Well, technically it's a "protect the core mission". You know, the one with the zeppelins? I'm playing the game on hard and this is the second time the game has dropped me into an eye rollingly bad battle which feels like the designers just flipped the hitpoint adjustment switch and didn't bother play testing the sequence on the hard difficulty. The first time would be the first encounter with Lady Comstock's ghost.

What's worse, it was all going so well, the game did a good job of instilling you into it's world but when you hit these stops you start to pick apart every little "gamey" nuance and it just tears the whole thing down. Holding down the key to send the songbird to attack seems to take too long and on top of that, why can't i send it to attack the zeppelins until after they've launched patriots? It's that kind of design flaw that pulls you out of the moment and reminds you you're in a poorly created videogame sequence.

So does anyone have any advice (on Hard) for beating the mission where you have to protect the core of the flag ship?

I'm not going to lie: I cranked the difficulty down to normal because this last sequence is BS. The ammo capacity on most of the guns is not enough to deal with all of those enemies, and it's a bummer because I felt like the rest of the game was pretty manageable on hard, not counting those similarly awful Lady Comstock encounters.

I think for what is essentially the final boss, it's good that it's challenging, and it only took me three tries on hard. I found the challenge to be refreshing, especially given how easy all of the original Bioshock was on hard.

@ll_exile_ll: What kind of strategy were you working with? Did you use a lot of vigor? Which ones? did your "gear" loadout factor in at all?

@sin4profit:

I mostly used return to sender (fully upgraded). I would obviously use the songbird to take out the airships, while using the skylines to airstrike regular enemies on the outer edge and shoot down on the ones coming up the middle with the carbine. The patriots were the most trouble, but I found going for them first with a crank gun while the regular enemies fired into my active return to sender ball (which I used to finish them off) was a pretty efficient strategy. The rocket guys are also a pain in the ass, but as long you make sure you've got your return to sender shield up when you face them you can chip away (and deal huge damage if they decide to fire a rocket into your RTS ball)

Hope that helps.

If you are playing on Hard and not using Return to Sender on the ghost or at the end, you probably shouldn't be playing on Hard as you don't understand how to use the tools at your disposal yet.

Protip: get that piece of gear that makes you invulnerable after dismounting a rail. I forget what/where it is exactly, though. Also, sometimes you run into a motherfucker of a foot soldier (with a rocket launcher I think) that takes 7 shotgun blasts to the head to kill. Possess him.

@ll_exile_ll: I found the rocket dudes to be easy to deal with while wearing that gear that possesses dudes when you smack'em til they come to your way a'thinkin. A two part sequence of Skyline attack on the rocket guy fallowed by a melee hit would posses them without fail and of course they just kill themselves when it wears off.

I'll have to try the return to sender and the ram vigor in my next playthrough, also see if i can create a more meaningful gear loadout for the sequence which i tend to forget about.

Thanks for they strategies, we'll see how it goes.

@aykay_47: Sounds like Return to Sender's the way to go then, have a bad habit of not using my vigors enough so that maybe my problem.

Personally i really liked the bucking bronco/shotgun combo for the rocket guys on the mid-air parts. Launch em' up and give em a blast till they're over thin air...works everytime hahah