This mission was the single most frustrating that I have come across thus far. I have played both House Atreides and House Ordos and beaten the computer on Normal difficulty with both houses. I checked out the advice on this specific mission and found most of it to be trite and vague at best. Thanks for nothing! So in response to otherwise spotty advice I give my complete almost step by step approach. As soon as the mission begins take 4 tanks and go to the Mercenary base to the west of your Harkonnen base. While the tanks are en route, do the following: build a wind trap, build a barracks, upgrade the barracks, start building light infantry while the barracks is upgrading, move you existing troops and seige tank over to the infantry rock at the Southwest entrance to your base. By now your tanks should have reached the mercenary base and your barracks should be fully upgraded. Do not enter the mercenary base until you have killed the 4-5 troopers, 2-3 quads and tank. Those mercenary units will come out of the base to meet your attack force but they pose a minimal threat so let em come. Once those units are destroyed start building the first of 2 engineers youll need to commandeer their starport. Immediately after starting the engineer send all 4 tanks to take out the gun turret. While they are blasting away at the turret, the A.I. will be building a seige tank, this is no matter, simply turn the tanks around and pop the seige tank a couple of times and it will disappear with a satisfying poof. By now your first engineer will be ready, send him to the mercenary starport while you build the second of the two engineers and start on your refinery immediately to the south of your construction yard since there is a substantial spice field southeast of your construction yard with in the perimiter of your base. In the meantime the A.I. will continue to turn out tanks at the mercenary base but you should still have at least a couple tanks left unless you just absolutely botched the initial assault. Surely while this has all transpired you will be attacked at the southwest entrance to your base, but the ground troops, seige tank and trike that you left at the infantry rock will have destroyed the small invading force. As soon as the second engineer is completed send him to the mercenary heavy factory. By now the first engineer will have taken the mercenary starport; immediately purhase one harvester and maybe another tank. Start building squads of troops and infantry in a ratio of 3 troopers: 2 infantry as quickly as possible interspersed with a few individual infantry units to spread out to the immediate north of your base perimiter which at this point should still be pretty close to all of your buildings. The individual infantry units you should spread out a bit and set on guard mode since an Ordos Saboteur will be coming from the north in short order. By now your second harvester and tank will have arrived at the starport; bring all units back to your base from the mercenary base at this time. An Atreides attack will come shortly and your force will not stand a chance there; so moving your tanks and harvester will save you the wasted units and also help bulk up your defences that will be necessary for your main base in the coming minutes. The Atreides base is to the far northwest of your base so all ornithopter strikes will come from that general direction, so remember to space out you buildings and always keep on top of repairs to damaged buildings. While all of this is going on keep building squads of ground troops and start planning for your light factory, another wind trap and the eventual walling in of your entire base. You initial perimeter should only enclose the area just north of your construction yard and all points south. Do not try to wall in the entire rock formation at this point; it will be more advantageous to do that later. I prefer to start a perimeter with a group of 3-4 guns and then the walls come later. Once you have your guns and several squads of ground troops and a few light vehicles (trikes and quads) this should slow the sttacking forces enough that you can start focusing on creating a second grouping of guns at the southwest entrance of your base. Remember, the whole time you will be building masses of troops and small vehicles and replacing the occasional destroyed gun turret, but by now the spice will be flowing enough to build your heavy factory and additional wind traps. By this time the mercenary base will be under attack and you should immediately sell both the star port and heavy factory, dont worry, youll need the income for the defence of your main base and youll rebuild these buildings later in the game at your home base. You should also be able to start moving your perimeter northward to encompass the entire rock formation at your base (youll need the room of course). You will want an L shaped formation of guns at the northern entrance to your base which will be open at the center but walled in at the flanks so any enemy penetration will have to go straight into a small opening between the formation of guns. Start small with maybe 2 guns per side of the L and walls to fully close off that area of the base. This should considerably slow and or eliminate Ordos Saboteur activity since almost all of his attacks will come from the north. You can replace sections of wall with gun turrets to increase the size of the L as spice flows. Hopefully by now your heavy factory will be complete and upgraded and you can park a couple of seige tanks behind the guns to help prevent squads of enemy troops from making short work of your gun turrets. By now the spice should be enough for a few more wind traps and a repair pad. Once you have the repair pad you should be able to significantly slow your production for troops and vehicles and focus on upgrading your construction yard and amassing more spice for a starport and ASAP a couple of carry-alls because by this time the spice field inside the perimeter of your base will be picked clean, but not to worry, there is another spice field to the southwest of the base that is safely away from the significant fighting. Once you have upgraded your construction yard and built your starport you can start placing missile turrets immediately behind your gun turrets. With about 7 gun turrets and 5 missile turrets in the aforementioned L at the nothern entrance to your base, this should create a virtually impenetrable kill zone at which the enemy will continually throw troops and vehicles. Now you can reinforce a similar kill zone at the southwest entrance to your base, this one being 5 gun turrets in a straight line with 4 missle turrets immediately behind. Do not worry if cannot place all the missile turrets immediately since you will also need to build additional windtraps to keep up with the power demand and repair buildings after airstikes. Keep in mind that once your kill zones are in place a few missile turrets along the weatern perimeter of your base will help quell the onithopter strikes. With the enemy effectively denied entry to your base, start building and importing as many units as possible. Think about additional refineries and harvester/carryall combinations to allow maximum acquisition of spices. I like to create several teams of 5-6 quads and 2-3 trikes to go harrass and/or eliminate the enemy’s spice production. I would say start with the Atreides to the extreme northwest; they have a relatively small base and while I was attacking a pair of their harvesters I was able to send a third squad of 4 trikes to destroy their construction yard while their forces were tied up defending the harvesters. Of course this was a suicide mission for the squad of trikes but they got the job done. Once your have amassed enough units you can go after the entire Atreides base and confidently leave very few units left to defend your base since your two large kill zones will easily squash any Ordos pushes. To take the Atreides base I sent a squad of 10 tanks, 5 seige tanks, 6 missile tanks, 15 quads and 6 trikes. Travelling first due west and then due north (going out of my way to avoid being intercepted by Ordos forces en route) my force reached the entrance of their base and the units were split into two teams to take out the 2 gun turrets. With the two gun turrets eliminated I was able to overrun the base quckly, stopping only occasionally to destroy new troops as they built them. Your should destroy all military units and all buildings that create military units first leaving the refineries, harvesters, silos, a few wind traps and the repair pad. I then immediately built and sent a squad of engineers to take these remaining buildings the repair pad was especially important to repair what was left (not much due to the gun turrets; you will lose most of your light units but several heavier vehicles will likely survive) of my attacking force to secure the base. I then left a small team of engineers to take the refineries and silos, and once they were filled to capacity, I placed a huge starport order for more heavy vehicles and then sold the remaining Atreides buildings and finished destroying the base. Take their spice first then crush them! When you make your assault on the Ordos base, do it from the northernmost entrance to their base (due east of the Atreides base from the top of the map). It has only two gun turrets for protection and many vital buildings are reached easily and quickly from that entrance (the construction yard for example). Their other entrances are no good because of combinations of gun turrets and rocket turrets; still not as many as I put up but they will whittle your forces down quickly enough that the enemy defense units might take a real toll. Take note that I was able to finish this mission without devastators and deathhand missile; I find them to be a waste of Solaris. Also, Ive only been playing Dune 2000 for about a month, but Ive beaten th A.I. on normal difficulty with Atreides and Ordos and soon to be Harkonnen; am I still a Newbie??? Thanx, Mr. Pink
