Campaign play-through on Brutal Only, All Side Objectives - COMPLETED

I'm doing a play-through of the campaign on Brutal Only difficulty and doing all Side Objectives in the same mission.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCYkdoPqAL9xfJ5Atuq2gz6MUeQ3RTmDf

I made use of the upgraded commander often, pausing, sometimes terraform, though I tried not to use much terraform. Depending on the mission, maybe some mission-specific tactics (cheese or otherwise standard).

For basically all missions, I'm going in prepared with full data and notes from a previous spectator view. Some of the missions take multiple, upwards of 5 or 10 attempts.

I wanted to challenge myself and also do a more recent recording. I noticed that the only playthroughs were really old or not filling the difficulty criteria.

I hear some other really high skill players have beat missions on brutal, so I wanted to do that as well.

As of June 17, 2026, 43 of 71 planets have been captured, so it's a campaign-in-progress.

Any comments/questions?

Some missions I use others guides for, notably Kitty has some videos for a couple of the missions that seem to be very very hard https://www.youtube.com/@catmaster9410/videos (and they're done very well, as well!)

Rating of hardest missions:
Fel Diacia
Kayvillon
Ganong
Old Falsell?
Bavhakya?
Zhurou?

I did some of the campaign in brutal and all bonus objectives in one match. It's hard. It's possible to play the campaign co-op. If you want, we can do the harder missions together. It's still the same resources, just shared control.

quote: For basically all missions, I'm going in prepared with full data and notes from a previous spectator view. Some of the missions take multiple, upwards of 5 or 10 attempts.

This seems like a step too far in my opinion.
If you always start a mission by going to the spectator view, it kinda warps how you play the game and it becomes more like looking for exploits.
Of course, if you have to replay a mission 10 times, you basically get the same information, but personally, it just feels so nice if you finish the mission in the first try.

Of course, doing all mission objectives in the same run is quite hard, so maybe you have to do exploits on some maps to achieve this.

I haven't played the Brutal campaign in years but when I played it, I did it in coop which is quite a bit easier.
We definitely cheesed some levels, and used paused and whatnot. I think we usually tried to go for all objectives in the same run, but weren't too picky to just replay the level to finish off some other objective in the next run.

I could have done Bluebell in one go had I gone through gs first, just wall off the dante and charon the scuttles over to the objectives, shouldn't be too difficult.

I'm personally predicting one of these: Ganong, Hibilha, Old Falsell, Fel Decia.
On account of their thin thresholds and pressure (whether time or attrition).
I've seen Kitty's Fel Decia video ( ) and frankly, I can not execute like that.
But perhaps there's some more accessible strategy I can use.

And now only Zhurou remains. So far it seems very difficult to execute, an endurance execution test over a very large battle space.

Old Falsell was quite difficult, and despite it taking 56 minutes to complete, I think Fel Diacia and Ganong were tougher in execution.

Bavhayka was very RNG dependent, both on enemy Commander movement and the general flow of the AI vs AI battle swings. Even if I did things right, I have to hope the AI doesn't collapse on its own and the enemy commander exposes itself. In my success completion, the AI commander came middle instead of north.

Oh yeah and Kayvillon was the most difficult so far.

Fel Diacia was a lot more approachable/noticably more reachable with sufficient hyper-aggression.

rn when i play the campaign i only ever do all bonus brutal, and i play the mission its intended to, aka i try to use the unit unlocked there as much as possible(with few exceptions like zhurou, kayvillon etc). just gonna give some random thoughts on the missions.

Walchice(stinger), Juliburg(seawolf corsair), Fel Diacia(tb), Sirlanna(griz). Maps i used to think is hard but gradually as i get better i feel much more fun in place of hard, they are fun and good practice material, i just go back and play them randomly from time to time. all are missions that require you to expand, multitask, micro and destroy enemy in time.

Caderical(zenith), Ciphe(starlight), Chatka(merlin), Intrepid(pala), Karuwel(scorp), Rockbar(reef), Mannia(detriment). Maps that are macro heavy and slow, which i likes alot, all of them are fun and easy, something i can just go in and chill/do whatever i want.

Old Falsell(crab), Sapphire(deso). i really like these two because there are very little missions that i feel like have a good design for just porcing and defending. Although Old falsell is not designed as a porc mission but it is also very unfair simply with how much the ai has, it just feels way more fun to play it as a porc mission. There are few defending mission in the first place, and then some "defending" mission like Walchice or Lalata still provokes you to wipe out the enemy as usual.

Tempest(ulti), Pendust(shogun), Bluebell(skuttle). other kind of hard maps.

Ganong(Domi) is the single hardest mission in the entire campaign if you try to do all bonus, there are four diffrent, distinct bonuses that you have to do... not only you barely get anything are the start you also have to micro every single domi, not to mention thier terrible handling. not complaining, but im not good enough for this mission, this is the only mission that i've never finished all bonus brutal in one go.

Zhurou(drp), Kayvillon(siren) this two are pretty hard, but different to a "skill issue" thing like the above, these two are just out dated missions that just became obsurdly unfair over the balance changes. can be frustrating if you dont play it with the right mindset, but still can be fun.

Bavhakya(likho). absolutely terrible design. the odin killing trinity is fine... but why are you telling the player to spam likho on a narrow map where it is also one of the maps where the ai spams aa? and ofcourse the ai simply have way too many stuff, this is especially true as likho has a "efficentcy limit" where it takes forever to reload.
and more importantly is the bonus... why the hell would someone want to snipe the commander? it does not do ANYTHING for the opponent, and it is compltely RNG that if you can kill it or not. i remember retrying the mission 20+ times to just ONE match where the commander comes to frontline at a possible-to-kill timing, and then i fucked that up so it is 100% my most hated mission.