Soon... Shivan Juggernauts that have insane inertia! Watch as the Colossus gets rammed by a gigantic space flea traveling at 640m/s!
Make it 800m/s and I'd pay to see that...
just joking
When I get the time to try/figure it out, I'll let you know what it looks like (assuming the game doesn't just crash horrifically on impact). Imagine that--the Sathanas' inertia ramming the Colossus is so destructive that it
breaks reality (or the game's reality, so to speak).
EDIT: Also, I'm a little sad at how this otherwise-incredible mission was turned into the most frustrating, annoying, rage-inducing gaming experience in recent memory. It was a combination of many factors, but in hindsight, I now realize that it was a combination of
both the "uber-bombers" and the Karuna self-damage that made all of my attempts to do things well enough to beat the mission pointless.
To be honest, my experience with this mission was so bad it's almost like Murphey pulled every trick in the book, including invoking the berserk button for my
second-most rage-inducing gameplay experience in recent memory (FS2's and AoA's "Helios bomb the Sathanas' turrets in 2 minutes" missions).
I was playing on Easy difficulty, and I'd attempted the mission at least 50 times, never getting as far as the Hanuman's obliteration. I just gave up and used cheats to just kill everything when required by the objectives, but that didn't work either--because the Karunas would
kill themselves. Then, I made all of the Karunas--and myself, because at this point I was just DONE, and wanted to finally f****ing finish this mission--invincible, cheat-killed everything in-sequence, FINALLY got to the part where the Imperieuse shows up, watched with utter glee and spite as all the UEF ships got obliterated one-by-one, and then I go to cover the Indus' retreat, and then....
...then I got obliterated by one of the main beam cannons of the Imperiouse. No, really. That should not have even been possible for a number of reasons, but hell, I'll list them:
1) I wasn't directly in-between the Imperiouse and either the Indus or Yangtze.
2) The Imperiouse is not in range to even shoot at the Indus or Yangtze, for its own list of reasons.
3) I was not in the Imperiouse's line of fire with any of the doomed UEF ships.
4) I was, through cheats,
invulnerable.5) Capital ship beam cannons
are flagged to only target/shoot at other capships, not craft or bombs.6) I don't think I was even in range of the Imperiouse's beam cannons either.
7) I was, through cheats,
invulnerable. (yes, I'm listing this twice)
So, by this point, I can't decide whether this is hilarious, utterly baffling, unfathomably frustrating/rage-inducing, or just spitefully insane. I quickly come to the conclusion that it is all of the above, to absurd levels, and so I am now out of ****s to give.
I turn on cheats, and kill
everything. Then the Sathanas shows up. This part is solely hilarious, because it was an explicit throwback to a berserk button of mine
within an even greater berserk button. I'm not sure what the dev team was aiming for the player to think/feel when the Sathanas shows up, but it probably wasn't gleeful, slightly cathartic rage at quickly annihilating the Sathanas with `Kx10--
that particular feat was something I was very, very experienced in.
"Now seriously, go read a book"? I already had, that same day (not the entire book, obviously). So my course of action was a little bit different.
I did one final attempt at the mission. I used cheats immediately, carefully, and methodically. I stayed the hell away from the Imperiouse and beam cannons in general, made all allied ships invincible until the Imperiouse showed up, and killed everything in sequence.
At this point, I'm waaaaay beyond empathy for any of the characters in the game (in the moment), and I'm taking mild satisfaction from the Diablos Ex Machina that dooms the Yangtze without any warning/precedent--or at least that's what I perceived it as at the time. I was practically rooting for the GTVA at this point, because the UEF's elite strike force of four frigates, two heavy cruisers, twelve Uriel gunships, and an AWACS would--without fail--get utterly decimated by a few bomber wings and a handful of older cruisers and corvettes
piecemeal. It took trial-and-error refined, precise, and overkill-levels of
cheats divine intervention to get anywhere near the Carthage, and only when I made it impossible for the Karunas to kill themselves with their own weapons, at that.
And when the Indus ended up where it did, in the state it did...I was just cracking up. It wasn't until Simms' letter that I stopped feeling like the Joker ("it's hilarious to just watch the world burn") and started caring about the characters again. For the most part. I was definitely not in the right state of mind to appreciate it then. I do now, for sure, but back then...
In hindsight, it was pretty much the polar opposite of ME3's end-game. A fantastic end-game, story climax, twist, and ending (temporarily) ruined by an absurdly unlikely combination of factors outside of the control of either party, coincidentally putting me in the worst possible state of mind for the ending (and the crazy, mission-breaking bugs were found, acknowledged, and addressed with impressive skill and tenacity). As opposed to ME3's, you know, terrible-in-almost-every-way end-game, unbelievably anticlimactic ending/end-game, dozens of nonsensical and self-contradictory plot twists from out of nowhere, and a series of utter disillusionment, betrayal,
criminally false advertising,, totally shameless cover-ups/PR BS, and of course the intellectual disrespect towards the fans, with regards to BioWare.
Now, I can look back at DE and the ending and really appreciate it for its awesomeness, while I can't look back at ME3, BioWare, or at times the ME-series in general without disgust and disappointment.
I apologize if these ramblings are off-topic or irrelevant; I hope they helped or were amusing in some way. Now I can feel very much at ease with regards to this mission, thanks to the awesome work/troubleshooting of the dev team and players alike.
