Brood lord

The brood lord is a powerful zerg flying unit derived from the corruptor.

Overview
Brood lords are massive manta-like flying creatures that serve as aerial siege units for the Swarm. Only seen in the largest of conflicts, the brood lord has the ability to spit out biological symbiotes that function as living ammunition. This attack makes brood lords extremely dangerous to opposing installations. However, despite their impressive offensive abilities, brood lords are not very durable, and they make easy targets for most aerial-strike combatants.

Game Unit
Brood lords replace the guardian as the zerg aerial bomber, retaining the guardian's ability to attack from outside most ground-based defense ranges. It is strong against any ground unit but have absolutely no defense to aerial attacking units. Despite their strong attack against ground units, massed formations of anti-air ground units still pose a large threat - Marine (StarCraft II)s backed with medivac dropships and stalkers with sentries as well as hydralisk (StarCraft II)s can easily overcome brood lords. Brood lords should always be provided with a heavy escort before attacking.

Abilities
Brood lords are accompanied by a small number of broodlings. Its attack consists of throwing broodlings at the enemy, doing damage, at which point the two broodling emerging can wreak havoc on the ground. The attack then goes down to one broodling, but if the brood lord does not attack for a while, a second one will be launched on the next attack.

Development
During the development of StarCraft II, it replaced the swarm guardian.

The combat role of the brood lord fluctuated for a very long time. Many variations of the guardian were presented but the intention was always clear that the development team wanted more out of this new flyer. Finally out of the blue, Samwise Didier concepted the brood lord like a bold of lightning and thus the design team created the 3D art in accordance to his concept. The head design was lifted from the scrapped morphalisk.