BWP02 - Dunes of Shakuras

This is pretty much your standard Protoss vs. Zerg mission, without many tricks to exploit as far as I know (unless you want to count that gateway/zealot blockade).

The only twist is that you're granted four dark templar at the beginning. So, the key to a fast time is to utilize their insane damage potential at every turn, yet still keep them alive.

BWP03 - Legacy of the Xel'Naga

This mission gives you four corsairs upgraded with Disruption Web. This ability works remarkably well against the computer because it doesn't move its units out of the area of effect.

It seems as though reavers would be ideal for this mission, because you're forced to tech up to robotics facility anyway, and you need to destroy plenty of towers and bunched ground units. Even so, range-upgraded dragoons worked better for me. I think this is because they have better synergy with disruption web, and because rebuilding scarabs is really annoying.

BWP08 - Countdown

The objective for speedrunning this mission is to start the countdown timer as soon as possible and still survive. I tried a number of different defenses, including combinations of dark templar, air units, reavers, even arbiters, but in the end I became convinced that the awesomeness of psi storm trumps all. Adun was clearly on my side, enabling me to start the countdown without any initial defense on the temple, then move in and fry all 374 of the attacking zerg.

BWT01 - First Strike

Author's Comments: This run merely combines the block strategy discovered by Philip 'Ballofsnow' Cornell with the pause glitch originally discovered by Blake 'Spider-Waffle' Piepho.

BWT03 - Ruins of Tarsonis

This is a very difficult strategy to execute because you have to use precise micromanagement in several places at once. I'm especially proud of the group of 8 marines and 2 medics, which singlehandedly lays waste to two zerg bases, with only one casualty near the very end.

After much testing, I do believe that this strategy (namely range-upgraded bunker vs. purple, tanks vs. red, and M&M vs. brown and orange) is the fastest possible. It could have been done faster; in my practice runs I was able to destroy either the left two hives or the right two, using disjoint sets of units, within about 5:20. However, because of the difficulty involved, I think it's pretty good that I lost only a few seconds to doing both at once!

BWT06 - Emperor's Flight

This is not a new strategy, but I substituted four marines for one tank, which is theoretically slightly faster. I'm pretty sure this time is within 5 seconds of perfect.

BWT07 - Patriot's Blood

Although the corridors of the psi disruptor house many enemies, most of them aren't all that aggressive and you can run right past them, turning the mission into a stimpack relay race of sorts.

The most important place where fighting can't be avoided is the tight spot where you have the high ground against a ton of hydralisks and zerglings. It seems necessary to bring a medic to that battle, because you need full health (or close to it) on about 5 marines in order to survive the home stretch, using stimpack the whole way.

You'll also notice me pause during a lot of transmissions, usually because it means less in-game time until the next event that allows the mission to continue (e.g. a door opening).

BWZ01 - Vile Disruption

This mission boils down to running a zergling through the map, avoiding various traps along the way. If you do it fast enough, the enemy will not have enough time to destroy your hives.

Actually, if you examine the minimap carefully, you'll see that one of the hives was destroyed at the very end; however, due to the way the Starcraft trigger system works, the fact that the victory conditions were met at nearly the same time meant that the victory overrode the defeat.

BWZ03 - The Kel-Morian Combine

The goal of this mission is "amass 10000 minerals," so the run is self-explanatory. There is one more undefended resource node, but it's rather scant in minerals, and doesn't pay for itself in time, according to the tests I did.

BWZ04 - The Liberation of Korhal

1 -- Buildup: There isn't much that can go wrong here, once you've memorized what to do.

2 -- Zergling wave vs. blue: This phase was only about average. It's possible to lose a lot fewer zerglings than I did. But I was happy that orange's attack went straight for the four sunkens I had prepared. (This attack goes to a random location; some locations kill the run.)

3 -- Destruction of orange: This is where the run really began to gain time over my other attempts. I got my hydras to the front in an organized fashion, and then the zerglings arrived at precisely the right moment. If they get there too soon, you lose most of them.

4 -- Destruction of white: White's defenses are considerable; they have enough goliaths, marines and medics that they can end the run by breaking through that wall of hydras. But this time, the momentum from the previous phase carried through, and all their attempts at organizing a defense were stopped before they started. I'm pretty sure my casualties during this phase were the lowest ever.

5 -- Cleanup: I lost several seconds here. My dealing with those three lurkers was pretty disastrous. Also notice how that lone missile turret was the last building I destroyed; there's no good reason for that. But at least I noticed it in time to keep the run sub-11. This is a very good time.

BWZ05 - True Colors

This run saves a massive chunk of time from Marshmallow's previous one: about 4:42 from improved methods and 2:55 from a newly discovered glitch that makes in-game transmissions not count against your time.

Contrary to what Kerrigan tells you in the mission briefing, 6 minutes is enough time to do a lot of damage to both bases. Namely:

-On the terran side, nearly all unit-producing buildings are destroyed or get an undetectable lurker burrowed within range. Only a few barracks and starports (which the AI doesn't seem to use) are spared entirely.

-On the protoss side, pretty much everything except their southeast stronghold is erased by zerglings.

After that, it's just a matter of releasing numerous waves of hydras and zerglings to destroy everything else. If you're wondering why the terran base had no siege tanks defending it, it's because all their factories were destroyed, which forces the AI to pull tanks from its base defense in order to attack me. Most of these attackers (and many protoss too) get killed by lurkers before they can do anything.

BWZ06 - Fury of the Swarm

After watching StuporMan's run I decided the time on this level could be improved by mixing up the unit choice instead of just using hydralisks. In fact, this version doesn't use any hyrdas at all, but a combination of lurkers, zerglings, and mutas. Also noteworthy is the early expand trick at the beginning.

Sub-9 is possible; I have gotten as low as 8:45 in my practice runs using load/save. But, this is as close as I managed to get a single segment.

BWZ09 - The Reckoning

The protoss base defense in this mission seems pretty random as to when they send their units at you. If the reavers come accompanied by a bunch of gateway forces, or if they send their carrier at you right away, you'll sustain too many losses and there's no way to salvage the run. You'll see how things worked out favorably in this run; I was actually very surpised to acheive 6:30, which is an excellent time I daresay.

BWP05 - The Battle of Braxis

This missions requires you to take out 5 power generator that are surrounded by heavy AA defences. I take the shortest paths to the generators as much as possible resulting in quite some suicide actions. The only non power generator buildings I take out are the four bunkers in front of the second generator as I found them hard/impossible to skip.

BWZ07 - Drawing of the Web

I have to first give credit to René Kamp for his 9:49 video. When I saw it in the SDA news that it was a 7:46 improvement I was intrigued. After watching the video I wondered if I could come up with some better strategies for this mission as it looked interesting and not one dimensional.

For this mission you must get Duran to all 5 beacons without him dying.

This run came after a lot of new strategies I found. Originally I did a hydralisk strat which I managed to get 6:05 with after some time. After that I wondered if a zergling strat could be faster. After much testing I came up with one that showed great promise. I figured out I could run the beacons in the optimal order too which out many problems. I tried to refine the strat such that Duran could be running from beacon to beacon without having to slow down. I essentially was able to do this.

This strat requires a lot of luck, and has low completion rate (2 times in 5 hours for me). I give the first beacon 70%, the second 95%, the third 50%, taking the bridge 50%. There's some random zealots and DTs which can make you fail. If you get past the bridge at full health I still only give it a 35% chance of completing. You have to get some luck with photon cannons firing slow and being just outside of range and the 4th beacon completing fast with barely touching it.

BWP04 - The Quest for Uraj

It seems you CAN send Kerrigan alone through the red base to the Uraj. Before my 2:47 run I tried this but I always ran into 4 goliaths, marines, firebats so I didn't think it was possible. Well, I discovered that the Red A.I. gets triggered when you go down the ramp of your main base. When the A.I. gets triggered, it sends that group of goliaths, marines, firebats from the bottom base to the middle base. So, what I did is I immediately sent the Dragoons down the ramp. This helped the timing because the goliaths are just leaving as Kerrigan gets to the tanked ramp.

BWP06 - Return to Char

In this level you can choose to kill the Overmind or bring a Probe/Drone to the Uraj crystal. I thought about sending a mass of 40 Probes/Drones to the Uraj crystal but this didn't work because they kept bumping into enemy units and each other. Since they have very little health, they died long before even getting close to the Uraj. Then I remembered the Stack Glitch. You'll notice that worker units pass through units when gathering minerals and gas, and when you move them they start bumping into each other, no longer able to pass through. With the stack glitch I was able to move them to the Uraj while still being able to pass through units.

BWP07 - The Insurgent

There is a very easy way to kill Aldaris, all you have to use is Mind Control. Flagitious discovered that the enemy shuttles a Reaver from the east base to the west base and that if you get Dark Archons up the middle in time you can mind control the Shuttle on its way back. This leads to a 3 minute improvement over the previous three Shuttle strategy.

BWT02 - The Dylarian Shipyards

I used the pause trick at the beginning because the Dropships wait for Stukov to finish his transmission before unloading troops, saves about two seconds.

Selecting the one Marine among the Medics and Pilots allows me to use the attack command when distributing them to the three beacons. This causes the medics to heal the Pilots as they're moving.

The second island is the easiest of the four. Move the medics to the farthest tank and use Optical Flare along the path.

You don't actually need to capture all 18 Battlecruisers to defeat Duke's forces at the end. Kiling the Pilots and backups skips the third island altogether. The fourth island isn't too bad either. The Tanks are used for cover and three Battlecruisers are captured making a total of ten to fight Duke's force.

BWT04 - Assault on Korhal

Flagitious came up with the idea of dropping 2 tanks on the mini cliff next to the Physics Labs. Since there is barely enough room to fit the 2 tanks, the enemy is unable to drop its units onto the cliff (most of the time). At first I thought this strategy was impossible because of how heavily fortified the red base is, but knowing that it would unlock T05 Ground Zero, which has a much shorter time than T05 Birds of War, I had to give it a try.

Of course I realized it's not impossible, just really, really hard. First I had to make sure that the Wraiths drew as much enemy fire as possible. I had to hope that the enemy would fire at the leading dropship first so that the following dropship would still be alive to make its own drop. Since the cliff is so small, I had to hope that I could drop the tanks at all. I had to hope that when I dropped the 2 tanks there wasn't enough room for a single enemy marine. I had to hope that I didn't drop the second tank just out of range of the farthest Physics Lab. I had to hope that the marines inside the bunker below the cliff wouldn't kill off my first tank. And last but not least, I had to hope that the enemy wouldn't bring over 2 of its wraiths to kill off my tanks halfway through the siege. After many, many tries, each factor worked in my favour.

BWT05 - Emperor's Fall (Ground Zero)

I discovered that it's possible to save most of your troops by killing off some of the ghosts with Vultures. The first Spider Mine that I place is in a very specific location. If you place it in this exact spot, it will kill 3 ghosts every time. The second spider mine of the second vulture kills off 2, and all others are single kills. In total, 9 ghosts dead with 6 spider mines.

BWT08 - To Chain the Beast

It's always fun to finish the last level of a campaign in such a short time. Pulling off the drop at the end required a bit of skill and luck and took many restarts. Credit goes to flagitious for the strat.

BWZ02 - Reign of Fire

The previous strat for this mission was to do a drop with your hero units... which turned out to be a very slow strat getting a time of over 7 or 8 minutes. The secret to this mission is to not build a hatchery so that the enemy A.I. doesn't get triggered. Attacking the Psi Disruptor while the A.I. is active would mean fighting off a lot more units since the A.I. would command them to go defend it. I kill the firebats at the top of the ramp because they block your path and you get damaged more.

BWZ08 - To Slay the Beast

To slay the Overmind I decided that a handful of Ultralisks backed by Dark Swarm and sneaking Dark Templars would do the job. The mission objectives say you must kill the Overmind with a Dark Templar, so you might think the final blow must come from a Dark Templar. Well, not necessarily! The way the game works is that when it detects that the Overmind has been killed, it checks if there are any Dark Templar in the direct vicinity. If one or more is nearby, the objective is complete. If not, the game regenerates a full-health Overmind in the same spot.

Since the Overmind is killed within 11 minutes, my base is safe from any serious threats while I go through my build. So what this mission comes down to is being efficient with resources and getting your units to the island of the Overmind as fast as possible, and then a little bit of micro to kill the Overmind. I chose to use Ultralisks because they have very high hitpoints. Anything else would get torn up by the enemy Lurkers. I used the Dark Swarm spell on top of the Overmind to protect the Ultralisks from enemy ranged attacks.

BWZ10 - Omega

In the last level of the Brood War campaign you face three enemy forces, two Terran and one Protoss. Thank Blizzard for making this level easier by only requiring unit-producing buildings to be destroyed. I can't imagine having to destroy every single building in this map.. *shudders* Anyways, for the last level of a game it's fairly straightforward: build, destroy, expand, repeat.

BWBonus - Dark Origin

The goal is to get Zeratul all the way to the beacon as fast as possible. The enemy units at the beginning can be ignored except for the tank on the cliff. For that I rushed my four Dark Archons and used Mind Control as soon as the tank came into view. This allowed safe passage for Zeratul around the bend. After that it was simply moving Zeratul on a smooth path, not bumping into any critters or firebats.