Festering Skies

Warning! Spoilers ahead!

work in progress

Now there is a number of bases with free Manticores (depending on difficulty level: 3 on Rookie, 2 on Veteran, 1 on Hero and 0 on Legend).

The DLC starts on January 3rd, with an ominous message from Disciples of Anu. Shortly after, the Egg arrives with a cutscene. Mount Egg will then appear somewhere near your starting base. You cannot interact with Mount Egg in any way. A few days later on January 9th you will receive a message from Synedrion and a mission (the Gift), which you will 15 days to complete. The mission requires you to reach an evac zone at the other end of the map to escape a haven under Pandoran attack in a fully armed Manticore. There are a lot of enemy reinforcements on this map, and lot of enemies towards the end of the mission. Don't try to kill them all: the objective is to escape. As all missions of similar type, it's easier with a vehicle. Once you complete the mission, you will be introduced to the aerial combat minigame with a tutorial.

The minigame is fairly simple. All human aircraft have slots for 2 weapons and 1 special module, usually a counter to specific type of attack that allows you to ignore it (for example, the starting special module is afterburner, which, while active, makes all visually guided attacks miss the craft).

You only have control over what weapons to use and on what (whether on the hull of the enemy craft or on a weapon/module), when to activate the special module (though some are passive and always on), and whether to disengage. This last part is very important: you can press the disengage button at any time to leave the combat in 5 seconds. This can be abused to damage an enemy aircraft using long range weapons, leave the combat before the enemy can respond, and attack again, and so on and so forth.

If your craft is destroyed, the operatives on it will take 100 HP damage each and be automatically teleported to a base.