Let's see what my new engineering delivers on the carnage front.

(6:52) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Normal. After the glorious trough battling of the last movie, I had some ideas for an enhanced set-up and got to work. The trough now includes 2 Ghosts and a Shade, along with 3 needlers and a sniper rifle. I've also blocked off the inner walkways, so I should get fewer covies arriving at the rear. In addition I now face a stronger mob. There are 53 covies, with 14 Elites instead of 12, and also 2 Hunters, a major threat! Two plays here, again using some initial blitzing.

Released December 11th 2025, gameplay recorded December 9th-10th 2025.

00:02 (New features) I thought it would be nice to start with a rundown of new features. Namely, extra goodies in the trough, inner walkway blockades (although, sometimes a covie may go around the outside), and a mob which now includes fourteen Elites and two highly hazardous Hunters!

01:11 (Play 1 - Launcher & plasma rifle, plus Ghost) When I fly in, there's a Grunt who's out on his own and I blast him for fun. I often do that as he makes such a nice target. Unlike the other covies, he's actually not free-roaming. When left alive he typically does get drawn into the trough however, so I do sometimes leave him unmolested.

Once in the trough, I go for a bit of blitzing but soon back off, not wanting to risk getting into trouble. At the bottom I make use of the Shade by rocketing it towards the covies with a plasma attached. Works very nicely, killing two Elites! That incident is really the main reason I've got this play in the movie.

After dealing with the Elite charge, I board the rearmost Ghost to do some mopping up. Not many covies left by then. Eventually a red Elite turns up late and gets a rocket for his trouble.

03:40 (Play 2 - Needler & AR, plus Ghost) The key feature of this battle is the longer and meatier Ghost ride, which gives a better sense of the potential for carnage and chaos. In that connection, you can look forward to a Ghost-centric movie coming up soon, in which I'll be really going to town with the hovering!

Closing remarks Just to clarify, this new set-up doesn't derive from the one used in the previous movie. Rather, both of those set-ups derive from an earlier one used in BCM36, which is why the new set-up has some features in common with the previous one.

To form this new set-up from that old one, I culled some of the covies (the mob originally numbered 65, including 18 Elites and 4 Hunters), and added the desired items to the trough. Adding items was the tricky part, given the presence of the mob. The main technique was to blast an item along from high up in my Banshee, staying out of covie range. But final positional tweaking was generally done on the ground, briefly dismounting then making a quick getaway before the mob closed in. All rather delicate and laborious.

The two Ghosts I added to the trough were originally not even in the field, so there was a lot of Banshee blasting to do for those! The needlers weren't in the field either. The sniper rifle was in the field, but not in the trough. Rather, it was originally positioned for deep left defence. Blasting that into the trough took quite a lot of tries however. An issue with the sniper rifle is that its draw distance is oddly low, which means that it quickly vanishes from sight when you blast it away. I usually lost track of where it went, and also couldn't see it in the trough, so I just reverted to try a fresh blast (I'd sensibly got a delayed checkpoint for the blasting operation).

In creating the new set-up I could've had more Elites, and as many as four Hunters, but I was keeping the challenge level in mind. I didn't want to end up with a set-up where I'd get slaughtered too often!

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