War Core, Chapter 19.

Chapter 19.

Hugh was down to seven minutes when the machine gun team walked off the assembly line. The team consisted of two standard infantry mechs, each holding a component of the machine gun. The weapon itself resembled the World War 2 weapon it was named after, just like the GCA had done with most of his other equipment. The second mech on the team carried a foldout tripod for the weapon as well as the large power supply that the plasma-based weapon required. He assigned the team to Captain Tran’s final defensive line, watching as they picked the bunker to the north and began to deploy their weapon. After the weapon was mounted in the bunker, one of the infantry mechs operated the weapon and the other on the team began to scan for targets with its arm-mounted rifle. It looked like the weapon system only required the team to move it from place to place, and once employed he gained an extra rifleman on the line.

“Sir, permission to take the light mechs down to the beach. If they attack like before, I should be able to pick off a landing craft or two before they reach us and still make it back to the final defense line before the enemy,” Captain Cartwright asked. It was a good tactic, and the return fire from the landers had proven ineffective against the mechs, so the risk of sending them forward on their own was minimal.

“Sounds good captain, I’ll assign your force to that area,” Hugh replied, moving the light mechs from the final defensive line and onto the beach area, where they began to patrol. He had earlier increased the T-7 queue to four mechs, the third of which would be completed in the next minute and would join Cartwright's other light mechs. Once everything in the production queue was built, he would be over his unit point limit, but he was in no danger of reaching his limit anytime soon. They needed every weapon they could build and couldn’t afford to keep a production building idle.

He now had a total force of 23 infantry, 1 machine gun team, and a pair of T-7’s. Once they fell back from the beach, the light mechs could move into one of the defensive positions that the drones had dug for them, improving the lightly armored units’ survivability. After the next infantry mech was completed, Hugh queued up a second machine gun team, which should finish up just as the battle started. He had done all he could think of, and unless he had some unexpected windfall of resources, or survived a wave without too many losses, he wouldn’t last much longer. He wondered how his opponent was faring as the battle started.

Contact warnings were called out at each of the four compass points, just as he had predicted. Thankfully, there were only four landing craft in each force, rather than the six that the previous waves had included. His second machine gun team moved to the fighting position facing south. With the north and south reinforced with a weapons team, his force holding east and west would need the most support.

“Captain Cartwright, focus on east or west with the light mechs, we need to wear down those forces before they land,” Hugh ordered. The captain acknowledged the order and moved two of the T-7’s to the east and a single mech, which was just walking out of the factory, headed west. The landing craft were still pretty far out, so the single mech should have time to make it into range before they made landfall.

They now had twenty-five infantry to work with and Captain Tran chose to assign five to the northern and southern positions to support the machine guns, while ten each deployed to defend the east and west. The deep thump of the fifty cal weapons in the light mechs caught his attention, the pair facing the east began to focus their fire on a single landing craft, already scoring hits as the range shortened by the second. His mechs turned the first target to swiss cheese and had begun work on the second when the other light mech arrived on the western beach and began to fire.

The landing craft returned fire with their mortar type launchers and the light mechs began an evasive pattern as they kept up their own rate of fire. A loud clang was heard, followed by an explosion as the lone T-7 on the western beach was hit by a lucky shot. The mortar round had burned through the top armor and taken out the mech, which was now a burning wreck. Not having had much time to do its work, the mech had landed a few hits on one of the landing craft, but the worm-like machine still made it to the beach to offload its forces. As the hatches popped off the landing craft, Hugh did note that only six Chixtruax infantry dismounted the damaged craft, so his light mech had done at least some damage before being taken out.

In the east, things were looking much better. The pair of mechs assigned to the beach had sunk two landing craft and severely damaged a third before they reached the beach. His mechs began a fighting retreat, keeping the enemy infantry under fire as they pulled back to the final defensive line. Only a dozen Krixnas dismounted and two of those were shot down before they made it to the base of the hill.

In the north and south, the landings were unopposed, each location had all four craft make it to the beach and disgorge their 32 Krixnas infantry. The enemy moved easily past the first defensive line but had only begun their advance up the hill when the machine guns opened up. Hugh didn’t know what to expect. The light mechs mounted what was supposed to be a heavy machine gun, but the rate of fire wasn’t much better than a bolt action rifle. His machine gun teams, while not anywhere near the rate of fire of a conventional machine gun, still were able to spit out a shot every second. The steady fire reached out at the approaching infantry, the plasma infused rounds slamming into the attackers, thinning their numbers. The machine guns were more powerful than his rifles, but weren’t up to the damage output of the heavy guns in the T-7’s.

As the enemy approached the second line of defense, the infantry were able to take them under fire. Rifle shots, the steady fire of the machine guns, and the dull thumps of light mech rounds cut down enemy after enemy. By the time the enemy was in range with their strange and inaccurate laser weapons, less than thirty of the attackers remained. The first volley of grenades was thrown as the enemy closed in, Hugh noted that the soldiers on the machine gun teams didn’t use grenades. It was a strange disadvantage to place on his forces, but the GCA rules didn’t always make sense to him. Relief flooded Hugh as the last enemy was cut down, he had only lost a handful of infantry and a single T-7 in the attack.

The Human War Core has defeated the third assault wave. The first interlude has been claimed.

“Does anyone know what an interlude is?” Hugh asked his commanders. There was a long pause before he received a reply, letting him know the GCA had likely edited or restricted some of what Tran was trying to say.

“Typically, when this type of battle reaches certain points, one side wins an advantage and gets to sit out the next wave. It’ll give us a chance to…and sometimes the first to beat the scenario wins the interlude…” The reply was chopped up and there was a long gap before he heard Tran again. “Sorry sir, that’s all I can say at this time,” Tran replied.

“I understand, it should give us the time we need to build up our forces and get some more upgrades rolling,” Hugh added, glad for the reprieve.

“Okay, for now, I’m going to work on gathering up resources and maxing out our forces. After that, we’ll see about upgrading the command post to the next level,” Hugh advised. His command post had assembled replacements for all of his lost drones, giving him five squads of five to work with. Hugh assigned one squad to complete the fortification upgrades, while three more were assigned to gathering salvage. Knowing he would need more unit points, Hugh queued up another signal tower to be constructed by the final squad.

Once the signal tower was built, he would have 400 unit points to work with. Hugh went through several army buildouts, finally settling on one he felt gave them the most bang for their buck. It was hard to plan when he didn’t know what the next waves of attacks would bring, so he was forced to generalize and try to prepare for as many possibilities as he could. After the solid performance of the thirty caliber weapons the machine gun teams used, he wanted that upgrade for his T-7 mechs as soon as he could afford it.

Unit points 400/400

Construction Drones: 25/25. Unit points required, 25.

Infantry Mechs: 39/39. Unit points required, 195.

Machine Gun Teams: 4/4. Unit points required, 80.

Light Mechs: 4/4. Unit points required, 100.

Once the construction drones were done with the signal tower, he would place them on resource gathering. Hugh prioritized salvage that was furthest away from his command post. It would take longer for him to gather it due to the travel time involved, but it would help him not to exhaust the salvage that was near his command post. The salvage near the command post was likely to be the only stuff he could safely gather as the battle progressed.

The Krixnas War Core has defeated the third assault wave. The next wave will commence in 15 minutes.

It was interesting that the time for the next wave hadn’t started when he won the fight. Perhaps it would be too much of a burden to force the other side to deal with not only losing the interlude but also starting the clock for the next wave. He really wanted eyes on the enemy force, but that would take a command post upgrade to unlock. As it stood now, his resources were increasing at a slow rate, but the rate would skyrocket once his forces were all built and their drain on his resources ceased. Despite wanting the upgraded command post, Hugh spent the resources for the secondary armament on his T-7’s. Once that was done, he would have upgraded everything he could. Hugh was torn between building the final signal tower to increase his total force or just stockpiling resources for the command post upgrade.

“Captains, any preferences on rushing to the next command post tier, or should I build another signal tower and more troops?” He asked. As expected, there were no replies.

“Thoughts on deploying our current forces?” Hugh asked, his available troops, even now that they were maxed out, still seemed like too few to try and hold all three defensive lines.

“Two ways we go at it, sir. We can keep a sizeable force of infantry and the gun teams at the second line, leaving the first empty save for the light mechs. A small force would be held back at the third line to hold off any surprise rushes on the command post. If you expand the signal tower, we will have more infantry to cover the third line, and flesh out the second line,” Tran offered.

“I concur, sir, and agree with Tran’s assessment of our options, especially with the deployment strategy for additional troops,” Cartwright added. Hugh picked up on their not-so-subtle suggestion to build more forces and queued up another signal tower. He had at least one light mech and machine gun for each side and decided that the best use of the extra unit points would be producing more infantry.

The fourth wave has begun.

Hugh kept an eye out over the ocean as he worked, not entirely trusting the reprieve he had been granted. When no landing craft appeared over the horizon after the first few minutes, he realized the interlude wasn’t a trick. The third and final signal tower was well on its way to being built and he had queued up enough infantry to max out his unit points. Despite all the construction he was still amassing resources and was up to 327, with the drones bringing in more all the time.

The third wave of the assault had been going on for around ten minutes when he finally hit the 750 resources needed to expand the command post. With his troops maxed out, he had no other reason to hold back so he ordered the upgrade. A squad of drones was pulled from salvage duty and began to expand his command post. This time, the walls were only pushed out far enough to add additional structural reinforcements to them. Most of the work was going on inside with the production line as well as the computer systems and communication gear. He figured he would need more processing power in addition to better comms if he wanted to control air and sea units at some point.

Hugh felt his mind work faster after the upgrade and he instinctively knew his drone construction had gotten a huge efficiency upgrade. Multiple drones could now be produced at the same time. Previously, he had to wait for one to be finished before another would start building, now the next drone in the queue would start once the first was only halfway down the assembly line. He could only hope the upgrades would affect his other combat unit factories once he got around to them.

Before doing anything else, Hugh looked through his various menus and build options to see if anything new had unlocked, holding off on building any additional units until he saw everything that was available for upgrade. There was only one new option showing from his command post, everything else was the same, at least until he upgraded his existing structures or built new ones.

Construction Drone Weapons Pod. This upgrade requires 100 resources and will equip your construction drones with a simple laser weapon that will automatically target and engage any hostile forces in range. Construction drones will require an additional resource point to construct or upgrade to the new standard. While this upgrade will add some firepower to your drones, which will improve at higher command post levels, it should be noted that the drone chassis is not rated for combat operations and they make a poor substitute for even the most basic of infantry mechs.

It was an intriguing upgrade and his drones had taken a beating every time the enemy broke through their lines to assault the command post. For now, Hugh couldn’t justify the resources when the other combat unit factories were still waiting to be built or upgraded. Once he maxed out on units and other upgrades, the weapons pods might make a good resource dump.

The Krixnas War Core has defeated the fourth wave. The next assault will begin in 10 minutes.

The enemy hadn’t taken long to fight off whatever was attacking them this time. Hugh felt more confident about the coming fight after the time given to build up his forces, but he would have to use the next ten minutes efficiently if he wanted to keep his advantage.