#ra2

Then, you give them the birthday surprise,

And then you kill 60+ enemies in one big cluster explosion, pretty simple.

At 7:15PM Eastern time, I'm playing more of Red Alert 2 on twitch!

My friend @timekiller21 is joining me for commentary once more, as we finish up the last third of the Soviet campaign.

It’s time...

Oh shit sorry for the late response if this was time sensitive.

Well, you really want to plan ahead of time where your huntbox -- like a killbox, but, well, you know -- will be. You set up slightly ahead of the huntbox or in the huntbox. This is where your damage, block, interception as a whole will be. Your Hunting Net Launcher is aimed at the huntbox.

Now, beat the tar out of the Exotic Beast, until it's under 30% HP (leave it at like 20% just in case), then undeploy all your people and let it limp away, into your huntbox.

Now, your huntbox will depend on the exotic:

Big Burdenbeast and Mini Mumu are map dependent but they are very easily blocked so just aim it at them.

Thalebeast has a route so you can set it a bit ahead of where you engage so you catch it as it goes back to its routing, or just by blocking it like the ones above.

Sandworm needs to be where you engage it because on low HP it will stay in place and charge up a skill that makes it escape the map.

Vanillawing is more involved, because this fella will start beelining its intended exit. You set the huntbox on its path to the exit or near the exit.

My first inclination had been to just recreate what I made in RA1 (winding labyrinth with lots of net launchers, gas launchers and a narrow kill lane), but IDK if that will work out and the resource outlay for a properly built up torment nexus IS pretty huge even with all the extra ways to get stuff in RA2

(sent by @the-cornuthaum​)

Recreating an RA1 format base is indeed a good long term goal in my opinion, but as you said, it’s a resource intensive matter, particularly because it takes literal thousands of Stone -- Lighting Ore is really not an issue if you do a lot of Strange Territories -- to make all those ideal Urban Barriers III.

Personally, I would start with making a simple kill lane and building outwards from there, probably with a loop being the next thing after the kill lane. Cover your Campervan with Urbans, then choose a direction and make your lane there, and then stretch to either side of preference and make a basic loop surrounding 3-4 Battlements. This is highly informed by my own preferences and player expression, mind you, because I love radial range units -- Lin, Gnosis, Arturia -- and it tends to be how I start, but, of course, I think you need to adjust your layout to your own preferences.

I know most people don’t share my playstyle -- radial units close up, very long range artillery blasting those tiles while the radials damage/crowd control, like Horn, Firewhistle, Fiammetta, Ray, W -- so instead of a loop, you can do a zigzag funnel with Battlement ‘alcoves’, extending all the way to one of the enemy spawns with a single opening so all enemy spawns have to enter through there. I’m at work so bear with my MS Paint skills here but I think a small visual representation can help:

Basic, low resource kill lane. Greys are Urbans, browns are Battlements. The Battlement directly on the enemy route near the Campervan is intentional because a good kill lane will not have to worry about them reaching there in the first place. You can comfortably put several Battlements on the Battlement side, like rows of 2-3 per line, depending on your needs, and long range bombardment like Fortresses behind them. The straight line Battlement is good for Ifrit/Corroseum, Ray, Fartooth, Schwarz, any straight line killer of your choice. Apply Cursed Mire as needed, but keep in mind a Cursed Mire tile is a tile you don’t get to deploy Melee units on, so leave a gap here and there if you want to put an Ambusher like Manticore here and there. Your straight line Battlement can also be under the entrance, but do mind ranged enemies.

From there, you can extend like this for a funnel, like so,

Do zigzag alcoves like this, 

or make a simple loop like this

Added a red line to show you how the enemy pathing would go; you can add more Battlements to the empty space down there in the loop.

Then, with a few more blocks, you can create this Purple Zone above the loop, which is where I would put all sorts of goodies like Net Launchers or long range artillery Battlements, aimed towards the loop.

Start with angst?