Mengsk controls the system. She cant “not care” about it, because it is a system he will and does use against her. She fights for practical reasons, not moral reasons, but you cant pretend that the rest of the Dominion outside of Arcturus is just coincidental collateral damage.
Theres still no proof of this. She weighs the tactical disadvantage of trying to enable them some safety versus removing an avenue of attack by Mengsk, and comes up about even. She cares, she simply isn’t confidant that she can both protect them and still win.
Well, technically in SC1, enemy civilians are shootable in insertion missions, though not in SC2. Also, when you find the Confederate Adjutant on Tarsonis, Hanson talks to Raynor about it. This is a paraphrase of what Hanson says will happen when Raynor releases the Adjutant’s contents: “The backlash will be awful. Uprisings everywhere. A lot of fighting. But that’s just what you want, isn’t it?”
Raynor’s reply was, “It’s a start.”
So, I mean, yes he is a good man but he’s out to take down Mengsk. The aftermath of Media Blitz sure seems like breaking some eggs to make an omelette, and Raynor and Horner are celebrating with cigars and booze, and then they just start laughing and laughing. At the fact that there’s crazy uprisings and people – including civilians – fighting and dying left and right.
I mean, yes, I am being very nitpicky about this, but it does seem an accurate comparison to you describing Kerri monstrous for pushing against Mengsk, which also required to take down a lot of people. Raynor, who you describe as a good man, was doing the absolutely same thing, a revolution against Mengsk.
There’s no reason to cripple the whole Dominion war machine when her target is one man. Period. The allies can’t teleport to Berlin. She can teleport to Augustgrad.
I’ve literally given you the direct quote where she would prefer to not save civilians because it makes her job harder. She only did it to humor her allies and save face with Raynor.
For a more specific example, let’s look at the Roach evolution mission:
The zerg discover hidden protoss research facilities here. The zerg have come to this planet, and they are the aggressors. Again, this has nothing to do with our war against the Dominion, or anything else. We have decided to slaughter these protoss only to improve the swarm. Kerrigan makes a note to “leave no survivors”. In the second mission we destroy random protoss on a random world again for no reason. Kerrigan sensed “protoss nearby” and decided to test out the new strain on them. Again, they were just sitting there, minding their own business, and Kerrigan decides on their extinction at a whim, instead of putting these roaches to use against Mengsk.
How does this remotely compare?
It’s Raynor’s writer who created the character that thinks he’s a “good man”, not me. I think he’s an @hole in WoL too. But me and Kelthar were talking about Rebel Yell.
Every commander in StarCraft probably has contributed to collateral civilian death, but only Kerrigan is as gratuitous about it.
I actually got the impression that Raynor was a good man too. In Kerri’s, you have stuff like her hesitating to attack Narud during their duel because he took Jim’s form; cold-blooded killers don’t think or act like that, tehy just point and shoot.
Maybe you don’t like the writing style or something? We’re getting vastly different impressions of these characters. Raynor is constantly worried about people, lives, helping, etc. His lieutenants have mostly been personally rescued by him, whether it’s Swann or Hanson. I can understand thinking Kerri is an expletive because her role requires her to be ruthless. But I don’t often see people describe Jim in this way.
Well if we’re talking about just WoL, several things that come to mind are:
Robbing the Tal’Darim of their valuable religious treasures at gunpoint, who have done nothing to wrong him. This is like walking into a church, stealing sacred relics, and shooting the priests who try to stop you.
Freaking out on Matt who calls him out on his drinking.
Never bothering to look into his best friend Tychus’s predicament, who’s clearly being blackmailed/extorted. Raynor got multiple hints & did nothing. Instead he just shot him in the face at the end of the game.
What you said about not caring if rebellions & civilian deaths break out. Raynor even states that he cares about revenge more than justice.
Willing to screw over his crew to get his bug girlfriend back.
The most significant judgment of the Tal’darim is not by Raynor but rather by the Shakuras Protoss. When you enter the mission where you get Battlecruisers to secure the final artifact fragment, the Dark Templar call the Tal’darim traitors, tell you the Tal’darim have imprisoned all who oppose them, and request that you rescue them and they’ll gladly kill the traitors alongside you. If High Executor Selendis was there with her Golden Armada, it would very defintely result on some Mothership on Mothership smackdown, with a few hundred Carriers involved. xDDDDD
Doesn’t really sound from that that the Tal’darim were ever in the good graces of Raynor’s Protoss friends. Then, in the LotV campaign, you get in the history of the Tal’darim, and this seems to be confirmed further.
Raynor has fought Protoss before, and counts some among them as friends. It was pretty clear to me at least that Tychus’s analysis of the Tal’darim as “not your Protoss buddies” was fully accurate, though he of course had motives to argue that regardless.
Have you ever been that drunk? The world is literally spinning, you say the dumbest things, and then your shoes are covered in vomit.
One dude I used to know showed up to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting completely wasted, puked in the middle of the support circle and lurched out of the room groaning like a zombie.
Freaking out on your friend is a gentle example of what can happen when you are in that state. I would have expected Hanson to bring Raynor a brand new 0 year old liberator 9 months later after that binge. xD
I don’t know why he didn’t look into Tychus’s predicament, so I can’t argue with you at all on that point. However, he HAD to shoot Tychus because by that point he was aware of Zeratul’s prophecies, which clearly stated that Raynor would hold Kerri’s life in his hands, and if she did not live, all life would end at the mission In Utter Darkness. He simply didn’t know up to that point in which way he would have her life in his hands. He HAD to save her.
Sometimes actions speak louder than words. Raynor spends most of his time in both SC1 and SC2 rescuing somebody, assisting somebody, or nearly getting killed in the course of both. That’s why the Protoss respect him. In the finale of non-expansion SC1, you can destroy the Overmind with Raynor’s battlecruisers and not even use the Protoss. He wanted to help people, and he was not messing around.
It initially seemed that way, but aside from his love for Sarah, he would be saving billions of life by bringing her back to humanity.
This was accurate. Without the treacherous, ultra-violent Queen of Blades around, humanity would be infinitely safer, and that would indeed save billions of lives. That’s what he says to his crew after beating Tychus up, they say “that’s my commander!” and they get back to work. They agree with that.
Well, at the risk of doing this again, when the Queen of the Zerg shows up invading your planet and makes no effort to deescalate the situation, calling for help seems pretty reasonable.
but to your prior point, if we were meant to veiw this from a Zerg perspective, the game wouldn’t have spent so much time trying to justify this to us, via Kerrigan talking to Lassara. The Zerg don’t try to justify themselves, or take revenge, they just eat things. Kerrigans human motivations drive the entire plot.
I’m not saying that the protoss were any more (un)reasonable than Kerrigan was. The whole thing was a tragedy, because Kerrigan wasn’t really interested in picking a fight with the protoss at the time. But the Protoss have no reason to know that, and no reason to let her explain.
As for Lassara, she’s a relic from an older build, where she didn’t die at the end of Kaldir. That change is almost certainly why Kaldir is so bizarre.
It was his stepdaughter Winifred that was close friends with Hitler, but she didn’t die until the 80s. You must have confused Wagner with Nietzsche, whose sister was also a friend of Hitler and died in 1935, and both authors were hijacked by the n*zis, despite being opposed during the later parts of their lives (Nietzsche was appalled by Wagner’s anti-semitism).
Probably, but the ingredients that put him in power would have been untouched : he could do all of that because he had the support of the German Army that was run by the Old Prussian aristocracy, who craved for revenge after WW1, was pan-germanic, hated democracy and despised the Jews, sentiments that was also present in the masses. All of this would not have disappeared simply because of Hitler’s early death, on the contrary, he would probably have been regarded a martyr by the regime who would have radicalized by this. And the remilitarization of German would have happened with out without him : the Weimar republic was already breaking the treaty of Versailles in that regard.
Not to mention the rampant pacifism in France and Britain that paralyzed their decision making. Daladier, the French Prime Minister, refused an assassination attempt on Hitler at the last minute because he feared a war to break as a result, and a war caused by the French and British assassinating the German leader would have been wildly unpopular among a population and armies still traumatized by WW1. A war between two nations who have no motivation for fighting and one fanaticized by the death of her Fuhrer would probably have resulted in a stalemate at best, leaving a German state that would still pursue the same objectives as Hitler.
Finally, WW2 would have begun, somewhere else. Japan was already conquering China with mass murders, and due to the US ban on oil it would still have attacked them. Italy had already conquered Ethiopia and annexed Albania which put them at odds with the Western powers. Spain was engulfed in a civil war where the Republic was condemned because no democracy wanted to intervene because pacifism. The liberal democracies were in deep crisis even without Hitler’s rise.
Not really. The campaign of France for instance, was only a success because his generals (Guderian here) kept pushing instead of stopping at Sedan like he ordered, and when he did ordered to stop the advance at Dunkirk, it resulted in the entire British army getting evacuated, which greatly helped Churchill convincing the UK to keep fighting, entire divisions being wiped out or worse, captured would have been catastrophic for Britain. Had Hitler got his way during this campaign, the German invasion of France would have been a massive failure, because instead of pushing the front the Germans would jave given time for the Allies to retaliate, and German forces were worse than the Allies’s.
Is it the point where you made an analogy between worlds and IRL cities ?
Correct me if I took the wrong post, but if it is this one : Because of the nature of interstellar space, there is a difference between both : you can directly go to a planet if you want, whereas cities can only be accessed by crossing anything between you and the city. In WoL the Dominion army despite the massive Zerg invasion of their sector was able to reach Char as soon as Valerian ordered it, they didn’t have to retake every single world the Zergs took between the core worlds and Char.
Her war was already efficient without taking the factories out : the Dominion simply can’t put up with the Swarm in terms of production : they can produce a battlecruiser, the Swarm will pop out an entire Brood in the meantime. She loses a Brood ? She’ll replace it in a week, meanwhile the Dominion’s losses are less sustainable. Heck, the Dominion can even kill her, she’ll respawn and keep fighting. No conventional Dominion weaponry can harm the Swarm significantly, thus worrying about the enemy military production is useless. The only world that was necessary to take down was Skygeirr, because Hybrids have the ability to harm the Swarm significantly.
Furthermore, compared to WW2 that lasted years, HotS’s campaign spanned a very short time : 3 months from start to finish, and Korhal’s assault lasted a week at worst with most of the Swarm in orbit. During such little time military production is irrelevant : the Dominion won’t pop new armies fully equipped in a week.
She doesn’t tho. She can smuggle a single larva on Korhal, and alone it will overrun the planet. Conventional warfare is weak against the Swarm, at best it can contain them for a bit but eventually it’ll lose.
Yeah, I’ll agree that’s probably the way the Kaldir arc was intended to be viewed, I still don’t think they actually accomplished that intention.
The Lassara tidbit is an interesting point though, a decent amount of HotS feeling off is pretty attributable to stuff from when Kerrigan was intended to be far more monsterous sneaking into the finished game.
That doesn’t seem to be the Zerg modus operandi at all, though. She did this at the end of Kaldir because the ship was beyond her reach. She also did this with Hanson’s colonies, though in the canon outcome Hanson cures the virus.
The entire concept of the Swarm is a hyper-aggressive, ever-evolving, relentless machine of destruction that just rips at you with teeth and claws until you’re in 10,000 pieces. The idea of covert subversion doesn’t seem to be what they do. Keep in mind that in SC1, Infested Kerrigan has abilities from all three races, and her Terran ability is the ability to cloak.
Yet, at no point does Cloak get integrated into the Swarm. They burrow and use burrowing to ambush, but they don’t use stealth. I can only conclude that it for some reason is not seen as desirable or necessary by them. If that was not the case, Infested Kerrigan in SC1 would very certainly passed on her cloak to Zerg specialist units. She had Cloak in her Zerg form.
None of your points change the basic fact that crippling the Dominion armament production will cripple their ability to fight the Swarm. If you have a planet which manufactures Gauss rifles and you destroy its facilities and overrun everything with Creep, no more Gauss rifles can be made there, and no more Gauss rifles can be sent to Mengsk’s forces. If you have a planet that manufactures Crucio shock cannons or shells and you overrun it, no more Siege Tanks. She can afford to lose a brood or two, yes. But it is to her definite disadvanatage to fail to deprive her enemy of any advantage he might enjoy. So, if she can prep the Korhal invasion by taking out all the Gauss rifle factories, it’s in her interests to do so. Losing a brood or two POINTLESSLY is not the mark of a successful military strategist or tactician. You want to make your situation as decisively advantageous as you can.
This is standard military thinking in literally every functional military around the real world and has been since factories came into existence. Ignoring armament production when you can cripple it does not benefit your chances of a successful outcome, it cripples it. You carpet bomb their factories, and then carpet bomb them a second time to make sure no conveyor belts were left intact.
You’re saying miltary production is irrelevant due to logistics reasons, but you’re kinda judging sci-fi by irl standards. In the Korprulu Sector, a battlecruiser armada can rapidly warp to anywhere; stands to reason that shipments of tanks and Gauss rifles can be just as fast.
The reason I am trying to do this is because we seem to be getting lost in the numbers. The scope of population and military sizes is so vastly greater in SC than irl that I thought it was a useful analogy to make.
The central failure of the French in the start of WWII was to rely on massive static fortifications to repel the Germans. This would have worked in WWI. Hitler ordered his Panzers to essentially bypass them in the course of Blitzkrieg. The rest was just details and because of this issue, the French lost horribly.
In 1945 under Hitler, Germany was a smoking ruin and in utter disgrace on the international scene.
In 2015, Germany under Merkel is the undisputed leader of Europe, and no longer at all in disgrace on the international scene. Just 70 freaking years – after THAT. I would argue it’s pretty decisive that the Germans have more than gotten what they wanted in WWII: they outmaneuvered history and public opinion, and got on top of Europe. Merkel may not have Hitler’s charisma or a mustache, but she succeeded where he failed. I am kinda surprised it happened this fast, with 1945 being by historical terms recent.
As far as Germany having “changed,” I am afraid that the heart of a nation shaped by thousands of years of crazy stuff won’t change between 1945 and now. I don’t have the article on me anymore, but there was a Swiss actor who looked, sounded, acted EXACTLY like Hitler and they used him in all the movies requiring a Hitler. He came to Germany to do a movie in the 1970s, and everybody greeted him like a god, cheering for his return, Sieg Heiling, he was completely shocked. My mentor, a professor, took one trip to Germany and told me he didn’t want another: “They are, as they had been, a bunch of drunken bigots.”
The French and British wanted to avoid war at all cost and this made them blind to what Hitler was really doing. He exploited this until Poland made France and the UK realize it, but by then they were in a much weaker position.
I am not disputing what you’re saying, I’ll look into this. I know some things about Nietzche, but not everything. Having read some of his works, maybe he didn’t intend to be hijacked by the Hitlerites, but you gotta admit, the stuff that he was saying didn’t make it particularly hard for them to do so, even if his sister as custodian of his estate was actively working towards that end.
Outside of what Kerrigan is just talking about as a defensive reaction as any person is attacked justifiably or not, your claim is based on the contempt of Zerg life, which is only a point of view, for example, Jainism proclaims that the life of a ant is as valuable as human life nd Darwinism establishes the right of the most able (and the zerg is quite certain to be this), now the kerrigan claim emphasizes that this is a war and blood is blood simply kerrigan is acting under his interests and his people, any moral excuse at that time seems weak, he will hit his enemy before it is his threat to her and does not attack with total certainty, certainly in this world where she is persecuted there is no “us” and she is a survivor
1- It is a psionic based power, so it is harder to spread to mindless Zergs.
2- From what Sc Remastered shows Kerrigan still had her old ghost suit when infested. Probably her ability to turn invisible comes from there, and she can’t turn invisible in Sc2 when she no longer has her suit.
Real world does not have armies that can produce thousands of fully trained and equipped warriors by the minute. When you have a massive advantage in terms of production like the Zergs has against the Dominion, any effort to cripple their production is by default pointless : you’re more likely to lose forces taking those factories down than ignoring them and go straight at your target : if a Broodmother dies during the assault, you lost control over a brood that would have been useful on Korhal with the Broodmother accompanying you. The point of taking factories down is a long run strategy to make you gain an big advantage, when the gain and loss of it are equivalent and not relevant for your fast strategy, why bother ?
For one, Kerrigan had put a blockade around Korhal : shipments of tanks and Gauss weapons wouldn’t make it to the surface anyway.
As for Battlecruisers : we know that the Dominion fleet pre-Char invasion had 50 battlecruisers. Assuming they were all made during the interbellum, that put the production rate of them at 1 per month. This will not make an impact for an attack that last at worst a week.
That’s… not exactly how it went. Germany already bypassed French fortifications in WW1, France expected it to happen again, and the Maginot Line was made in prevision of the Germans attacking in the Belgian plains which they did. The only thing they didn’t expect was for an attack to be made in the Ardennes Forest that was thought to be impossible to cross. Germany managed to pull it partly because it looked stupid thus the Allies did not look there, otherwise the German army would have been sitting ducks in the Forest and we would be talking about how Germany were laughably incompetent.
And once the initial breakthrough at Sedan happened, Guderian went against his superiors’s orders and kept pushing, thus trapping the Allied Armies in Belgium and winning the campaign from that point on. Hitler’s original plan (which was independantly thought on by another general : Halder) was half-@ssed, it was mostly Guderian who managed to bring victory.
Germany as a nation wasn’t even a century old in 1945, it was a bunch of small kingdoms nominally connected to each other that was seen as a fighting ground for most of European history, see the Thirty Years War. And prior to 1871 Germany was seen as the land of thinkers and poets, a bunch of hippies and softies. Then Bismarck came around and created the German Empire which was basically “Prussia and its minions”, and suddenly Germany was a nation of tough and serious men in the eyes of everyone. Big events can change the heart of a nation : France prior to 1914 was a nation who was always eager for war, come the horrific losses of WW1 and everyone suddenly hated war and wished for nothing but peace.
His sister actually reworked his writings to make it support far-right ideas of the time. You’d have to grossly twist his writings to make it appreciable for the n@zis : He denounced German nationalism, going as far as to deny his German affiliation late in his life, he loathed antisemitism and wished for all antisemits to be shot, assimilated racial hatred with ressentment and weakness, and in general he hated mass movements whether they were socialist or nationalist. The only point where Nietzsche and the n@zis were in agreement was the confining of women to procreation, everything else was a result of twisting his views : the Ubermensch was (broadly) in Nietzsche’s works a man who lived by his own morals (not from any religion) and embraced his mortal life (as opposed of hoping for fluffy heavens) and rejected nihilism, becoming a source of creation. N@zis interpreted this through racial lenses : The Ubermensch was an Nordic man built for war who had to purge the weak races and conquer the Earth. While you may not agree with his philosophy, it would be a big error to associate him with n@zism, particularly because what n@zis read of him was the rewrites of his sister.
Then again, Hitler had a knack for twisting culture into his viewpoint : the swastika was originally a symbol of good luck, and still is for the Hindus.
Why does having a production advantage somehow lower the effectiveness of crippling your enemy’s production? Zerg are quantity over quality, but that doesn’t automatically make them win every confrontation.
Given the forces he had defending Korhal, im not sure that’s a safe assumption. He had his own battlecruiser squadron to defend Augustgrad, so clearly the Dominion Fleet that Valerian took from was not the entirety of his available battlecruisers.
There are also the Gorgon Battlecruisers that were stationed on Char. Those didn’t come from nowhere.
The production ability of the Dominion is irrelevant because:
the swarm outpaces it by so freaking much. The Terran worlds are a joke compared to the power of the swarm.
it’s not a factor during the course of one battle. $hit takes time to build. A factory isn’t going to crank out a battlecruiser or even a Viking in the time you’re attacking Korhal.