5

5: Firing Back

Once again, you must safely escort your units to the site designated for building a base. You will soon be attacked by the first wave of incoming Hadean attackers, Xares and Xypos ships. Your turrets are already positioned to intercept these attackers, but you should move your wingmen up into position, too. If you are quick, you'll have just enough time to go mortar some enemy turrets that are covering the base site, before this attack wave arrives.

After fighting off the first attack wave, you'll want to quickly move all your units to the base site. Deploy your remaining units, set up the recycler, build a scavenger, put it on the nearby well, build repair pods, and get ready. The first part of the mission will hinge around you building out scavengers and turrets to get a firm grip on your base area. Keep an eye out for the Xares, in particular, which seem to like to come in along the wall opposite of your deployed scavenger.

Once you feel that you've protected your recycler, cargo ship, and well, build out four or five more turrets to try to hold the area forward of your base. This is where you'll want to set up some gun towers. I use the high areas over looking the entrance to your base to deploy these turrets.

The only units that can really make a dent in this defense are the Xerrakis kamikaze attackers.

You're going to need to get your factory and service bay up, so you can get some service trucks out repairing the damage that these huge explosions will cause.

Now, put up an armory. I go ahead and drop chain guns on all of my turrets, and then I start building out a group of tanks. Since I only have one well at this point, I drop SP stabbers to upgrade them outside of the factory.

I take this group of SP equipped tanks, the first group of turrets I built to protect my recycler, some service trucks, and a scavenger, and I make my first foray outside my base. Try to time your exit for right after the Hadeans have sent in one of their attack waves. Head out east from the your base in the direction of the Mega Gun nav. You'll discover that there is a nearby well, guarded by some turrets, which is your first objective. I have my tanks wait at the foot of the hill that the well is on, near the entrance to the Mega Gun area. Fortunately, these guard towers are not active.

Meanwhile, use your mdm mortar to take out the turrets, but be prepared to call in your nearby tanks and move your own turrets up there quickly, because you'll find that these turrets are soon replaced.

Use your tanks to keep a path clear for your constructor to move out of the base and join you near this just captured well. This will be a bit harder than it sounds, heheh.

The idea is to use your constructor to set up some gun towers over by the nearby portal that the enemy turrets keep teleporting out of.

Clear out the turrets guarding the Mega Gun.

And the Zeuses.

And start building out some hornet equipped rocket tanks to hold the staging area, just outside the entrance to your base, that the Hadeans collect at, before they make their attack run against your base. Keeping this area under your control will make it much easier to move units out of your base. I go ahead and make this area the deploy spot for units built by my factory and my recycler. This way I can easily keep reinforcing it with more rocket tanks and repair trucks.

Now, things should be secure enough to bring out the cargo ship with the engineers and escort it to the Mega Gun.

Once you secure the Mega Gun, the nearby guard towers are activated, but as friendly units. They take over the work that your group of tanks had been handling of keeping the Hadeans from trying to retake this area. Now, you can focus on your main task which is to secure a total of six wells. You should be upgrading any wells that you have deployed or will deploy by this point.

The next well (number three) is easily taken, as it is not guarded.

The next well to capture is over on the other side of the map. It is protected by a couple of spikes.

The fifth well to capture is not far from where number four is. It is guarded by turrets that will be replenished from a nearby portal.

Once again, set up some gun towers to intercept those turrets before they deploy around the bio-metal pool.

Some times the Hadean attack forces will swing away from their run at your base and make an attack on this well, so it may be a good idea to put up some gun towers on the other side of this well (the side nearer to the Hadean base).

Now, you are ready to go after the final well, which is located near the center of the map. Not only is this well protected by some fixed defenses, but all the Hadean attackers emerging from the nearby Hadean base travel through here.

From here on, you'll want to learn from my mistakes and do more as I say than as I did, because I ended up losing this particular recording of the mission. I think you'll easily see what needs to be done differently to come out on top of this mission.

I poured all of my offensive units into the area of this last well, because I knew how much the Hadeans would throw at it once I tried to hold onto it.

What I didn't take into account was that after you capture the last well and your engineers are able to use the accumulated scrap to fire the Mega Gun, the Hadeans counter attack with their remaining Mega Guns against your bio-metal wells. Each time you fire your Mega Gun, the Hadeans take out one of your wells, which you will have to replace before you can fire your Mega Gun, again. The first well that they took out was this center one, and my units were too close to the blast area. My constructor seemed to be precisely at Ground Zero.

This blast pretty much took out all of my tanks and service trucks. Although I was able to get a scavenger back on this well pretty quickly and get off another shot with my own Mega Gun, the Hadeans countered by blasting another one of my wells, and I was not able to hold off the onslaught of attacks against this center well. Eventually, you may learn that you are up against a time limit to get off the third and final shot from your Mega Gun. It seemed to be about 25 minutes from the time that I first fired my Mega Gun. If you are too slow, the Hadeans will fire upon and destroy your Mega Gun before you finish taking out their guns.

I somewhat stubbornly kept trying to hold this center well by sending units to it as soon as I could build some. I would have done better to retreat behind my initial wall of gun towers and build up my forces back at my base, first. Then move out to retake the center well. The other well that I lost to the Hadean Mega Gun was easily replaced and not really a focus of the Hadean attack parties, as they seemed to resume following their attack paths taking them towards my base.

Once you do fire your Mega Gun three times, you basically have won the mission. However, you will have to escort your recycler to a dust off point. You won't have direct control over the recycler, and it doesn't seem to initially head off on its own. However, if you make a visit to the Mega Gun nav (your cargo ship will likely be sitting there), this seems to trigger the recycler to begin it's trip to the dust off point. As long as you still are intercepting incoming ships near the center well, this last stage should be uneventful.

Back to FE Walkthroughs.

On to the Next Mission.