Part 100: Otrav

Otrav

Video





We're on to the Andere system, and right now there are just two stars left to visit on the map.




Surprisingly, there are only two systems here -- including the mysterious Farbor. Still, I was expecting more in numbers of planets.






















I'm surprised Lia is even able to speak, what with all the 'gel circuit maintenance' that is surely going to be required now.







That's ... a lot.













...





That seems obsessively thorough.
















Well, that explains why Farbor is so dog-gone special ...













Big sucker of a map. Got some weird circles by that building in the east, a bunch of emitters naturally, and some more somethings-or-others on the various plateaus.




Let's blather on some more about this planet.










That doesn't sound like fun.







Interesting how Skars has switched to telling Lia what to do, when it was initially the other way around ...






















Unless what, Lia? Oh that's right - you're just going to leave your thoughts hanging there. AGAIN. Given the situation, it would seem the shield key is the main thing here. If there are billions of worlds like this, silencing one won't matter much.




West side appears to be the only option. All three nodes go down and some collectors - that siphon contains 500 energy, which sounds like a lot. Some of the creeper is starting to flow into the ditch protecting this area, and it's not all that deep.




I get four mortars spaced out to try to keep the ditch from filling up too much, then put down some reactors and cannons.




Wanting to act before the creeper builds up too much, I ry a crossing soon afterwards. It fails horribly. The fairly narrow 'steps' or 'ledges' or whatever up the hillsides make things more difficult on this map. I try a second time with similar results. Then a third with more weapons. Fail again ...




And now I have a bigger problem, as I took away all the weapons defending this area and now the creeper is overflowing the ditch and taking out a bunch of my base. By the time I regain control of the situation, the majority of my reactors down there are kaput. So ... this isn't going super. The only real good news is that there are no Spore Towers on Otrav.




After regaining control of the situation and adding more reactors, not sure of any other way in which to proceed, I decide to build a bridge with a terp. If there isn't a good path, I'll make one. It isn't particularly hard to defend ourselves on this world, but actually making offensive progress is another matter. Berthas aren't as useful when there are no large areas for the creeper to pool, although I do have one up to help out a bit.




It's a bit of a slow process with constant cannon fire to clear out enough creeper for the terraforming to happen, but it works. At 16 and a half minutes here, there's a lot of creeper pretty much everywhere I'm not.




Eventually I make the bridge wider and push to the east. This allows a sufficient concentration of firepower to start making things happen, though getting up the hill is going to be another matter ... I'm at least to the hill now securely though. It is painstaking work and soon I pause for more reactors and a couple more berthas. One of things about the design of this world is I can't just wait for Forge upgrades ... because I don't have access to any Totems initially.




A common theme at this point was for me to get close to getting a nullifier in place ... and then they'd dump more creeper on the hilltop and blow it up.




When I finally did take out the first one, I got a nice surprise ... some AC came out of it to make things a bit easier.




Once I'd secured the area, I soon leveraged this vantage point into taking out two nearby emitters. The hilltop to the north went next, and the usual pattern of accelerating progress eventuated ... particularly since each hill had a Totem, so the Aether supply grew with each conquest.




A point was reached where I'd have two or even three nullifiers going at once, and it became easy to forget where I was advancing, not notice when one was lost due to an untimely creeper dump by those darned circles, etc. That actually became more of an issue because the further I progressed, the more often they'd choose each hill to dump on(simply because there were fewer of them to pick from).

I built more SuperBerthas than I needed during this process, and had some of them target the flat east end of the map by that Ticon structure, under the 'anything worth doing is worth overdoing' theory. This robbed those attraction fields of having any creeper to dump, so they just sort of sat on the final active hilltop and didn't do anything.




Here's a pretty good shot of the amount of overkill that was going on at the end, and I could have had more if I wanted it. Farbor Shield Key #3 already in my possession, I ended the activities of this station, and it was time to finally see just what Farbor has in store.

This mission did not need to take an hour, but like all the others it eventually fell to my will ... err, my spamming of firepower.