Finally finished. I wanted to share with you more of my lets-try-to-play-the-mission-different-and-either-break-it-or-get-more-kills attempts, this time with 'Clash of the TItans III'. The vulnerabilities come in the fact that there are no penalties for not jumping to the new positions right away. After taking down the Punisher's beam and reactors, instead of jumping out, I set about destroying everything I could. Ultimately, that means everything short of the station and the Nemesis. Taking out the corvettes was quite the challenge. For the skotas, after disarming and disabling it, I just sicked my wingmen on it, having replaced Beta's 2nd bank with Corinthos instead of those fighter-suppression missiles. It still took them quite a while though. I also swapped out my Stilettos for Corinthos. I had to disarm the station to ensure that my wingmen could go over to the other corvette without getting harassed. I then set about destroying all of the Nemesis' turrets, but since the front cannon is guardian-ed, I couldn't take that one out. Ultimately, my wingmen got that 2nd corvette down to about 9%, before I had to join them, and crank up the time compression all the way to 32. My mission time was about 120 minutes when it finally blew. Then, after joining the Bastion and going through the ambush, I had my wingmen stay around after everyone left, and I proceeded to disarm everything in sight. In a previous playthrough, I'd disabled everything too, but that came with some mission-breaking side-effects, so I had to settle for just taking out their turrets, and weapons subsystems to be on the safe side. I also used my Corinthos to destroy the Baselius (sp?) escort from distance until they stopped respawning. Once everything had been disarmed, I jumped to the Bastion, went through the rest of the mission, and just relaxed when the destroyer trio arrived, as I'd already neutered them. During my previous replay, when I'd disabled them as well, they were still loitering around ahead of the Bastion in the distance, and then when the trio arrived, they'd inherited the status of their copies, and so they didn't jump out once the Lindos got waxed, so the mission never ended. Comically though, there was a bomber wing launched to destroy the Tereus, but they went for the one in the distance and destroyed that instead.
I'm not sure exactly what you could do to encourage the player to jump out. Maybe try sending multiple wings and waves of highly skilled enemy fighters after you. If you had time and opportunity to record more audio files, you could include warnings about the fact that Command needs you there or they'll abort the mission. Take too long, and you lose. The debriefing gives you a royal dressing down for throwing the entire sol campaign into chaos, just because you wanted to get more kills.
Anyway, I enjoyed the campaign, though I am a little disappointed that the Nemesis mission from the original Inferno, got reduced to a much less pivotal one. I also would've liked to retain the scan-ships-at-the-gate mission from the original. When I was working with the team in the pre-Nostos release, I'd modified the mission to include a portion where you get to swap out for an EA cloaking stealth fighter half-way through, and assassinate an agent.
