Tex Talks Battletech Episode XZ: The Zerg, or 'One of Two Reasons why the Terran's don't Dominate the Koprulu Sector'
Chapter 0: A Reminder on Terran Technology
So, class. We've covered the Terrans and their technology, or at least some of the most famous and prominent examples of it.
We've covered the Siege Tank – the weapons system that reminded Mechwarriors everywhere that a tank might not be as flashy or as prestigious as a Mech, but it'll still kill you dead.
We've covered the Goliath, which most 'proper' Mechwarrior's would scoff at considering it's smaller and lighter than a Locust, and even with Neosteel construction not exactly the sturdiest thing out there. But these things are small and cheap enough that they can be mass-produced to reliably support infantry even in thick cities, or even inside buildings if the ceilings are tall enough, and are modular enough they've been retrofitted for practically every purpose out there since the designs spread. From police-work to gladiator bouts, or just sticking with their original designs of 'killing anything that dares to fly stone dead with a volley of missiles'. Riflemen jockeys, eat your heart out.
And we covered the Thor – the most famous Mech the Raiders have produced, by dint of being the first functional Superheavy the Inner Sphere ever saw, and the first one that can be somewhat economically produced period to be an actual fighting unit, as opposed to a one-off vanity project. And still, years after its introduction, still unmatched in the ability to make anyone fighting it up-front very, very dead.
The Terrans have warships that outfight anything the Star League ever built. Their industrial capacity is so high even the most wild estimates of prior generations fell short of the reality. They can relocate and build entire fortresses, miniature Castles in a matter of days anywhere they choose. And their weapons and tactics are pound for pound the best you'll find anywhere in known space.
Which was a surprise when word spread about the fact that apparently, the civilian ships the Raiders brought with them were mostly composed of refugees. What the hell could have pushed people with this much hardware out of a place?
Well, that's the question we're going to be taking a crack at today – because as it turned out, the galaxy was already home to two other sapient alien species. Neither of which really took all that kindly to the new kids on the block.
We're here today, to talk about humanity's first encounter with genuine, no-bullshit extraterrestrial life. And it wants to eat us.
Say hello to the Zerg, class.
Chapter 1: Holy shit, aliens.
We are the Swarm. Numberless… Merciless.
- Boast from an unidentified Zerg Queen.
It was the year 2499, November, by Terran reckoning – about four or five years before the Raiders wound up in our stretch of space.
Most people thought that the giant fleet of golden alien spaceships that showed up to burn an entire world down the bedrock was the first time humanity met aliens. Even the Raiders did at first. But that honor would go to the world that had been burned, because you see it was on that world – Chau Sara – that humanity would find a weird alien species that seemed oddly numerous for just plain old wildlife, a weird alien species that despite being quite large still seemed to operate with such perfect unison that it made ants and bees look like Leaguers.
Naturally, Confederate scientists – because this was before Mengsk set up his Dominion – decided to probe them. Oh, the irony.
As it turned out, though, shit went sideways – the aliens got loose, and it turned out that they were a bit more organized than the Confederacy had bargained for and nearly wiped out the Terran colony. Once they regrouped and wiped out the Zerg's primary hives, the Confederate forces promptly clapped themselves on the back, said 'mission accomplished', and put an information lockdown on the entire affair under threat of death. Because the Confederates were like that – the types who think the Capellan Confederation doesn't go far enough.
Of course it turned out that, in a stunning example of Confederate effectiveness, the job wasn't actually done – the Zerg recovered, ate everything on Chau Sara, then the Protoss promptly burned it from orbit.
How do we know all this when the information got suppressed? Well, as it turns out when the reigning government falls a lot of dirty secrets can come out to light. And Mengsk did know how to play a crowd – trumpeting about how the Confederates had bungled the Zerg problem far and wide, giving journalists reams of no-longer-classified information as proof.
Anyway, the Zerg started showing up on Mar Sara next and this time, when the Confederates tried to pull their usual bullshit, they failed miserably. The Zerg spread unchecked, again, at least until the Protoss showed up to burn them all.
After that, they spread like a plague – constantly attacking Terran worlds all over, eating and infesting as much as they could as the Koprulu Sector turned into a free-for-all between the Confederacy, the Sons of Korhal, the Protoss and the Zerg. I won't get into all the details of the Great War in this video – this is just meant as a primer to give you all some context as to what the Terrans have been fighting for the past few years.
Chapter 2: Wait, these things can think?
Now, I just said I wouldn't get into the details of the Great War, but you can't really talk about the Zerg without talking about the minds that lead them.
Because you see, despite what the Terrans thought at first, the Zerg Swarm aren't actually a bunch of animals. They don't just operate on instinct, even if 99.9% of the Swarm basically are just feral beasts when they don't have enough floating gas-bags providing some brain-power. More on that later.
Rather, the Swarm is divided up into several broods, or hives – kind of like the Great Houses under the Star League in fact: You have your overall leader who has its own brood, which is naturally the biggest and baddest thing around, and then you have several other smaller broods under sub-commanders.
According to the Raiders logs, these used to be giant, functionally immobile, virtually immortal worm-things called 'Cerebrates'. Even if you shot it until it was a wet smear on the ground, the overboss would just grow it back with the same mind behind it. Fucked if anyone knew how. When the Great War culminated in a change of leadership for the Swarm, however, the new boss decided that maybe having your leader be totally immobile wasn't such a good idea, and replaced them with 'Queens' instead.
I won't get into the Overmind, or its replacement just yet. That'll be for another lecture on the Great War. This is just a more 'general' outline.
Now, the Zerg did have 'Queens' before, but they were more like support units managing the Hive – a combination of backline administrator, accountant, and the leader of espionage operations since they also had a big hand in infestation, more on that later. These new Queens were a lot fatter, couldn't fly, and were overall a lot slower and bulkier. They could, however, crucially speaking, move, which was a big upgrade from the old Cerebrates – even if they couldn't just walk off getting killed.
And, to help protect the Hive if need be – or as a last resort once the Hive had matured and was subsequently being given a hot bath via liberal application of fire – they had a pair of dainty little claws they could use to quite casually tear CMC-armored troops in half, when they weren't volleying poisonous spines at them from afar. Charming.
All this is to say that it's easy to look at the Zerg and think that they're just a bunch of frenzied animals, rushing towards lures like bees or ants, no matter the risk, and that you could basically always see a Zerg attack coming because they would run towards you like Clanners who got word that you might have a pencil that Kerensky once used.
So did a lot of Terrans. 'Did', being the key word, because those Terrans are for the most part, no longer with us today, having been rendered into the past tense when the Zerg attacked from odd, unexpected angles, performed flanking maneuvers, attacked in coordinated waves on multiple points at once, or even their old favorite the burrow ambush. More on that later.
But in reality, most Zerg broods and hives are going to be networked to their hive mind, which unlike how ants and bees do it can be considered a 'true' hive mind. Because, thanks to alien psychic space-magic, all of their minds are linked together - information is shared instantly, and decisions are made with perfect awareness of the battlefield. If a force gets noticed by any Zerg organism - and remember, their buildings count as 'organisms' - then every single other Zerg organism, including their commanders, have eyes on that force now. If a single weakpoint opens up in a defense - whether it's a chink in armor or an overrun bunker in a line - then every Zerg organism will know about it, and can concentrate on it with all the firepower at their disposal, because the Zerg do have ranged weapons. A lot of them, really. I'll get to that in a bit.
Simply put, the Zerg have a level of tactical and strategic coordination that goddamned Kerensky himself couldn't pull off - we have to rely on radios, training, C3 Computers and on actually listening to the voice coming out of the speaker before we act. The Zerg Queens and whatever other thinkers they might have can just think of an order, and have it be instantly followed by a swarming army of soldiers that can move and fight in perfect sync, and do not give a shit about anything other than serving the will of the Swarm.
Turns out, when all of your troops don't give a damn about dying just to grab six more inches of territory from the enemy and will keep on fighting even if they've got limbs blown off as a matter of course, it opens up some tactical options other commanders might not have access to. No clashing egos, no sense of self-preservation in the expendable rank and file - no commander in the Sphere would ever sacrifice an Assault Lance for other troops to push ahead and win the battle. For the Zerg? They pull that kind of shit regularly, deploying their big, scary monsters to the front and letting them soak fire so that when, or if, they go down the rest of the Swarm has advanced right up to the firing lines and is currently eating your troops.
Hell, even when they're feral, it's important to remember that all sorts of animals know how to do things like sneak up on their prey. They might not be able to think particularly long-term, but they know how to hide in underbrush until the enemy's right in the middle of the pack.
Chapter 3: You are what you eat
Now, before we go any further, we need to go over one of the Zerg's most notable qualities – the fact that they take the phrase 'you are what you eat' to a whole new level.
See, the Zerg are really, really good at manipulating DNA and performing things with biology that'd make the best Canopan scientists scratch their heads in confusion. But even they know that it's a lot easier, and cheaper, to just copy someone else's work and make what tweaks you need to make it fit your own stuff.
And, thankfully for them, on countless worlds all throughout the galaxy, evolution's been doing the hard part for them for millions and millions of years. All sorts of wildlife – from tiny little worms that burrow through the ground, to the kind of megafauna that make the idea of an Agromech armed with multiple machineguns seem practical and worthwhile – have their own little genetic twists to make them better able to survive in their environment, and the Zerg can pick out the best adaptations and use them to their advantage. And, often-times, push the envelope far beyond what nature intended.
Some herd animals have skin that deals with heat very well thanks to living on a scorching barren desert-world? New Zerg strains might be noticeably more resistant to flamers and other heat-based weaponry. They found a tunneling mole-thing that goes through dirt like water? Add that to the mix, they love burrowing deep to avoid passive sensor-nets. Or to burrow relatively shallow, wait for an enemy column to come marching by, then popping out to instantly surround them. A beetle has a tough carapace to deal with hailstorms? Toss that in, you have carapace that's much more resistant to ballistic damage now.
Stronger acid, more powerful and efficient muscle systems, tougher and sharper claws and teeth, the Zerg take that they can find from what nature has to offer and improve on it until it poses a very real threat to even mechanized forces. Until even their basic swarm-units can, if they get close, tear open power-armored soldiers like tin cans filled with a tasty snack inside. They then use this, making incremental upgrades or local adaptations as necessary here and there, until they found a new upgrade courtesy of Mother Nature and blend that into the mix.
And if they find a species that's got a particularly good design, they might just copy them wholesale – with the caveat that they're always turned into killing machines of course. Turns out, after Dominion scientists did some research, one of the Swarm's most feared breeds, the Hydralisk, used to be a bunch of sloth-caterpillar things that could fire hairs coated in a mild paralytic venom to ward off predators. Slow, sluggish and herbivorous, once the Swarm found them those hairs got turned into needles, and these poor, gentle bastards got turned into sadistic sons-of-bitches who enjoy playing with their food before biting their heads off. If they're lucky.
Fun.
Though, it's important to note that even they aren't perfect - shoving more features into something takes resources, and on the scale they operate even minor costs per unit add up quick. They don't just make 'perfect' breeds of each unit and mass-produce them - rather, they keep libraries of genetics and dna on bank with their primary Hive Clusters and broods, while lesser ones tend to make do with breeds that are economical, efficient, and overall just 'good enough' at what they do to do it without really breaking the bank.
Even Swarm intelligences have Royal divisions, who knew.
And even their genetic mastery has limits - apparently, and every Terran I asked confirmed this, Zerglings are allergic to lemon juice. Not exactly a major battlefield weakness since a lemon-juice sprayer isn't exactly standard-issue for a modern military, but it's the kind of weird biological quirk you get from time to time. Still, trying to bank on one of these weird little vulnerabilities is going to be a lost cause - because if they've been kept in, it's because they weren't a big enough deal to try and fix despite the Swarm having eaten dozens of Terran worlds by now. Some vulnerabilities, aren't.
Though hey, if you're about to be eaten by a pack of Zerglings, maybe you can dump a jar of lemon juice on yourself and take them with you. If you don't have a grenade or something that is.
Chapter 4: They can do 'what'?
Nature doesn't just adapt. Nature cheats, changes the rules, and slips out the back door with your wallet while you're still trying to figure out what the hell happened.
- Maren Ayers, Dominion Medic Corps – because even dictatorships can take care of their troops
Now, all of you might be hearing this and thinking to yourself, 'how can the Zerg possibly be such a threat? They're just meat.'
And to be fair, you wouldn't be wrong. Most Zerg units are pretty fragile – after all, meat isn't quite as good as neosteel at taking damage after all. But they're also less fragile than you think – you can eke out some surprising durability out of biological substances, and one advantage that meat has over metal is that unlike metal, meat can heal on its own. Any Zerg organism with access to enough time and nutrients – whether from their creep or more traditional means – can fully recover even after being blasted and shot so badly it's a stiff breeze away from keeling over. And of course if it gets big enough, then even 'meat' can do some work – like the Ultralisk, which the Terrans don't even bother engaging up-front if they can help it. Instead calling in the artillery, which is a response in the Sphere usually saved for Assault Lances.
I'll leave the detailed analysis for later though, maybe – Zerg organisms are a bit far outside my usual wheelhouse after all.
The bigger danger of the Zerg is that while they can't quite take a punch very well, they sure as hell can give one – even their most basic combat-organism, the Zergling, the things they pump out in industrial quantities in their hives, is fully capable of killing a CMC-armored trooper once it closes in. Because those claws and jaws are fully able to tear open power armor like a tin can so it, or its friends, can get at the screaming operating inside.
They can't close into melee? No problem, because they can lob acid powerful enough to make neosteel run like water from a number of their units, or volleys of spines capable of punching through over two inches of the stuff at a range of over three hundred meters courtesy of their Hydralisks in nice, neat volleys. And more besides.
Of course, on the Mech-scale of things a single Hydralisk doesn't sound like a big deal – that's because it isn't. Two centimetres of armor penetration on each spine, from a volley? That'll strip some armor but nothing a tech can't fix in the bay.
If they ever get the opportunity. Because you see, the problem is that there's never just 'one' Hydralisk, or just 'one' Zergling. When the Swarm attacks, they live up to their name – attacking in numbers large enough to blot out the ground under a sea of carapace, shading out the sky under thousands upon thousands of wings. And they're perfectly willing and able to throw enough bodies into the meatgrinder to make the most hardcore Kuritans blanch, until their enemies are low on ammo, worn down, and breaking. Never giving them a chance to catch their breath, repair, restock, regroup. A constant application of pressure until some critical point fails.
One Hydralisk isn't a threat to a Thor. Even twenty wouldn't be a big deal. But fifty, sixty, a hundred? Coupled with a few thousand Zergling's overruning its smaller friends? Terran armored units are well-familiar with the phrase 'death by a thousand cuts' now. It's a fact they always have to keep in mind whenever they face the Zerg, especially since you can't rely on breaking their morale or convincing them that this fight isn't worth it. That's not their decision to make, so defeating a Zerg assault means killing *every single one of them* as they charge into your lines, crawling over the corpses of their own fellows in their single-minded determination to make bolognaise out of your chest cavity.
Even in space they aren't safe – because the Zerg are fully capable of contesting their enemies in space courtesy of space-fauna they've eaten and adapted over the years. Fighting the Zerg in space means fighting countless thousands of small flyers, picking and pecking away at your hull… if they aren't sending suicide bomber flyers to blow out your thrusters and engines instead.
Oh yeah, they have those too. Because of course they do.
Chapter 5: Zerg Operations
I used to think that defeating the Zerg would take precise military maneuvers, clever tactics and strong leadership. I was wrong. You can't out-think the swarm, you can't out-maneuver the swarm, and you certainly can't break the morale of the swarm. I hate to admit this, but I could do my job just as well if I ordered all my men to simply shoot anything that moves.
- Colonel Ronald Jackson, reflecting on the incorrect assumptions many Terrans had
Now, I've gone over why the Zerg are such a threat in a vacuum, but we all know that warfare doesn't take place in neat, perfect theatres matching specs against specs. Logistics is a bitch, and what you can do before the battle is just as, if not more important than what you can bring to the battle. Doesn't matter how scary your Mech is if you only have one after all.
And here, again, the Zerg excel due to how they function – when Zerg spores arrive on a world to begin the process of infestation, i.e. adding Zerg DNA to anything that walks, flies, crawls and to the fucking soil, they start by spread out their drones and setting up a few hatcheries. These structures are like big meaty pyramids and are basically meant to pump out a constant stream of Zerg larva – which will at first be morphed into worker drones, but afterwards can be morphed into whatever the Swarm needs.
Drones will scour nearby regions of resources, harvesting them and bringing them back to the Hatcheries for processing and digestion, and as more resources are collected the Hive spreads, morphing additional hatcheries from their drones to further the spread of 'creep', basically how the Zerg terraform the ground to suit them better. It's food, a passive sensor-net, and a road all in one for any Zerg organisms around. Convenient.
Part of these resources include Minerals and Vespene. Yes, the same Minerals that are used in the construction of Terran warmachines, and the same Vespene that's used to power starships. Turns out, you don't need as much food for giant, giant monsters when those monsters can metabolize starship fuel. The Zerg, the big ones at least? Hoover that shit down like we do energy drinks.
As for Minerals? It gets used for a lot of things for the Zerg - bones and skeletons, carapace, and most often to make sharper and tougher teeth and claws. They harvest these with drones - they just cut right through with their claws, and carry chunks back to the Hatcheries where they'll be used to line the many, many claws of the Swarm. Yes, the same Minerals that can take a mining team fully equipped with Inner Sphere technology hours of cutting just to get a head-sized piece out of an outcropping, a drone can just snip it apart like they're carving up ice with a saw. This is basically standard for all their edged implements - minute traces lining the edges so they can cut through Neosteel like paper. Or, in the case of carapace, reinforcing it until it's the equivalent of military-grade Neosteel.
Puts what I told you about how dangerous even a single Zerg organism is into some context, doesn't it.
You can see where this is going. More hatcheries, more larva, more drones, more resource income, the spread continues in an exponential spread of consumption and growth. The requirement of Overlords - basically floating brains intended to take some strain off of the Queen - is a small damper on their growth rate, but even then Overlords are fully capable of loading up Zerg organisms inside themselves and just flying away. Either escaping a losing fight, or just acting as dropships. Or just act as slow, fat scouts. Even their most passive and harmless organisms have tactical applications.
When they run into resistance, of a level that drones and Queens can't just deal with it themselves, the Zerg start morphing additional structures out of drones to support their more combat-focused breeds. And this is the key thing with the Zerg – a Larva can turn into any Zerg bioform.
If you wanted to build a force of tanks, Battlemechs, and aerospace fighters, you'd need to build factories for each and every different thing there. Sure, you could use shared components to minimize the fuss, but you'd still need to build a minimum of three different assembly lines all told in a giant, sprawling manufacturing network.
But the Zerg don't have that problem – their biggest issues tend to be building housing for their various breeds to stick around in, alongside any other requirements they have. Once they've got that, then any Hatchery can start pumping out whatever organisms they need – a Hive that's under threat from fighter-bombers can, therefore, instantly pivot from a heavily ground-based production line into nothing but Zerg flyers to gain air superiority.
So, this is what the Zerg are – an enemy that, if you give them even three days of uncontested growth can spread across thousands of square miles of territory, entrenching themselves into the planet so deep you'd need nukes to burn them out. An enemy who can easily obtain a week or more thanks to how damn difficult it can be to catch out their spores, which can just wander through space for years and years. An enemy who can almost immediately adapt strategies as needed to counter the enemies strengths, using organisms that are fully capable of matching an entirely mechanized, modern military. An enemy who is able and willing to bury their foes in bodies until their guns run dry.
And if you want proof that they're capable of all of the things I've spoken about this lecture, look no further than the Raider's archives of the Fall of Tarsonis - where a world that may have been more well-defended than Earth was during the height of Star League, was overrun entirely in less than a month. A world defended by an entire fleet of warships better than anything the SLDF ever produced alongside the most lethal Space Defence Platforms ever conceived until that date, with an entire Terran army garrisoned down below with all the firepower that implies, and the Zerg overran it in less than a month.
Now to be fair, Tarsonis had been a battleground beforehand - being softened up by the Sons of Korhal and Raynor's Raiders, who were a part of the former at the time. Not to mention the Sons of Korhal, under Mengsk's orders, explicitly fought to prevent the Protoss from bringing the hammer down on the Zerg. Still, even with all those caveats, the defence of Tarsonis was probably only second to Terra, if not its equal.
Terran losses were nearly total, military and civilian alike - tens of billions dying once the defences finally fell. This was the death-blow for the Confederacy, and a major loss in overall Terran fighting ability.
For the Zerg, who had lost billions upon billions of organisms of their own? Who would and had, without hesitation sacrificed millions of their own 'soldiers', just to kill a few thousand Terrans in key defensive positions? Who had taken losses that may have been as lopsided as a 100:1 in favor of the Terran defenders, the armed forces of the Confederacy? It didn't matter. They'd recover from this loss in weeks at most. A minor and temporary dip in their strength before they moved on to fighting the Protoss.
Hell, they didn't even bother fully withdrawing from the planet - they just picked up their immediately available organisms and left. Those remnants that the Swarm considered insignificant enough to just throw away on Tarsonis have since gone feral, and the world is still considered too dangerous for a reclamation effort.
Faced with all this, it's small wonder the colonists that the Raiders brought with them self-identified as refugees.