Act II

Mission One: Amazon Desert

Primary Objectives

• Protect the Nod Lab
• Eliminate the GDI Expansion Base to the north
• Destroy the GDI Construction Yard, Command Post, and Refinery

Bonus Objectives

• Capture the Reinforcement Bay

Base Defense

This opening defense of the lab isn’t as bad as you might expect. Get your three missile squads into the building on the northeast side of the base, or perhaps go with two missile squads and one of your Black Hand squads, then just repair the laser turret on the other side of the small passage and let it deal damage as well. You can build another laser turret here, or a flak turret if you’re worried about infantry.

When you get the prompt to start attacking the enemy base, start building up your own first. Another harvester would be nice, as well as some silos, and don’t miss that you can now start building air towers. Build a tech center to boot to research some nice upgrades for your units.

Now, feel free to take up a bunch of spider tanks and buggies to the north and destroy their base, but you’ll want to pause before taking out the refinery there. Leave it alone for the moment, actually; if you just destroy the two factories here, you can prevent the enemy from building any more units. Do so, then move an Emissary unit from your main construction facility up here to make an outpost. If you do so, you can build another refinery and another war factory up here.

It’s pretty obvious that you’re going to face off against more troops on the eastern side of the map when it expands, so build up turrets on each of the eastward-facing roads. A couple lasers, a flak, you know the drill. Also don’t be afraid to build a couple of anti-air turrets in each of the main bases, and don’t forget to start pumping out many more spider bots and buggies for your eventual assault into the enemy base!

Expanding the Map

Building up a large force before the map expands will let you easily finish the mission.

When you take out the northern base, finally, the map will indeed expand, revealing an enemy base to the northwest. Your goal? Get in there and destroy it.

First off, though, you’ll want to complete the bonus objective by capturing the reinforcement bay to the southeast. You can fly over a saboteur if you’ve built an air tower, land him nearby, and grab it. Use your Venom fighters to clear out the town nearby if they’re giving you trouble.

When you’re ready to take out the northwestern base, a fleet of around 30 scorpion tanks and ten or fifteen buggies (to deal with air units) will be more than sufficient to run in there and start smashing the buildings.

Mission Two: Atlantic Coast

Primary Objectives

• Destroy the GDI Artillery Emplacement
• Destroy the GDI Artillery Emplacement to the east
• Destroy the GDI Artillery Emplacement in the northeast

Bonus Objectives

• Destroy the GDI Construction Yard
• Destroy the Rig before it can reach the Artillery Emplacement
• Eliminate the GDI Aircraft Carrier

Turtling Up

You can turtle up a bit here at the beginning of the fight, although you will likely take some damage from the enemies that will assault you from the north. Go ahead and destroy the first artillery emplacement with your Vertigos to expand the map.

After doing so, quickly build a new refinery near the southwestern tiberium field in your base. Each refinery only needs one harvester, though; don’t want the fields depleting, after all. With that done, build another shredder turret outside your northeastern wall, near the existing laser turret. That will help ward off the enemy advances and let you build in peace. You may wish to simply build another war factory just to the north of your walls, as well, to let the bulk of your vehicles get repaired as they defend you from your opponents.

Keep in mind that you can build more Vertigo bombers at your air tower, and that you can build more towers. No need to make do with the two you’re given; eight would be a more appropriate number for you. The first thing you’ll want to do with them is move them up into the northwest corner and destroy the refinery that the GDI has probably built near the blue tiberium up there. Might as well make them work for their tiberium, after all.

Bonus Objectives

While you turtle up, send your Vertigos out on bombing runs. You can take out the two anti-vehicle turrets in front of the GDI base in the middle of the map, if you like, but don’t fly over the base itself unless you want to lose your units. To the east, you can start taking out the anti-air turrets near the eastern artillery point, as well as the Battle Base there.

Eventually you’ll get a new bonus objective: a rig is heading to one of the two artillery emplacements, and needs to be destroyed before it can get there. If you have four or eight Vertigos, this is a simple matter of flying over and bombing it. You can route yourself along the extreme southern edge of the map to avoid most of the damage from any anti-air units in your way.

Likewise for the aircraft carrier that’s in the southeastern corner of the map. It’ll take repeated bombing runs to destroy, so skirt the southern half of the map until it goes down. This isn’t on a timer and isn’t a pressing concern, so don’t worry about doing it right away.

The Central Base

Taking out this central base is optional, but might as well be mandatory.

One of the optional objectives is to destroy the construction yard in the middle of the area. To do so, build up a force of perhaps 20 to 25 scorpions and mix in a few stealth tanks and buggies for good measure. You can weaken up the defenders in the base with some of your special powers or bombers if you like, but this is a ground attack all the way. Get your forces into the base and wipe everything out, being sure to take down the power plants here. That will disable all enemy turrets on the map and make your job a lot easier.

If you wind up needing more tiberium at any point, don’t forget about the blue tiberium field in the northwestern corner of the map. You can expand up that way (after checking for any enemies with your bombers) and build another refinery for some blue tib goodness.

With the central base out of the way, bomb the heck out of the eastern artillery to take it out of the picture. The northeastern base will be defended by Firehawks, so you’ll have to go in on the ground. Most of the defenses around the base should be shut down, and most of the bunkers here will be filled with riflemen, so you won’t need a huge number of ground forces to take with you, but it’s still fun to build up a large force and march up the side of the mountain to the last artillery piece.

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