Mission Two: Operation Snow Blind

You’ve got a ticking clock on your hands at the outset of this mission: you have around half an hour to get an engineer over to the research station to the east and repair their power core, which will detonate if you don’t reach it in time.

Immediately queue up a three pairs of power generators and mass extractors, then build a land factory; ignore the order to build an air factory for the moment. The land factory, assisted by your ACU, should queue up a few engineers, which can then spread out and build on the nearby mass points and hydrocarbon factory locations (the large lightning bolt symbols on the ground). Another engineer can build a radar station as well as some point defenses and anti-air towers, while the factory moves onto building a few ground units. Since you’re going to be pressed for metal here, feel free to build a complex of mass fabricators. Build them in a honeycomb pattern, interspersed with power generators; that will reduce the energy drain that they hit you with.

Build up a large force of units to clear out the northern Aeon defenders.

In order to get to the research station, you’ll have to fly an engineer over to that base in a flying transport. Unfortunately, the path east is chock full of anti-aircraft vehicles; that’s what your ground army is for. You can probably clear out most of the units in between you and the station with nothing but heavy tanks, with a few AA vehicles thrown in for good measure. There’s no real need for artillery just yet. So build an army, then sweep off to the east until you clear out the northern passage for your engineer. There’s no real time pressure, as most of the enemy units here are anti-aircraft and thus can’t fire on your ground units. When you’ve eliminated the enemies here, quickly shuttle an engineer to the eastern base and repair the power core. Only clear out the northern passage, though; don’t worry about any units to the south of the small mountain range.

Defeat Aeon Assault

When you repair the power core in the eastern facility, all of its units and resources become yours, resulting in a large surplus of power and mass. Take the time to go around to your various Tech 1 Mass Extractors and upgrading them to Tech 2. It takes a lot of mass to do so (a drain of -10 per extractor), but it’ll triple their mass output when it’s done.

With the research facility under your grasp, you’re going to be warned of an impending Aeon attack. Unfortunately, the warning doesn’t specify where this attack will occur, but we’ll go ahead and spoil it for you: it’s at the research facility. Have your engineer there build a land factory, upgrade it to Tech 2, then pop out a Tech 2 engineer and begin building Tech 2 point defenses and anti-air on the southern side of the base. Have a few more engineers assist until you’re secure in your defenses. You have plenty of time before the attack occurs, so don’t stress yourself too much.

Evacuate Luthien Colony

Your goal now? Escort 15 supply trucks from Luthien Colony to Station Lima Foxtrot, in the northeastern corner of the map. This would be a good time to take a breather and build up some units, since the supply trucks don’t spawn at Luthien until you bring a bunch of units there. At this point, your northwestern base is pretty much free from attack, so feel free to move your commander and engineers down to Luthien, where they can start building new factories to supply your eventual attack to the south.

Anyway, you need to bring in a fairly large number of direct-fire units, anti-air units, and gunships to Luthien in order to make the supply trucks spawn. Gunships are a Tech 2 air factory unit that are fantastic for taking out ground units, but they move slowly and can’t defend themselves well against anti-air units.

An air evacuation is the quickest way to go here.

Now, when the trucks pop up, you have a couple of options: you can either attempt to take them to Lima Foxtrot on the ground, or pick them up and put them into transport airplanes and fly them there. Of course, it won’t be easy to do either one, as there are tons of enemy ground units coming up from the south, as well as patrolling Interceptor airplanes and anti-air units that are roaming the skies. Still, it’s quite doable to transport them, especially if you load them up in gunships. Each gunship can carry a single unit underneath it, so loading all of them into gunships, then dumping them all in the landing zone is one solution. You’ll need to ensure that the gunships take a route that first leads north to your northwestern base, then east along the northern edge of the map to reach Lima Foxtrot. Be sure that they’re escorted by Interceptors of your own, though!

If you want to escort the trucks on the ground, then you simply need to build a very, very large army. Move the trucks in a separate group to the north of the army as it proceeds to the east, blocking the small passages leading north from the bottom of the map. With your army acting as a mobile wall, you can sneak the trucks around the large mountain chain to the west of Lima Foxtrot and get them up to the base.

Destroy The Aeon Commander

With the trucks secure, it’s time to take down the Aeon commander once and for all. Prepare for this by building up your base defenses at Luthien; it’ll be the site of repeated and heavy air and ground assaults. If you want to be clever, you can try walling of the end of the small mountain chains that lead from your base to the Aeon base; you won’t be attacking from that direction.

With Luthien well defended, have one of your air bases queue up an infinite string of scout planes and tell them to patrol the north side of the enemy base. They’ll get shot down as soon as they arrive, but they’ll let you know of any large troop movements leading north from the base. If you wish, you can have a Tech 2 engineer move out to the north there and construct a few point defenses to deal with any large armies that attempt to strike towards your northwestern base. This won’t happen very often, so if you prefer, you can simply set another airbase to continually create gunships that will patrol that area.

Your missile launchers will be able to shred the base from the southeast.

In order to take on the base, it’s best to attack from the southeastern corner, where the bulk of the power generators are located. Since so much of the base is shielded, taking out the generators will drop the shields for a spell, allowing you to attack them directly. Fly or move a few Tech 2 engineers to the extreme southeastern corner of the map, being sure not to let them be spotted by any of the Aeon forces, then build up a few defensive structures before constructing a pair of land factories. Each should have four of five engineer assistants, and each should start constructing units as soon as possible! Missile launchers will be the units you’re going to use most here, so a ratio of two missile launchers to one tank and one AA vehicle is fine.

There aren’t any point defenses on the southeastern corner of the base, so when you get some missile launchers constructed, move them out with AA vehicles to cover them from air attack and start pelting the generators that are unshielded. After you take most of them out, the shields in the rest of the base will begin to flicker on and off. At this point, you can either send in the heavy tanks, if you wish, or continue to use your missile launchers to pelt any structures that you can see. Eventually you should be able to spot the commander, who usually assists some of the factories on the southern side of the base. You can either missile him to death or send in your tanks! You should encounter relatively few ground units on this side of the base, so steamroll your way to victory.

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