**Halo Wars: Alpha Base — save the Marines before clearing the base**

**Halo Wars: Alpha Base — save the Marines before clearing the base** **Definitive Edition. Mission spoilers. Conventional route, with collectible and achievement stops.** Alpha Base looks straightforward because you're mostly following a road. The useful lesson is what you do with the units you pick up along it. Forge can take more punishment than the ordinary Warthogs, and the Marines become essential when you reach a barrier the vehicles cannot cross. If you're chasing **Everything's Better with Bacon**, start using Ram on Grunts early. You need fifty Grunt kills with that ability, not fifty enemies shot by the Warthog's gun. Waiting until the last fight leaves very little room to correct your count. **Build the convoy as you move** Advance Forge toward the first stranded Marines and destroy their attackers. Once the rescued troops join you, bring the additional Warthog along rather than leaving it at the rescue point. Continue across the bridges and around the snowy bends, checking each pinned-down group as it comes into view. The rescue objective has four groups. Use the objective count to confirm your progress instead of assuming every group standing near the road has already joined you. Where a Shade turret covers the approach, focus it before driving the weaker Warthogs into its firing lane. Forge is the better lead vehicle. Move the ordinary vehicles up once the turret is distracted or destroyed, rather than letting the whole convoy arrive in a clump and trade health unnecessarily. The same principle applies to the infantry barricades. Ram a useful cluster, let the ability recover and finish the threats that can damage you. Don't drive farther into unexplored ground just because the current Ram animation carried you forward. **Make Ram deliberate** For the fifty-Grunt achievement, select the Warthog you actually intend to use and issue its special attack against Grunts. Regular fire from Forge and the rest of the convoy can kill them before the vehicle reaches them, so hold back unnecessary support when you're lining up an easy group. That does not mean leaving dangerous turrets alive for the sake of the counter. Remove the threat, then use the remaining infantry for the challenge. On higher difficulties, keeping the force healthy is more useful than risking the entire mission for one extra Ram. The separate skull objective is **one hundred Grunts killed**. Ordinary kills count toward that objective; the Ram requirement is narrower. Keep those two counters straight. **Heal before the next fight, not after losing the unit** When Heal and Repair becomes available, gather damaged units inside its area rather than placing it ahead of a moving convoy and watching everyone drive through. Check the actual availability on your difficulty; don't plan around an unlimited supply of heals. Pull a badly damaged ordinary Warthog behind Forge while the next engagement begins. If you've selected infantry and vehicles together, remember that their movement speeds differ. Give the fast units a separate order when you need them to reposition rather than dragging the whole group slowly across a firing lane. These are small decisions, but they're the difference between arriving at the gate with useful reinforcements and arriving with Forge doing everything alone. **The barrier: send infantry through** At Alpha Base's entrance, select the Marines. The energy barrier stops vehicles, not infantry. Move the Marines through and attack the power source behind it, using their grenades to bring it down. Don't keep ordering the Warthogs into the barrier. They aren't refusing to follow the route; they cannot pass until you've removed the power source. Once the barrier drops, bring the vehicles inside and work through the remaining Covenant. Use your support abilities where they help, but stop before clearing the final opposition if you're still collecting. **Black Box 1: under the last bridge** Before committing to the base clear, inspect the last bridge outside its entrance. Take a unit down the small ramp on the left side to the lower ground beneath the bridge. The black box is near the overturned Warthog under the arch. Move close enough for the pickup to register, then return to the army. This is a short detour, but it's easy to overlook when the rest of the convoy is already gathering at the shield. **Look Daddy!: backtrack after the hundredth Grunt** Once the hundred-Grunt objective is satisfied, the **Look Daddy!** skull appears outside the base near the last rescued Marine group, on the embankment by the downed Banshee. Send a fast surviving Warthog back to collect it. Keep the main army from finishing the mission while that unit is travelling. Killing the required Grunts makes the skull appear; it does not collect it for you. If you're short of the kill count, don't assume the skull is missing because you're standing in the right place. Check the objective first. Conversely, if the objective is complete, don't keep killing enemies inside the base while your intended collector sits idle. **Finish and check the result** Clear the remaining Covenant inside Alpha Base to complete the mission. Definitive Edition awards **Meet Sergeant Forge** for finishing it on any difficulty. For gold, the published target is **27,000 points**. The mission's published par-time band is **5–12 minutes**, but that is not a promise that any completion within the band automatically earns gold. Rescue objectives, combat performance and the final scoring calculation still matter. If a collectible run takes longer, let it. Get the pickup confirmed, then return with a cleaner route for the medal. A first mission doesn't need to become three failed attempts because you tried to learn the controls, count fifty Rams and optimize the clock simultaneously.