keeping the last 4 alive. And definitely do-able with just the last one.

So I found out that Kerrigan, my favourite, is not very good in this :frowning:
The key is to destroy the buildings asap (=before night 3), ideally without taking losses, so for example HnH or Vorazun (or Mengsk, but it takes time to setup the EO and they can’t reach the edges of the map from the center and you can’t focus on building both EOs and tanks due to limited gas)

I would be seriously impressed if someone managed this by night 3. Just Die and Photon Overload make pushing way more challenging than normal. I beat it with Zagara w/ Abby ally, and even going full tilt we didn’t win till the 5th day.

Practically speaking, a strong level of defense is required. Kerrigan’s lurkers behind worms are incredible, and I thought was a pretty straight forward path to victory. I added some zerglings once defense was established to destroy buildings and provide extra defense in a pinch.

I finished such game today (As Mengsk with HnH partner, who cleared twice as many of the infested structures as me); we waited for the bonus, otherwise it would be done before the end of Day 3 I think.

This mutators don’t really affect Strike Fighters or Earthsplitter Ordnance.

Kerrigan is good at defending this (although I think Mengsk (or Swann, or Raynor) is better), but I had troubles pushing with her … I tried destroying infested buildings with lurkers (so I could leave them behind, unaffected by photon overload), but it was too slow and by the night 8 it was over as we run out of rss and there were too many stanks or chokers to handle

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I think Spirit’s video (first reply to topic) is exactly that.

Rule of thumb for DoN mutations, finish early by using HH and Mengsk for an easy time.

I random queued and ran into maguro and we easily beat it before night 3 as Swann + Raynor. The thing is, night pushing is actually defense and offense at the same time, since you catch a lot of the Infested that are headed for the base. This means the defensive partner doesn’t have to invest as much into full defense and actually get a daytime pushing force to help you.

Very easy as Han & Horner with strike fighters.

Can finish before night 4 starts

Good point. I should’ve said way upfront that I’m far from the best player and even if I can’t complete it that fast, I’m not surprised at all that 1) it’s possible, and 2) that some of the best-known and published players would be able to do it.

I will note that I have not managed a great level of success using HH on this level. HH is one is one of my favorite commanders and one I feel most comfortable with, but I’ve yet to crush this level using strike platforms. I can’t get them out fast enough, and it’s so far been a cumbersome level to play.

See guys it’s easy; just run into Lila on the solo queue and you got this no problem.

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Lol, where do y’all even play at? EU?

I’ve never had the pleasure of encountering you famous people.

The trick with H&H is:

  • Get 10 strike fighters ASAP, let your ally worry about defence
  • Get the “Napalm upgrade” for striker fighter ASAP (set ground on fire)
  • With the “Napalm upgrade”, try to hit a minimum of 2 small buildings with one strike (!!IMPORTANT)
  • Big buildings will require 3 fighter strikes to kill
  • Constantly use your striker fighters, don’t leave them idle for too long
  • Use your first Galley to scout for buildings (I normally scout to the north first)
  • Once you have 10 striker fighters, use cloaked wraiths to sneak around the map to scout for buildings
  • Once you have 10 striker fighters, Get up to 5 Galleys and pump hellbats and battlecruisers. Just leave them in the middle of the base in case your allies defence gets breached.

With this method you should complete the mission before the 4th night starts

Finally beat this with mass Tempests, ally was Swann, he was the primary defender, took me awhile (on Brutal)!!

Pretty easy this week. Managed to complete it with both Swann and Mengsk in 1 shot with random allies. Hardest part of the mission is if you get Skanks instead of Nydus Worms. Those things take quite a bit of punishment to take down.

Highly recommend using supply depot walls if you’re Terran.

For me, this brutation was a challenge. Had to try a few times, eventually won with Nova + Zeratul.

Haven’t done brutations for a long time but easy one as Stukov with full DB and Nova partner.