Part 88: Flick

If you are reading this; congratulations on making it to the 100th Creeper World episode! And thanks for sticking with the adventure this far. Depending on how big CW3 and the eventual CW4 end up being, there could be another 100 to go I suppose ... we will see.

Flick


Video





It occured to me that it might make more sense to put the planet map overview before Skars & Lia blather on discussing it, so you can have some vague idea what they are talking about ...







How typically vague of you, Lia.



















Lovely.










So we've got an 'island' map here - which constrasts rather hilariously with the somewhat normalish orbital view of the planet - that is apparently being held together with nothing but invisible/transparent space-magic-glue. And we're here to get the death & destruction ... err, bomber schematic.

The 'master' emitter produces 20 every 0.5 seconds, a decent amount but nothing overwhelming. A lot less than the big one did in our last venture. The ability to dispense it in several locations at once via the handwavium of 'subspace rips' is the gimmick to deal with here.




This particular island in the lower-right has a moderate amount of space, ore, and is also close to the schematic. It also doesn't have an indestructible Subspace Slip-Emitter on it. Nowhere else on the map has all of that going in favor of landing there.




This announcement that we've got the bomber schematic is eloquent in it's brevity. I'm also relaying my way along the islands on the right and upper-right of the map here in order to get to the other ore deposits. After building some reactors to compensate for the limited land area available to me, it's time to build some bomber bases.




They look similar to the Strafer ones, but the aircraft are quite different. I do really like the distinctive unit graphics of CW3 so far. I haven't yet hit a situation where isn't quite clear to me what all is going on. Here it's time for some island-hopping ... I could have chosen a different one but overall this seems as good as any. I want to clear this off to get myself close enough to the central island which is the primary target.

Below in the control panel there is the very useful 'Auto Launch' toggle, an improvement over CW1 which allows me to just set a target and have the bombers repeatedly attack it whenever they get the ammunition to do so.




Here I bring over a group of cannons, after the bombers take down the buildup a bit. In the very bottom-right by the terrain meter, we can see the creeper depth is '2.21'. Anything much higher than that is generally too much for cannons to deal with in a single go, so I try to get it down to about 2.5 or lower. And in fact, this attempt fails as well ... I run out of ammunition before creating enough clear space to get a relay up.




After pulling them back for a resupply, and some more bombing, I'm able to successfully get a beachhead soon afterwards. The bombers are re-targeted on the central island. I've got eight of them, but that isn't enough to exhaust ore supplies so I upgrade to 12. The creeper depth by the master emitter is in the 15-18 range ... several times worse than what we just dealt with. It's gonig to take a while to work that down to a reasonable level, so the more pounding the better.




Eventually I end up with this setup; one Mortar can just reach the edge to help thin things out a little faster, while the pulse cannons keep any creeper 'rifting' over here from doing any damage.

Now we wait. I fully admit the audio is screwed up on this part; with a dozen bombers firing non-stop you really can't hear much of what I'm saying *slap self*.




The master emitter going down cuts off the flow ... but it doesn't end the struggle. There's a shield key on an island in the upper-left. More bombing commences there, and a similar operation proceeds to acquire that. It's just cleanup though; once the central island is conquered, it's only a matter of time.