There was an emotional payload Adam wanted to unpack on the spot, but as a veteran RTS player, he knew full well that the first few seconds of any battle were the most precious for laying down a foundation for the rest of the game.
He was given a Command Center, a few Men-at-Arms, and a Crawler vehicle. With these, he was supposed to build a company and invade the map as soon as possible.
Immediately, he broke into a run towards the Command Center building and found all the gear he needed inside: a holo table, a radio set, and several computer screens showing all sorts of useful data. This was the norm for the RTS simulations he had designed before, but one additional detail had been added.
A Doomsday Clock!
Looking at it, he saw he was given a gracious two hours to achieve his objective, the Doomsday Extraction. In other words, he had to secure the target, which on the screen seemed like a cubic artifact with no location given on the map, meaning he would have to scout, attack, and retreat before the clock ran out and the Apocalypsis Decree began.
"What do we have here?" Adam immediately turned to his holo table, refusing to let one more precious second pass by. "Four auxiliary squads with six members each, a Crawler, two Logistical Zones, and a massive open field leading into trenches. I hate this!"
He immediately grabbed the radio handset and issued commands, not just to individual squads, but in succession to each, laying out automated work orders.
"First and Second Squads, construct a Solar Plant here. Third Squad, construct another Solar Plant here. Fourth Squad, capture the Logistical Point north of the map. First Squad, after construction, capture the second Logistical Point to the east. Second Squad, assist the Third Squad once you finish. Fourth and First, follow this scouting path after you finish. Crawler, collect that scrap pile over there. Third Squad, build a Beacon over the Logistical Point after you finish. Command Center, line up squads for training every time Requisition Points are available."
Laying it all out in what seemed like a single breath, Adam earned himself a few moments to zoom out the map and contemplate his options while following the scouting squads with his eyes and waiting for the newly trained squads to arrive from orbit.
The map appearing beyond the Fog of War seemed to be laid out in a grid fashion: a trench battlefield followed by an urban area, followed by a distant landscape. To get a better lay of the land, Adam picked up a sniper Blazer and walked out onto the balcony of his Command Center, scanning the ruined city in the distance.
There was nothing to see just yet, and the visibility was quite terrible. This scenario seemed like a lost world where the Machina had prevailed over the defenders, and now the Apocalypsis Decree would perform a total wipeout in classic Solarium fashion.
The enemies, however, were Machina Deathbots, one of the most resilient and destructive factions in Wartopia.
When an Artificial Incursion strikes a planet, the Malcode of the Rogue Machina starts infecting any infrastructure terminal with AI. Machina Cultists would also dig deep tunnels below the surface to start constructing hidden war factories, hijacking the infrastructure like cancerous cells, diverting resources for an entire fleet of Deathbots to be deployed. Then, the entire planet falls like domino pieces.
And to bypass the agonizing process of manufacturing Data Cores, human captives would be used as Code Hosts, living CPUs trapped in life support forever to give processing power to the machines.
The Machina Cultists must also eventually surrender themselves to the machines, becoming Code Hosts. To maintain an entire planet of people in stasis as living CPUs, the Machina generates a simulation for all Code Hosts. Within this simulation, the Cultists live as debauched kings, while the general population endures stressful daily lives to provide the Machina with the necessary processing power.
That thought crossed Adam's mind because for Rogue Machina RTS players, Machina Cultists were their first and most expendable worker unit in the early game, and he needed to find them as soon as possible.
> ENEMY SIGHTED!
The familiar notification buzzed from his holo table, prompting Adam to run back to his station and watch what his scouting party was seeing. Indeed, these were Cultists trying to capture a Logistical Point in the middle of the map in the abandoned trenches.
"Scouting Team, strike hostiles." Adam gave the order immediately and called a second team to reinforce the first.
Cultists were small teams of four at most, with very low attack damage, but fast movement. In comparison to them, the Men-at-Arms were an excellent fighting force. But rather than pressuring them with heavy fire, Adam made his first scouting squad exchange fire lightly, giving time to the second team to push forward through a trench, encircle the Cultists, and pin them in an inescapable fight.
Cultists would actually run the moment they sustained damage from a much stronger enemy, thus Adam needed to make sure that he could hit from both sides and deny their retreat, not for any strategic threat these Cultists might pose, but rather for their logistical value to the enemy.
Since Cultists were considered worker-type units, losing them would set the enemy back in terms of gathering resources such as b-mats and mech parts, thus slowing them down. Meanwhile, Adam felt a strong pressure coming towards his base as he heard a powerful engine sound, prompting him to run towards the balcony once again.
And there it was, a Harbinger starcraft coming from the mothership in orbit with a Carapace troop-carrier attachment, deploying a new squad.
"Squad Five, to work immediately, construct a Beacon at the western Logistical Point. Squads Two and Three, build an Infantry Boot Camp; time to turn you shitty auxiliaries into proper grunts."
Adam got into his zone, following the classic build order for an Enemy Rush strategy. As soon as the building was finished, he pushed ahead to capture more Logistical Points, assigned a squad to gather scrap, and found a gathering point near the enemy base where Cultists were mining scrap. He immediately made a blockade with two squads and fired indiscriminately at the gathering Cultists before a Deathbot started moving towards his squads, prompting him to retreat into the trenches once again.
Early Deathbots were slow, but they packed quite a punch with heavy automatic energy weapons and sometimes sluggers at their disposal. Risking his harassment squads wasn't a wise action against the Deathbots, but he needed them crippled in some way, so he split his teams while spamming reinforcements on each.
Reinforcing teams meant adding more members to the squad, as each squad was a unit unto itself, and losing members would be like losing hit points. Adam would usually not risk this in the early game, since he preferred to finish the Infantry Boot Camp first, then add specialized units via reinforcement, rather than just adding auxiliaries. Still, he needed the extra petty firepower auxiliaries had, since he was going to kite the Deathbot with one group and strike the Cultists with the other.
A few minutes later, each of his scouting parties had nine members, one fighting the Deathbot and losing members as it went, while the second descended hard on the Cultists, also losing units but reinforcing as it went.
Effectively, Adam was turning the enemy's main resource gathering point into a mess, while keeping his resources safe and gathering fast enough for the Infantry Boot Camp to finish, then quickly commissioning a Script Monastery for technology upgrades. The Sixth Squad arrived, and he put it to work. He now had five Logistical Points under his control, all with Beacons built over them to maximize RP production.
On the front lines, Adam started sacrificing some Auxiliary troopers from the two scouting squads to replace them with Grunt troopers, who were better armored and used heavier Blazers and Bazookas, finally starting to do real damage to the Deathbot. However, the enemy seemed to have scraped together some resources to send out another Deathbot to defend the Cultists, but Adam was already following up with an extra attack squad.
The Script Monastery was finally finished, now giving Adam a host of technological upgrades, but more importantly, it gave him the option to upgrade his Command Center to a Base Bastion, which he immediately went for, halting his troop production as soon as the Eighth Squads were delivered.
Increasing the pressure, he kept trying to secure more Logistical Points, killing more Cultists, and baiting more enemies into inescapable engagements, finally destroying his first Deathbot and crippling his enemy's momentum.
If that was a match against a human player, the opponent would usually type "GG" and resign the match, but since this was a computer opponent, it would fight until it lost all ability to sustain the fight. Adam was hitting the Cultist workers and supply gatherers for this reason, draining his enemy's logistical lifeline and the ability to rebuild it. In a normal match, even against a computer opponent, the opponent should have quit by now, and Adam was very proud of his strategy of rushing the enemy, the one he had learned from Kave to overcome matches like this, but…
"Alas… if only it were that simple."
The voice came from Adam's left as he finally noticed Solana walking into the room, dressed in proper Warrior Nun attire. The doubt inside him regarding this game being too easy and too suspicious grew, but he decided to press even harder before turning to meet her eyes.
"What is it?" he asked, his eyes trying to catch any hint of trickery in the supposed admin.
"As you can see, in this particular scenario, the opponent should have occupied this world prior to your operation," Solana said, watching Adam's reaction with interest.
His thoughts raced through his head for a while before starting to make sense of what she was trying to tell him.
"A Machina-infested world should have all its humans captured, put in life support vats kept under…" Adam's eyes darted left and right for a bit before turning back to the holo table and finishing his thought, "Underground!"
Solana showed a smile, seeing Adam now realize where he had made his blunder.
"The Rogue Machina doesn't operate above ground in normal cases, meaning all their forces are underground, now alerted by the fighting we had been doing," Adam said, smacking his head. "This isn't a fucking RTS simulation; this is a full battle scenario."
He immediately tried to recall his troops, and rather than going for an economic boom as the rush tactic would usually require, he immediately shifted back to his old strategy.
"I want these areas secured. Squads One and Two, start fortifying this area. Leave open chokepoints here and here. Squad Three, start putting down turrets. Squads Four, Five, and Six, put distance between you and the enemy; don't engage them anymore and keep scouting. Squads Seven and Eight, construct a War Factory. Script Monastery, train three Script Monks, then research Warrior Monks and Guardian Aura. All units, start training Sergeants."
"So, you're turtling?" Solana asked, watching how Adam was switching strategy. "Do you have time for that with a Doomsday Clock ticking?"
"If this is a full scenario, then an Apocalypsis Decree has been authorized by the Supreme Council of the Solarium only as a last resort to counter an alien threat before it is deployed," Adam replied, giving an analysis of the situation from his memory. "It means there is a way to stop the clock… or buy extra time by completing secondary objectives."
Solana fell silent, seeing that Adam had seen through the trial's core problem. However, that was only the first layer of the map, and the enemy on the surface wasn't all there was; rather, it was simply the first wave of an iron tide yet to come.
In addition to that, he had to figure out the true objective, hidden in the layers of the battlefield, how it was shaped, and how traversing it properly would affect this trial.
As thirty minutes passed on the Doomsday timer, Adam started to look worried, scanning the entire battlefield with his eyes before using the sniper scope and going out onto the balcony a few times to see things directly. He thought at first that Solana would try to teach him about that Sacred Geometry concept through the shapes and layout of the battlefield, but apparently his imagination was short-sighted since the battlefield itself looked like a messy, spaghetti-like array of dug trenches, tunnels, checkpoints, and a broken city layout.
The more he looked, the less it started to make sense, and the more agitated he became.
Then it hit, not an idea in his head, but rather an explosive shell against his fortification. The enemy was here at last, and Adam's preparations were halfway done. However, something didn't feel right.
"Where did they come from? I see no tunnels, and they didn't pass by the Beacons!" He became alarmed quickly, trying to see from which direction the enemy was coming.
His base was on the edge of the map, and behind it was the barrier of the Code Guardian, so the enemy couldn't have come from there. The remaining three directions had one area on a natural slope, making it easily fortified. As for the north and west, nothing should have snuck up on him like that with his heavy unit count and surveillance.
"Squad Three, intercept with anti-vehicle weapons. Command Center, line up some Crawlers. We need Mech Parts to sustain this fight," Adam frustratingly said, exhaling a breath before noticing that his War Factory was finally built. "Give me two H-Bugs and research the Battlemaster Tank technology right after."
He gave his commands while scanning the map with his eyes, watching the Deathbot that was armed with an artillery weapon make its entrance before being retaliated against in kind. Adam expected more units to come after, and sure enough, the little rascal brought its meaner cousin.
"A goddamn Bruiser Bot? Are they also at phase two?" Adam ground his teeth and added two more squads to the fight, feeling the strain on his resource gathering and building processes for the first time, but still confident that his Grunt Men-at-Arms were the right answer to this type of enemy, especially now that they were backed by a Sergeant on each squad.
The Script Monks came right after this, and Adam set them to perform a disruptive ritual on the Machina's Malcode. He made them target the Bruiser Bot, giving it a -30% debuff on speed and attack power. Bruiser Bots were insane melee powerhouses, posing trouble even for Paladins if they were not careful, and their speed was rather problematic, as they could catch up to a squad of Men-at-Arms, but with this debuff, the Bruiser could be kited with the right amount of micromanagement.
But right after exchanging a few hits with the Bruiser, the first H-Bug was finally deployed from the War Factory, and Adam sent it with its insane speed to release a full payload of rockets against the thing, chipping its health to half.
The bitter fight continued afterward, and after sustaining some damage to the Men-at-Arms, the attack was finally stopped. Still, Adam's gut feeling told him that a second wave was coming soon, and he needed to prepare.
His resources were running low, and if he were to be forced into a corner right now, he would need to turtle in his base and fight defensively until he built enough numbers to move out, which would drain his time completely.
Between a rock and a hard place, Adam refused to retreat his scouting squads and pressed forward for more partisan action, trying to do damage behind enemy lines to relieve the pressure on his base, but in doing so, he found something rather curious in the middle of the battlefield.
It looked like some sort of important objective, but as he drove his soldiers near it, powerful debuffs started to apply to them, and the Machina Deathbots appeared from many ambush sites, causing the squads to sustain heavy damage.
Retreat was given, and Adam now realized he had found the first clue to the mystery: the thing he needed to destroy in order to move forward with his promotion trial.
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