Getting so many Mengsk partners is making power creep annoying

Artanis expanding WAY faster than Vorazun doesn’t feel like power creep…

You overstate Mengsk’s reliance on his troopers in the mid-late game where mass AOE starts to be an issue.

At that point his Royal Guard can mostly supply the damage he needs while the cannon fodder supports them, and his Troopers are far less vulnerable to it in Flame and Rocket mode with health and spacing respectively.

Swann gets constantly supply blocked while he’s ramping up, while Mengsk gets a constant flow of free troopers, supply, and bunkers wherever he needs them to defend.

By the time Swann gets both a decent army and a defensive line or two capable of holding without unit support, Mengsk has cleared at least half the map and, at very most, may have to move his deathball over to defend or drop a call down to stop a wave if he can’t be bothered with bunkers.

If anything Mengsk’s Royal Guard scales much better into the late game than Swann’s machines. Both have to rely on an annoyingly slow detection unit though, so they’ve got a small weakness in common.

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You’re comparing the two as if they are in the same game. I’m comparing them as if they did the same run, same enemy compositions, same ally, same map. (IE: Swann/Fenix vs Mengsk/Fenix on DoN, vs Mech Terran.)

Flamers only have 100 health and have to get in close. Reavers, Tanks, Fungal, and Storms are still a big problem. Rocketeers can only hit air with their rockets. They use their SMGs for ground targeting, and have a much shorter range than rockets.

If you’re CONSTANTLY supply blocked while building up, I’m sorry to say it but you’re bad, lol. You should be constantly producing supply depots. Never run into a supply issue as Swann unless I am forgetting to continuously make them.

At the cost of mandate, which can be scarce early on the game. Your major mandate generation comes from the Imperial Witnesses after you have the mandate upgrade. After the first two drops for the fast expand, it’s not worth it to drop more bunkers when you can call upon Dogs of War and Nuclear Annihilation. If you need to repair, you can build a supply bunker with your troopers and change modes.

Well, sort of. They scale based on EXP that I think gets divided amongst each of them. They are unaffected by Weapon/Armor upgrades.

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Bingo.

Thing is - nobody likes being nerfed.

The answer is - like they did in Diablo - to add additional tiers of difficulty (more units, some additional mechanics/minibosses) with Brutal+ rather than mutators.

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Seems like OP is simply upset that the new commander feels shinier than his old commander. Mengsk can expand early but he needs the econ boost to start generating mandate and get his expensive units. He has little to no early game pushing power. Swann’s bots can clear his expansion/ first enemy encampment and the first attack wave by themselves.

B-but that would require actual work and creativity, wouldn’t it??

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??? Wut? Do you even bunker rush? Or trooper upgrade? Or call down?

By the time that Swann’s bots come down, he should already have basically saturated on rocks maps, and mengsk should already have his blimps up, mearning he can Zerg anything he wants.

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His bunkers are super brittle and will die very quickly to anything. Especially to a ground-heavy early game attack like mass roaches or zealots. Also using them offensively like that means that you’ve massively set yourself back econ-wise and it will take you a lot longer to set up your mandate generation and build an actual army.

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I actually find the bunkers to be surprisingly durable, especially since you can just convert one trooper to a worker and repair them.
I do agree that early pushing with bunkers isn’t worth slowing down your rampup tho.

You can’t out repair that kind of damage the attack waves I mentioned can cause. Also the enemy will very quickly target your repairing SCV. And even when you’ve managed to pull it off, the damage to your econ will already have been done.

I must have played like a bazillion games as Mengsk since he came out and experimented with all kinds of strats. Offensive bunker pushing is the one I found to be most sub-optimal by far.

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Those 3 things are listed in order of when they are best used. Bunker rush for anything you need to kill between 2:00-3:45. Trooper upgrades for anything between 3:45-5:00, with bunkers if you are defending. Zerg rush anything past 5:00.

You can’t outrepair wave damage with any bunker, and that’s not what anyone means when they say “durable”. It’s always about keeping them up until what’s inside and behind bunkers can kill the things attacking them. Bunkers can deffo stop the early attack waves, but as they start ramping up as objectives go on you need more than that, obviously.

It doesn’t matter tho since nobody is gonna do that before eco.

It’s fair to compare them in having the same ally, but it doesn’t change the timing mismatch.

Flamers aren’t really there to do damage when massed in the late game, they just have to soak it for the Royal Guard.

Rocketeers similarly just fill the AA niche while the Royal Guard handles ground targets - Marauders and Tanks are both excellent at it.

I didn’t mean supply blocked as in I’m constantly hearing the alert, I meant that Swann constantly has to funnel resources into it as he builds up.

Mengsk saves a ton of minerals and time with his free depots.

Mengsk’s mandate goes from being scarce in the early game to next to limitless when he gets a Witness over each mineral line and the Fusion Core upgrade for a cherry on top. And he can rush to that with his early economy and quick build.

Once that’s done, he can spam bunkers on cooldown and still not have long to wait until it builds to 100 - especially with high rank Royal Guard and Witnesses that are properly buffing his army in fights.

From what I’ve seen the EXP seems to get divided, and most of them get extremely powerful at max rank. Vikings may be an exception, and Vikings have more trouble reaching that point.

Mengsk is just indicative of a larger problem to me.

I’m not convinced he needs the econ boost - it’s not a bad thing for a commander to have a slow early game.

In theory that should give commanders with a strong early game a niche in supporting them.

Swann should be clearing his expansion with a Blaster Billy to do it sooner if the expansion isn’t guarded, and two Perdition Turrets will almost always stop the first attack wave without burning that cool-down. They can be salvaged afterwards.

Designing additional tiers of difficulty like that is probably the best way to do it.

Though I wonder if an optional Nerf mode where commanders are weakened until Brutal is a challenge would catch on.

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True, but my point was just that he has a lot of early game firepower at his disposal, which also happens to be completely separate from setting up his econ.

You could seriously cut the starting mandate mastery in half, and it would still be super strong.

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I was actually discussing his mastery options. If I mass BattleCruisers on Mengsk, their exp is pooled and shared, not individual. So by 8 BCs only 1 or 2 have reached lvl 3 assuming I’m pumping with a starport. That rank 3 with triple tap is HUGE. BCs also have a much, much higher exp pool than any other royal guard except Thor which comes close. Exp is very much like Dehaka’s Essence and is hard capped based on match. There is definitely an incentive to rush a BC as quick as possible but probably not before first or second witness because of how critical mandate is to ease of play. That said, 15% exp is a big deal for him and can result in 1-2 for a total of 4 BCs with max exp pretty quick. By end of match I can usually have 10-12 BCs although a BC without 2 charges of warp isn’t that powerful because I can’t control group them for warp in because they have no escape and essentially die if things go south. Not that big of a deal on brutal but on brutal+ where strategy becomes more important, it’s a huge choice. I think as people learn and master this commander more, they’ll realize his starting economy isn’t that big a deal.

No one cried when certain heroes like Zagara, Zeratul or classic Vorazun get their expo going asap but Mengsk starts with a free expo on outdated maps that are no longer a challenge and people just sh!t the bed. It’s certainly fun and definitely a power creep but Mengsk also has a lot of vulnerabilities and can at times feel fairly fragile so I’m not really terribly bothered by this. When I buy a commander I expect fun and I definitely got that from him. Money well spent.

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Mengsk doesn’t just start with a free expo, he starts with a free nearly SATURATED expo (12 free workers… who can fast build)*

just clearing the rocks is not the big deal

*and also 24 bonus free supply

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Fenix can start with a ton of supply, has no tech tree limitations, his structures costs no gas and has cheap units. So what? Let Mengsk live, please. He is strong, but he needs that starting economy, because Royal guards are the most expensive units in game.

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Just so there is no misunderstanding, this is only if there are no nearby Royals to soak up the full 100% of experience.

Killing enemy units grants experience to nearby Royal Guards. If there are no nearby Royal Guards when an enemy is killed, the experience is instead split between all Royal Guards in the mission.

That’s literally on the command card as a passive for every Royal unit. It means with micro, you can keep back other Royals to make a single Royal gain all the EXP so you can rush a unit to Rank 3 as quickly as possible. One doesn’t have to stop massing Royals just because you don’t want the pool of XP to be spread around.

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