Waking Giants

Ronahn shows Macha the true dark secret within Acheron, and she must lead her forces to safety.

Mission Prep

The initial stages of this mission will be rather heavy on infantry use, and you are also forced to have Macha and Ronahn as two of your Elites. The Wraithlord is, as always, a good third choice. For Doctrines, Reaper Focus and Avenger Shield are solid choices, take your pick for the third.

General Notes

The first main stage has you move towards a large webway gate to the south. Try to avoid combat by moving along the eastern edge of the map. There is very little to this stage, just get south to the gate.

In the second main stage, you have to destroy 3 Disruptors that have locked the gate. You need to bring Macha to each Disruptor to use a special blast to destroy them. There are also two reasonable-sized forces of friendly units trapped behind forcefields with a few guards, rescuing them will be quite helpful. There are also small groups of friendly infantry scattered around the map, frequently hiding in Stealth cover; check every Stealth cover you find and you should be able to recruit several of them.

Once two of the Disruptors are destroyed, the next main stage begins and you gain base construction abilities. The main goal is to slowly repair, one at a time, four Generators surrounding the Wraithknight. DO NOT START ANY REPAIRS YET!!!

There is a catch; after each repaired Generator the enemy attacks will be come stronger and more frequent, and during this phase there is no enemy base to destroy to slow down the attacks. Webway Gates will spawn in, an unlimited number of times in 4 distinct places, to spawn initially mixed infantry and later vehicles to constantly harass your forces. What's worse, not only can you have easily acquired enough troops during the previous phase to completely zero out all of your resource income, nearly all of those troops are incapable of handling vehicles which the enemy will send at you frequently as you progress through the generator repairs. Your primary goal for this stage will be to set up a good defensive firing line of Dark Reapers along with a couple of Ranger squads in Hold Fire mode as forward scouts, however to do this you will need to gradually suicide the troops you collected. Start with putting your couple of Dark Reaper squads into Heavy Covers at key points along with a good supply of your initial Dire Avengers, but then send out all of your Banshees and Shadow Spectres to just attack anything. You can keep the Wraithblades and Elites you have for melee cover of your ranged defenders at the moment. Once the Banshees are dead (and you've hopefully spent some of your initial resources building up your starting PoCs) you should start gaining income; begin researching Infantry techs and training Dark Reapers.

Once you have a few Dark Reapers in place you can start sacrificing Dire Avengers; the Dark Reapers will be far more important for anti-all defense given the number of enemy vehicles that will be sent at you eventually, and they can also handle the enemy infantry attacks quite well. You may also find having 2 Fire Prisms with at least one Vehicle Weapon upgrade handy; two shots from them will instantly destroy a Webway Gate that is spawned in. Also make sure to research ALL Infantry damage and health tech, and shield regeneration.

Once you have your defenses set up, and save your progress, start the repairs. The attacks will get more frequent, sizeable and varied in what is sent at you as you repair each of the four generators. Make sure all of your forces are within a Fleet of Foot aura so their shields regenerate well.

Once you have repaired all 4 generators one at a time, bring Rohnan to the Wraithknight and activate the ability that shows up, then Taldeer is revealed. You now need to get her to the final Disruptor at a key position, and use her Scatter Shield on the beam to reflect it back and destroy the disruptor. Now the final stage begins; a small force of infantry will start attacking the large Dark Gate in an attempt to destroy it and prevent your escape, but a much larger spread of forces including Wraithlords will spawn in various places on the map. Don't even hesitate; have ALL of your forces Attack-Move towards the gate to fight through everything there, make Taldeer in particular get there quickly with careful use of her Jump ability to get good distance. Once the specifically marked squads that are attacking the gate get killed, you win.