[Androgeos Exeunt]

Well...guess what? I completed the whole thing without using the sequence-breaker. The stealth missions were the most exciting ones. The walkthroughs on the PI page are very useful indeed.

I got 60 percent of the bonus points, which is good enough.

[lostllama]

Found the easter egg in mission 12 (the mission I'm stuck on).

[Mongoose]

Sweet Jesus, getting that bonus point in mission 4 required an inordinate amount of replays. I feel like CP's walkthrough isn't nearly as detailed as I would have liked for the second portion of the mission, since I found myself dishing out all sorts of orders in order to stand half a chance.  I had all sorts of fits keeping either the Satis or the Anuket alive; either the Medusa wings would get to them, that wing of Horuses at the end would take the Anuket, or one of the Mentu's other beams (not the one on the bottom that was recommended to be destroyed) would slice through them.  I eventually kept Alpha on protecting the Satis, ordered everyone else to take out that bottom beam turret, and then stuck them on protecting one or two of the other convoy ships; somehow, I made it through by the skin of my teeth.  I came close to wasting the effort at the end, though; those bomber wings took the Typhon down to 64% before I was able to take care of them.  I'm 3 for 3 with these bonus points so far; I'm getting the sickening feeling that I'm not going to let myself come away from this without all of them accomplished.

[Goober5000]

It's kind of anticlimactic if you get them all.  I did, and when I got to the last briefing it said I had only gotten 60% of them.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

It's kind of anticlimactic if you get them all.  I did, and when I got to the last briefing it said I had only gotten 60% of them.

Hang on, Goober. Are you implying that 60% is actually 100%?

[Goober5000]

Hang on, Goober. Are you implying that 60% is actually 100%?

I'm not.  CP5670, the great math genius himself, is.

[CP5670]

Didn't you say you got 72%?

There is a known problem with it capping the rating at that number, which is especially strange since such a value should never occur at all (it just multiplies the number of points by 5 to get the score). I spent a lot of time looking into it last year but wasn't able to turn up anything. It may be a glitch with the persistent variable system. As far as I can tell, it works properly up to 70%.

In any case, the bonus points are there for people looking for an additional challenge and are certainly not mandatory. There is no reason to go out of your way to get them if they're making things frustrating for you.

[Mongoose]

Yeah, but when you're an obsessive-compulsive completionist, they might as well be primary objectives.

[Goober5000]

Meh.  I remembered it was more than 50% and less than 100%, so I just pulled a number out of a hat.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I did recall getting sixty-something, though...

[Mongoose]

Okay, so I have to agree with what Goober stated way back near the beginning of this thread...mission 6 was much easier than it was spun to be.  I wasn't even particularly trying to get the bonus point on my first play-through, yet I managed to keep the Deshret at 13% when it jumped out.  I took that dual-load of Tempests, but I only used about 30 of them; it was really just a matter of keeping the Vulcan firing non-stop whenever I lined up on a bomber wing.  The Sekhmets jumped in so far away from the Deshret, it was usually no big deal to take them all out without letting a single bomb through.  I think the repair transport came under significant fire once, but my wingmen managed to bail it out.  Just a nice, straightforward bomberfest.  It certainly gave me far less grief than the previous mission, where it took me way too many missed ships to figure out that telling all my wingmen to cover me was the most surefire way of tearing through the convoy.

(Also, I'd never realized just how powerful Infyrnos really are.  Maybe my normal policy of all-but-ignoring secondaries needs to change. )

Edit: So...anyone want to explain to me how one manages to take out six escape pods that spend the vast majority of their 20-second lives conjoined with the installation they're being launched from?

[CP5670]

Yes, I should reduce the difficulty rating of that mission in the walkthrough. It was justified at one point in the campaign's development, at the time that walkthrough was written, but I made some seemingly minor table changes at one point that made it quite a bit easier. (and I ended up leaving it that way, as the original was probably too hard even by my standards )

As for the escape pods, you need sit in a place where the fighterbay is visible and pick them off quickly with Thunders or Rockeyes (the target ship in reticle key works well for this). It can be done in 10 seconds if you have a rough idea of they're coming and get into position in advance. People who have played online will find this situation familiar since it occurs in several missions there.

[Mongoose]

I've tried doing that, but every time I lurk around the fighterbay, I either get gang-banged by a wing of Seths that happen to fly out at almost the same time, or an EMP blast catches me and wigs me out for a good fifteen seconds.  It'd be much easier if the Cairo didn't have that structure right in the middle of the fighterbay; I can never seem to pin down exactly where all six of the pods are, much less take them out.  At least it's a fairly short and easy mission otherwise, which makes the endless replays much less tedious.

Also, just as a general note, ordering a lone wing to cover you might as well equate to ordering them to do whatever the hell they please, since my pals are doing just about everything but protecting me in this one.

Edit: You know, I have no idea how I managed to take out all six of those things just now.  I crammed myself as far up the Cairo's fighterbay as I could, and as soon as they showed up, I started spamming Vulcan and Thunders in the general direction of where I thought they were.  I swear one or two of them had to have died by colliding with me, since I didn't see myself kill more than three or four of them, but somehow, they all wound up dead.  The next mission was a nice break, other than the fact that I'd never realized what a ***** the Hatshepsut is to take on directly. I'm fairly certain that mission 9 is the point at which I became completely stymied and gave up last time, so we'll see how that goes.

[Mongoose]

Okay...so during my second attempt at mission 9, as the last enemy cruiser and corvette jump in, I'm sitting there rearming myself with one last round of Cyclops, with the Minotaur already at critical hull integrity.  Fast-forward about 30 seconds, and I'm desperately afterburning away from the enemy corvette with all of 8% hull integrity thanks to a whole load of flak and a missile or two.  I still haven't managed to take out out any of the corvette's beams, and the Minotaur is hovering in the single digits.  I finally say "Screw it," order whatever ships are left to take it out, and make some of the most halfhearted, distance-flinging bombing runs you've ever seen, in the vain hope of surviving.  By some miracle, my bombs and the allied warships manage to take out the corvette, leaving the Minotaur with all of 5% hull integrity.  I take a deep breath...then exhale immediately as an enemy bomb takes it all the way down to 2%.  But for the first time in their AI lives, my wingmen actually did their job, and I just barely squeaked by.

I now completely understand why this mission had me stumped last time.  That could have easily ended in a lot of tears...or, more likely, a lot of profanity.

(I'm sorry that I'm kind of singlehandedly filling up this thread at the moment, but this has been the sort of campaign where I feel the need to dish about my epic struggles. )

[Mongoose]

I again apologize for this multipost spree, but if this campaign has stumped me once, it's stumped me a thousand times.  Mission 10 seems to be all sorts of inconsistent.  Four out of five times, my wingmen are seemingly utterly useless, and I don't come close to taking out either ship (in fact, the Aeolus managed to take me out once).  The other time, though, we managed to knock out the Deimos within three minutes, and the Aeolus was easy prey afterwards...and I'm fairly sure I didn't do anything substantially differently.  Unfortunately, by the time I did get to the Orion, I somehow managed to get stuck in one of its large turrets while trying to disarm it and died swiftly; I probably would have lost the Mentu during that run, anyway.  The walkthrough states to order Alpha and Gamma to take out the Aeolus when the Deimos becomes critically damaged, and that'd be all well and good...except for the fact that the player can't issue orders to either wing.  In fact, Gamma has orders to evade the Aeolus, for some strange reason.  I'd settle for telling either wing to cover me, since they don't seem to do anything to keep enemy fighters off my back.  I'm feeling like my only shot at this one is either to call in Delta wing right from the start and get them on the Aeolus, or else do what Goober suggested way back when and spam the Aeolus with Stilettos to disable it.

[General Battuta]

Stiletto spam is the way I handled that particular situation.

[Admiral MS]

I used Trebs (better to use against fighters but does low damage against the Orion turrets) for the Aeolus engines. As far as I remember 9 were necessary leaving me with 4 to disarm the 4 backside turrets on the Deimos before actually being in its range. So it was unloading all cyclops in its engines until I was out of ammo... At the time my wingmates got the Aeolus down and when rearming was finished they had destroyed the Deimos as well. Somehow that was pretty easy but then the Orion came and I got stuck two times in one of these large turrets 
And I don't know why but Delta wing was entirely useless whenever I called them in. I couldn't see any difference at all. So in the end it was all my task to take out the relevant turrets to save the Mentu and to destroy the navigation subsystem before it jumps. One time I even got nav destroyed but the Orion jumped out 3 seconds later kicking me to death...

[Mongoose]

Ah, so you got stuck in one of those too.  That makes me feel a bit better about managing it. I actually managed to get the nav system taken out in plenty of time to avoid the Orion leaving, but I was so damaged by then that I had to call for a rearm.  The Mentu was hurting pretty badly by the time I had restocked, and I was in the process of trying to scramble to disarm the beam turrets when I managed to get stuck.  I'm kind of wondering if CP didn't originally intend Alpha and Gamma to receive orders from the player, seeing as how he suggests doing so in the walkthrough.  It would make the whole mission much more reasonable if they were tasked to do something other than, "Fly around aimlessly in circles, and completely ignore the player when three or four fighters are swarming all over him."

[CP5670]

That was a mission bug that I fixed a long time ago, but the final patched version isn't released (it will come shortly after the finalized media VPs). They should still be fairly effective with their default orders though. One problem with telling them to cover you is that they rarely attack anything else, even if they're being fired on themselves.

[Mongoose]

Yeah, I know that's the case, but at least it would mean that the enemy was shooting at something that wasn't me.  That's not even my concern anymore, to be honest, since I've been able to (almost) consistently plow through the first portion of the mission by spamming the Pirene's engine with Stilettos and letting my wingmen take care of the rest.  The middle portion is an utter breeze; you can sit back and let your wingmen do all the work for you.  But the endgame...that's what's driving me ****ing insane.  I cannot get the Enceladus to leave the Khepren alone.  It's always firing with more beams than I think can possibly be facing the Enceladus...in fact, I know it fired through its own hull on one occasion, which annoyed me to no end.  I can take down the nav system easily enough with the help of my wingmen, and I can knock out one or two of the beam turrets, but that's often not nearly enough to save it.  The thing is, I think a lot of it has to do with timing.  On one or two occasions, I've had an enemy wing stupidly chasing a support ship for a minute or two during the Khepren defense segment, which means that the Khepren wound up much further along in its waypoints than normal, which meant that the Enceladus seemed to be able to bring two or three more beams to bear.  I just couldn't get to all of them in time, and that's without the flak and enemy fighters bearing down on me.

And the worst part of all of this?  I had it beat and lost.  I took out the nav subsystem, I managed to take down every beam turret that could reach the Khepren (which was at somewhere near 25%), and I was just trying to keep myself alive until myself or my wingmen could finish off the Enceladus (under 20%).  I was heading away for a rearm, and I managed to park myself just inside the range of one of the blob turrets.  Thanks to your lovely turret modifications, my shields were down before I even realized it, and I dropped sixty hull points in about two seconds.  I think my vocal cords just about ripped out of my throat, I screamed at myself so loud.

And yes, before you say anything, I know that they're only bonus points, but I also know that they're do-able, so I want to do them.  I'm really in the wrong line of entertainment...anger issues + perfectionism + challenging game = perfect storm of hatred.

(Oh, and one more thing?  The Sekhmet's energy reserves are about the worst thing I've ever seen.  Dear lord, you'd think the Vasudans would have managed to include a decent powerplant in this thing.  Kaysers drain its primary energy in all of about twenty shots.  I'd take a brick of an Ursa any day of the week over this thing, speed advantage or not.)