Well...it's done.
In the end, I only received credit for 85% of the bonus points...which is odd, since I remember going after every single one over the course of the campaign. Maybe somewhere during my infinite restarts on a few of the more difficult missions, I forgot to accomplish something, or maybe so many restarts managed to tweak a variable somewhere. (Come to think of it, I don't think I saw a HUD point indicator appear when I killed all of the escape pods in 16.) Oh well. I know that I managed it, and that's really all that matters to me.
(Besides, the message I saw was a lot more uplifting than the one for 100% completion that I looked up afterwards.
)
Mission 16 was fairly easy, except for the several restarts I entailed by failing to get all four of the escape pods coming out of the Phoron. Making one or two of them fly out of the opposite fighterbay each time was just mean; you can barely move fast enough to cover the ground.
Speaking of which, I
love the Amun Mark II. It flies like a cruiser, but it can take about as much punishment as one, and those turrets are awesome. Taking out a Poseidon in two shots with a quintuple Phalanx is a thing of beauty.
I ran into some trouble when taking on the Xanthus when I nearly got overrun by a few fighters, but I managed to make it out alive.
17 was just...epic. Taking out the chin-mounted laser turret with Stilettos first made the whole affair much easier...though I wish I had thought to take out whichever missile launchers were constantly pummeling me as I went for the reactor. At least I figured out that putting my shields to maximum completely negated them before dying; it also had the added bonus of keeping my max speed the same as the Hades'. The ending cutscene of that was brilliantly choreographed...at least until the incoming juggernaut managed to clip entirely through the Sekham and didn't seem to fire any beams at it.
The second part was a welcome cakewalk; I just parked myself way behind the engines, picked off the one turret that was giving me intermittent troubles with Stilettos, and hurled Helioses into the engine for ten minutes or so. Got the kill, too, but not the promotion, since I think I picked that up the mission before.
All in all, this campaign was a fantastic piece of work. There were moments of almost agonizing (though admittedly optional) difficulty, and I managed to lose my temper an innumerable number of times while playing through it, but the storyline and writing were second to none, and you pulled off some mission events I've never seen before. Thanks for sinking all of that time and effort into crafting such an enjoyable campaign.
...but don't blame me if I don't feel like replaying it any time in the near future.
(Now, to have a look-see at that story document and hunt down some eggs...)