The Fade - How do you keep that colony ship alive??

[XOOR]

GOTTA ASK.....

How the hell are you guys doing this mission?

I can get 1 star with the colony ship dead

BUT By the time I get to one objective, the objective either moves or I am blown up trying to take out the 6 engines.

I must be missing something but what am I missing?

Even using the missiles which recharge like a snails race by the time I am behind the ship if I don't over shoot (which I nearly always do lol) I am still dead before I take out a second engine.

Sorry for the rant any help would be appreciated lol


{Spoiler material, so moved to Spoilers Forum. - Nanook}

[Vertigo 7]

as far as taking out the engines on an H, get right behind it up its rear where you're being pulled along from its gravity well. stay dead center, vertically relative to the H, and you'll be out of the firing arc of any of its turrets. blast away! You'll have a lil room to move around without getting shot at.

As far as the rest, yeah, its rough. there's soooo many xenon and just a few fighters on your side... haven't figured out the best way to deal with that myself.

[GCU Grey Area]

I flew this one like a Split - fast, aggressive & with utterly reckless use of boost. Frequently had no shields whatsoever, but that was absolutely fine (because in this scenario death just means respawning in a brand new ship). Important thing seemed to be to kill marked targets as fast as possible before they could inflict too much much damage to colony ship's engines. Ended up with a 3* rating. Not the best, but colony ship did survive.

[EGO_Aut]

What i remember, you do not need to kill ALL H engines.- missiles do help a lot!
Its also important to kill marked enemy S ships, after "they try to disable the colonie ships engines (or similar)"
https://youtu.be/hPu9GOrauqg

[Feloidea]

Its also important to kill marked enemy S ships, after "they try to disable the colonie ships engines (or similar)"

Would be neat if there was a way to reliably target ONLY those instead of needing to pause the game, manually target, rince and repeat until done. Also, those defence drones that occasionally target the engines fly so damn close it's nearly impossible to hit them without also hitting the engines with friendly fire.

[Reprisal]

I flew this one like a Split - fast, aggressive & with utterly reckless use of boost. Frequently had no shields whatsoever, but that was absolutely fine (because in this scenario death just means respawning in a brand new ship). Important thing seemed to be to kill marked targets as fast as possible before they could inflict too much much damage to colony ship's engines. Ended up with a 3* rating. Not the best, but colony ship did survive.

This advice helped me finish the mission and get 5 stars. Thank you. I played like you did except I was very generous with my missiles and somehow didn't die.

[Imperial Good]

The main killers are the 2 Xenon Destroyers that show up. You want to missile into the middle of their engines and then melee the engines as quickly as possible. Those ships deal orders of magnitude more damage than the rest of the ships so need to be stopped ASAP. Chances are you will be destroyed while flying away from the destroyers, this is good because it will respawn you back at the ship saving you travel time.

Spam S missiles at targets as much as possible. The damage does add up. Make sure they land before killing a target for bonus score.

Towards the end of the mission 2 Xenon corvettes show up. Although not as high priority as the destroyers, they are still highly damaging to the engines so need to be focused ASAP. Use a light missile to help remove their shields otherwise they will waste a lot of time fleeing.

[Flaz3]

The main killers are the 2 Xenon Destroyers that show up. You want to missile into the middle of their engines and then melee the engines as quickly as possible. Those ships deal orders of magnitude more damage than the rest of the ships so need to be stopped ASAP. Chances are you will be destroyed while flying away from the destroyers, this is good because it will respawn you back at the ship saving you travel time.

Spam S missiles at targets as much as possible. The damage does add up. Make sure they land before killing a target for bonus score.

Towards the end of the mission 2 Xenon corvettes show up. Although not as high priority as the destroyers, they are still highly damaging to the engines so need to be focused ASAP. Use a light missile to help remove their shields otherwise they will waste a lot of time fleeing.

I would go as far as to say Xenon Destroyers are not the problem, non of my 5 tries gave me 0 stars because of the destroyer, problem was 2 corvettes and all those small ships. They essentially hamstring the capital ship you're tasked to defend (as they should) WAY too fast and once they get your ship to 1-3 engines or less you might as well restart if the progress is anywhere bellow 93%. If the ship you're tasked to defend has most of it engines down at 86% - 95% it doesn't matter if you took the destroyer engines out, your capital ship will just sit there unable to fix any of its engines even if its at 90% hull only to see those destroyers travel bellow the sitting duck and finish it off.

There is several problems, first of all non of the following defense missions tasks you to defend anything alone, and neither should this mission (some may disagree and that is fine, but this is just my opinion). Secondly, I have no problems with 5 star rating being a challenge to achieve, but for a mandatory 1 star rating mission that blocks Graph 2 behind it and essentially all of the following missions because of it, this is serious oversight and heavily over tuned.

[Alan Phipps]

@ Flaz3: Be aware that this thread is 2 years and several game versions old and that combat and ship firepower mechanics and balancing have changed a lot in that time.

[Flaz3]

@ Flaz3: Be aware that this thread is 2 years and several game versions old and that combat and ship firepower mechanics and balancing have changed a lot in that time.

Be it as it may, my experience on 'The Fade' is at most 1 week old since I played through the DLC and I searched the relevant topic as the 9.0 launched and I bought the DLC. I am hoping developer will give this mission a try on this patch, or perhaps see what is the failure to completion rate if such stats are available for them, since I do feel that the mission in question is still way too over tuned. It's so over tuned and frustrating in fact that I actually got around to register in this forums just to leave this feedback.

[Whismerhill]

@ Flaz3: Be aware that this thread is 2 years and several game versions old and that combat and ship firepower mechanics and balancing have changed a lot in that time.

yep, I was just about to write a new thread about this
I think 9.0 made "The Fade" considerably harder
in fact all graph 2 mission & graph 3 & graph 4 missions I did in 1 or 2 attempts
The fade took me 6 to get 3 stars, honestly not even sure how I did it