Part 224: CEO's Landing

CEO's Landing (35:27)





The layout is pretty clear here, and let me just say that's a lot of red plasma.




The new RegSmash with more protection on the sides and less severe of an angle so it won't get punished as much if it faces the wrong way. We're not going to use it, but I just made it for demonstration's sake.




And then the BiLathe, with more armor and a centralized cockpit. You can get almost two and a half regular Lathes for the same price, but as we'll see this definitely has its uses.




We have defensive struc and a bunch of energy pods, but very little actual energy sources. The economics of the start here would be interesting to optimize, but it's clear we want to grab land at the edges via Omnis. Also, there is this one emitter we can eventually flip which will help.




I ran out too early, having overbuilt. 2:30 in, income of 5, expenses of 258! Yeah, I don't advise this technique. Now we do have some occasional attacks coming our way, but suffice to say getting to the emitter and amp gems before you run out of storage is more advisable. I misjudged this.




The mire expansion gradually equalized income, but here we aren't quite there yet. The emitter has been flipped but there are more hostiles ... more importantly we were able to put the amp gems into energy tech. That helps give us the firepower to battle this Doppel.




Omni Reactors were an obvious early choice. Here along the top, we grab another energy mine - though they don't give us much we'll take it anyway - but there is worse resistance ahead. With income at 31, we're now definitely into the positive there.




The emitters yield amp gems underneath - I'm not a fan of this mechanic as there's no way to tell when they do or don't ahead of time. More importantly getting the rest of the fleet up with the biggest available ships being the Marauder, Wolf, and Big Nose, gives us more than enough to chase off the doppels and start to be more aggressive.




Here the Omni Cannons have now been deployed, and with a full complement I spread out around the enemy stronghold to have firepower from all directions and also grab more energy sources. Also, there's another Gem Harvester here worth my attention.




Here's what the back end looks like ... a loop of particulate with additional struc inside it. Layered defenses indicative of a reasonable intelligence.




Around the edges omnis are able to snipe a few emitters, but aside from that we breach the fortress more traditionally; straightforward firepower against some pretty substantive doppel variants with everything taking part.




After a suicidal trial run and some other experimenting, the newly reinforced BiLathe shows it can take some serious punishment - and pose a threat to fairly fortified enemy positions.




Elsewhere, things aren't so rosy. Being regularly attacked by a trio of doppels with limited firepower isn't a fun thing. It was tricky to keep them under control, and I wasn't always successful.

Another issue was many emitters on the map, so that it took a lot of combat to take down enough of them to really make a dent.




This took them down to only one remaining Doppel-producer though, and I was making enough headway as it was that it felt like a decisive turn.




The main remaining problem was eating through the plasma to the back fortifications, where the BiLathe did it's best Hammer-wannabe impression in overtly taking the final assault.




The revised-and-improved Thor design will feature when we move on to Archipelago, which it can be seen is a fairly fitting title for our next mission.