GDI Mission 09: Destroy Vega's Base
Play Time: 56:07

So this Vega guy is the Nod commander in Central America and the objective is to take his headquarters in Honduras. You start with just some infantry and have to clear out all air defenses around the starting area. They are not really defended by anything, but this map is huge and they are spread out over a big area and not marked on any map. So this really takes a while even though you're not actually doing anything noteworthy. Once the air defenses are down, dropships arrives with two titans and an MCV to build a base. There is plenty of tiberium in the area, but the pathfinding often acts really weird and the harvesters are not using the ramp right next to the refinery to get down the cliff, but take a big detour to take a different ramp. I think this mission you basically get the full game. Nod launches frequent attacks against your base, and occasionally does it with its mole APCs and burrowing flame tanks, which can be really nasty. But you can protect your base against such a tank by building walls and covering the whole ground inside with concrete, which stops the burrowing units. You also can build a mobile sonar unit to detect underground units. Another new addition is the Jump Jet Infantry, which can fly around with a jetpack but is still super slow. And really expensive.
I've build another eight helipads and Orcas, but they really don't seem to be worth it. They just don't do any real damage against anything and are super expensive.
The main new addition this level is the amphibious ACP. Which sucks. It can swim through water and can carry five soldiers, but it doesn't have any weapons and unloading the soldiers is extremely fiddly and very slow. Landing troops close to enemies is basically impossible without big losses because you have to get each APC into a location where it can unload troops manually, and then you have to wait for it to come to a stop before you can give each one the order to unload individually. It's so much easier in Starcraft where you just select a group of transport units, click the unload button, and then click on the spot where you want all of them to unload all their units. The developers must have played Starcraft. Why didn't they see that their method is terrible?

I also think that having three harvesters gather tiberium is a good number. Once I have all three going, I rarely find myself waiting for money to come in to construct what I want.

Once I had a pretty big army, I send it all over a bridge to destroy the main Nod base and send an engineer to capture the HQ. Then all I had to do was to kill every single Nod unit and building on the map. But first you need to find them. It's a very big map, with some areas that are very annoying to navigate through. And your units are so slow. So after I basically won, I still spend a long time looking for those two rocket launchers that were in somewhat random places.

Once all Nod units are destroyed, McNeil and his pilot go inside the HQ to find Vega. He calls Kane that GDI is taking the base and he needs reinforcements, and Kane sends him some missiles. Just not as reinforcements. When McNeil finds him he is coked up and the only thing they get out of him is that Nod took something very valuable named Tacitus from the alien ship. McNeil returns to his ship before the HQ blows up, but I think leaves Vega behind.

Once back on his command ship, McNeil gets a message from General Salomon that Nod has taken a GDI base in the Norwegian Arctic and he needs to go there to retake it.

I am still having fun with this game, but Starcraft clearly is by far the superior game in every aspect except graphics. As a game, this really isn't that good. This is a really long game and I am not completely sure if I will have enough staying power to complete it. I also have the Firestorm expansion, but at this point I expect that I'll be skipping it.