Humans, a very long way from Earth
The Terrans are human. That is the whole of the word: Terran describes the species, not a government, an army or a side. Everything else about them — who commands them, who taxes them and who they are shooting at — changes from one campaign to the next, which is why so much coverage of this universe ends up contradicting itself.
Their presence in the Koprulu Sector is an accident. Centuries before the first game, Earth shipped a population of convicts and political undesirables out on a long-range colonisation programme, and the programme went wrong: the ships arrived far from where they were aimed, with no way home and no help coming. The survivors settled, and three of their worlds became the sector’s first powers — Tarsonis, Moria and Umoja. [B]
Two things follow from that origin, and both matter more than any individual plot point. Terran technology is industrial rather than elegant: welded plate, exhaust, stencilled serial numbers, hardware kept running past its service life. And Terran politics are the politics of a frontier that was never meant to exist — colonies that owe Earth nothing, corporations with private armies, and a population that has been governed badly for generations. The series has always called this a space western, and that is where the label comes from. [A]
One species, several governments
This is the single most useful thing a newcomer can learn about the Terrans, and it takes one table. These are not factions in a multiplayer sense. They are states, cartels and militias, and they fight each other at least as often as they fight anything alien. [A] [B] [C]
| Power | What it is |
|---|---|
| Confederacy of Man | The old order, centred on Tarsonis. Wealthy, corrupt and resented by its own coloniesThe power that is in charge when the original campaign begins |
| Terran Dominion | The empire founded by Arcturus Mengsk after the Confederacy fell, with its capital on KorhalThe largest human power for most of the series — and the one people mean when they carelessly say “the Terrans” |
| Kel-Morian Combine | A mining cartel from Moria, run for profit with its own security forces |
| Umojan Protectorate | Umoja’s own state: smaller, wealthier, deliberately independent |
| Raynor’s Raiders | Jim Raynor’s irregular outfit. A few ships and a grievance, not a government |
| United Earth Directorate | Earth’s government, which eventually sends a fleet of its own into the sectorAn outside force, and not present for most of the story |
So when a summary says “the Terrans did X”, the honest question is which Terrans, and in which year. A marine fighting for the Confederacy and a marine fighting the Dominion wear nearly the same suit.
The marine, the suit, and why that is suddenly the point
The image the series is built on is a human being sealed inside a CMC power suit, carrying a C-14 gauss rifle: a shoulder-fired weapon that accelerates spikes of metal down a magnetic rail. The suit is not elegant. It is a mobile industrial container with a person in it, and in the earlier games plenty of those people did not choose to be there — the Confederacy filled its ranks with convicts whose personalities had been rewritten to make them obedient. [B]
For thirty years you looked at that marine from above. It cost minerals, it took up one square of space, and you spent it. The announced game changes the distance rather than the fiction: Blizzard has confirmed third person as the intended main perspective, so that players see their character and their armour, and describes the experience it is after as being a Terran marine in heavy armour whose weight, size and stopping power can be felt — naming the gauss rifle specifically. [D]
The developers’ own example of what that costs them is worth quoting because it is so unglamorous: if you are ten feet tall and wearing something that weighs a thousand pounds, doors are a challenge. [E] Everything the strategy games could leave as an icon on a grid — a doorframe, a stairwell, a landing barracks — has to become a real object at a real size.
None of this is a demonstrated feature. No gameplay has been shown publicly, so every sentence in the paragraph above is a stated intention from an interview, and we mark it as one. What it does tell you is where to look when footage finally arrives.
Beyond the infantry
Four more Terran things are worth recognising on sight, because they carry most of the series’ visual identity:
- The siege tank. A vehicle that stops being a vehicle: it plants itself, unfolds and becomes artillery that cannot move until it folds up again. The whole Terran approach in one machine — dig in, out-range, hold.
- The battlecruiser. A capital ship the size of a town, and usually the most important room in a campaign rather than the most important weapon. Raynor’s ship, the Hyperion, is where much of StarCraft II’s story actually happens. [C]
- The ghost. A psionic operative — cloaking, a long rifle, and a deeply unpleasant institutional history behind how such people are found and trained.
- Vespene gas. The other resource beside minerals, extracted from geysers. It is the reason a Terran base looks like a refinery, because that is what it is.
The rest of the vocabulary — and the terms that most reliably confuse newcomers — sits in our field glossary.
How the old order ended — contains spoilers
Collapsed on purpose: this is the plot of the original campaign, and it is better played than read.
The Confederacy did not fall to an alien invasion, exactly. It fell to a rebellion that was willing to use one. Arcturus Mengsk led an insurgent group against a government that had already destroyed one of his family’s worlds, and in the course of that campaign the Zerg reached Tarsonis — the Confederate capital — with human help rather than despite it. The Confederacy ended there, and Mengsk declared the Terran Dominion over the wreckage, with himself as its emperor.
Two people leave that campaign changed. Jim Raynor, a colonial marshal who joined the rebellion in good faith, spends the rest of the series opposing what it became. And Sarah Kerrigan, the rebellion’s best psionic operative, is left behind on a doomed world and taken by the Zerg — the event that turns the Swarm from a natural disaster into a character. Her story is the spine of everything that follows, on both sides. [A] [B]
If you intend to play the campaigns, this is the point at which to stop reading summaries and start with the original game. [B]
What carries over to the announced game — and what does not
All three species appear in the announced game, and the developers have named Terrans as the perspective you play from. [F] [D] That makes the material above genuinely useful context. Two limits keep it honest.
The seventy-year gap. The new story is set roughly 70 years after StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. [F] That is long enough for a government to fall, a border to move or an institution to be abolished, so treat every entry in the table above as a fact about its era. “The Dominion runs human space” is a statement about the earlier campaigns, not a prediction.
The cinematic’s title is not the game’s. The announcement cinematic is called “Dominion”, which is a resonant word in this universe and is not a confirmed subtitle for the game — the game so far has no number and no subtitle at all. We explain why that distinction keeps getting lost in our reading of the reveal cinematic.
What is worth bringing with you is the texture: industrial hardware, bad government, and people who are dangerous mainly because of what they are wearing. What is worth leaving behind is any assumption about the map.
Change history
- First published version. Written to replace the announced-but-unwritten faction overview: the human powers are given as a dated table, and the campaign outcome that explains how one replaced another is collapsed rather than left out.
Read and released by a named editor before publication. This page describes the released games of the series. Where it touches the announced game, the statement it rests on is attributed and dated; nothing here is an account of firsthand play of the unreleased game.