Mission Twenty-Eight: Means To An End

Objective: You've come so far... You don't need my advice anymore. [But she'll give it to you anyway.] To win, shatter the three black crystals on the top screen and defeat Von Bolt on the touch screen within 24 days. This is it! The final battle!
CO: Choice of two, one for each front.
Enemy CO: Von Bolt & Kindle

All right, troopers, it's time to finish off Von Bolt once and for all. Although the totality of your experience would probably lead you to believe that he and Kindle will escape you yet again when you end this mission, you'll just have to charge ahead and hope that that isn't the case.

Despite the destruction of the black obelisk, Von Bolt is seemingly undeterred, although he no longer treats you like a gnat or a fly to be ignored; you've been upgraded to vermin status, and now warrant a beating. His weapon of choice? A gigantic Oozium called the Grand Bolt which takes up most of your lower screen. It's an impressive weapon, no doubt, and one that can quickly expand; in 24 turns, in fact, it'll be big enough to encompass all of Omega Land, including all of your armies. You'll need to defeat it by striking its three weak spots before it can do so.

Unfortunately, each of those weak spots is going to be protected by a black crystal on the secondary front; until those crystals are destroyed, you won't be able to do much more than one damage (out of 99 hit points) to the three weak spots. The secondary front cannot be manually controlled, either; you'll have to leave it up to the CO of your choosing to do the deed up there!

Since you have so many properties on each screen, we went with Colin on the top screen and Sasha on the bottom. Sasha's ability will let her prevent Von Bolt from using his SCOP if she builds up her funds a bit, while Colin will be able to build expensive units very cheaply with his ability, and will also constantly be using Gold Rush to get even more cash, which is helpful because cash rules everything around us. Although his units aren't as powerful as those of other CO's, he'll make up for that weakness with sheer numbers, and should win on the General AI setting within 12 days.

If you favor a more aggressive approach, you may want to use Grimm or another high-offense character on top, like Hawke (although Hawke may trigger his CO Power and thus be mostly useless for a turn). Sami is a decent choice on the bottom thanks to her quick-capturing infantry; you'll need to get as many of the bottom properties as possible as quickly as possible to prevent the enemy from building mid-tanks on their upper factories.

Early Game

Indeed, the first thing you should concentrate on are the bottom four infantry that the enemy has. If you leave them to their own devices, they'll rapidly capture numerous cities down there and give their overlord the funds he needs to build powerful units in the factories; you've got to stop them! Build a B Copter on your first turn, then another on your second turn, and get them down there as quickly as possible to start killin' dudes. Follow those up with a pair of infantry in T Copters, and when the coast is clear, start capturing the cities that the enemies took over to weaken their flow of funds, while watching for the ooziums to start coming in.

Recons and infantry will help you defend your base and capture the other properties near your starting area.

When you have two B Copters and two infantry-laden T Copters heading south, you can start working on defending your base. You'll have a dozen days or so before the ooziums manage to get anywhere near you, so there's no need to worry about them right away. Instead, you'll want to focus on the infantry, recon, and anti-air units that will be coming out of the factories to the north. The infantry are easy to deal with; just start building recon units to pound them before they reach your buildings, and a tank or two when you can afford them to make it easier to take on the anti-air units that will be popping out.

Really, that's pretty much the strategy...just hold the line and build progressively better units until you can get your secondary CO down from the top screen to join the fun. If you manage to recapture most of the cities in the south, the enemy won't be generating more than a few thousand funds per turn, which will force them to crank out endless infantry units, which are easy enough to defeat. You can, if you wish, head towards the enemy factories and attempt to block them or even capture them, but doing so is fairly difficult thanks to the ooziums that continually get spit out of the Grand Bolt.

The Killing Blow!

After the secondary CO comes down from the top screen, you'll be ready to make your push towards the three weak spots on the Grand Bolt and finish it off. If you're on turn 12 or so, then don't worry; you're almost assured of getting an S ranking on this mission unless you really manage to screw up. From here on, it's all about execution. Don't leave any units sitting next to an oozium at the end of their turn, check the movement distance on the enemy units, and so on and so forth. You might get a little excited at finishing the game, but that's no excuse to get sloppy! If you have the cash to do so, don't forget to build numerous infantry units and send them south of your base, away from the ooziums. It'll help your technique score and, if you group them together, might give Von Bolt a completely pointless target for his Ex Machina power.

All three of the eyes have 99 health, obviously, and will spit out new ooziums every four days or so. If one of your units is in front of an eye when an oozium pops out, it's dead! These ooziums pop out at the beginning of a turn, and then get their own movement period, so if you're approaching an eye, be sure to pause on the outside corner so that an Oozium that moves twice couldn't reach you.

You'll want to use neotanks to deliver the killing blows to the eyes, preferably having them within range of the eye just before you trigger a Tag Team strike for the two attacks in one turn. You can use bombers if you wish, but Von Bolt will likely build anti-air vehicles on his bases, which can prevent them from even reaching the weak spots. Of course, pulling off a single-day defeat will be a trickier proposition than it sounds, mostly due to the swarming ooziums, but you can take a few days if you need to. We actually managed to screw up pretty badly and didn't finish until we had four days left on the clock, but we still got a 100 score for speed; we did suffer in the power ranking, but we still managed to get an S for the mission.

After you defeat the Grand Bolt, you'll be confronted with a bit of a choice. Whatever you choose doesn't really affect the ending, though, so watch the credits roll and get your final campaign score. Hope you got an S!