"Slings: I found God for you. he's hiding behind these brass knuckles"
-CynicalMagician and Fox^1
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| The last of the half-assed | | | Author: | | | IP: | 24-90-13XXXX | | Date: | 11/12/02 07:11 | | Game Type: | Westwood RTS | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 0, Max: , Min:
Lifetime Rating for YourButteredBiscuit: 6.7500 | | If you want to get straight to the half-assed text only report and don't care about my petty excuses, skip this paragraph. If you don't care about any of this click the X in the top right-hand corner. This is my last battle report under this name. I have long since forgotten the password to it, so I have no choice but to submit text only reports as long as I use it. My HTML is fairly abysmal, so in the future, I don't expect the graphics will be anything exceptional when I finally do put some effort into a report under a new name, but at least you'll have pictures. Since this is the last half-assed effort, it may as well be about a game where there is no time for screenshots anyway. I speak of Red Alert 2 of course. You couldn't pay me to take a break in the gameplay to take screen shots because it would mean certain defeat, and there is no replay feature to speak of.
The Pre-game:
The map was one I was unfamiliar with, it was a user made map that I had just finished downloading, and the godawful minimap previews that are in the lobby showed me that it was an island map and had a lot of unsightly blotches. Whatever. I'd figure everything out after my scouting. I chose to be Russia, and my opponent elected to be America. There are two sides in Red Alert 2, the bourgeoisie capitalist pig dog Allies, and the Great Soviet Warmachine. Each side has several nations to pick from, each with a unique unit. Russia gets the tesla tank, a slow but cost effective tank effective against pretty much anything on the ground but limited by its speed and short range. It can fire over walls and when it reaches the elite status its shots hit multiple targets and do obscene amounts of damage. As America, my opponent recieved the ability to paradrop 8 GI's on the battlefield every couple of minutes after building an airforce command center. 8 GI's doesn't sound like much, but if you're not ready for them, they can take a chunk of your base off the map very quickly.
The Map:
The map was a 2 player island map where we started on two opposite sides of the island. The main path down the center of the island leads to a ramp up to our bases. The path is pretty much open, except it is lined with rows of oil derricks, which provide a steady trickle of money when captured. This territory is very hard to defend and equally difficult to attack through, but since there aren't too many ore fields, it is something constantly being fought over. Its a game of inches and yards and how many poor bastard troops are going to have to die for each scrap. On elevated terrain on either side of the path were dense cities to be garrisoned, there were a few derricks and an airport on either side. When captured, an airport allows a Soviet player the ability to drop 10 conscripts every few minutes, and an Allied player 5 GI's (more on this later). These paths lead to a narrow entrance on either side of your enemies base. Control of the cities is key as well, and you have to stick your neck out to garrison as many civillian buildings as possible and fortify your footholds, or else your enemy will have you pinned down and without breathing room.
The water surrounding the island is pretty much open, with a minor exception being the coastal edge of your base. There is modest inlet leading into your base, a good place for your enemy to gain a foothold for an amphibious invasion. Naval battles come down to who has a bigger and better balanced navy. Naval superiority will only help in bringing down coastal defenses so you can land transports. You'll be able to give your invading troops some moderate naval support, but beyond coastal entrenchments it will take some very expensive capital ships to do any serious damage. The large amount of derricks on a relatively small map means that you'll be flooded with money, but if you don't spend every last cent you will die a horrible death. Its a map designed for brutal sieges, bloody charges and carnage on multiple fronts. In other words, its better than the shit the game came with.
The Early Game:
I started things off conventionally. I deployed my MCV, built a barracks, an ore refinery, a war factory, radar, and power as needed while building a mixed force of conscripts and attack dogs. Boris the doomed conscript is sent in search of the enemy, Ivan the equally doomed is assigned the menial task of slowly circling around the base to get a feel for the terrain. Conscripts cost $100, while the allied equivalent, the GI, costs $200. GI's can deploy into stationary bunkers and get longer range and better firepower at the cost of being able to move. 1 GI in a bunkered position can kill 2 conscripts charging at him. Thats why conscripts cost less and more of them come with the paradrop. They are absolute cannon fodder and make fine bullet sponges. Do your duty and lay it on the line for the home country, Ivan!
The first skirmish came early when he landed a group of paratroopers while a small group of GI's and Grizzly tanks held the line waiting for the airborne reinforcements. I sent a specialized quick response to this attack, a handful of attack dogs took care of the infantry while terror drones made short work of the tanks. Terror drones are cheap, fast and fragile. They are killed quickly by infantry, but if they get close enough, they can kill an infantrist in one leap. They also burrow in tanks and gradually damage them. The only way to remove them from a tank is to send them to a repair depot. This wasn't an option for him since if he even had a depot, it was across the map and his tanks wouldn't make the trip there. The battle was pretty one-sided since it didn't take long for my forces to mop the floor with his but he had a rough feel for how high I was in the tech tree and the attack was cheap for him to conduct.
I was focusing more on map control and military muscle than on technology once I saw the nature of the map for what it was. I had garrisoned most of the buildings closest to me and had captured a line of derricks. The good thing about derricks is that they pay $1000 upon capture, and provide 6 credits every three seconds. Pretty good for something that was captured by a $500 engineer. You can also build structures off of them, so its easier to defend them. I build a wall in front of them, a war factory and a barracks behind them, a long with a few static defenses behind the wall. He was employing a similar strategy. This was looking ugly, if I attacked him I suffered a crushing defeat, if he attacked me the same would happen. Very World War I. We were both taking the next line of derricks closest to us. After that, there would be one left in the middle. There would come a time when we would have a showdown for it, but neither of us were ready for something so earth shaking.
I broke the stalemate when I laid siege to the eastern side of his base and dealt a fierce blow. A wave of infantry and a squad of tanks, terror drones and dogs protected 8 V3 rocket launchers. The V3's have excellent range and pack a punch, but have paper thin armor, very slow movement, very slow rate of fire, and the missiles themselves can be shot down by anti-aircraft defenses. But I had picked this side of his base for the lack of said air defenses. He lost a barracks, a refinery, a warfactory and 3 power plants. He was forced to divert a lot of his forces from his entrenchments to deal with this threat. This allowed me to charge his derricks line with a large group of conscripts and tesla troops (infantry version of tesla tank) and a few rhino tanks. I took heavy casualties, but I breached the defenses in two different spots and destroyed the barracks behind the derricks. I didn't manage to kill any derricks or the war factory next to the barracks, and my siege was being overrun, but the punch was landed, and I know he felt it. My legions of Vladmir's, Ivan's and Leonid's cheered as the soulless capitalists felt the economic bite that follows a Great Soviet Assault. It was truly a victory for the people. Mother Russia: 1 Capitalist Gangsters: 0.
I wanted to retreat my attackers because they were the bulk of my military, but the slow speed of just about every soviet unit made retreat an impossibility and after losing a lot of his retaliating units, my opponent overtook both the siege and the derricks attackers and slaughtered them all. I had hurt him. But unbeknownst to me, he had a transport chopper filled with all sorts of ugly headed my way...... which you'll read about in part two if you care.
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