Mission 6 is, again, very straight forward. Your basic goal for this map is to wipe out every Martian you see, something which is rather easy seeing as how Soviet tanks trump all Martian units. This is made even easier, though, thanks to Stalin finally pulling some strings and giving you access to every unit in the game. The two new tanks you get (the T-34 and T-35) are more expensive but have most of the benefits of the cheaper models along with more fire power. The T-35's are probably the most useless of the tanks you get. It's huge and therefore moves slower, however it packs a rather large punch so I still ended up using it in my force. The T-34 is faster, smaller and cheaper so, I guess this is the best unit in the game.
The Martians also get a new unit, a purple frog which hops towards your troops and burps up something. Again, they aren't anything which focused fire can't handle so they are barely what I would call a threat.
The mission starts out with you making a dash towards the northwestern corner of the map to gather your scattered troops. There is some light resistance along the way, but it's nothing a little Soviet steel can't handle. After you gain reinforcements, you're given a command to cross a bridge near where you started. Before I did this, I decided to explore the rest of the starting area and was rewarded by running into one of the slime creating trees. By destroying this and its Martian guards, I made a later objective much easier.
When you cross the bridge, you run into the first of the giant purple frogs. After plowing through them, you are told to destroy several Martian slime trees including a cluster in the middle that is heavily guarded. Because of my exploration, I had managed to destroy one of these earlier. So, I decided to start with the single trees and then attack the central location with a massive force. After I crushed any Martians around each tree with the usual strategy of move-shoot, focus fire on the larger Martians and structures and then celebrate my victory, I bought more tanks to enlarge my force further for the final push. I came up to the central cluster through the back way and absolutely crushed the Martian resistance their. It was epic in a "I just completely owned you" sort of way.
The mission ended and I suddenly had a realization that I was actually enjoying myself. Despite all the flaws which make this a horrible game, I was actually almost at the point of saying "For it's novelty, its worth the price." Then I tried the next mission...and that went down the gutter.
The briefing basically tells you that the Martians have caught on to your tactic of spamming tanks until they die, and have called in some bugs that serve as their artillery. Stalin then tells you that you should stick to infantry for this next mission. I took this as a suggestion so, when I read it, I thought "screw that, I'm using tanks!" No, this was a command. Right after experiencing access to every unit in the game, this mission makes it so you can only build and use Spetznas for the first half. Spetznas are a little more competent then regular infantry, but they suffer from being unable to shoot and move at the same time. So, whenever you encounter smaller Martians which are littered all over this stage, you have to tell your Spetznas to hold position or just not move them. They'll take care of the enemies that rush them, and then get destroy by a single artillery strike. By the way, the first objective in this mission is to destroy the three Martian artillery embankments scattered across the map.
You see, the artillery in this mission, is incredibly effective against infantry who stay still. You see, like all units in Stalin vs. Martians, they have trouble targeting things that keep moving. So, even though these bugs could probably one shot tanks, they probably wouldn't be able to target them since I'd be moving them around so much that they'd never get to target them. That's not all, in this mission, for whatever reason, you don't get a ton of money. So, if you get hit and loose most of the units you start out with. That's it, restart cause you aren't winning this. Further frustration is added by the fact that the only way to get out of the starting area is over a bridge. So if you move all of your units over the bridge and they get rushed by the annoying confetti aliens, they will get killed in one hit. But that's not all. There is one artillery battery near the starting point of the mission, so occasionally your units will be destroyed by them while they are in the starting point. However, once you get rid of these artillery units, you can still get hit by artillery strikes from another embankment much further away. So, these artillery bugs, have ridiculous range and there is no sage spot for your troops. But this isn't the worse part of it. The placement of the units and the objectives on this map are horrible. If you go the wrong way, you can aggravate Martians that your Spetznas stand no chance against. Also, at the very center of the map, is one of those Toy Story looking aliens who, for some reason, the Spetznas can't kill. I've killed these guys with Infantry before, but I guess Spetznas don't have grenades or something.
So far, I'm on my 12th attempt of this mission and the furthest I've gotten is to destroy two of the artillery embankments. Honestly, this might be the mission that makes me stop playing Stalin vs. Martians. It's just that bad. I may give it one more go here in a few days since I do have some other more in depth strategies I want to try out. But if those don't work, then I will likely put this on hold for a while until I can work up the will to play it some more. If that occurs, then I'll be writing on other things (like Eternal Darkness...).
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