Part 57: Day 14: Phoenix

Day 14: Phoenix


https://youtu.be/XFb-veCDXsc



Me, after noticing it was the 14th consecutive Obliteration level: "I'm seriously wondering why they put that on there. 14 of them in a row, all the same."










At least the Styglek have an impressive grasp of vocabularly and eloquence.













Wisdom beyond his years. Perhaps Dax is growing into his job.













The unstoppable force of off-screen strikes once more.










That's a lot of things. Esp. reactors. And I didn't at first notice the Incoming Phantoms countdown at the top, much like the Spore one from the first game.

** Doom Timer: 12:28.

Imminent danger to the Liberation Ship isn't really the thing here.




The Phantoms would soon draw my attention though. I'd just got done looking around at everything, and deciding what I definitely needed was some weapons up, and then ...

"What on ... what on earth are those things!!" Then, as they exploded ... "Oh, you bastards!!"

So a couple things learned here: these wispy, floaty, cloud-like things are Phantoms. Apparently they are bundles of creeper. And they explode all over the place when they hit something. And can go through terrain.




Not even a minute and a half in. I've put up a few blasters but haven't accomplished anything else, the reactor farms are going the way of the dodo ... and I decide to restart.




Didn't go much better this time. I built some Blasters further up, and observed as this on the left might as well have waved at the Phantom as it passed by. I'm not really sure why I expected it to fire at something that was within solid terrain, but I did. My hopes were not justified.

"Blaster didn't shoot at it. I've got to find out what I can use against it."

So at this point I was basically just wanting to do SCIENCE and figure out how to combat the phantoms.




I build some blasters down by the ship and start clearing out the creeper pool. The reactors are all gone by now so I'm really struggling on energy. Works a lot better if you just build a couple blasters down here right away and ignore the reactor farm at first, but that didn't occur to me since I didn't know what the heck I was doing. Once I harvested one of the energy crystals things started happening more quickly. Then the schematic was collected:




Light dawns on marble head. The schematic is necessary for fighting the Phantoms.







So the other ship invented this thing but couldn't use it in time, whereas Hale just did it on the fly because ... plot device??







I started building up a new energy supply in this lower cavern, and placed some of the new Phantom Coils. You can see the effectiveness on the right; decent range and ability to target multiple phantoms at the same time. Progress.




A defense system against an immaterial foe that materializes on contact with important structures but not anything else. Which means Phantom are an intelligent, non-existent(or at least non-existent in our reality) enemy. Sure. Whatever.

I soon discover they can be placed anywhere and moved around.




With a few more Phantom Coils built, the base of operations seems secure so I take a look at the top. And rather wish I hadn't. Only the one emitter as mentioned, but that's a lot of gateways.




More reactors, a couple tech domes, and then we start moving upwards, gradually clearing out the passageways. And then the emitter breaks through another section of terrain on the far left. A waterfall, only it's not water, results.




A stupid-large reactor farm replaces the one that was destroyed earlier in the same location, and a few micro-rifts are added as we proceed upwards, gaining momentum.




That emitter is an obvious priority target. Here I use the same tactic as in the last mission; excavate to create an much larger field of fire for the growing force which now includes launchers as well.




The slowish push upwards proceeded in stages. Here you can see that I've done some excavating, but can't do any more because the leaking creeper cuts off any packet access to the terrain that needs to be removed. Once I've cleaned up the mess, we can proceed.




The design of this upper area makes this rather annoying once you take out the emitter. There's no real threat anymore -- even if a phantom does hit a blaster, it'll clean up the mess and repair reasonably quickly. Divided into multiple sections here, we need to dig our way through each, deal with the creeper at the bottom of it, then take out the gateways. Lather.Rinse.Repeat. I really like the way the first part of this level was designed. Most of it in fact. The top here though is just tedious. There are a few capsules to break it up though.




Cute.







That's about it -- I'll spare everyone the play-by-play of the grind to clear out all pockets of resistance.