Mission Six: Operation Beginnings

Time for the final surge towards Black Sun. You begin here with the barest beginnings of a base. Immediately crank out five or ten T3 engineers and set them to work. You’ll want to have a few build more mass extractors on the island, a couple build mass storage points around those extractors, a couple to build perhaps one T3 mass fabricator, ringed with mass storage, and at least two or three more to ring the island with SAM installations. Your naval factory should begin cranking out submarines; if you have some engineers to spare, feel free to have them assist it. Another T3 power generator will be a good idea when you have the resources to spare.

Most of the early attacks will come in the form of light aerial skirmishes, which the existing anti-air defenses will deal with until your SAMs are in place. You can build more air superiority fighters to ring your base, as well. Soon after that, though, ships will begin coming your way. Most of these will be frigates, but one or two each wave will be cruisers or destroyers. A fleet of 20 or 30 subs will be able to deal with these as they arrive, especially if you repair your torpedo launchers as they get damaged, but you’ll want to crank out a few battleships for some extra defense when possible. Later on, some T3 air units will begin attacking in small waves, but you’ll be able to take them down with your SAM launchers.

Building four or five heavy artillery pieces will let you pound the units in the rest of the mission.

You have as much time as you like to capture the control tower here, so don’t worry overmuch about building an army or anything. Fortify your defenses with shield generators, upgrade your ACU, and build a nuke launcher, as well as a T3 heavy artillery or two. (Or three or four if you don’t mind taking some time to build them; we personally built five of them and found that they made the mission much easier than it would’ve been otherwise.) They’re big, they’re expensive, and they’re slow, but they can fire for miles and miles, which will be useful when the map expands. You may also want a strategic missile defense that covers most of your factories, although we never had the enemy fire a nuke at us. Another air factory and another naval factory would also be a good idea; try to have a fleet of around 10 battleships guarding the southern side of your island before moving on.

Capture the Black Sun Control Center

As you were required to do in the Cybran campaign, your goal after building up your base is to capture the Black Sun control center in the southeastern corner of the map. If you manage to build a few heavy artillery pieces, they’ll probably do most of the hard work themselves in terms of disabling the defenses of the small base surrounding the control center. If you need to, feel free to launch a nuke at the base; the control center is currently indestructible.

Build up your defenses here before capturing the control center.

You have to capture the control tower, but be forewarned that you’ll subsequently have to defend it against a Cybran attack. Go in heavy with transports, landing five or six engineers at a minumum, and guard them with a number of siege bots. Before capturing the control tower, the engineers should immediately get to work building SAM installations (at least five), overlapping heavy shield generators to protect them, and perhaps point defenses or T2 artillery pieces as a line of defense in case the siege bots get overrun. An air repair station would be nice; you can move the air superiority fighters from your main island to patrol around here. Lastly, be sure to build an Omni Sensor under one of the shield generators.

Just keep in mind that the assault from the Cybran base that comes after you capture the control center will be quite heavy. We managed to defeat it by building around 20 T2 artillery pieces to the north of the control center, protected by heavy shield generators, but you can take it on in a number of ways, including a fleet of strategic bombers or parking a few battleships off the coast to the north of the tower. The assault will include at least two spiderbots, so be ready to take them down from long range; their lasers will make mincemeat out of any smaller units that get in their way. You can try to land a nuke in their path, but timing it right will be difficult. At any rate, since the assault doesn’t get underway until you capture the tower, you can take your time building up whatever kind of defense you wish.

Protect the Control Center / Defeat Cybran Commander

When the map expands, the Cybran base will appear to the northeast. Fly a spy plane or two over it to reveal the units that it holds, including the small army that’s about to head your way, as well the enemy commander. You gain the ability to build the Cybran special units now, so if you have excess materials, feel free to tell your home base to start building a saucer or a submersible battleship. If you want to build a Colossus, you can do so, but you should build it on the main land to prevent it from having to walk all the way across the ocean.

Now, at this point, you hopefully built up your defenses to the point where you can deal with the army, which will allow you to retask your heavy artillery pieces on the Cybran base. Now, it’s probably going to be wise to take down the incoming Cybran army before taking out their commander, for reasons that will become clear shortly, but that’s no reason not to start dismantling their base. Their strategic missile defense should get hit first, followed by their naval factory, followed by whatever else you like. When their assault is blunted or defeated, tell your heavy artillery units to bust a cap in the commander. With five artillery units blasting away at him, he should go down in a few minutes. If that doesn’t work, then concentrate on the strategic missile defense until it’s destroyed, then nuke the hell out of the base. If you really want to, you can attempt to build a ground army and storm the base; this will be easiest to accomplish if you build one or two Colossi and let them lead the way.

Defeat Marxon

When the Cybran commander goes down, Marxon’s base will appear to the south. Almost immediately, he’ll launch a huge naval attack at your main island. Although it looks intimidating, it will contain only two battleships, with most of the fleet consisting of T1 and T2 ships. If you have a goodly number of submarines left, send them down to whittle away the first groups of the fleet, while your battleships remain in reserve to pound away at any survivors. Have your naval factory construct submarines as best they can to finish off the fleet. You can even try lining up a nuke in its path, but again, that can be difficult to do.

Marxon's base is heavily defended, so it's easiest to attack it from long range with artillery.

With the fleet taken out, the map is fairly open for you. Marxon’s forces don’t really antagonize you all that much, luckily, but you have to be careful, as they’re no doubt rebuilding and preparing for an attack. Fly your spy planes over the base to get a sense for what’s around. Most troublesome is the appearance of a Colossus at the northern edge of Marxon’s base. It’ll pace around for a good long while, instead of attacking, allowing you to build your own Colossus, or attempt to artillery or nuke it to death. There’s also a small island in the southeastern corner of the map, where engineers are busy working on another Colossus and a Saucer. Nuke it if you like, although they’ll take a good amount of time to get done with the units.

Anyway, to win here, you need to take down Marxon, who roams the Black Sun facility to the south. As with the Cybran commander, you can simply target him with your heavy artillery and fire away at him, if you like, or take out the strategic missile defenses and nuke the base to hell, or build a couple of Colossi and rampage through the base until you defeat Marxon. You can also extend the base around the control tower to the south a bit, build some shieldings, and build T2 artillery to shell the base there, including the Colossus. Regardless, by this point, you should have some way to take down Marxon and his defenses.

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