Part 94: Chanson

Chanson

Video





This is a big map, and there's a whole bunch of unnatural stuff going on. Looks fun.










Creeper's getting sloppy.




Rather obvious historical reference here. A tad unoriginal, but fitting .



















All your tech are belong to us. Skars' command of the obvious is simply astonishing to behold.










That's unfortunate. Incomplete records do haunt me so.













Wouldn't be a proper 'boss' planet without a couple of surprises for us, now would it?




The southwest wedge here has some low-lying areas around it, not much but it'll slow the creeper down. Meanwhile there's totems and ore here. Definitely an obvious starting location.




I swear I have some sort of disease which causes me to ignore spores at the start of missions. Me, at the second warning of these arriving(not to mention we could see the towers being built at mission start), before all this carnage:

"Oh yeah, spores are coming and I don't have beams up. Good grief! ... So let's ... uh ... put those up far too late ... And we're short on energy. So, yeah. ... Not the most inspiring start, let's see what we can make of this."

I'd like to say that I learned my lesson this time and will never make this mistake again. But I'd be a liar. As for what we'll make of this -- well you can already see that our forge is being damaged and has become a paperweight. So there's that. What happened was few minutes of faster-than-expected spore volleys and impacts, with me thinking I would just get the beams up, then build reactors, eventually dig out of the hole. That's harder when your energy-producing infrastructure is going up in smoke though. Err creeper, not smoke.




That did eventually happen, but not before I lost stuff repeatedly for almost ten minutes. I toyed with Sprayers before deciding on a few bombers to put some pressure on the emitters. And of course rebuilt the Forge.




By the by, there is this just out of reach. I didn't end up getting it until it really didn't matter anymore. Getting a couple of collectors there right away and building a siphon with a Forge quicker would allow gathering this Aether deposit and really aid in the early part of the mission. I wasn't fast enough though.




I would add more bombers, and eventually got the usual upgrades in and started pushing up the northwest slope. I was finally getting my act together -- mostly, losing some cannons and whatnot as I went.




Here's what happens if you get too close. Brilliantly, I chose to place a long-range Sniper right next to the Glider path. Why not? What could possibly go wrong with th ...

Oh. They shoot yellow beams similar to the nullifier's red one. So keep your stinking distance. Duh. Now the glider was consumed/destroyed, but building weapons for them to blow up is hardly an efficient manner of terminating the hostiles. My favorite part is what comes next:

I didn't see the glider attack on the sniper. So I just thought 'Huh, I wonder how that happened' and decided to just build another relay and put a sniper on the Power Zone from the emitter I'd destroyed at the same time. Which was at least progress. And then the connecting relay disappeared. It took me way too long to figure out what was going on, but I did eventually build a sniper far enough away from the path. At that point it started regularly taking out the gliders from a safe distance, much like it had with the Runners on Defi. Another nullifier took out the 'Glider Tower' or whatever they are. No power zone there as they are over space, but it's one less source of gliders to deal with. Now only periodic reinforcements would come from elsewhere on the map.




Time to get moving again. Next order of business was a SuperCannon on the power zone so we could clear out this area and take control of that Bertha. It's thick enough here that a mortar probably would have been better, but it worked. Once connected, I discovered that they have an 'Auto-Target' function(yep, looked at the control panel. Aren't you all proud of me?) which seems to target the deepest concentration. That might have made more sense but instead I just sighted it in one of the emitters on the other side of the map. They appear to have literally unlimited range.




Next, we just did the same thing but towards the east. Bombers and weapon platforms combine to advance towards another cluster, also containing a glider tower, emitter, and bertha. I wouldn't say we're mopping up yet but I'd figured out what the mission was about. In this section it got a little complicated. I couldn't go straight for the bertha because there's no room on that plateau for a sniper that's far enough away to be safe. So I went for the tower. Got a nullifier almost fully charged -- and they took out the relay nearby it so it just kept spinning at 80% or charge. Built another one -- and they destroyed the nullifier before it could finish. Conniving little twits.




Eventually it went down and another area was cleared out. the Bertha was targeted here in the northeast; the warp inhibitor and friends, including another time capsule or whatever, spore towers, and slip emitters. As you can see it's really deep here.




But our work in clearing out the perimeter was not yet done. A third cluster was nearby, and sort of between me and the inhibitor. I went for the glider tower first this time; it was the last one, and soon the Gliders were no more. I randomly picked up the Strategic Reserve achievement shortly afterwards(I've not mentioned all of them, but this one came when I hit over 800 energy in storage at each command node).




It was time to lay down some serious firepower. That flash in the upper-right is a Bertha projectile impact. They aren't subtle. Along with the bombers and the three berthas, I added a row of mortars to pound the crossing here. It didn't take long with all of this destruction going on.




I built a bunch of cannons to get ready and a few more bombers -- and then proceeded to totally forget to tell the aircraft to actually attack. So they just sat there.




There's a series of large, slight steps as we close in. At first I thought it was flat, so I wasn't moving up as aggressively as I could have. Still, we were almost there.




As the final Nullifier powered up to shut down the inhibitor and all remaining resistance on Chanson, there was still the matter of the message to be decoded.







Abraxis' photographic memory apparently includes CAPS.



















So it IS possible after all. Skars and Lia prepare to make their way to Frykt now with a suspenseful cliffhanger hanging over their heads.