#totala

finally defeated CORE mission 19: The Vebreen Fleet this is the second major hang-up I’ve had with the CORE campaign The first difficult one was mission 16: Departing Rougpelt, really only because of the meteor showers provoking the ARM forces into a full-scale “counter-attack” far too early because of some sloppy programming. Anyway this mission has you rushing to build a base on an island to intercept an enemy fleet that makes its way up the map. Fortunately it only starts off a few ships at a time, and mostly unarmed transport ships, but there’s almost no metal. There just isn’t time to build any moho mines either, so you can’t build your own ships until you have sunk enough wrecks and reclaimed the metal. I found the trick is to use aircraft as much as possible - they are cheap and fairly quick to produce, and nearly all of the ships have absolutely no defence against them. So, a large force of patrolling fighters, and gunships and torpedo bombers as soon as you can will harass the ships well. Torpedo bombers are particularly effective The geography also works to your advantage - there are only two narrow channels on each side of the island that the enemy fleet can pass through, so I lined these with missile towers and a few Punisher artillery batteries for backup. There are also several small islands in the channels which will tend to block the enemy ships.  But if any ships manage to get through the channels, you’ve pretty much already lost as it’s pretty much impossible to catch them before they reach the edge of the map, which is a mission failure. Once there were plenty of wrecks to reclaim for metal, I started building scout ships to patrol and then destroyers. Fortunately there are only a few subs with the fleet and they only come in the last wave.