Sabre wrote:I love this mod, had a blast figuring out all the missions, but the last Bonus Mission of 8472 "Containment" is unbeatable on normal difficulty.
How am I supposed to hold?
Getting to the Federation does nothing; they need too much time to get going.
I've played that mission daily for weeks on weeks now, and tried all I can think of, any tips?
You're in luck, I've just finished a new version (5.0.D), it's up on Moddb now. "Containment" is one of the missions that has been rebalanced, for example you now start with weapons upgrades already researched and there's now a hidden extra dilithium moon on the map you can reach through a wormhole, the enemy also takes a bit longer to get going.
Tips for winning this mission (I played it myself yesterday to ensure it's beatable now, even without using the hidden dilithium moon) are largely the same as before:
- Build a double-layered wall of Mothers to plug the entire entrance to your base, also place your Evolution and Development Cores behind those, so they can help out a bit.
- Have the double-layered wall of Mothers be slightly diagonal; the top-left Mother should be slightly more to the north than the top right Mother, because the enemy typically comes in at angle.
- You can shave time off reaching the abandoned Federation outpost by only clearing a path along the bottom edge of the map so the Federation ship can sneak through, but do clean up the remaining Borg turrets afterwards, otherwise they'll slow the Federation base down.
- Spam the Fluidic Rift as soon as it's available every 5 minutes to get that 1000 biomatter and 3 free ships.
- Use your ships to snipe enemy artillery ships ASAP, and kite the rest of the enemies into your wall of Mothers, but retreat any damaged ships when possible to keep them alive.
- I focused on static defenses and systems upgrades first, only later growing ships, so using only my starting ships, free ships from the Fluidic Gate, and growing two extra Launchers from the active embryos you get at the start, to help with those Borg turrets. But I don't know if this actually optimal, just that it's beatable this way, maybe it's more efficient to grow lots of Watchers early on and defend with them, who knows...
- Save the game every couple of minutes: even with perfect gameplay you could (not likely, but it's possible) get unlucky and get the enemy sending a Cube, a Dominion fleet, and using Regeneration Wave all at the same right after you've lost most of your ships.
