Campaign Feedback - Gunships, Skuttle, Firewalker and Athena

• Basic Cloakbots (22/10/17)
• Advanced Cloakbots and Stinger (29/10/17)
• Shieldbots and Caretaker (5/11/17)
• Rovers, Faraday and Puppy (12/11/17)
• Hovercraft and Amphbots (19/11/17)
• Tanks, Fusion, Terraform and Dante (26/11/17)
• Gunships, Skuttle, Firewalker and Athena (3/12/17)
• Spiders and Ships (10/12/17)
• Planes, Artillery and Scorpion (17/12/17)
• Jumpbots, Nuke and Sea Striders (24/12/17)
• Land Striders and Heavy Defences (31/12/17)
• Paladin, Detriment and Superweapons (7/1/18)

By far one of the easiest missions I've encountered, with some likewise-easy bonus objectives, which I believe is a bonus when introducing the basics of gunships. (Plus it was a refreshing breather after dealing with the major warzone that was Bavhakya.) While I did feel that the mission showcased the Locust well (with having to take advantage of their regenerative abilities and surprisingly-durable tankiness to perform hit-and-run attacks against enemy infrastructure, which allowed them to take on Vandals and Lotuses, and gave them ample time to escape from Razors if they strayed too close), sadly, I don't think it did enough justice at showcasing how effective Blastwings or Nimbuses could be under the right circumstances. In fact, despite the presence of Hacksaws and Razors to punish any aircraft that came too close, I could probably beat this mission in under 10 minutes (which I did in about 8 minutes), even without building any Nimbuses or Blastwings (which I did, with the Blastwings doing some scouting to identify enemy radar blips, and the Nimbuses cleaning up the enemy's base).

Sadly, I didn't find the smaller Charon transports to be all that useful for this mission, as once my starting forces had secured a beachhead on the main island, I plopped down my starting factory, and proceeded to expand from there, negating the need to continuously ferry forces from island to island. (Maybe the Charons would get more use if the map was more like an archipelago, with anti-air turrets deterring attacks from gunships?) On the other hand, I did find a considerable use for the Gnats and Hercules transport, as the Gnats allowed me to paralyze the enemy commander long enough for me to send the Hercules dropship to abduct him, and send him over to some Dominatrices to net me that objective (though I had to be careful not to kill the enemy commander with my Fencers). Overall, another relaxingly-easy level, in which I managed to build a Geothermal Generator in about 7 minutes.

Knowing the kind of threat that Chickens can pose, I decided to try the same trick that I did in Vis Ragstrom, and that was to terraform some ditches to block the Chickens' passage towards my economic assets. However, it turns out the Chicken menace here wasn't as menacing as I thought it'd be, as I had little problems clearing out their roosts with Locusts for the most part (though I put the starting Harpies to use there as well). What was more difficult for me was taking out the enemy commander in time, since I barely managed to take out 10 roosts and the commander before 10 minutes passed (with me having to sacrifice many of my Locusts to get the job done). From there, it was just cleaning out the enemy base with Nimbuses, while fending off the Chicken "hordes".

Unfortunately, and needless to say, but neither the Harpies nor the Revenant saw any major use in this mission, as there didn't seem to be any significant need for either of them compared to using Locusts or Nimbuses. There weren't clusters of enemy units or structures that demanded use of the Revenant's aoe bombardment capabilities, nor were the Harpies' slowing missiles greatly needed to support other units in dealing with enemies. The mission simply never progressed to the point where either was really needed.

Another heated battle like Bavhakya, only this time, the bonus objectives were pretty easy to accomplish. My starting force of 2 Harpies, 2 Tridents, and a Nimbus was enough to take out the enemy Krow in under 5 minutes (though it almost escaped), while after building a couple Caretakers, I was able to build my own Krow (which was the 1st thing on queue) in under 5 minutes as well. Like with the Dante, while I could use the Krow's heavy armor to break through moderately-defended enemy lines, I needed to be careful not to lose them, as they're very expensive.

As for the Tridents, I probably could've completed this mission without building any, as they seemed largely unimportant for this mission. If this were a pure air vs air mission, then perhaps I'd consider them? The reason why I say that is because, when dealing with both air and ground forces, I tend to prefer more multi-role units that could attack both ground and air units, such as Locusts, Harpies, and Nimbuses. Speaking of Locusts, if I don't have Tridents of my own, I'd probably use Locusts to try to counter enemy Tridents due to their much faster speed, whereas I find that my Nimbuses could also put up a decent fight against Tridents.

So yeah, if you wanted to showcase the Trident's usefulness, then perhaps it's best to do so on a pure air vs air mission. The Krow could still be showcased well on such a map, in that it could be used to clear out enemy anti-air emplacements that block your way to the enemy base, or bombard waves of enemy troops that are assaulting an allied base across a river and steep canyon. (Take a look at such air vs air maps in Supreme Commander 2 as Corvana Chasm for example.)

Now this is a mission concept I'd get excited by, in that you need to stay on the move whilst building up your forces. Only I didn't have to stay on the move, as there was no way that the enemy could reach my position, and even if they could, a little terraforming would've fixed that.

Anyways, seeing as how the Detriment was this towering juggernaut of death that would eat Dantes for breakfast, I looked back to how I defeated a certain other towering juggernaut of death called the Core Defender, which I had to fight back when I played "Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun: Firestorm", and just as I had spammed dozens, if not hundreds, of cheap infantry to defeat the Core Defender, I had the bright idea of using the Athenas to spam hundreds of the single cheapest, most brittle, and most expendable unit in the game, which would be Fleas, and use them to take out the Detriment. However, my Fleas died faster than I thought, as while the Detriment possessed gauss guns that could make short work of lines of enemy units, what might've caused my Fleas to die more quickly than expected were the explosions that Fleas created when they die. It might've costed me over 800 Fleas, but after 2 failed attempts, I just barely managed to take out the Detriment on my 3rd attempt before 20 minutes passed. (By contrast, I was easily able to take out the enemy factories before 10 minutes passed just with the Hermits that could be resurrected south of the starting base.)

Update: I just replayed this mission, and decided to pit 6 Dantes (which is one Dante's worth of metal shy of the amount of metal needed to build a Detriment) against the Detriment. While they were able to bring down the Detriment, only 1 Dante survived, partially because the Detriment wisely tried to keep as far away from the Dantes as possible before they could catch up to the Detriment. Given how much metal was spent building the Dantes, I think it was more cost effective of me to pit hundreds of Fleas against the Detriment. I believe at least 600 Fleas, which cost only half as much as a Detriment, could've taken down a Detriment.

I had originally been putting off this mission until I could unlock the Jumpbot Factory, but after dealing with cloaked Scorpions and Phantoms at Romolis, I felt ready to tackle this mission as well. I had originally presumed that I would be facing off against enemy Phantoms at Nullkodkas as well, but as soon as I entered the mission, and as soon as I was told that the enemy was using Irises to cloak their forces, which would've made my initial plan to build masses of Fleas for the purposes of revealing cloaked units pointless, I changed strategies, and sought to focus on building Dantes, supplemented by Knights, Aegis, and Irises of my own that were being built by an Athena, all so that I could beat them at their own close-quarters game. (That and keep building Fusion Reactors at the back of our base to overdrive our team's mexes some more.) While I would still build the required amount of Firewalkers to meet the bonus objective, I didn't think they would be used very well for this mission... until I saw the Firewalkers in action that is.

Turns out the Firewalkers were far more useful for this mission than I had thought they would've been, as the enemy forces, despite being hidden by Irises, were giving themselves away by attacking the frontlines as soon as they were in range, which proved very counterproductive for the enemy Irises, as my Firewalkers, which were set to fire-at-will mode, could saturate pretty large areas with napalm, revealing any enemy forces which were dumb enough to walk across the burning puddles of fiery death. So effective were the Firewalkers that I then ordered my Jumpbot Factory to produce nothing but Firewalkers, and sent all my Firewalkers to lay siege to the enemy's frontlines while my assaulting force of Dantes, Knights, and Jacks pushed through the south, then proceeded to obliterate the enemy's bases from the inside-out. I was able to finish the mission in less than 12 minutes, and this is also including the fact that I manage to destroy 3 enemy factories before destroying the enemy Warp Jammers.

As for the Jacks that were also introduced in this mission, unfortunately, while they did provide some help in taking down enemy defenses alongside the Dantes and Knights, they weren't all that useful for this mission, especially compared to the Firewalkers and Dantes that I was building. Unfortunately for the Jacks, the map lacked terrain features, such as steep cliffs overlooking rivers, which would've required the usage of Jacks, which could use their jumpjets to infiltrate the enemy base by jumping across the cliffs and rivers.

Although this mission started off promising, with having to use Skuttles to sneak past enemy defenses and destroy the enemy Geothermal Generators, Strider Hub, and Commander, and although the beginning parts were going well enough, with me destroying the 1st Geothermal Generator and Strider Hub not long after starting the mission, unfortunately, I suffered from so many setbacks with using the Skuttles (most notably being unexpectedly shot at by Stingers that I didn't know could hit them from what I thought to be a safe location), and my forces were being attacked so often by forces that the Skuttles were having so much trouble dealing with (particularly because of the Skuttles' painful combination of slow speed, low health, high cost, huge decloak radius, and needing to be next to enemies in order to deal the maximum of 8000 damage), that I ended up resorting to the use of more reliable Phantom and Dante spam, which ended up taking me 24 minutes to finish the blasted mission. What's worse, much of that time was spent on a wild goose chase trying to hunt down the enemy commander before destroying the 3rd Geothermal Generator, with seeing one of my Dantes getting pushed back by a Newton being a runner-up.

Yeah, this wasn't a fun mission to showcase the Skuttle.

If I wanted to showcase the Skuttle better, in a more fun way, I'd want there to be an allied player fighting alongside the player, drawing much of the enemy's attention away from the player, so that the player can better focus on using Skuttles to, say, infiltrate past enemy defenses and destroy objectives within the enemy base (such as Strider Hubs, or a superweapon like the Big Bertha, which we used Scythes to destroy on Thibella), or destroy enemy Paladins or Merlins that are giving the player's team headaches (like in Romolis).