Part 5: NSDF #6 - So much for your coherent line of commentary at this point huh?

I've started to feel guilty about all the sound modding and am asking a very serious question: would it be too much to just take it all out now? I think the reason I started doing it was mostly because the main game's music was so subdued and there wasn't much to the backdrop. But after playing the first four missions of the Black Dog campaign in The Red Odyssey - and this is is after the patch where they re-added the game's music and tuned the difficulty some way after I played - I am blown away by how much more bombastic the game is with some of its music. I truly, truly love the Black Dogs as a faction. They are literally afforded every opportunity to be badass (fuck Commander Harris though) and come off as literal space desperados, like Alamo defenders even. They're the most humanized that the game gets and it's totally believable. They get shit on in so many ways and come back from it. I feel like the mods will definitely hurt that and the game does finally get serious in terms of difficulty with TRO.

The only necessary case to make against the sound modding is this track. I mean we can keep some like Collins and Avitus for sure but the Tim Allen grunting and other self-referential stuff should probably go.

Please Listen To This https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCB0dvJaS9o

That music on loop fuck me this expansion is so good. The music was so good that I broke my rule about recording in advance of any suggestions. Believe me, I'm completely open if you hate this stuff or not and I can change it as needed. In this case though haha I kinda drove myself up a creek. I can't in good conscience impugn that awesome music with all the horrible mind-numbing cacophonies.





The NSDF forces were crushed utterly on Titan. As the Justice arrived in orbit, they only detected three distress beacons of the remnant survivors. The Furies the CCA had built had gone out of control, and the Soviets quickly surrendered as both sides came under heavy from the maniacal machines. Able to soar through the atmosphere at high speed and drop in anywhere on the battlefield, launching missiles and lightning at their foes, they were surely a force to be reckoned with.

By consolidating their forces and gathering enough material, General Collins and Commander Jason Bates launch a counter-attack on a CCA base converted into a Fury production facility. Against overwhelming odds, with former enemies working together, they manage to push the Furies off of Titan. They retreat to a small moon orbiting Uranus called Achilles, where the final stage of the war would be fought. The NSDF arrive on the moon Achilles and take the fight to the sentient Furies. By destroying their primary factory, which was tapped into the molten core of the moon for power, they trigger a chain reaction which is tearing the planetoid apart at the seams. In one final desperate act, the Furies try to escape again, but Grizzly One and his team destroy their transport and make it back to the Justice in the nick of time.

With the Biometal War behind him, Jason Bates puts the finishing touches on his recording and vanishes from history, hoping that these events are not repeated lest Earth and all humankind be eradicated by the struggle for power.

Very tough missions, those last three, but let's talk about them now!

Mission 13 gives you a lot of prep time and if, like me, you shut down the CCA scrap operation early, you keep them from harassing you and your scavengers with fighters for the whole map until they go neutral. Everything else is just a bonus dependent on how much you want to steamroll over everything that's about to come your way. This mission lulls you into a false sense of security about the furies. It cannot be understated just how powerful two of them together can be and it was a fluke that I survived in that Walker. I had no business getting out of that one alive. Just escort an APC around the map with a posse of Tanks equipped with SP-Stabbers and you're good to go honestly. The attacks don't come frequent enough to put a dent in any of your base structures.

Mission 14 is ultra easy as seen. They try to trick you into setting up at a base with a Supply Depot, Hangar, and unpowered gun tower to draw it out but if you head north immediately and start harvesting you'll get done in about 8 minutes. Furies will constantly spew out from the northern field, which is where all the big piles of scrap are, after a while so you've got to go fast. Other than that, unremarkable filler mission.

Mission 15 is where you get slapped upside the head with the Fury's bullshit. Right off the bat, before you can even select anything, you are already going to be coming under fire with two Fury Tanks on the north and south ends of the map moving around the outskirt hills to attack you. You have got to move faster than you've ever had to before, and even then it's not enough and requires quite a bit of luck. Gun tower rushing is mandatory. There's no way to maintain a fighting force early on because there is no scrap to be found anywhere except in the inner ring, which is guarded by a fury and some mines, in addition to the risk you run of having the gun towers on the hill kill your scavengers and leaving you nearer to Fury attacks. It's probably a better idea than what I had, but it still does not solve the problem of your reinforcements being made dead on arrival 90% of the time. Once you build up a full force, you have to attack ASAP. When I say the attacks never stop, they never fucking stop and every 30 seconds you will be attacked somewhere. The missiles will constantly wear down your power stations, gun towers being struck with bolt buddies notwithstanding. Just get the hangar down fast and you'll be out of the frying pan.

Mission 16 is a very long and very drawn out mission. You should immediately set up a series of Silos around the mountain crater you start in and crank out 4 scavengers to keep the flow of biometal going. Set up 5 tanks and get them equipped with SP-Stabbers and whittle down a couple towers, which also frees up more scrap fields. I set up a hangar & supply depot just down the hill from where I started. There's no need to worry about your Recycler because the Furies tend to go straight for you and the scrap collectors. The AI has some weird priorities in this one but at least they're not constantly soaring in and dropping in on top of the Recycler and throwing missiles everywhere, though I can tell I cut a very frustrating thing where a fury was basically teabagging me by just hovering up and down out of weapon range and firing the fucking missiles at me. As soon as all the towers go down you can assault the Fury Base, but it has to be taken slow. If you just rush in, you will be instantly annihilated and have to rebuild the entire force. You cannot deal with the base yourself because there will be a slow and steady stream of tanks still spawning there. Take it down, and move on to the final mission!

Mission 17 is very short, and very frustrating. Everything I could say already happened in the video. There is no real strategy to this. Maybe throwing a lot of Day Wreckers and flying a bomber in from the get go. I dunno. My strategy is to take everything on the chin

The ending cutscene is very exploitable imo.

CAN'T WAIT FOR TRO IT"S GONNA BE SICK

SHOW ME WHAT PASSES FOR FURY AMONG YOUR MISBEGOTTEN KIND!!

FUN FACT: There exist only 400 physical copies of The Red Odyssey expansion!