Command & Conquer: Generals - Zero Hour/USA Air Force General vs. USA Laser General

This level is initially extremely intimidating. You start out with a Command Center and bulldozer – while the Laser General begins with three Particle Cannons ready to blast away.

The land assault starts slowly and will give you a chance to form rudimentary defensive positions by garrisoning the buildings centered between your base and the Laser General’s base.

Building multiple Supply Drop Zones before building your Particle Cannons is a suggested strategy. When all of your PC's are built at once, they are less susceptible to destruction while being built.

Further into the game, it will be necessary to beef up your defenses a bit more with Patriots to defend against persistent Comanche helicopter attacks. An enemy Colonel Burton will also be attacking your base. Detection units are a must.

Walkthrough
Build and upgrade a Reactor. Build a second dozer and construct a Barracks. Build a Supply Center and immediately build a second Chinook supply helicopter.

Be sure that all buildings are placed far enough apart so that the Particle Cannons cannot destroy two buildings at once.

The odds are enemy infantry may occupy one of the five civilian buildings right in front of your base before you can get to it. Go ahead and research Flash Bang technology at your Barracks. Create a Ranger and five Missile defenders. Have your Ranger clear any garrisoned structures with the Flash Bang and then put your five Missile Defenders in each of the five separate buildings.

Build your Weapons factory and immediately send a Humvee to protect the buildings from infantry attacks. Possibly upgrade it with a Battle Drone.

Put a bulldozer in the area to keep the garrisoned buildings repaired. Pull back slightly to a safer area when buildings are at full strength.

Build your Strategy Center. Don’t forget to pick one of your free upgrades.

Start building your first Supply Drop Zone.

Create Colonel Burton and send him to protect your garrisoned buildings. Keep a bulldozer in the area to keep the garrisoned buildings repaired. After repairing the buildings, you need to bring the dozer back to a safe area after repairs or it will be destroyed. This is a great choke point and you can conduct your entire base defense in this area.

By now, the Particle Cannons will start attacking your base. If you are lucky enough “just” to have your Barracks destroyed, rebuild it, and keep rebuilding at as many times as necessary. It takes only 500 credits to rebuild and will keep the ion blasts away from your other structures.

If it targets your Command Center, repair immediately or it will be lost on a subsequent blast.

Beef up your garrisoned buildings with two Missile Defenders each. Add more as opportunity arises.

Have a Pathfinder stationed on both sides of the garrisoned buildings. This way, you will not have to worry about enemy Colonel Burton blowing up your buildings.

There is one area at the top of the overpass north of the garrisoned buildings that eventually a Laser Tank will target your buildings and your Missile Defenders will have a hard time targeting. Move Colonel Burton onto the overpass, behind the Laser Tank, and keep him stationed there to destroy it and future Laser Tanks that come up the overpass.

Build two Patriots to the northeast of your base, separated by a safe distance. You must keep these here to protect your base from Comanche attacks. They will be destroyed by PC blasts, but that’s okay. Just continue to rebuild them.

Build a second Supply Drop Zone and then a third one before starting on your Particle Cannons. Trust me. This will save you a lot of time in the long run. This way, you can build many Particle Cannons at once and they will be less susceptible to attack. The Laser General will target your PC’s as they are building. When this happens, the PC’s will be totally destroyed and 5,000 credits is lost. Even if you get one built, it can be destroyed if you don’t get it fully repaired before the next Particle blast.

After you have over 10,000 or 15,000 credits, build two or three Particle Cannons at once. Be sure you have enough upgraded Reactors to power them up.

Once the PC’s are completely built, attacks from enemy Particle blasts will not entirely destroy them and they can be repaired after each attack.

After building the PC’s, construct Patriots in areas to protect them from Comanche attacks.

Keep building as many Particle Cannons as you can afford. Start dismantling the enemy PC’s.

Wait for your PC’s to charge back up and destroy the Command Center. Destroy the bulldozers as they come up to rebuild it or hunt them down individually. From here on out, no new structures can be built and you can slowly start taking the base apart.

Destroy first all Airfields, War Factories and Barracks. Use your General’s Powers, such as A10 Missile Strike, Spectre Gunship and Fuel Air Blast, to destroy defenses at the very front of their base in case you decide to launch a ground assault – which is not necessary. Targeting further inside the base may lead to destruction of your aircraft before they reach their target.

The quickest way to finish the mission is to continue building more Particle Cannons and destroy the entire base with Particle blasts.

It is not necessary to destroy the Laser Turrets, Fire Bases, garrisoned civilian buildings, infantry or vehicles to win the mission.

If you so choose -- with the frontal defenses destroyed by your General’s Powers weaponry -- a small ground force can perform mop-up duties of any structures left standing.

Mission accomplished!

Alternative Strategy
Laser General is BY FAR the easiest General to beat. Here is how:


 * Make an airfield and research countermeasures
 * Make a warfactory to unlock combat chinooks
 * Make several combat chinooks and load them with missile defenders and a few flashbang rangers
 * Fly in over his defenses to the particle cannons then destroy his base from the inside out

Apparently laser general does not recognize chinooks as dangerous so does not activate his laser patriots and the countermeasures and PDLs take care of the missiles from the garrisoned towers. Even if he did activate the laser patriots you could fly the chinooks in simultaneously from different directions to get some inside where they will wreck havoc in his undefended base interior.

It should even be possible to destroy him with regular chinooks, just unload flashbang rangers and missile defenders in the middle of his base. However probability of getting bogged down in rangers from destroyed buildings is high - combat chinook renders them harmless.