Spetses Blockade

For all my griping, I'm still playing Infinite Space. The battle at Spetses Blockade turned out to be trivial^† after all — retreat to the left, play defense (including unleashing your AA and fighters if necessary), wait for SPC1 to flicker on, then advance. When your (carefully) targeted ship unleashes a Normal attack, hit it with SPC1. Rinse, lather, repeat.

With Kira in the First Officer slot, SPC2 will also light up. If you've taken damage, use it, but be cautious about raising Dodge almost immediately.

That's Phase 1.

Phase 2 begins at Alonnisos, where'll you have to take down the reserve elements of Cadmus' elite forces. Basically, this works the same way, but... There's a weakness! You're facing five ships. Ship 1 is MIDDLE. Ships 2 and 3 are FORWARD, and ships 4 and 5 are BACK. In other words, you're only facing two ships and the flagship, not all five! So take out 3, 2 and 1, and the last two vanish when you take out the flagship.

(Of course, if you do that, you've also lost a chance to recruit Belenko, Cadmus' unenthusiastic but duty-bound admiral, according to one of the fan-contributed faqs. I took the easy way out, myself. So Belenko didn't like Cadmus? Neither did I.)

After the action progresses beyond these two bottlenecks, the business with Cadmus is over quickly, and full immersion resumes.

†Yeah, sure. "Trivial." Apologies if you're still stuck there. It took me 61 hours to get by.