Part 1: Intro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCwR1h82HiA

Whoa. Pretty exciting intro. We'll be starting with the LC as the LC have the quickest of the three campaigns, for reasons that will soon be apparent. They also have no navy and a minimal number of unit chassis, making unit construction simpler than the UCS or ED.



We begin with General Fang (as played by me) sending an outline of a proposed alliance to the Defense Manager of the LC, Sombra Shattan. The UCS has provided General Fang's personal anti-gravity vehicle and the General himself as a sign of good faith. The General also insists if the LC agree to the alliance he will lead the troops from the front General Fang looks pretty awesome so far.



Defense Manager Shattan agrees to the alliance with the UCS! He also is now a Soul Partner (whatever that is), however she cautions that she has little knowledge of battle. It's a good start though. GOLAN II (and the UCS President) have seen a bold move early in the war payoff quite handsomely. I'm sure General Fang will have a fearsome force at his disposal now with the might of the LC warmachine behind him.





Oh. The LC army consists of nothing more than 5 Lunar-class scout vehicles. Fang's anti-gravity tank could crush these scouts before they could even say boo. The LC will need to make some serious technological advances if they have even a prayer of defeating the ED and escaping from Gaia. For now we'll need Fang to help support our nascent army. Fang is extremely strong in the early game though. We'll be okay.



A new message from High Mentor Alia Tiolan! Wow, the LC must really trust General Fang to put him in charge of resource procurement. Let's see how much the LC needs.



500,000 CR? But, we only have 5,250 in our HQ right now... This might be tougher than we thought. (Author Note: the UCS and ED require 1,000,000 CR so the LC gets off easy here).



And with that the countdown to the destruction of Gaia begins. You have 183 in-game days to build your spaceship. It sounds like time is tight, but if you fight efficiently you'll be able to make it off the planet with plenty of time to spare. Now, at this point you can jump into missions by clicking on the globe to the right of the screen. Before we do that though, let's take a look at our HQ. We'll be coming back here after every mission, so it's a good idea to familiarize ourselves with its layout and features.

LC Headquarters



Spaceport - This is the most important structure in the game. If you are dumb enough to click on auto-destruct you will lose the campaign. You must defend the Spaceport at all costs! Losing it will doom the LC. If the need arises you can pull 5,000 CR out of the Spaceport. But that is 5,000 CR less you have to construct your ship. You can also put in 5,000 CR at a time. Once the spaceport has 10,000 CR a supply ship will come down to send the credits up to the orbital docks, permanently removing the money from the game and also advancing the escape ship production.



Main Base - The LC constructs all units from the Main Base. It's more expensive than the UCS and ED factories but can mount more weapons and as a result can usually defend itself.



Solar Battery - The LC uses solar power being the peace loving hippies they are . The solar battery is needed to keep LC bases running when the sun isn't out. As you can see here, this battery is 100% charged. It will begin losing charge at night when the Solar Power Plant shuts down.



Solar Power Plant - Like I said, the LC uses solar power. Unlike the other 2 factions, the LC power grid spans the entire map. However, Solar Power Plants are very expensive as you need to build all 10 solar panels next to the plant to ensure maximum output.



Mine - This mines for minerals (those white shiny dots on the ground). As you can see in the screenshot, I've turned this mine off to demonstrate the power function on buildings. Any building in the game can be turned on or off. If the enemy knocks out some of your power grid, turning off non-essential buildings may be the only thing that saves you from defeat. LC mining is yet another thing that's different from ED/UCS mining. The LC merely needs to drop a mine on top of a resource patch to begin extraction while the ED and UCS require units to either mine the minerals themselves or carry raw materials to a refinery.



Research Center - Our last pre-built structure. All LC research originates here at the Research Center. You may build an additional 2 Research Centers to speed up research, something we may invest in later on in the game when we are at a severe tech disadvantage. While we're here, let's take a look at the Research screen.

Research





Here you can see the research screen. The only things we can research right now are two updates to the Lunar-class scout we encountered earlier. Only ammo upgrades will apply to units in the field, so since we don't have much of an army there's no downside to spending some money now for the chassis upgrade. This is one disadvantage the LC has over the other 2 factions. The ED and UCS can upgrade weapons and chassis designs on units. This allows them to, in theory, carry one unit from the start of the game to the finish. We probably won't see any LC units do that.

Construction Center



Here it is. The main thing that makes Earth 2150 so damn cool. This is the Construction Center. When you begin the game, you have no units to build that can shoot people. Let's change that by designing our own unit. I picked the Moon m1 because the Lunar m1 will be obsolete once we finish researching that chassis upgrade. The Moon m1 is a pretty good general unit for the LC. We'll probably be building a lot of these.



This is the customization part of the Construction Center. Up top you can see the equipment that is mountable on your selected chassis. The 20 mm chaingun isn't that great, but the rocket launcher isn't half bad. The banner is a fairly confusing mess. Allegedly it raises unit experience level which should improve destructive power, sight line, firing range, speed, resistance and reload time, however I've noticed none of these things when I've played. It could be that the effects are very tiny. In light of their general uselessness, I won't be using banners all that often. In the dropdown menu below the unit name you see we can give the unit different scripts. The only major change is regular/simple/advanced and the script allows more complicated or simplistic commands to be given. For now we'll stick with the default script.

Also, do you see the name field there? If you all would like we can give each new unit type a unique name instead of the generic "chassis type, revision, weapon" names. Please give me faction-relevant suggestions and I'll try and incorporate them into our army. I am not naming our entire army "Dongs mk 2 jizzflinger" or anything like that.



There we can see the Moon mk1 R I added to the Construction Center. I also added a Phobos-class detector to our civilian unit list. These will be good for finding any cloaked enemies. The Mercury-class resupply vehicle is usually a better choice for reconnaissance due to its price, build time and speed.



Speaking of the Mercury, let's build one. Except right now we don't have a Supply Center for it to dock with. The LC really isn't good at this whole war thing. Right now if we were attacked our Lunar m1s would have no way to reload once they depleted their rockets. Let's fix that by calling in an Aerial Supply Center.





The last major difference between the LC and other two factions is how construction proceeds. The ED and UCS use construction vehicles while the LC just drops their structures in from space. The structures are vulnerable while being air-lifted in and if they take even a few rocket or other anti-air hits the space cranes you see here will be forced to drop the structure and run, leaving you out 100% of the resources invested in the building. I'm not kidding, even a very weak rocket or two will blow these things up, they have the lowest HP in the game at 50 and no armor.





With that we have our Aerial Supply Center. The Supply Center requires an attached Mercury-class resupply vehicle so I've attached it here. You can select a re-supply speed (slow/average/fast). Since we only have one supplier we'll stick with fast. Slow gives you a single Mercury for each military vehicle, which is insane and is almost never useful. Average has one supplier for a few vehicles and Fast is a single Mercury for every tank on the field. Air units will fly back to the Supply Center to re-supply, so you don't need to worry about them. Also we don't have any air units right now. Once again, the LC is not good at this "war" thing.





Like I said earlier, we can put weapons on some of our buildings. I throw a rocket launcher on the Supply Center in case the ED try something. You can never be too careful.





Here you can see another neat thing Earth 2150 does: vehicle lights. All vehicles come with lights that you can either turn to auto, on or off. We'll stick with auto for now but it might be useful to keep changing the lights in mind if we end up in a bad storm or need to make a sneak approach. We're almost done here at the LC Headquarters, we're just missing one structure.





And that structure is the Headquarters. The HQ building allows you to automate research, building defense upgrades, general defense (fairly useless) and unit design. I'll probably stick this guy on general defense or building upgrades since I'd like to have more control over unit design and research.

So with all that done, how do we get to the battlefield?



Why with the Jupiter Transport of course. The Jupiter is a weird mix of unit and building in that it's tied to the Landing Zone and can move from battlefield to main base. But it has no offensive capabilities and just has a lot of HP. If it somehow gets destroyed the LC will get annoyed and send General Fang another one. The transport is mainly used for shuttling units between the main base and battlefield like so.





General Fang's anti-gravity ship is now inside the Jupiter, ready to head to whatever battlefield we decide to go to. The Jupiter transport can also hold 5,000 CR in case you need an emergency infusion of cash on the front lines.



Our research is complete, so it's time to head out and select a mission.



Sneaking in behind ED lines to mine some minerals? Sounds risky! We all know General Fang likes to be bold, so we'll start off with that one!



Earth 2150 has some kick-ass music. Each mission I'll upload a track until we run out of tracks for each faction. For now here is the LC main theme and the LC ambient theme. See you next time with our first field mission!





Bonus Recruitment Video - Are You From the Moon?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztQpkAK72pk