Mission Four: Operation Entity

Pacify Nexus04

Begin building your base again here. (Sigh.) You’ve got a really, really long time before anyone comes knocking on your door, so don’t worry about building T1 units, except maybe an engineer or two; just get yourself to a T2 land factory and start building up engineers. All of the nearby mass points should be built up with T2 mass extractors. Be sure to get a couple of T2 power generators down, as well.

Although the enemy will mostly leave you alone for a good long while, they’ll eventually start harrassing you with aerial units, as well as some landing craft. Build up anti-air and point defenses around your base, and have interceptors patrol towards the northwest, near the node, which is where all the aerial units will be approaching from.

When you have a land factory that can pump out missile launchers, build ten or fifteen of them and have them head towards Nexus04 to the northeast. It’s ringed with point defenses and anti-air turrets; nothing you can’t handle. Be sure to hit the T2 radar system in the middle of the base, to prevent the artillery to your north from being able to spot you. (Scout the area first to reveal some battleships and the artillery so you know what you’re up against.) If you move from the southwest of the city to the southeast, then wrap north and to the west, you should be able to complete your objective relatively easily, although you will lose some units to the northern artillery. You can mop up with gunships, if you like.

The battleships here won’t move, and are difficult to take out since they’re on land. Build a tactical missile launcher that can hit them, then blow them away with a couple of hits each. You can repeat the process for the southernmost artillery unit, but beyond that, and you’ll generally be hit by the artillery before you can build the missile launcher and fire it on the artillery.

Destroy The Naval Base

The naval factories to your west will be problematic for you, as they’ll continually spit out cruisers and destroyers to thwart your progress. If you can build a naval factory in the small bay near your base, you should have as many engineers as you can spare start cranking out destroyers and cruisers at a 3:1 ratio. When you’re ready to head out (have at least nine or ten destroyers available), swarm to the west, killing any ships coming your way, then take out the naval factories there. You can shell the buildings to the south, if you like, or just try and get an engineer to head in and convert them. This is an optional objective, and you can leave the naval base alone if you like, but it’ll be much simpler to just take the whole operation out.

Capture The Node

Destroyers will be able to pound the enemy base to smithereens here.

The node to the northwest of your base is your objective now. It’s ringed with T2 artillery units, which will damage your ships as they approach, but if you have ten or 12 destroyers, you should be able to take them all down without losing more than a couple of them. When you deal with the artillery, as well as the tactical missile launchers, you can destroy all of the land factories and power generators, etc. If you wish, you can attempt to leave one of the air factories here intact, allowing your engineers to capture it.

Before you capture the node, check to ensure that there aren’t any more enemy structures around, and build as many mass extractors on empty nodes as you think you’ll need. The map is about to expand to the north, so you may want to build some more factories near the three artillery emplacements in the northeastern corner of the map and bring up your existing armies to that landmass. You have plenty of time to build up here, since there are no enemies on the map.

Capture and Defend Mainframe

The Cybran mainframe lies to your north. It and its defenses have been hacked into a neutral position by your engineers, meaning that none of the automated defenses will attack you when you get close. If you want to nab it right away, you can scout it out with a scout plane or ten, then send a transport ship laden with engineers to its northwestern corner, drop them off, then send them in to capture the building.

It’s far easier, however, to ignore the mainframe for the moment, and instead focus on capturing the two other nodes that have appeared on the map. You can’t see them initially, but one is located to the west of the mainframe, across the river, and another is located across the river to the southeast. Scout both of the positions out with scout planes, then deliver five or six engineers to both locations. Capture the nodes, start building anti-air defenses (you’ll want around 15 at each node), and retask interceptors to defend the nodes themselves. (Air staging platforms near the nodes will help them stay in position, and you might want to just go ahead and build an air factory nearby to replenish the supplies.)

When you do capture the mainframe, you’ll have to run a multi-pronged defensive strategy. Since you should have a few engineers under the shields at the mainframe, have them repair any damaged defenses in the structure while the artillery pieces here go to work on the tactical missile launcher nearby, then the base to the east. If you wish, you can move your destroyers up and around near the base to begin taking out the structures. Your nodes will also come under attack, so hopefully each of them is defended by around 10 T2 flak structures, as well as the remainder of your interceptors. No attacks will be coming to your main base until much later, so don’t worry about defending that overmuch.

The mainframe can take care of its own defenses.

It’s the nodes that you have to worry about defending, especially the nodes in the east and northwest parts of the map. They’ll be getting hit predominantly by gunships and bombers, so you want to have each of them guarded by perhaps 15 T2 flak cannons total. You might also want to have air factories continually pumping out interceptors to defend them, as you’ll go through plenty of the fragile little planes as the bases are attacked. You can survive the mission if a node is destroyed, however, but it’s definitely possible to keep all of them alive. The node you captured earlier in the mission will only come under light attack from gunships, so you don’t have to worry too much about defending it, so long as you have flak cannons around it.

The eastern node will eventually come under attack from a number of ships; they’ll split off into two groups, with one group heading towards the mainframe and the other heading towards the node. The group that heads towards the mainframe will be tough to take down if you’re not already blockading the small passage leading that way, so be sure to park your ships up in that area and be ready to take the T2 sea units on.

After around 10 or fifteen minutes of defending the nodes and mainframe, the mission will suddenly end.

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