Act V: Italian Red Zone

Mission One: Northern Italy

Primary Objectives

• Capture the Catalyst Launch Facility
• Repair the Catalyst Launch Facility to full health
• Destroy three Alien Gravity Stabilizers

Bonus Objectives

• Capture the Reinforcement Bay
• Destroy all three Gravity Stabilizers without using the Catalyst Missile

No Pressure

This is one of those semi-painful missions that may perplex you. You have to infiltrate a Nod facility that’s been overrun by Scrin and restore a Catalyst Missile that’s been damaged to full health. When you do so, you can use it on the nearby Scrin forces that will be attacking you.

First things first: you want to consolidate your positions, not deal with two separate bases. For that reason, as soon as the MCV was unpacked at the beginning of the mission, we packed it right back up and moved it into the larger city to the northeast, near the Catalyst Missile. You might not find this to be an ideal solution, but we’re a lot better at playing when we only need to defend one base. If you do this, immediately build a Hand of Nod barracks when you plant it and build a saboteur. Capture the other nearby Construction Yard. That will open up all of the other buildings in the base here to your control, allowing you to repair them as necessary.

Important! Although you gain control of the Catalyst Missile when you capture the Construction Yard, don’t repair it. Repairing it fully will move you to the next part of the mission, which is tougher than this one.

While you do all this, enemy planes will be running around all over the place here. Your rocket bikes can shoot some of them down; have the rocket bikes run over some of the crates here, and hopefully they’ll all achieve a higher veterancy. To supplement your defenses, have the barracks near your original base pump out a bunch of rocket squads and get them to move into the base here, preferably guarding the northern exit.

Park Venoms here to take out the shock troopers as they warp over the gap.

Build a new refinery when you’re set up angled towards the southern blue tiberium field, first thing, then a war factory for another harvester. You need to get your tech tree up, so build a tech center first off to enable you to research laser capacitors and build Avatars. While you do this, try to build a new air tower and construct five or six Venoms. These guys can be parked up near the canyon to the north, where the small, annoying alien enemies are warping across. If you put them right on top of that in a Hold Ground stance, they’ll shoot the aliens as they warp, before they can fire back.

Enemy airplanes will be flying over your base often at this point, so some flak turrets along the northwestern wall will be a good idea, as would some rocket bikes or stealth tanks parked around your war factory.

Stealing Their Base

At this point, if you can figure out where the enemies are coming from (it’ll all be airplanes except for the little guys to the north), you can lock them down with anti-air turrets and achieve a rough stasis. When you have yourself defended satisfactorily, build a Temple of Nod and start the nuke countdown. Don’t miss the tiberium spike in the northeastern corner of the map.

Gaining control of the alien base will let you blast fools without too many problems.

When you have four bombers made up and ten or fifteen Venoms, launch your nuke directly on the drone platform. That will shut down the nearby Storm Columns, letting you move in with your bombers and gunships any other nearby defenses and construction buildings. If you wish to do so, you can leave the drone platform intact, kill the buzzers on the ground (can be difficult since they’re stealthed; might want to drop a minefield around the drone platform), then land a bunch of saboteurs to capture it and the nearby buildings as well. Doing so will of course grant you access to a whole lot of unfamiliar technology, but you’ve been facing off against the bulk of it for a while now, so you should at least be somewhat familiar with it. We also had the game bug out and remove the cash cap when we took over the buildings, but with two blue tiberium fields on the map, you should be basically as rich as you want to be at this point regardless.

So...start building things up. Build up the alien tech tree if you like, or if you’re capable of doing so. It’ll give you access to Destroyers, Motherships, Rift Generators...pretty much anything you’ve wanted to play around with since the Scrin first appeared. It’s not necessary to build Scrin vehicles to win, but some of their support powers will help you out a bit, especially the Wormhole Generator at the Signal Array.

Anyhoo...

When you have a large, large force of units to work with, park them on the western side of the map, preferably on the northern side, and start repairing your Catalyst Missile. When it’s complete, two more bases will appear to the west, so get in there and start taking them out! You only have two buildings to destroy, and with an infinite amount of time to prepare for the fights you should be able to overpower the outposts fairly easily. Note that one of the bonus objectives is to win without using the Catalyst Missile, which should be easy enough to do.

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