Spoiler tags! Spoiler tags!
There's also an Aeolus that arrives as a reinforcement if the Phobos's main guns are destroyed quickly. Did it not show up or did you manage to disarm it, too?
Also what difficulty were you playing on?
Another thing: If I go about your solution, which I considered of course, but decided to go about the non-guardianed way, then someone else might come along and complain about that. I made my choice and it's final.
I believe I managed to disarm it too. I remember in my first playthrough the Aquitaine made it to the node and the Octopus survived too. Another solution might be to start the Aquitaine off at lower health.
I wanted to quickly see how the campaign compared to previous versions so I was playing it through on Very Easy. Would a higher difficulty be better?
I beat the campaign recently. Aside from this issue I just mentioned (which wasn't major and there was a workaround somewhat), I didn't encounter any gamebreaking errors and consider this a fun campaign and improved over previous versions. One thing I'd especially like to compliment this new version on was "Twilight." In previous missions that mission was easily broken but this time around played a lot better.
There was one minor technical error in the campaign though (I'll put it in spoilers just to be safe):
Nameplates didn't always appear on allied Terran warships. For instance, in its first appearance "GTC Fisthand" didn't appear on the side of that cruiser but in a later mission it did. Same with "GTD Obelisk" and "GTD Carthage" for example...sometimes nameplates would appear and sometimes not. Though some ships did always have their nameplates like "GTD Phoenicia" and "GTC Thief's Hand".
This wasn't a gamebreaking error, it was just something I noticed.
Overall, this was a great work.
