An otherwise alright mission with some problems.
General thoughts:
I'm pretty sure this mission is mostly meant to be hard. That's fine if that's what you're into.
The ship designs are pretty ok overall. I didn't find the shark to be too particularly useful and the blast ships had little worth due to the layout of the map. As a big note, one of the blast ships has a different loadout than the others, but you can't know this until you build it. The combat ship and combat lathe are nice, but you don't need them to win the map. They do make the map easier though.
There's a hidden (redacted) under (redacted). I have no problem with hidden secrets, but a well executed hidden secret needs a clue. I would say that this is even more important for missions in a game genre that doesn't typically have hidden secrets. Even a subtle clue is good, but here there is just nothing.
Now those are issues, but here's the biggest issue on this map. Unless you have a certain graphical setting (particle coloring by health, defaults to off), you have no idea that there is a weak area you can clean out. There are no other clues to this fact, so it is not at all apparent that it's even an option. Unless you're just plain lucky, read the spoilers on this thread (I didn't), or just fail the mission repeatedly until you figure it out, it very much feels like the author of this level just throws sucker punch after sucker punch at you. Once you do figure it out, the rest of the level is tough, but relatively straight forward.
My Rating:
6/10
My times:
1 hour 40ish minutes first (successful) run
40ish minute second run
18:54.0 Third run (current record)
Difficulty:
Hard as nails.
Speed Run Hint:
You actually need very little to finish this level. On my last run, I did it with the fishnet, a trio of combatants, and 8 omnis. I'm pretty positive that it can be done even faster.
