The Story of Starcraft Part 5: The Terran Units

The SC1 Terran campaign tells its story through characters, cut scenes and dialogue.

What if you strip those away, though?

What if you focus purely on the gameplay elements - specifically, the units you use to fight your wars?

Is there anything they tell you about the Starcraft story?

Quite a bit, as it turns out.

Marines

I’d include screenshots of these units but they all came out blurry and unusual. Apparently Starcraft 1 is old!

I’ve already talked about these. On the one hand, these are epic scifi warriors, wearing spacesuits that are practically spaceships. On the other hand, they’re convicts with machine guns.

It does a great job of marrying the two fundamental concepts of the Starcraft Terran faction: advanced technology, cobbled together by folks clinging to survival.

The marine does a great job of taking the Wild West genre and welding it to the Science Fiction genre it has going on. The Terran armies fight with what they can scrounge up - it just so happens that what they can scrounge is awesome.

Firebats

Firebats take the marine concept and amp it up.

In terms of gameplay, they’re average units at best. They cost more than marines and are trained from the same building, so you have the choice between these two. It’s a shame that marines are ranged and can hit flying units, making them the better choice than the firebat nine times out of ten.

Conceptually, though…?

Imagine the sort of lunatic or desperate criminal that would agree to fight a war in a fragile spacesuit.

Now give that convict a flamethrower and strap explosive tanks to their back.

Firebats drive home the point that the soldiers in the Terran campaigns aren’t professionals. Most of them have no choice but to fight. Others enjoy it or have been conditioned to think they do.

Here’s where it gets interesting - all of Raynor’s faction (the faction you play as) are volunteers, adopting the same tactics and technology as the tyrannical, cruel Confederacy. What does it say about him that he takes displaced farmers, straps them into a life support/flamethrower suit and sends them into battle?

It says he’s human, fighting for what he believes in with whatever he has.

Ghosts

Ghosts are interesting infantry units.

They’re psionically gifted assassins, capable of turning invisible and shutting down enemy tech.

They’re deadly, silent and effective - part ninja, part Jedi, part assassin, all awesome.

The enemy AI cheats when it comes to cloaked units*, though, so that’s a shame.

* Cloaks units can’t be targeted by the enemy side unless they have some sort of detection. The thing is, use a cloaked unit and the enemy knows exactly where they are. They’ll send a unit with detection to the exact spot where your cloaked unit was, which you can occasionally use as a pointless ambush and more often to get frustrated at the cheating silicon jerks.

Lorewise, ghosts are rare, elite soldiers. In game, you can build up an army of them, lose them, then build another army. They’re a more expensive version of the marine in gameplay.

Vulture

Imagine a motorbike with some armour strapped the front and a front-facing grenade launcher.

Now imagine who would ride something like that into battle.

Vulture bikes are scifi versions of that, meaning they hover. Otherwise, yeah, that describes them. To me, vultures feel very Terran - they hit hard but are fragile, which is what you’d expect from improvised tech.

The unit barks are great. Vulture pilots are arrogant, insubordinate and eager to fight - the sort of cynical, adrenaline-addicts who would ride something fast, fragile and hard-hitting into battle.

Goliaths

Goliaths drop the western angle and go full into scifi. They are mech suits, piloted by cyborgs, and armed with machine guns and missiles.

Their design is great, contrasting nicely with the cheapness of the vulture.

At the risk of overthinking things, they’re a nice metaphor for the technological arms race. Take the best fighter jet in the world on Earth. It has a ton more advanced technology than the third-best and probably costs a hundred times more, all for a 20% edge in performance.

Goliaths feel like that. They’re the most cutting edge technology in the Terran arsenal*, but they’re not unstoppable. Yeah, a group of them in capable hands is tough and flexible, but dudes with primitive guns can take them out.

* Arguably

Siege Tanks

Siege tanks tell you that, sometimes, Terrans go to war with serious enemies. They are tough and can take a beating. You could go as far as to say they can tank for their side.

More than that, they pack a punch. It’s all in the name - siege tanks can transform themselves into stationary artillery, shelling enemies at a range for heavy damage.

They’re slow, clumsy and expensive, but a few of them can route an enemy army in the right hands.

The siege tank makes it feel like the Confederates play to win. It feels like serious hardware for serious situations.

Just keep them away from flying units of anything able to get too close. Like all tools of war, they have obvious and significant countermeasures to protect against.

Wraiths

It’s hard to bring a Star Wars feel to an RTS in Starcraft’s style, but the wraith certainly tries.

Take an X-wing. A ship like that can’t take much of a hit. It survives by being fast and nimble. Who cares if it can’t take a hit if it’s good at dodging them?

Wraiths are a bit like that, except Starcraft doesn’t have a way to dodge. A “dogfight” between enemy fleets involves the ships hovering there, swapping shots, with occasional shifts in positioning to bring damaged ones to the rear.

How wraiths inject a bit of agility to the mix is in two ways. One, they move fast. Two, they can turn invisible. That’s not quite the same as dodging enemy fire, but the end result is the same.

Used poorly, wraiths are expensive and fragile, easily shot from the sky.

Used well, they hit an enemy’s base or army hard and fast, exploiting weak points before evading the counterattack.

Dropships

There’s not a lot to say about dropships. They pick up ground units, move them through the air, then drop them somewhere else.

One cool thing: their design and their female pilots make me think of Starship Troopers (more the book than the movie). Was that by design? Probably. Starcraft shamelessly draws inspiration from a lot of scifi, war and action pop culture.

Charging the enemy with dropships laden with forces, knowing some will be shot down before they even make it, feels very gritty. It turns it from an RTS to a war movie, shot from above and at a distance.

Science Vessels

Now these are weird units.

Some missions in the campaign take place on board science vessels. And yet, you can build a dozen of them in a mission, no dramas.

Maybe the ones they deploy to the battlefield are smaller variants. I hope so - as quirky, unique and useful as they are, they don’t hit with the same force as you’d expect from an entire mobile, floating base.

Science vessels are harassers. They detect cloaked units and irradiate enemies, causing damage over time to them and units around them. They have no attack but can sow chaos into enemy forces, which is what you’d expect from science geeks. Which these pilots clearly are.

Battlecruisers

Battlecruisers are what you’d expect from a militarised spacefaring civilisation. They’re big, tough and loaded with enough armaments to wipe out a fleet.

In game, they’re the toughest and hardest-hitting unit in the Terran arsenal. Again, invoking Star Wars and other classic scifi, they’re great against tough enemies but vulnerable to large swarms of weaker units.

It might be the scale or maybe Terrans put more pride in their capital ships, but battlecruisers look, shall I say, less improvised than other units. Like the goliath, they lean more towards straight scifi than westerns.

Those are all the units from the SC1 Terran campaign. Next week, I’ll talk about named characters and hero units.