The Light of the Astronomican has shone again! And with it comes all the battlefleets from different sectors. I couldn't help but be overawed by the massive number of warships simply warping in above Lord Admiral Ravensburg.
"What can possibly justify interrupting me, Wigandus?"
"Lord Admiral, the light of the Astronomican shines once more. Reinforcements have been dispatched to the Gothic Sector. The warp storm...it is gone! Tremble before the majesty of the Emperor, for we all walk in His immortal shadow!"
That was just so awesome.
Anyway, back to the beginning. Since I've gotten my Retribution-class battleship, The Hammer of Marinas, I have run into the Eldar, the sneaky, deceitful Eldar prince. He needed help, and me being the nice guy I am, decided to accept and help him fight off Orks. Unfortunately that threw me right into the most frustrating and impossible missions of the game. With 2 ships (1 battleship and 1 battlecruiser), I was forced to fight off 9 Ork warships. NINE. Freaking hell. 3, if I traded the battlecruiser for a cruiser and a destroyer/frigate, but it changed nothing. The Orks had 1 battleship, 2 battlecruisers, 3 cruisers, several light cruisers and destroyers/ram ships.
The Eldar AI ally was absolutely useless. First, he almost always spawn on the other side of the map and would just charge into the fray in a suicidal (and un-Eldar like) manner, and get destroyed, leaving my 2 ships to fight off 6 to 7 ships on my own. I can tell you, that was impossible.
After loading, retrying and restarting the mission for over 2 hours, I called it quits. It wasn't fun, it wasn't even "challenging" or "difficult". It was outright frustrating and absolutely impossible. So I accepted the loss and moved on, but I did manage to secure an alliance with the Eldar. I decided to heed his warning regarding a seditious Captain who turned out to be a traitor (good thing I listened to the prince and his Farseer), helped him out with a couple more missions, and cemented the alliance.
All this while, I was focusing on weeding out Chaos from my midst. I actually won in a lot of Chaos missions, defeating Chaos fleets and freeing planets from their grasp. Awesome. On the other hand, I had terrible luck against Orks, and was always battered by them, so I tended to avoid confronting the Orks altogether. Funnily enough, this meant the Ork threat grew and soon enough they easily composed of half of the worlds under attack. At one point of time, I lost about 20 worlds, and approximately 10 of them were attacked by Orks.
That wasn't good.
However, a stroke of fortune came when intelligence detected Orks behaving suspiciously and running away instead of ramming into Imperial confrontations in their usual suicidal manner. As it turned out, I had to throw a beacon on their warboss's flagship, force him to warp out, and then track the beacon to their base. Which turned out to be a giant space hulk repurposed into a battleship, the Kolossus. In the end, I participated in the Hunt and destroyed the Kolossus, at the cost of both my battlecruisers, but it was worth it. I killed the damned stupid warboss, who either decided to blow his own space hulk up or my attacks triggered it - and the cyclonic torpedo basically wiped everything. With the Warboss dead, the Orks fell into disarray and the Imperium wasted no time in eradicating all the Orks.
In one fell swoop, one mission, I eradicated the Orks, and my sector is now completely safe from the greenskins. Hooray! For the Emperor!
Anyway, I continued fighting Abaddon after that, defeating Chaos fleets and taking out three of the nemesis flagships, gaining lots of renown points in the process. My entire fleet now has Adeptus Mechanicus flavor, which is fitting considering I'm a fan of the Adeptus Mechanicus. So all my ships of the line now are red in color, the color of Mars, and sport the Adeptus Mechanicus cog-skull icon. YAY!
For the Omnissiah! I'll play Chapter 5 tomorrow, and begin reclaiming the Gothic Sector from the Archenemy!
