Mission Three: Operation High Tide

Hope you enjoy naval battles here, because you will, again, find yourself on a fairly small island where you’ll have to reside for a goodly amount of time. Most of the buildings here are severely damaged, so you’ll need to task an engineer or two to go around and repair them. You only have a single T2 engineer at the outset, though, so task your T2 air factory to build five or so more, while the one you already control gets to work on a T2 power generator to shore up your construction abilities. You can turn off the T2 radar system in your base to earn a bit more energy to work with until it’s built, while the destroyed factories nearby can be reclaimed for a fair amount of mass.

Your first enemy here will be a wave of air units. Nothing major, just some scouts and bombers. Set one of the T2 engineers to build flak cannons all around your base. You will also want another unit to build mass extractors on the nearby mass points, as well as another engineer to build a wall enclosing perhaps half of the island for your little base; that’ll make it more difficult for the enemy ground units that will eventually head your way to reach you. Point defenses should also be built by some of the engineers, as they’ll be the best way to defend against the dropships.

Defend yourself well, as you'll have plenty of attacks to deal with here!

You should have around ten to 12 each of the T2 point defenses and anti-air units scattered around your base. Keep in mind that you don’t need to defend the entire island; you can concentrate all of your defenses in the southeastern corner, scattered around your factories, if you want to focus on a smaller area. The enemies will bomb and destroy any northern mass extractors you have, but you shouldn’t need an insanely large number of them if you’re just building defenses. Needless to say, don’t worry about your naval units at this point.

The first wave is an easy air unit attack; repel it and make sure that you have point defenses scattered around the island. The second wave is going to be a much tougher transport unit wave, where transport ships will drop numerous units on the island in an attempt to roust you that way. Your anti-air units will shoot a good number of the transports down, and even if you haven’t built any ground units, the point defenses should be able to deal with them as they attempt to crawl around your walls.

Lastly, a naval attack will see you surrounded by frigates and destroyers. If you task each of your factories to build 20 or so subs, and have engineers assist them, you should have more than enough subs to deal with the threats. Unfortunately for you, this wave of naval units will be followed by a combined wave of naval, air, and ground units. You’ll lose some buildings here, but should be able to withstand the assault with enough defensive units.

Defeat Enemy Commander

The map expands now, and you’ll be able to build gunships at your air bases, and destroyers at your naval factories. Immediately start on four or five destroyers, pairing the factory up with five T2 engineers or so. You’ll need them to attack the southeastern island, where the enemy commander is located. The destroyers you build can deal with anything they encounter, including killing the T2 torpedo launchers from a distance, and they can even deal with enemy subs. You may want to scout the island with a scout plane before heading that way, though. If Arnold, the enemy commander, goes underwater, move your subs in to torpedo him until he disappears.

Next up is the aerial base to the southwest. Move attack ships into position under the flight paths of the circling bombers, then move in your destroyers to shell the island. The destroyers alone should be good enough to attack and destroy most of the northern island, as well.

Defeat Main Enemy Base

At this point, the map expands to the west. Nothing surprising here: an enemy base! It is, however, well-defended by enemy cruisers and destroyers. Queue up a large number of scout planes to fly over the area to give you line of sight on the enemy ships, and move in a large number of destroyers to take them out, protecting them from aerial assault with cruisers. When the naval forces are mostly destroyed, your destroyers will be able to sweep through the defenses and crush most of them. When you defeat all of the naval bases (send in your remaining subs to take down any new subs that they’ve launched), start taking out the structures near the coast of the enemy base. If you see Commander Arnold, take him down to end the mission.

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