Some battles are won before they even begin. I woke up on the Sunday morning for which I scheduled my nukes and surveyed the situation. Much to my dismay, o4kapuk’s repair was very effective and the nukes themselves would do virtually no damage to the structure. Once again, the only thing I could rely on were the brief intervals between nukes in which I could whack away at the walls mostly uninterrupted. The typical wall height was 6m, and I would need to carve away at least a dozen before the integrity of the bunker was significantly compromised. With only a handful of nuke intervals to work with, there just wasn’t enough time. Still, giving up now would be a terrible way to end the story. I’d rather my attack end in an impotent blaze of glory than fizzle out in a prudent surrender. o4kapuk had also done a hell of a job adapting his defense up to this point. He deserved a better ending. I went about setting up the parameters for the grand finale. I decided not to hold anything back. I would crank-up the five rooms that were spawning my squads to full steam. That sounds like a lot of rooms, but a few of them were so far away that creeps would arrive with only 500 ticks to spare. I would have been able to put more creeps in the room with two closeby rooms, but you go to war with the army you have. This would mean a GREAT DEAL of boosts would be required. Given the fact that I had been sending in a steady stream of creeps for the last two days, my stocks were starting to get low. Many people were wondering where all these boosts were coming from, some even speculating that I had a botnet army sending me resources. Unfortunately, reality is much more boring. My ally, SteeleR, had decided to respawn and was sending me all his leftover boosts. With dozens of my impatient attack squads waiting outside his room, the first nuke landed. Ignoring the dangerous radiation, my squads rushed into the room. My plan of attack was inspired by finndibaen’s attack on my own room design. The idea was to try to take out some key ramparts (shown in cyan) in the short time that I had. Those ramparts are crucial for protecting the entire corner section, since some of the other ramparts where attackers could stand rely on them for a safe path. Of course, a defense involving ranged attackers will be less susceptible. Still, it was the best plan I had, an upgrade from my usual plan of “kill all the things”. During the barrage of the first four nukes, things went about as well as could be expected. I was able to get many creeps into the room, and also have them retreat at the right times. Some creeps stayed behind because they didn’t have enough TTL to make fleeing worthwhile. During this time I was trying to improve my nuke-fleeing code. I accidentally recorded a gif that shows one of my frantic edits. Despite a few creep losses here and there, it went pretty much according to plan. If I wasn’t able to take the room, at least I could be sure that I gave it my best. Finally, the last nuke landed and it was time to go full tilt. I made some quick edits to my code so that the fleeing was less conservative. If I can’t maintain a position near the walls, it was all over anyway. There was even a glimmer of hope. I was able to weaken the wall at the critical junctures on the right side. There was one funny moment (shown in o4kapuk’s story) where about 15 ranged attackers are trying to outdamage a single boosted repair creep. They were just barely successful. I managed to wedge some squads into the critical points. For a few hundred glorious ticks, it all went according to plan. o4kapuk had a specific lab he was using to boost ranged attackers, and they were unable to get to it without venturing into an unsafe position and being sniped by a dozen furious bonzAI creeps. There was an obvious solution. Fill up a different lab with boosts for his ranged attackers. Would o4kapuk accommodate in time? The outer shell of his wall was failing fast, with a few ramparts only ticks away from obliteration. And here it is folks, the critical moment. An attack that lasted several days, it all came down to this. Watch it with me and weep (or rejoice, depending on your persuasion). Over near the terminal, you can see o4kapuk’s ranged attacker boost himself and join his already-boosted brethren at the wall. All three of them together, combined with the towers, can deliver over 9000 damage (more if they used rangedMassAttack). That’s gonna leave a mark, no matter how much healing you have available. And like that, my creeps are sent to Valhalla, one by one. With the heavy amount of damage, even their very brazen flee parameters are not enough to keep them on the front line. Confused, they stumble around the battlefield looking for their lost parts and wondering what kind of cruel commander would lead them to such a fate. Death brings mercy and garbage collection to their memories. I had a controller attacker about to enter the room. This creep would have been necessary to continue the fight, had it not already been decided. I kept it going just to prove that I could have attacked the controller, had the other part been successful. In these moments, you take whatever consolation you can find. However, I quickly went in my editor to change the code so that it delivered a congratulatory message rather than attack the controller. There is a saying where I’m from. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The first thing worth mentioning is that bonzai blocked all the ways to evacuate population, so I disabled it for E2S7. The second thing is a good timing between bonzai’s nukes and an excellent synchronization between nukes and troops: ~400 ticks between bombs is not enough to recover proper room filling creeps and spawn defenders/repairers, but definitely enough for attackers to jump inside and do notable damage to ramparts. Fortunately for me, taiga’s nukes wasn’t coordinated either with bonzai’s nukes nor with each other so that was not that stressful to survive them. Nobody came in to damage my ramparts or to frustrate me. Although extensions filling infrastructure was slightly damaged by taiga’s nukes, it was operational; I lost 8 extensions, all of my ‘caching’ containers and most of roads. I was very glad to see that despite of being damaged filling system still provides adequate filling rate; it was slower than before, of course, and my fillers literally hadn’t a single tick to smoke, but it was working good enough to handle expensive creeps spawning one by one. Only between the nukes, when I saw which ramparts he was targeting I understood his plan: together with destroyed rampart in the epicenter these two which he was going to demolish was meant to block safe access to my lab with XKHO2 boost, a core component of my defense. Unboosted defenders could handle some attacks, but not this one. Not a bonzai’s crowd. The plan was performed perfectly. My ranged attack boost lab was cut off completely, ramparts were melting with a frightening speed, resistance was useless, and the big picture seemed to be irremediable… …until I remapped my labs which triggered loading of XKHO2 to a previously unused lab in a safe area. The rest was predictable. Being properly boosted, my defenders with coordinated support of towers easily secured the whole perimeter (exactly how that was happening before), and then my workers were spawned to rebuild destroyed ramparts. The Battle was over.