Heart of the Swarm Campaign- Zeras Achievements: Waking the Ancient

Normal Difficulty:

Waking the Ancient (10): Win.

A Game of Drones (10): Win without losing more than 3 drones to Brakk's attackers.  This is a relatively easy achievement- if you keep losing drones, you won't be able to win the mission anyways.  Keeping your attack/exploration force well-positioned is pretty much mandatory.  Helpfully, once you know where Brakk's base and spare primal hives are, you can protect your drones by keeping your own assault force between it and them.  This results in the enemy units charging right into your forces and getting torn apart, hopefully before even catching sight of your drones.

Rude Awakening (10):  Kill four primal hives.  While this seems easy, it actually is a bit harder than losing few to no drones.  Aside from the two or three waiting in Brakk's Southeast main camp, the four primal hives spotted around the map are very spread out in location.  They are also very large and powerful, so if you encounter them with a lighter force you're going to lose the fight.  Maintaining three field forces in this mission is a good way to go so slowly at the beginning that Brakk destroys seven meat sources, so you should focus your first time through on gathering meat and collecting primal DNA.  If you're quick, or meander your forces a little, you may find you complete this achievement anyway- otherwise, you may need to save it for a replay or subsequent playthrough.

Hard Difficulty:

Whack-A-Brakk (10): Complete the mission without Brakk's forces destroying any biomass.  This should definitely be done on a replay rather than an initial playthrough- the diversion of focus needed to accomplish this while gathering the DNA for Kerrigan levels and keeping all drones intact is untenable.  For the purposes of this achievement, you want to keep your assault force free-floating, and be ready to move in each time Brakk starts trying to destroy the quillgor meat- by essentially 'claim jumping' his attempts, you can use his eagerness to stop you to help yourself to the revealed meat without leaving your drones unguarded.  You may find that fast-moving units are a necessity here, in which case a combination of zerglings, aberrations, and mutalisks will likely be your best bet.