Unfortunately I never got much further with my attempts at that mission, and haven't tried again since. I can't say my hopes are high for success, but I should definitely try again at some stage.
hello i'm new here
haven't played Terra Nova for a good few years, mainly because i couldn't figure out how to get it to run on my machine! Might try a few of the suggestions on this forum tho...
Anyway... i seem to remember my favourite tactics being to rush the enemy, the laser was perfectly suited to this becuase you could keep a constant stream of fire at them and really wear down their armour. Great against pirates, altho the hogs seemed to like firing grenades in my face...
I pretty much use the laser the entire game. I occasionally switch to the EM grenades, or high-grade weaponry, like the grenade launcher, or MB Accelerator, but only to take out turrets. If it isn't red, singular, and there from the beginning of the game, I don't want to know about it!
Ah, my old foe -- final mission on World War difficulty in a Scout suit. We meet again.
I finally continued an old save game where I'd been playing the whole campaign on World War using the scout suit exclusively (if available), and have reached the last mission.
I'm currently getting absolutely thumped :)
My main tactic throughout this campaign has been to take scout suit + dynamo + laser, and simply out-run everything. It's certainly a change not allowing myself access to any of the heavy weapons.
In the earlier missions I took a particle beam to hit things from afar, which was fine when the bad guys weren't too tough. Once available, I switched to the ionic fusion rifle, which is great for hit-and-run assaults on heavy targets.
The latter approach is currently serving me very well for taking out every single turret in that base before bringing my squad mates into play. I'd just forgotten how easy it was to get squashed in this mission regardless. I have everyone else in a heavy suit this time, and Brandt still went evac within about 10 seconds of entering combat in my last attempt...
To quote Hannibal: "I love it when a plan comes together."
I was thinking "If I could just tell the squad what I really need each of them to do, this would be so much easier", and then I wondered "what's the best approximation of that plan, using the commands I actually have?", and what do you know... immediate success!
Well, the support team went evac, and then I couldn't convince Brandt to bug out, so he followed suit* and it was just me at the pick-up; but I'm pretty happy regardless :)
* pun not intended, but kinda awesome.
Good job, soldier. Now, go do it again naked with nothing but a mean ol' scowl on your face and sand in your hand. That'll show them fascist hegemony punks we don't like them much no more.
For real, you are my new hero if only for still playing the game, but on the highest difficulty to boot. {bows}
Yeah! See how your freshly-oiled PBA joints like this sand, Hog!
That'll show 'em.
(Wait, do I still need to jump out of an airborne drop-ship?)
All the while singing, "I gotta be me...", yes.
Wouldn't it be great if there were some easter egg free-fall speech samples like that buried in the game?
I thought you'd be entertained to know that <a href="http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7375&p=112965&viewfull=1#post112965">this mission</a> played out almost exactly the same way this time around. (I was looking up that thread because of the screenshots, and I had a good laugh when I saw what I'd written back then.)
There were a couple of other memorable missions. One ends up being an ambush, and we have to abort and escape; but instead I annihilated every single enemy on the map by myself, before sauntering back to the drop-ship (and being slightly disappointed that the debrief made no reference to my antics). In another I was explicitly told to avoid an area unless I have "a death wish" because my squad won't be able to handle it, but my eventual strategy was to make a bee-line for that area before doing anything else. I didn't even do it because I was told not to; I just got tired of accidentally stumbling into that hornet's nest while chasing someone else, and decided to see if I could forcefully remove the problem from the equation (and as it turned out, we absolutely smashed them :)
Last edited by Shadowcat; 1st Dec 2013 at 07:57.
Holy crap there were a lot of still active members running around this forum back then. I'd forgotten this place was as busy as most others at that time. For that matter, I was more active back then, too.
Thanks for the way-back trip, Mr. Peabody.
My friends, all I can say is this:Originally Posted by Shadowcat
"A toast: To the squad!"
Good job.
It wasn't even painful this time :)
I thought up the new plan in the wake of my recent success with commanding the squad in that same mission when they were in heavy suits. I had followed that up by repeating the mission (and the same plan) with them in standard suits, and naturally then wondered if it could work for scout suits. I concluded it wouldn't (although I never actually tried), but then a light bulb went on in my brain; a new approach to the mission that I'd never tried before, based on all my recent experience.
First of all, however, I wanted to replay the campaign from the start up to the point where I'd picked it up again recently, just because it had been so long since I'd put that game aside. I also figured that getting the additional practice missions in a Scout suit might help for the new attempt on the final mission (but mainly I just wanted to save that for last). I actually found some of the early missions remarkably difficult... I kinda felt I should breeze through them with all the recent game time, but that definitely wasn't the case a lot of the time (and bizarrely enough, some of the early missions actually felt harder than a lot of the later ones).
Having caught back up to where I'd started, I finally loaded up the last mission to see if my new plan would actually work. The first 4-5 attempts were failures, but all of those were due to me getting careless on the initial solo run before I even asked the squad to get involved. The first time I actually ordered Brandt to demo the base, he succeeded! (and not only that, but all but one of the squad made it back to the drop-ship!)
It's all about having the right plan...
I'm going to see if I can refine it, and hopefully get everyone out with the minimum of fuss. I've done it twice with only a single evac, but it was slightly messy at the end. Maggie really should have survived the last time, mind -- she certainly stuck around long enough to have gotten out; she just didn't manage to move to the right location. But then I've learned that playing Terra Nova like this requires you to work with the game, so I'll just have to try to make it so that problem won't occur.
I figure that getting everyone in and out and to the drop ship in Scout suits will surely be the ultimate success :)
Last edited by Shadowcat; 15th Dec 2013 at 01:01.
ttttttBoom! (prefix courtesy of my cat :)
Everybody out, safe and sound. World War. All Scout. No Evac. (Sounds like a tag line for something...)
I'll write it up with spoiler tags later, but perhaps the fact that I've even done this -- and can repeat with a very high success rate (i.e. virtually no luck involved) -- might prompt you in the right direction if you want to try this for yourself (which I thoroughly recommend -- this has really been quite satisfying :)
That's dedication, man. Great work!
Definitely write up a full debrief of your play-through. Too bad there's no way to record it the way recent games let you. A 'Let's Play' would do, though.
Well here are the spoilerrific tactics behind my all-scout world-war victory for the final mission. I won't give step by step details, but I think anyone should be able to implement a successful plan based on the following.
spoiler:It's all about working with the game; taking advantage of any weaknesses in its opposition, while avoiding their strengths.
My key observations were as follows:
1. A scout suit cannot go toe to toe with the enemy forces.
2. Once detected by the enemy, scout suits have just one advantage -- speed.
3. The enemies forces respawn in this mission.
4. The enemy forces will hunt you down in this mission.
Brandt needs time to set the explosives, during which time he cannot defend himself. In heavier PBAs the typical strategy is to defend Brandt by engaging the enemy, drawing their attention and their fire. But what if Brandt didn't need to be defended?
Something important occurred to me: The enemies respawn in this mission. Respawn. And in proximity to the mission target. There's probably no limit to how often that can happen, but there's undoubtedly a limit to how many can be present at any one time. So... what if all those units are (a) already present, and (b) "otherwise occupied" when Brandt moves in?
It turns out that the squad command options give you everything you need to make this happen.
Not that you won't still have a bunch of work to do yourself, both before and after you bring your squadmates into play -- no matter how well I've executed this approach, the old "if you want a job done right" proverb still holds, so you should expect to be a critical factor in occupying the bad guys. But between the three of you, you can very successfully keep Brandt out of enemy sights.
Last edited by Shadowcat; 8th Apr 2014 at 08:18.
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