The drop itself was uneventful, and resistance was light en route to the colonists' base. Only one real firefight - if you'll forgive a bad pun - broke out, with the two Firebats easily torching a pack of Zerglings.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...oach-Fight.jpg
When we arrived, Dr. Hanson immediately gave me control of the entire base...and I had plenty of work to do, with minimal supplies and only a handful of SCVs. I went to work fixing those two problems while adding a Firebat to the existing force and sending the troops out scouting. It wasn't long before the scouts found a chokepoint defended by an empty Bunker. Dr. Hanson wasted no time in explaining that the Dominion had simply left them there when their troops abandoned Agria to the Zerg.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l.../M4-Bunker.jpg
The first convoy was ready, so I pulled the flame-happy scouts back for escort duty. Zerg resistance was virtually non-existent until we were almost to the spaceport, when an Overlord and a pack of Zerglings tried to get to the road. Putting a couple of Firebats in another abandoned Bunker took care of the ground troops...
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-1-Fight-1.jpg
...while the handful of colonial Marines helping to escort the convoy
eventually showed up to take out the Overlord.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-1-Fight-2.jpg
When the convoy reached the spaceport, my troops got another surprise: there was some sort of weird chrysalis-thing just outside the access ramp. I was sure that Stetmann would love to have a sample, so I ordered my troops to take one.
Of course, since my troops were all Firebats, Stetmann would have to make do with Zerg-B-cue DNA samples.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...hrysalis-1.jpg
The first convoy's worth of civilians was safely aboard their ships. I ordered my troops to take the long way as they returned, looping around to the west where we'd detected some scattered resource pallets. They found the resources, alright, but they also found another chrysalis.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...hrysalis-2.jpg
Thankfully, the civilians didn't need those crops anymore anyways.
More scouting, this time to the east, revealed a third chrysalis. This one too was torched.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...hrysalis-3.jpg
I called up the
Hyperion and told them about the chrysalises, and Stetmann answered that there was several dozen more, and if I could just send somebody to go and get them and this time not blacken them with napalm...
Then I heard somebody yelling at Stetmann, and moments later Horner came on the air to tell me that three was plenty and that the others were not within a reasonable distance anyways. I liked Horner's version better.
As the second convoy got ready to go and my troops returned to base, I realized that I had a real problem on my hands. I'd seen no fewer than three Overlords barfing Creep all over the roads, something that they were
not able to do four years ago during the Brood War. I didn't want to find out what nasty tricks the Zerg had come up with to combine with having Creep everywhere, so I needed to be able to knock the Overlords out of the sky.
I needed Marines.
I canceled the Tech Lab building at the second Barracks that the colonial SCVs had recently finished and had it build a Reactor instead. I'd be able to recruit Marines by the platoon, and thanks to Swann's recent upgrades, I'd be able to train and equip Medics at the same Barracks. The first Barracks, the one that had come with the base, kept its Tech Lab to allow for more Firebat production.
The second convoy moved out just as I ordered that the abandoned Bunkers be manned by Firebats and Marines and be attended by dedicated SCVs. It worked like a charm: there was only three ways the Zerg could get to the highway, and suddenly, two of them were home to giant chunks of armor with a bunch of flamethrowers and Gauss rifles sticking out of them. When my mobile troops' firepower was added to that of the Bunker crews, the Zerg attacks
literally melted away.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-2-Fight-1.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-2-Fight-2.jpg
The Bunkers had worked so well that I ordered more be built and manned. That included sending an SCV to build a pair at the third highway access, at the halfway point between the two Dominion-built Bunkers.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...id-Bunkers.jpg
The attempted attacks against the third convoy were significantly larger than for the first two. Thanks to the Bunkers, the convoy made it to the spaceport with little incident. The only fighting was my Marines shooting down a Creep-spraying Overlord that had found its way to the road.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...oy-3-Fight.jpg
Things were going well. The Bunkers were holding up amazingly, and my mobile escort force was growing by the minute. But with the Zerg, nothing stays easy for very long. Horner called and gave me bad news: some sort of Zerg organisms were entering the atmosphere, and they looked like the bio-pods that had been dropping troops back on Mar Sara. Bunkers could keep the outward attacks at bay, but I'd need to beef up the mobile force even more.
So, I did exactly that.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...ig-Force-1.jpg
The fourth convoy moved out as the sun began to set, and sure enough, bio-pods began dropping all around the evac APC. They continued to do so all the way to the spaceport, leading to a running battle between the escorts and the Zerg. While my forces were overwhelmingly powerful, they had to stay on their toes to make sure they didn't get stuck in one spot, leaving the convoy open to attack.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-4-Fight-1.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-4-Fight-2.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...-4-Fight-3.jpg
More bad news came as night fell and the final convoy moved out: the
Hyperion had detected some sort of tunneling Zerg. I immediately moved to reinforce the first Bunker line as bio-pods continued to fall. My troops were just in time, too, as a Nydus Worm burst out of the ground just below the Bunkers and started spewing Zerg.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...M4-Nydus-1.jpg
The second and third Bunker lines were repeats of the first.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...M4-Nydus-2.jpg
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...M4-Nydus-3.jpg
With the Nydus Worms, the Zerg finally found a way past the Bunker lines, bursting out of the ground right next to the convoy just as it hit the spaceport's access ramp. My forces had to scramble away from the Bunker lines to save the civilians from the surprise underground assault. But scramble they did, and the final convoy safely made it to the spaceport.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...M4-Nydus-4.jpg
Sensing that their prey was escaping, the Zerg launched a final, all-out assault on the spaceport as the colonists' ship was taking off. A few brave defenders held the line as long as they could, and bought the precious seconds the colonists needed to make good their escape. Dropships from the
Hyperion hastily gathered up those of us Raiders who were still on the ground, and we left Agria to the Zerg.
http://i285.photobucket.com/albums/l...on-Victory.jpg