Oblivion Express Co-op Guide: How to Stop Amon's Trains

Oblivion Express is the StarCraft II Co-op mission that turns an RTS into a stopwatch. Amon is shipping resources across the map on armored trains, and your job is simple to describe and brutal to execute: destroy each train before it reaches the end of the line.

The key thing new players miss is that a train is not one target. It is a chain of cars, and you have to kill all of them. Leave one car alive and the train counts as escaped, no matter how much damage you did to the rest. That single rule reshapes everything — you are not looking for a big fight, you are looking for enough concentrated damage in one place at one moment.

Trains also announce their route before they roll. That warning is your planning window: it tells you which side of the map to be standing on when the engine appears. Getting caught on the wrong track is the most common way a good army loses a train, because travelling across the map costs more time than the train gives you.

What is actually fighting you. Two things: the escort forces riding along with the objective, and the static defenses and bases parked near the tracks and stations. The escorts are the reason you cannot just park a small squad on the rail and snipe cars in peace. The base defenses are why clearing an intercept point before the train arrives is usually worth more than trying to do both jobs at once under fire.

Tempo is the real mechanic. Between trains you get downtime, and that downtime is the mission. Expand, tech, add production, top up your army — then be pre-positioned on the announced route with your damage ready. Players who treat the gaps as rest instead of macro time hit the last train with an army that was strong enough for the first one.

Commander styles split cleanly here. Burst specialists like Zeratul, Nova or Tychus delete cars fast, which is exactly what a multi-car objective rewards. Long-range artillery — Mengsk's Earthsplitter Ordnance is the poster child — can bombard the route itself and soften everything before contact. Swarm and infested commanders like Zagara or Stukov trade bodies into escorts so the damage dealers stay free. Karax and Stetmann lean into defenses and support that make intercept points safe to hold.

If you want to see the difference in practice, the channel has plenty of Brutal Oblivion Express runs — Karax and Tychus, Mengsk and Abathur, Stetmann and Zeratul — solving the same tracks in very different ways. Browse the StarCraft 2 archive on this site, and if you like the survival-defense flavour instead, read the Dead of Night guide next.