Last week saw all sorts of fun and games, as under the direction of the Silver Mantis, a highly-placed Arachnos nutcase, our highly ambitious and mostly competent gang of Supervillains were sent on caper after caper, all with the express and cumulative effect of throwing a whole toolbox of spanners into the workings of the Sky Raiders.
This airborne company of guns for hire had clearly trodden on the wrong toes in the largely Arachnos dominated Rogue Isles, and have elaborate plans to become far too powerful for their own good. These plans mostly consist of a very optimistic series of raids on the various other Supervillain factions of the Isles, and stealing their stuff, in particular, the things that make them all super in the first place. With all these different powers, the Sky Raiders may indeed become powerful enough to confront the Arachnos, and so using the medium of our Secret Base's Oracle/Soup Cauldron/Answerphone, (seen below), the Mantis sends us out to disrupt and destroy, a calling that we tend to fall into quite naturally!
(The Control Room at our luxurious five-star Secret Base, Bar and Grill. Its done out in a bijou 'Arcane' style, with so many blood-red lighting effects that it becomes difficult to tell if your eyes are actually bleeding, or if it just seems like it, without touching your face! The Oracle cauldron itself, centre, is a deep green colour which provides a pleasing contrast and attractive talking point! Probably needs more purple scatter cushions and some rag-rolling. I fully expect an Evil Insurrection, and base remodeling to the 'Tech' scheme, any day now, but I'm watching those treacherous maggots like a hawk!)
Ahem!
We'd done most of the hard work last week, completing the first five missions out of six in the Pirates of the Sky Strike Force, and reconvened, ready to take on the final challenge; mission six, in which a certain Sky Raider Colonel learns not to get ideas above his station. The plan is a simple one; we stow away aboard a container ship at Sharkhead Isle, wait for it to get to the Sky Raider's secret offshore base, and then proceed to take the place apart and give everyone aboard a terrific mauling!
Here we are, perhaps not taking things as seriously as we ought to, lounging on deck as we wait for the S.S. Sky Raider Loot Express to depart. Needs more deck-chairs. We are contractually obliged to point out, at this stage, that our Brute, centre, does in no way resemble The Thing! He has a scarf on for a start, and any resemblance is merely a coincidental side effect of the SG Uniform Colour choices; a settable alternate colour scheme that lets SG members all coordinate on outings like ours. Fabulous!
Once aboard and underway, the first job is to bust out of the container ship. This is a mini instance using a tile set I'd seen before, but which works very well indeed; the Container Ship Interior. Designed to look like you're working your way along the interior of a super-tanker's hull, this is one of the more memorably types for me. Its roomy, logical and still made interesting with the addition of scattered towers of crates and containers. Large and believable bulkheads separate the whole into sectional 'rooms', and enemies lurk behind, and indeed on top of, these crates.
In this case it was more of the Sky Raider groups; Engineers with the Forcefield Generators, flamethrower types, teleporters and the officers as well. A useful and welcome warm-up exercise that still saw one of two of us knocked out as we all tried to find our stride again. I don't know about the others, but I only tend to pop into CoV once or twice a week on average, so hitting it 'cold' like this does make me a bit stiff and it takes a good few fights to get the hang of it all again. Same with my weekly Guild Wars sessions too - the first few fights will always go badly.
Once through this area, we arrive at a door at the far end, and leap through to discover that while we were busy, the ship has arrived. Standard sort of thing, oil tanker deck, no land in sight, lounging goons...and then you look up...
The ship is moored beneath the legs of a towering oil-rig like structure, with many levels, gantries, platforms and the like. An alarming number of very large gun emplacements cover the thing, and in the skies all around the place hover Sky Raider troops - literally in mid-air. The place is essentially a fortress, and is going to take a lot of work to climb.
We made a start on the nearest goons, with me using Teleport Foe to try and bring the flying troopers down to the deck of the ship where we could administer a sound thrashing, but it very quickly became apparent that here was something fairly unique; a properly three-dimensional mission, more akin to movement and fighting in EVE Online than any more usual MMO - the buggers would be swooshing up and down, back and forth, in and out, and this all made life extremely difficult for ground-bound, melee-ranged me.
Like everyone who knows remotely what they're doing with CoX characters, I planned ahead and got a Travel Power at L14. I went with Teleporting, mostly because it sounded interesting. The other three members of Strike Force Scalpel all went with Super Jumping as their means of getting about, and neither of these are a lot of use for Air-to-Air combat, frankly. The two Corruptors were okay though, both having a variety of targetable ranged attacks which don't especially care what direction the target is in, just how far away. Life for me and the Brute was more fraught. Being the huge aggro magnet that Brutes are by nature, meant that the enemy was quite often coming close enough for the Brute to just continue smashing away as usual, but being invisible, and largely built around my backstab meant I have to go to them.
Luckily, a previous line of work on Cap Au Diable meant I still had a Goldbricker Rocket Pack temporary power, so was able to take to the skies myself. Without that, the Raptor Pack available form one of the early Mayhem Missions or just Flight as a power choice, I'm not sure I'd have been any help at all in the largely air-based hijinks that followed. Anyway wings acquired I then spent a lot of the subsequent fighting trying to fly close enough to the hovering riflemen to actually make contact with my fists - delicate maneuvering which I really need to go away and practice a bit!
Mind you, despite the rocket pack sounding like a small helicopter, and belching out clouds of smoke, I was still able to remain Stealthed Up which helped a bit. Even so, while I did manage one or two spectacular (if I do say so myself) Air-to-Air Backstabbings, mostly while humming 633 Squadron (its that kind of mission), it was the others that carried the day, with their ranged attacks and the Brute's frightening raw Fury-Enhanced damage output obliterating any rocketmen that were foolish enough to come close enough to the ground. Hectic stuff, which only got worse when we started on up the structure of the rig itself.
In addition to the swarms of rocketmen, and rather obvious and powerful large caliber deck guns festooning the thing on every corner, it was also equipped with some kind of nerve-gas launching missile batteries, and worst of all, scores of 'invisible until you go near' pop-up anti-personnel machine-gun turrets, on pretty much every goddamned pillar! The entire time on the rig was largely spent under a withering hail of gunfire, which we had to struggle to keep on top of. Each time we moved into melee range of one set of guns, we'd trigger the next set along; all the while, trying to swat flying shock troopers. Harshness!
Thinking back, I do wonder why we didn't all jet-pack up, fly far above it all, and and try attacking the fortress from above, instead of the laborious attrition of trying to climb the thing. Oh well! One nice touch was the fire; the more turrets we blew up, the more flames started sprouting from the structure, lending a real 'action' feel to the endeavor, and by the time we reached the helipads on the roof, the whole structure was mostly ablaze. On the down side, it turns out that it is rather difficult to remain Hidden, while actually On Fire.
Once on the roof, Colonel Duray arrives to see what the noise is. He's an Archvillain grade boss, and takes quite a beating - purple difficulty (The one after red) and in addition to god knows what other powers, is able to call in killer robot minion support, which rather took us all by surprise. Before we knew what was going on he'd killed two of us and the full-party wipe wasn't far behind. Damnit.
One trip back from Hospital later, we got back to the oil rig fortress roof, to find it deserted. No sign of Duray, so we finished off the remaining turrets and goons. Still no sign, and by now the whole structure is looking decidedly rickety. We split up to scout about and found him, waaaaay over the far side of the map, hovering above a wrecked oil tanker that we thought was just scenery, along with another pack of the more standard flying henchmen.
As Archimedes says, 'Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth', which is the basic problem with this mission in a nutshell and lucky for us, Duray and Co are hovering about two feet above the deckhouse of the wrecked container ship, making the ensuing fight a LOT more conventional, and doable as it turned out. I'd run out of Shivan Destroyers, but two of the big friendly blue goo monsters were called in to help, which was only fair - Duray had robots! Some frantic pummeling later, Duray hits the deck, and we are victorious! He's not so bad if you can get him on the ground, and without fifteen turrets of varying bore firing at you as well...
The perfect end to the perfect day - gray storm clouds, lots of things on fire, and everyone beaten senseless! A true postcard moment. The fortress, right, is quite far in the distance there, and pleasingly aflame. We did that! We did leave a few Raiders alive (left), but then if you kill everyone, there is nobody left to spread the tales of how terrifying one is! Evil 101, that is.
Its a fun map, but grueling. The rig/fortress features in a couple of places; the above Strike Force, the last mission of the Lt. Chalmers Story Arc, or just out in the sea to the south end of the Sharkhead Isle map. The Chalmers version also features similar insane Air-to-Air combat too, this time vs Longbow Eagle units, and an Elite Boss, so bring a group! Air-to-Air Melee is really quite hard work, but something I'm going to have to get the hang of, I think.
The Strike Force in general seemed somewhat easier than the first one; Tarikoss, with less in the way of hugely difficult boss mobs and more variety with the enemies faced. The last map was genius though, and well worth putting the 2-3 hours of work to get to. And of course there's a badge; 'Air Pirate':
The Silver Mantis was suitably pleased with the mayhem we'd caused, and the status quo is restored, with the Sky Raiders put well and truly back in their place. Life continues on the Rogue Isles, as ever it did. For now...