[10-2-8] 8. The Gate to Aqueous Minor

Guide to Total Annihilation's 'The Gate to Aqueous Minor' mission. Learn how to establish your base, defend against aerial attacks, and destroy enemy construction plants.

There are two pathways into the northern section of the map, both guarded by dual ARM Sentinel towers. There will be very few attacks, and certainly nothing very serious, so you can take your time establishing your base.

Although the ARM base contains construction plants, it does not use them very much - but it is still best if you destroy them as soon as possible. If you use a bombing run to destroy these plants, you should make sure that the bomber force is large enough to destroy the target before they are in turn destroyed, because ARM does have a construction unit, and it will repair damaged buildings.

About the only attacks worth noting are the aerial attacks - ARM will use bombers against you, so you should have aerial defenses scattered throughout your base. ARM cannot rebuild their airforce, so once you have destroyed it, you will dominate the skies.

Yuan Liu ([email protected]): This is another big map. But either I learnt my lessons in mission 6, or the computer is just not that tough on this one. I scouted out the lower 2/3 of the map using the starting units. And after a small-scale build-up near the starting position, I was able to find a perfect defense position. About right in the middle of the map, there is a big boulder next to a small hill, so I set up my plants behind the boulder, some of my defense towers on the two high grounds, and some defenses choking the passages on either side of the boulder. Then when I got my advanced radar set up and "making sure" there were no straying red blips on the screen, using a c-plane (with the help of a couple of air-liften advanced c-bots), I was able to quickly set up a couple of Punishers and another advanced radar tower near the edge of the range of the first. Then I used the Punisher to soften up the enemy base for my bomber squadron. The rest is, again "boring" :)