[Tempest Rising DEMO] Dynasty Mission 1 (Insane) Speedrun in 7:39

This mission on Insane is far more difficult than any of the other three available demo missions, even outside of a speedrun. Tempest Rising is a Classic Real-Time Strategy game made in the style of games like Command & Conquer. This is DYN Mission 1 of the Steam Next Fest demo. Difficulty level: Insane Other restrictions: No armory upgrades, no doctrines (not that they're available on this mission anyway) This mission has three main objectives: 1. Make your way to the Dynasty base in the southwest. 2. Defend the Tempest Rig while it mines for three minutes. 3. Abandon the base and escort the Tempest Rig to the north end of the map. This mission is pretty linear and most of the mission can be kind of an autoscroller, but the mission itself is very difficult to simply survive on, especially if you try to rush the third objective instead of taking a moment to rebuild your army after the three-minute defense segment. The main difficulty of the mission comes from the second phase (the three minute defense), which can be very difficult to survive on even casually. Not only do I have to survive this phase, but I also need to have enough troops remaining after the fight to rush down the final objective. There are a few tricks that can make this phase easier: 1. Delaying capturing the tempest rig with the technician, while hunting money crates around the map and building up a force in the meantime. 2. Shooting down the planes that paradrop troops 3. Selling/unpowering your radar and turning on distribution mode on your power plant to speed up barracks production 4. Repairing the flame turret on the right and using it to soak damage instead of letting them kill your vulnerable infantry 5. Using your technician to deploy mines around the battlefield In a speedrun, I don't have the time for 1 and 5, but I heavily make use of 2, 3 and 4. Note that none of these are absolutely necessary to beat the mission (I didn't do any of these during my first playthrough on Insane and still survived, after a couple of attempts). The first two waves are paradrops, so the immediate priority is to build up a critical mass of missile troopers. It is also useful to keep your Havoc buggies alive as they do a ton of damage against the planes. My current strat trains about 15 missile troopers before switching to dynasty guard (rifleman) production, then later switching to a mix of the two. The paradrops come in at around the minute marks (3min, 2min, 1min remaining), so keep watch on the timers to anticipate the paradrops. The third paradrop at 1min is the most important to shoot down as it drops grenadiers which will very quickly decimate your infantry with their splash damage. Alternatively, you can split up your infantry to minimize splash damage from the grenadiers (this was what I did during my first playthrough). Other tricks and glitches: At 0:33, I ignore the four enemy riflemen and head straight for the cutscene trigger. Units are invulnerable during cutscenes, so I can leave my infantry fighting the riflemen during the cutscene with no worries. I do this as 6 ignitors (flamethrower infantry) spawn after the cutscene, which kill the riflemen quicker than fighting them without the ignitors. This trick will make you lose one or two soldiers compared to fighting the four riflemen normally though. At 5:16, I pull off probably what is the most interesting time-saving glitch in this mission. When the 3-minute survival section ends, a long cutscene plays to tell you to bring the Tempest Rig to the docks at the north. What I do is grab one of my Havoc buggies and send it to the right side of the map right before the cutscene starts playing. There is a GDF base at the right side of the map, and approaching this base triggers an optional, shorter cutscene with a side objective. Triggering this cutscene using the Havoc while the long cutscene is playing causes the long cutscene to end prematurely, so I can order my Tempest Rig to head towards the north end of the map much sooner. Timing is important here however, as you need to make use of the cutscene invulnerability for the Havoc to survive the trip to the GDF base on the right (the Havoc dies if you send it too early). Towards the end of the mission, I am targeting down GDF troops that are in front of the Tempest Rig as crushing enemy infantry/tanks will slow down the Rig. There is another trick that I don't use in this mission - you can skip most of the combat in the first phase of the mission by making use of the first cutscene to run your infantry through the battles. This saves about 45 seconds, but is tricky to pull off and you will lose all of your starting army, which makes the second phase pretty much impossible to do on Insane unless you sit around and rebuild your army, which costs more time than the 45 seconds saved. This might be a possible strategy on a lower difficulty though. Tempest Rising: https://store.steampowered.com/app/14...