Sunday, October 4, 2009

Stalin vs. Martians Part 3: Like Bolsheviks on Bicycles

I decided at the last moment to wait until today to post, mostly because I've already covered most of mission 2 and I wanted a little bit more content for part 3. Namely, I wanted to beat Mission 3 before I posted part 3.

So how did I beat Mission 2? Simple, I threw all conventional strategy out the window, and just used tanks. You see, I was wrong in my initial assessment that tanks cannot handle the little Martians who like to Zerg rush for no reason. All I had to do was micromanage slightly. How you may ask? Well, the first tanks available for you to purchase (BT-8s I think...) have an ability which allows them to fire while moving. So, if you keep all of your tanks hot-keyed, you can have them run away or run in circles around the small Martians and let that ability do the rest. All you have to worry about after that is retreating when you're close to losing all of your tanks, replacing lost units, and focusing your fire on the larger Martians.

You see, the thing is, I sort of knew this from the first time I played Stalin vs. Martians. I came to the conclusion that infantry were useless and tanks were really the backbone of any legitimate USSR military. I remembered this when I picked the game back up this week however, I rethought my initial assessment and decided that infantry must have some use like being cannon fodder. In other words, I over thought the situation. Which is also an overstatement since I was, you know, trying to apply legitimate strategy to the way I play. But that's not good enough for Stalin vs. Martians. No! It wants you to throw all strategy out the window and just spam tanks.

Anyway, mission 3. This is a pretty straight forward mission. There are a number of villages you have to liberate and once you've cleared them of Martians, you've won. Stalin also tells you in his briefing to destroy any strange trees you run across since they are desecrating the Motherland with slime. These have shown up in all missions up to this point, but I haven't felt the need to describe what they look like until now. These weird looking trees...well...you know those cartoons where they depict old willows and other small, bulky trees with scary branches as having mouths and angry eyes? There's your Martian slime producing tree. I'll take this time to mention that that part of the briefing is sort of misleading. You see, I only ran into one tree throughout the entire mission and I'm pretty sure that if I had left it alone, I still would have beaten the mission.

Also new to mission 3 is a new tank for you to use. I should mention that this is the second new unit I've gotten...I just didn't mention the new unit for mission 2 because, frankly, I don't use it (it's an anti-tank weapon...but regular tanks work just as good...so..yep I don't use it). The T-70 is just like the BT-8 except...well I couldn't really tell what the difference was between the two tanks besides how they look. I'm guessing the T-70 is a little stronger, however since it retains the move and shoot ability, it's really just a more expensive BT-8. But, I didn't let that stop me from buying a bunch.

Again, the strategy I used was the same that I described at the beginning of this post. When small Martians rush me, I run around letting my guns kill them. Then I focus fire on the big guys and move onto the next area after replacing lost units. This mission was very easy, and is probably what Stalin vs. Martians should be. But alas, it is not.

I took a quick look at mission 4 before I stopped...all I'm going to say is it's a giant worm.

Part 4 will be up latter this week.

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