Part 30: Special Ops: Mouse Shadow

Special Ops: Mouse Shadow


https://youtu.be/yqYNa6WGPvo





Spores, a very small starting 'safe' area', and two fairly strong, false-pulsing emitters which occupy the only high ground. Oh yeah, and still no upgrades yet. This is another one that is not a push-over. Another obvious question is why we have two artifacts here when this isn't a story mission ...

Doom Timer: 11:51


Imminent destruction isn't the issue so much as establishing a large enough presence to turn the tide on the Creeper here.




It takes very little time to cover the available area with collectors. Then the question of 'now what?' comes to mind.




In less than two minutes my initial plan starts taking shape. Relays to the west, where the hope is to establish more territory while not fighting the entire bulk of the enemy; there are lower elevations for it to flow down to. That's also the point of the drone base, dealing with pounding those locations.




Starts out ok here, but I forget about the spores until far too late. This one hits, taking out a collector and a relay and screwing up my connections. Both collectors in the western foothold are soon made casualties of this as well.




The next spore attack is defeated though, and I'm able to rebuild my position with interest. A second blaster is on the way and I'm feeling good about being able to gradually expand efforts.




A couple more collectors, but to go much further we need to assault the central plateau and I don't have the energy for that. In retrospect this is another siuation where reactors were the answer.




This happened after I tried to force the issue twice and got nowhere. Three spores came in, and the western SAM site took out two but had no missiles left. The last one landed directly on the middle relay, and once again the network crumbled.




After taking several minutes to re-establish basically the same position, creeper came up over the northern tip of our main holdings in the east. Once that was dealt with I got a reactor going, but still wasn't going anywhere. Partly because one of the blasters is regularly basically wasting energy firing at the lower basin here. Either way, at this point I would probably have needed a lot more reactors, but I got interrupted by some stupid RL thing that I can't even remember now and had to re-start.



https://youtu.be/sGc_NYGzdW0



The start went similarly on the next try. Too similarly. I once again forgot to build SAMs until after the first spores hit and disconnected the network. One would think that red box with the timer ticking down at the bottom of the screen would be enough warning. But no.




14:44 on the video here. For anyone watching them this is a decent place to start as the start of it just is almost a carbon-copy of the first try. Quite similar to the first try, except I have a speed building up and two Reactors. A little more sensible, though not much different. I'm afraid there are also some rather obvious stuttering things going on in the video -- I would eventually figure out the hardware cause which I won't bore you with here. For now, it is what it is. But the general pattern I tried to follow was building a reactor when the drone took off, so it would be mostly done when it returned and started re-arming. That permitted enough ammunition to get to the blasters, and ever-so-slowly the energy situation improved.

By the 15-minute mark on the mission timer, I could build a reactor before the drone returned from it's bombing run. Now with four of them operational and a 3.4 regular income, I was making sure if gradual progress.




After building another speed unit and a few more reactors, I finally made my move up, and it appeared successful. By this point I'd had quite enough of this mission and I wanted to be sure I was prepared before screwing things up again.




A steady advance soon capped the central emitter, and that was basically the end of any serious threat. But about those two artifacts ...




The first one(in the northeast) was reached after capping the second emitter, then getting my blasters blown up, then repeating the process. It appears we've reached the 'notes from the developer' stage.




This is a genuinely interesting tidbit IMO.




A very similar type of challenge here to the North Carolina map -- never really at risk of losing, but winning is not trivial.