Operation Meltdown Hard

How are you supposed to survive the first ten minutes? If you build any T1 turrets to defend yourself, the AI sends waves of T1 artillery within a minute to wipe the floor with you. If you try to get to T2 to build shields and point defense, they immediately send waves of T2 Assault Bots with 2 missile launchers, before you can even build the shields and turrets. I don't see how you can survive. The AI, before it's even seen your buildings, automatically builds the perfect counter. Do you just trial and error it until you figure out the perfect order to build things in? Do you just spam T1 tanks until you have enough between you and the enemy to get enough time to build a meaningful defense?

Are you talking skirmish or campaign?

Important tips for new players for this mission:

  • You have infinite mass for a long time: All those wrecks/reclaim in your base. If you place a building somewhere, your ACU/engies will reclaim the wrecks underneath it before building. This makes you waste mass if you are already full! This includes mass extractor wrecks! Always manually reclaim big wrecks when you need them before placing buildings on top of them.

  • Get a decent number of T1 power (for overcharge, com upgrades and factory T2 upgrade), and once you are T2 you want T2 power first!

  • You ACU is a killing machine and can single-handedly kill any attacking unit in the first 20 minutes except air, if you use overcharge! You need one or two (not more) energy storage to be able to use overcharge. When fighting arty or t2 missile launchers, keep moving in circles while shooting them. When fighting T2 assault bots, use overcharge! Make sure you can retreat to anti-air. Upgrading gun (the cheap one) makes using ACU much easier. Build a T1 radar!

  • The AI does not build counters at all. It always sends the same unit mix at about the same time.

You need more than 1 e storage since the oc nerf.

Corrected. I made my post into a video, maybe im gonna do the other missions as well at some point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xCMVlqNtGg

@Katharsas Finally got it. After some more playing (and watching your very helpful video) I found out my main problem was running low on power generation so I couldn't upgrade my ACU's gun and get to Tech 2 at the same time. Spamming T1 power generators helped me get over that. Thank you for the video and the tips.

Also found out that the waves are slightly randomized (based on the AI's building, I guess) and I was just getting super unlucky for my first couple of tries.