Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency/Go With the Floe

Mission Briefing
We have repelled Core's first wave. You can expect them to regroup and attack again soon. Rebuild your base sufficiently in order to launch an attack on the ice floe to the west. Destroy the hovercraft and VTOL plants there and then move to the mainland to the north.

Priority Critical:

It is hoped that if you can destroy the manufacturing plants on the floe to the west, the final assault on the mainland will not have Core units to the rear. Though Core has had plenty of time to prepare for our move to the mainland, the beach to the north can be expected to be guarded.

Info Feed:

Core has developed a new, more lethal, kbot, the Sumo. It is sure to make an appearance on the mainland (being too heavy for the floes). Though slow moving, the Sumo packs a nasty laser cannon.

For our part, Arm techs have assembled a battery of Bertha cannon weapons for your use. You will, however, need to build the necessary power generators to power them.

To complete the mission, you must destroy all Core units and move your Commander to the base of the glacier on the mainland.

END

Opposition
There's an Advanced Aircraft Plant and Hovercraft Platform placed centrally on the middle of the floe in the southwest corner. There's pairs of missile towers but nothing too scary - and a construction bot to repair any structures that you fail to destroy completely.

There are two destroyers patrolling the gap between that floe and the one you start on, in the bottom-right corner. In the main piece of water is a battleship, cruiser and some other ships - plus an annoying solitary Snake submarine.

On the mainland is a Fusion Plant in the top left corner; the top of the cliffs is lined with Toaster pop-up cannons backed with 2-3 Cobra flak guns and a construction bot for repairs. Below the cliffs, just out of range of your left-most Bertha, is an Advanced Kbot Lab producing Sumos - you can expect up to a dozen Sumos by the time you get there. On the right of that landmass is an Advanced Vehicle Plant producing Reaper tanks and the odd Goliath. There's also a few Mortys around the place, and another construction bot. The factories are protected by pop-up lasers at each corner, plus a few missile towers.

Details
The early stages are a desperate scrabble to defend against wave after wave of 8-12 hovercraft - and to keep your base repaired during hailstorms. Your first priority is a Vehicle Plant to get a Construction Vehicle, then some Flash tanks and the odd Samson to keep off air attacks. There's a small metal deposit northwest of your starting position - the enemy consistently attack from that corner, such that you don't really need to worry about fortifying anywhere else, not even with Dragon's Teeth. However that corner will take a real battering - you first need to get a pair of heavy lasers either side of the metal (ideally a bit in front of it, so that they can see more of the shoreline where the hovercraft are at their slowest) and some Flashes patrolling northwest of it before you can start to relax - better still get a Guardian plasma cannon just behind them and a scout plane patrolling just offshore to help spot for the guns. To start with the Commander can help even the odds with a few tactical D-gunnings, particularly of the missile hovercraft in the rear of the attack - but don't be too brave! Keep an eye on your energy during this time - it's easy to lose some collectors to a hailstorm or enemy aircraft and both the lasers and the D-gun need energy to work. A jammer in the rear can help spare the guns from attack until the enemy get a visual on them.

There's a rich metal deposit in the southwest corner of your floe. Any structures down there will quickly be destroyed by the two destroyers, which should be visible even on basic radar most of the time. It would be nice to kill the ships conventionally and then reclaim their precious metal, but it's probably more economical to D-gun at least one of them if not both, and benefit sooner from doubling your metal supply and sparing your units. After that you only have to worry about air attacks on that area - put in protection. You can also have tidal generators in that corner, and before you attack the hovercraft plant you want an Advanced Radar Tower as far to the left as you can get it.

Meanwhile you want to get on with building a Fusion Plant(s) to support the Berthas, followed by a Moho Metal Maker to fix your metal needs. If you can find the Aircraft Plant or Hovercraft Platform before it is ready, then it's probably worth firing a few shots just with your low-tech generators - use the same technique as in mission 9, assign the left-hand Bertha to a hotkey then you can call down fire without leaving the screen on which a scout or attack has seen a target. Once you've got radar coverage of that floe it is pretty easy to pick off the structures - start with the ones in the middle and work outwards, you want to nail the factories first.

Meanwhile your other Berthas can start on the structures on the mainland - once the hovercraft plant is gone you can put up an Advanced Radar Tower on "invasion corner" to illuminate as much as possible of the mainland. For some reason the spare hovercraft that retreated from attacks or were assembling around the platform when it was destroyed, end up at two points on the northern coastline, in front of the two factories. Periodically they sally out halfway over the channel, then go back - it's very easy to spot them on radar. For some reason about 5-8 Sumos assemble at the righthand spot, and can be picked off by the Berthas - or transport over some crawling bombs. You should also be able to Bertha the Advanced Vehicle Plant and some of the surrounding infrastructure.

Meanwhile you can started to think about land invasions, and clearing the channel. At some point you will need to send aircraft or hovercraft over to the other floe, to make sure it is cleared out before transporting an advanced construction unit across to build an Advanced Radar Tower to illuminate the western end of the Core base. An alternative is to transport an Infiltrator spybot over to the mainland but cloaking it uses most of the output from a fusion plant.

You also need to clear out the ships using torpedo bombers, hovercraft or Pelicans, and the remaining enemy hovercraft when they are out to sea and away from the cover of the Sumos. That will just leave a Snake submarine patrolling east-west down the centre of the channel, which needs to be destroyed at some point before the end of the game. You can see it on the radar map but not on the screen until the Commander or a Construction hovercraft build a sonar station. Once you can see it, kill it using a torpedo bomber or a torpedo launcher.

Assuming that you've Bertha'd the Advanced Vehicle Plant, your next target is the Advanced Kbot Lab, to close down Sumo production. If you try aiming the left-hand Bertha as far left as it will go, the plant is about 10 squares left of that and about 10 squares in from the shore. It is possible to use a mixed force of hovercraft to take out the pop-up lasers on the shore side and then use Wombat missile hovercraft on the coastline to destroy the lab - by this point Core appears to have no radar coverage so as long as a Sumo doesn't see you, this works OK. You can also bomb it out of existence - apart from the Cobras at the left end of the cliffs, aircraft "only" have pop-up lasers and Sumo lasers to worry about. Or you can use naval bombardment - build an Advanced Shipyard and then a Conqueror cruiser.

If there's no more energy production left on the low ground, a bombing raid on the Fusion Plant in the top left corner will eventually bring the Sumo lasers and any heavy lasers to a halt. You may be able to take bombers along the top of the screen. It may also be possible to air transport the Commander by the same route, in which case he could D-gun some Toasters, capture the remaining ones, then capture the Cobras and the Fusion Plant and make rounding up the Sumos and Reapers relatively simple. Victory comes when all Core units have been destroyed and the Commander is standing at the foot of the cliffs - it does not count if he is west of the cliffs.