Part 213: Intent
Intent (37:19)Ok, let's dive into the first official fail of this campaign! With no gaps in the corrected audio AFAIK.
We start off this mission by looking at the Help screen for the first time. I could have done this one mission earlier, but that's really it without spoilering. This makes me sad, because we're most of the way through the Story by now. Still, we have Game Play and Advanced Game Play ... the final two categories are still spoilerish at this stage.
Stored energy more importantly. And how is the novice supposed to be sure which is the energy pod, since they may not know what ship schematics are?
I'm guessing the Marauder was an earlier unlock at some point, but still this is egregious. It can't have been that hard just to grab a new shot that only had like the Lathe and Destroyer or whatever.
Always useful to remember.
Overall advice sound and appropriately basic. On to the advanced section ...
I still manage to forget some of the rotation specifics from time to time.
Good coverage of the essentials I think. So back to our regularly scheduled mission ...
'Becomes' very dangerous? That's ominous, I rather thought it already was.
Because Abraxis must be mentioned in EVERY.SINGLE.MISSON. I honestly miss the first part of the story when it looked like they might not go there.
I believe the completion to this statement is 'nothing blown to smithereens in a massive supernova explosion'. The degree to which these characters are totally ok with the 'just push the button and see what it does' approach is staggering.
Right and top are clearly our prospective starting zones, with the lower-left a defensive ring of plasma for the hostile particulate.
1:17 in. I focus on energy which is usually a good idea ... but here we clearly need more combat power. A cruisers has already been destroyed, destroyer and joven are building but clearly not fast enough.
This happens when the Corporate HQ gets destroyed ... it doesn't actually get destroyed but 'jumps to safety'. We have a counter in the lower-left telling me I can redeploy in 15 seconds, but that wouldn't do me any good given how overrun we are. It's the classic CW tale of build more defenses faster, and I'm sent to restart. I don't know whether to applaud the game or be ashamed of myself. At least it was quick ... 1:31 here.
This time I go with only one omni and a bit more efficient order at the start. A Destroyer is up quickly, and here comes the first doppel but we also have a Cruiser ready with a Joven soon to meet it. I've already had to tank a sizable amount of attacks with the HQ, but we've got enough firepower in place to start fighting back a bit soon.
I add another cruiser but frankly that was probably a mistake ... we just don't have the energy for it. Stunners start showing up and we can't do anything about that yet either. I'm just really trying to buy time at this point while the land gradually mires so that we can have a more tenable economy.
One of the two islands above our starting spot. I send an Omni there before it is overrun to get any little bit I can. Benign Emergent to help with the main defense, various energy boosters and the omni reactors are my early tech investments. Also we have benign particulate coming from this area, mixing in with hostile and I'm not sure how that all is going to work out.
Slowly we build up, and this is my first real offensive - we've grabbed the other island as you can see. This is one of the 'modified' emitters, and their gimmick is that they can be converted. It isn't destroyed, but rather switches from hostile to friendly. That's quite useful. We're pushing eight minutes in by the time I accomplish this, so there was still an extended period of tense survival to start things off.
I did a save-and-reload because the game was running quite slow ... had to boost the process priority which appears it will be necessary from time to time, and also sped up the video some after the fact. My CPU just isn't quite up to the task when throwing close to a max fleet out there. I do like being able to go straight to loading from this screen though.
Thanks is no small part to the good advice by Fangz, I give this a try with Omni Cannons enabled. Enough of them eventually grabs the second good spot along the top of the map, taking down a hostile energy mine and grabbing a few pods. Now we're in business from an energy standpoint.
Before pressing an attack though, I take some time to grab a couple of toys in the upper-right corner.
Then we press in on this smallish but fortified central island from above and the right, as well as directing benign particulate here via Emitter Control.
Then it's time for the Grabber, redirecting our increasing supply towards the next target.
This fairly impressive nest of enemy activity will eventually need our attention.
But first ...
All together now ... Platius did it.
The rest of this battle, although there was a bit of cleanup to do elsewhere, was mostly just forming a massive line of ships at the edge of the enemy plasma. An edge that was rapidly pushed back with our combined firepower.
The 145th of what? What are we counting here? My initial guess was some sort of military unit, aka the 145th Infantry Regiment or whatever. Perhaps I've just read too much military history, but I was in error.