Mission Five: Operation Shining Star

An awkward mission here, as you’ll be told to fight against another Aeon commander that has sided with Marxon instead of the Princess. Hooray for more defending! Defending stuff, instead of attacking stuff, is the funnest thing. The previous statement was a lie.

Anyway, you have to defend two small groups of civilian buildings from attack here. If too many of the buildings are destroyed, you lose. Luckily for you, none of the early attacks here will be targeted at your main base; all of them will be heading towards the small colonies. That will allow you to focus your defenses there.

Begin by moving two engineers to each of the colonies in the transport ships, and tasking them to each build five or six T3 SAM installations around it. You’re going to be building a heavy shield generator in each of the colonies, so try to ensure that the SAMs are going to be within the radius of it. At the same time, have one of your factories start cranking out a few more engineers. A couple of these should begin building extractors on the mass points around the base, while another should begin constructing mass storage units around the four mass extractors inside the walls of your base. Mass is going to be in short supply here. Subcommander Rhiza should go ahead and start making two T3 mass fabricators, which can border the T3 power generators in the northeastern and northwestern corner of the base. Don’t forget to build mass storage units around them to boost their output.

Take your time building the shield generators, because that's when the attacks become more intense.

The key thing to realize here is that Ariel’s attacks don’t begin in force until you build the shield generators. They will be triggered eventually just on time elapsing (around 15 minutes of realtime), but if you build the shield generators as quickly as possible, the enemy bombers will start coming in before you’re ready. Before you build the shield generators, then, be sure to ring the colonies with around 10 SAM installations and a few point defenses, to boot. (You can check the radius of the shield generators by pretending to build one.) A few planes will fly overhead now and then, especially near the eastern colony, so be sure to have one of your engineers repair any of the civilian buildings that they damage. You might also want to begin upgrading your commander with increased building speed and resource generation mods. Lastly, your three air factories should begin constructing air superiority fighters, which should patrol various paths around the two colonies.

Anyway, Ariel will eventually yell "You should be fighting with me, not against me!" That’s your cue to have your engineers in the colonies begin building the shield generators. (You should be saving your game every few minutes to ensure that you don’t have to start over if she attacks when you don’t have the shields up, anyway.) When they’re done, Ariel will come in with a fleet of bombers, fighters, and gunships. If you have enough SAM installations, you’ll be able to defeat them. Quickly check the civilian buildings for damage and repair them. Your engineers seem to go into patrol mode when they’re told to repair a civilian building, and will helpfully begin repairing any other building in the immediate area.

Strategic Missile Defense

After repelling Ariel’s initial attack, she’ll begin constructing a nuke, or so you’re told. You’ll need to build strategic missile defenses in each of the colonies to protect them. These are obviously going to be what drains your mass more than anything else that you need to build, as each one will drain you of 35 mass per engineer as they’re being built. If you run out of mass, you may want to fly an engineer or two up to the destroyed colony to the northwest of your base and have them begin reclaiming. If you’ve built a large number of mass storage devices, though, and especially if you managed to build a couple of mass fabricators, you should hopefully be able to keep up a continual stream of construction juice, even if you dip into a negative flow of mass.

At this point, Ariel will continue to lay down a bit of pressure on your colonies, so keep repairing and defending them as best you can. If your defenses are intact, though, you should begin building up your main base a bit, with some T3 shield generators on its western side to cover up the factories there. Be sure to nest them well, so that if one drops, another one will be overlapping its coverage area so that nothing gets destroyed if one goes down.

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