Hi! I've finished Total Annihilation with both expansion packs, even the infamous Krogoth Encounter. I recently managed to beat Kingdoms as well and am now trying to finish The Iron Plague.

I managed to get to mission 23 and believe I'm stuck. I attempted it about 5 times now and it's always the same story: I eventually get overwhelmed -- either by the siege towers and ballistas or now by, what seems to be, Veruna army.

I take over the 2 mana sources directly south and 2 directly east from my base and build up tortoises and beast riders. At the same time I attempt to build several mirrors and mortars around the base.
However, these all build too slow and I just can't keep up with the numbers of units the enemy produces -- especially when they send 2-3 siege towers and 2-3 ballistas at the same time; so I can't expand further east, really.

Is there something I'm missing here? Am I not playing it the way it was expected? Using the wrong units?
I'll be super grateful for any tips :(

Ok, I finally managed to beat the mission today, yay!

It seems that once I've beaten the initial rush or 2, the key was to not build a lot of stationary defence (I think I had 2-3 mirrors at most) and no barnstormers but instead keep building neodragons and use them to intercept the incoming forces of siege towers and catapults *and* provide LoS at the same time.

This allowed me to produce and keep a lot more of my tortoises which I then used to systematically remove the stationary defence of the enemy.

Just take the initiative and use your hordes of neodragons to harass them, destroy the builders, the trebuchets and their production buildings.