Starcraft 2: The new Crucio Siege Tank

A little about me before I post about the new Terran Crucio Siege Tank; I'm a hardcore gamer, I'm not going to lie. I game a lot and usually don't stick to one game because I get bored easily, but one of the games that has stuck to me in the last couple years was Starcraft. I still play a lot today, but not competitively or for fun. I really just play to keep my skill up. Lately, I just been playing to get ready for Starcraft 2, and now that I got that off of my chest, on to the Siege Tank.

If you check the Starcraft 2 website almost daily as I do, the New Crucio Siege tank was released on the 8th of January. So what does this mean for Terran players and people playing against Terran players? In a nutshell your getting a new tank with a better bombarding system. According to Starcraft lore, the Terran Dominion wanted to upgrade the old existing Arclite model to this new Crucio Seige Tank. In my opinion, I honestly feel developers wanted a cheaper version of the Thor mech unit. The Thor is basically a walking war factory with 4 bombarding cannons strapped to its back with miniguns for arms; it basically looks like a barracks/Goliath.

They originally were in talks of taking out the Thor for balancing reasons, but since they are keeping it in, I assume they wanted to upgrade their smaller/cheap bombarding unit, the Siege tank. With the new siege tank, what has really changed? From what I can see in demo videos and what they have said on the website, it looks like the siege tank will have a stronger cannon, be able to defend itself in its dead zone (when opposing units are too close to shoot) while in siege mode and a stronger defense.

The cost of these upgrades are enough, in my opinion, to balance these upgrades out to make no difference whatsoever unless there was a mass of them. The shooting in siege mode seems slightly slower because of the damage output. I have no idea what they are planning to do for defensive capabilities while in siege mode. The tank is more defensive and offensive in exchange for being more costly.

But there are other things wandering my mind regarding the new Crucio Siege Tank. With the new Protoss unit, The Immortal (3:27), that specifically has the shield that helps it defend against Siege Tank blast, is this why they wanted a stronger siege tank? To give the siege tank an edge against other units like the Zealots which most Protoss players use against siege tanks to exploit that dead zone? Or will the blast damage be so powerful that it render Zerglings useless that they upgraded the Zerglings with a "Kamikaze" (2:06) ability. We really won't know until they release more game play data or more information on the Zerg.

Other things that bother me are the siege mode, yeah it may look cooler, but seems slower. The slower the siege mode, the faster your enemies can advance without you actually having bombarding capabilities, meaning a tougher fight. So how much will the difference be from a couple of tanks to a Thor? How many make the difference? We know that the Thor has a special ability to bombard at a constant rate until all things in that zone are blown to almost nothing, but the Thor is slow and cannot shoot while it's moving, so will the siege tank still have that ability to "run and gun"? Even as a Protoss player, I actually hope they do. Nothing is worse than retreating a unit and it can't even try to fight back.

So yeah, many of you probably are more excited about the Thor like many Protoss are excited about the Mother Ship. Honestly, I'm more worried about the Terran siege tank. Tanks were the bread and butter of Terran pushers, especially since Terran seem to moving towards a more defensive strategy (more about that on my next post). The Arclite lore clearly states that the tank was originally suppose to be a "final defensive unit" but was clearly better as a "movable bombarding tank". If you also follow KesPa (Korea Stracraft Leauge) a lot of the Terran Players use the tank as its main support unit. Whether they're using infantry, mech infantry, or starships, the tanks are in the back line taking out the advancing ground units, while other units are taking out everything else that survives. Hopefully, all new "upgrades" made to the tank aren't nerfs that ruin that gameplay and makes people move onto the Thor, or even worse- make them not use tanks at all.