Going the extra mile, with delicate engineering!

(6:34) Level 2 ('Halo') on Heroic. Another rockslide megabattle tutorial. With the simple set-up routine shown in BCM648, you'll typically lose some covies and Marines due to fighting between them when you first turn up. But with some delicate work (which can take some perseverance) it's actually possible to keep them apart at the start, leading to a set-up which has maximum covies and 6 Marines (we're still eliminating the sniper), and hopefully with everyone healthy because there's been no fighting between them. This is namely my refined routine, which I came up with in 2009 and have been using ever since, when I want the 6 Marines.

Released July 12th 2026, gameplay recorded July 7th-9th 2026.

00:02 (Setting up) The set-up work is pretty clear I think, and there's also my site account you can read for details, but I'll comment on a few specifics here.

The main one is, when drawing the covies away from the rocks, I had a pretty rough time of things, and there were so many pink shards flying around, it felt like I'd walked into a needler convention! Definitely could've gone more smoothly. After getting the initial attention of the covies (I opted to fire a few shots when I noticed that one of the Grunts was very close to finding the Marines), I was a bit slow reboarding the hog, and soon lost two bars of health. Then when I was circling around to try and encourage everyone to head over to my corner (and also to survey where they were), a Grunt dived into my path, forcing me to slow down for a moment. That got me into a worse state.

When I then tried to recharge behind the hog, I was thwarted by grunty pressure. I realised I had to give up on that, so I boarded the hog (with one health bar left!) and headed off to trigger the dropships. Luckily I didn't die, but it was close. In view of my poor state, I didn't dawdle long when I briefly tried to draw them back to the corner again. Then I was off, just hoping things would be okay.

Back at the lifeboat, I made sure to get Johnson on the chain-gun. That's the main reason why I brought him along, though it does also lead on nicely from the previous movie.

As you can see, I brought a full needler along with me from earlier in the level, and coupled it with a pistol for battle. I thought I'd have a change from the pistol & AR combo featured in BCM648.

During the set-up work I managed to get two gratuitous gunner yells along the way, when getting big air. Hope you appreciated those!

I should mention that in achieving this set-up, it took quite a few more tries than just the two featured here (sometimes getting a fresh spawning, sometimes just reverting to my entry checkpoint for further tries with an existing spawning). But to keep the tutorial concise, I thought it was enough to just feature one bad spawning and then a success, albeit a success in which my performance was sub-optimal.

03:35 (Some checking) After driving around a bit to splatter a few covies, and leaving my passengers to fare for themselves, I proceed to check on the Marine survivors. I find six on the plateau as desired (the random sargeant being an unarmoured Stacker), and by picking them up two at a time, I establish that they all have full health. So it looks like they never tussled with the covies at all. Just what I wanted.

That leads me to expect that I've got all 34 covies, and they mostly have full health (though I did hear a Grunt apologizing for friendly fire during the set-up work, so I think at least one Grunt took damage). After saving my battle start checkpoint, I later did some careful counting and confirmed that I indeed had 34. Four of the seven Elites were red, yikes!

Incidentally, this checking phase was partly a case of winging things. I just knew I needed to pick up the guys two at a time, and also try to make sure any remaining ones didn't get found by the covies while I was away from the plateau. As it turned out, I got some good comedy from driving the Marines clear then ditching them. Certainly you could do the checking faster, but I wasn't fussed about efficiency here.

One other thing. When it came to picking up the second pair at around 4:45, I noticed from my tracker than a covie was almost at the plateau, and that's why I then drove left, splattering the Grunt and then grabbing the attention of other approaching covies. That left the final two guys pretty safe.

05:53 (All the blue Elites have needlers) After a while, I noticed that all three of the blue Elites had needlers, something which struck me as unusual, though I may have had that many needler blues before. In total my set-up has nine needler troops. This clip shows them in isolation, after I'd carefully killed everyone else and got a new entry checkpoint, from which to try and produce an amusing clip like this. Took quite a few tries before I got this one, which had an excellent launch across the rockslide. Made for a nice ending I thought.

Closing remarks The set-up turned out to rather nice. Got some battles coming up in the next few movies, and I'll be including some battle plans never shown before. We'll see how Johnson fares!

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