Malwarfare Co-op Guide: Taking Down Amon's Terminals

Malwarfare is the StarCraft II Co-op mission about machines turned against their makers. Amon has corrupted a Purifier network, and the way you fight back is not by out-massing him — it is by taking down the terminals that keep the corrupted network running. The whole mission is a sequence of terminal fights with waves in between.

The pattern is consistent: a terminal becomes available, you move in, you hold the area long enough to finish it, and then you reposition for the next one. That makes Malwarfare a mobility mission. An army that is strong but slow arrives late to every terminal and spends the whole game a step behind the objective.

Terminal fights are where runs are decided. You are standing still in a fixed spot while enemy forces come to you, which is the worst possible moment to discover your composition has a hole in it. Splash damage, focus fire on priority targets and a bit of front-line durability turn a chaotic terminal into a routine one. Commanders with strong burst — Tychus's outlaw squad is the obvious example — simply delete the dangerous units before they matter.

Because the enemy is a corrupted machine army, expect durable mechanical units and real air pressure. Skipping anti-air is a much bigger mistake here than on maps where the ground army does all the work.

Do not forget the optional objectives. Malwarfare has bonus objectives alongside the main terminals, and they are genuinely optional — one of the Brutal runs on the channel clears every mandatory objective and still misses the optional ones. They are worth going for when your macro is healthy, but never worth losing the main objective timing over.

Commander styles that work. Burst and elite damage — Tychus, Nova, Zeratul, Kerrigan — clears terminal defenders fast. Swann, Karax and Stetmann stabilise the area with turrets, support and zone buffs so the fight is fought on your terms. Swarm and infested commanders like Zagara and Stukov soak the waves with cheap bodies. Abathur and Dehaka scale into unstoppable single units that hold a terminal by themselves, and Mengsk softens everything with artillery before contact.

The channel has a deep list of Brutal Malwarfare clears — Tychus with Abathur, Raynor and Dehaka, Vorazun and Swann, Stetmann with Artanis and Mengsk, Abathur and Stukov, Zagara and Stetmann — each solving the same terminals differently. Browse the StarCraft 2 archive on this site, and read the Temple of the Past and Chain of Ascension guides next.