Mission Six: Operation Stone Wall

Time for another fun ride here. Your goal is to oversee the final construction of Black Sun and its firing. You’re given another large base to work with, and will be able to unlock more T3 units, including the mighty battleship.

Luckily for you, one of the Black Sun components is lost when the mission begins. You need to head out to the island in the east and retrieve it. Don’t worry about it initially, though; just take your time building up your defenses to stave off the inevitable and frequent enemy attacks. At the outset, you have to worry about bomber runs from the northeast. Fortify the northeasternmost little set of structures with another shield generator (you can only build the T2 variant here), and more T3 anti-air units.

Plopping subs in the waters will encourage enemies to attack them, thus saving your more valuable units behind them.

In addition, you’ll have numerous ships and bombers flying from the southeast over your naval factories. Your battleship will usually deal with the ships as they come in, but you want to have a bit of a buffer between it and your T2 units to prevent them from getting bombed by the bombers. If you set one of the factories to continually pump out submarines and place them in the ocean a bit off to the east, and continually toggle their dive buttons so that they raise up out of the water, they’ll be fired on by the bombers and ships as they arrive, allowing your more valuable units in the rear to stay alive and finish them off. Your other naval factories can build destroyers, cruisers, and another battleship or two (but these take quite a long time to build). Be sure to build some floating SAM units around your factories here to take out the bombers before they can reload and hit you again.

Lastly, perform some maintenance around your main base. You have strategic defense installation, but you need to tell them all to actually start building missiles, as they’re currently empty. You will probably also want to build a couple of mass fabricators near your power generators to up your mass resources a bit, since you don’t have any more mass points to expand to. Lastly, note that you have two commanders here. You can start upgrading them with the ability to generate more resources, as well, if you fool around with their systems upgrading menu.

Retrieve the Black Sun Component

When you’re ready to head out to the east and grab the component, be sure to come hard, with at least three battleships leading the way, followed by a number of cruisers to help deal with any airplanes that come around. There are two enemy battleships near the eastern island, so you’ll want to deal with them from long range. Your three battleships can focus fire on them to take them down, while taking damage in return, or you can attempt to use strategic bombers or even nukes to sink them.

Before you bring the component back to your base, it’ll be well worth your while to construct a nuke and equip it with at least one missile. Having ten or so strategic bombers squirrelled away somewhere is also a good idea.

Destroy The Aeon Commander’s Island Base

When the map expands, you’re going to be looking at a heavily fortified Aeon base to the southeast of your position. You now have new units to build: there’s a T3 submarine that can fire tactical missiles over long ranges, and which can also fire nukes if you build some. It won’t be greatly useful against the base, though, as it’s covered with tactical and strategic missile defenses. It also takes forever to build. In addition, a new experimental unit, the mobile factory, can be built; it'll be useful in fighting off the Cybran attack later on. Lastly, you also have access to the T3 shield generator, so begin upgrading all of the T2 generators that you have on hand.

There are a few enemy battleships patrolling the waters between your base and the enemy base. They’re accompanied by cruisers and destroyers, but you should have enough submarines to suicide those away. If you can submarine the cruisers and destroyers, you can finish off the battleships with your strategic bombers, or use your own battleships as a countermeasure.

There are four naval bases to the southwest of the enemy’s base. It’s unclear if they actually are used to make units, though; if you destroy them, they’ll simply be rebuilt, but won’t progress past T1 technology. Still, just in case, it might be wise to nuke them when they’re uncovered. If you aim at the westernmost factory, you should be able to take them all out.

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