A March of War: Lazy_Comrade - Chapter 2

Taking Root in Permafrost

When I arrived in the frozen north, the Soviet Union was just beating back the remnants of a five-faction invasion of its homeland. I don’t remember why this war happened, who the major players were, or when it started, but I do remember that I briefly fought against the SU for the LJ and the UR. I do know from conversations about this war after the fact that some prominent SU players had their beginnings in this war, and others emerged as strong leaders. Comrade_Makron led the SU through this war, and made a lot of progress towards reversing the state that the SU had been in before the war. According to xiSMGix the SU was “the play toy of any faction that wanted an easy kill. The High Command was full of traitors, rogues, and spies from other factions.”

The SU I found still required a lot of work, but there was evidence of improvements. One of the biggest and most problematic issues facing the Union was the lack of communication and organization. A significantly large portion of the player base ignored orders from the HC and FL, and fought wherever they liked, usually on fronts that didn’t matter, had been deemed lost, or been opened by rogues trying to sabotage the army. It worked very well.

However, the progress I mentioned was there. After I had a few hours of the SU under my belt, I found a player to be my co-op partner for a while. Her name was Abby, and she claimed to be one of Comrade_Makron’s officers. I never verified if this was true. She was energetic and very passionate about the SU. We played a lot of siege matches together before a few game patches happened and co-op siege just became an excuse to fill every available space with an AI unit.

One particular game still stands out to me. We were playing against the EA, and neither of us had a very large or researched army. I remember that we planned on having me research all the armor units, and she would make a beeline towards the Sickle, a heavy helicopter gunship with auto cannons and rockets. But we didn’t have any advanced units yet. As the game was getting closer and closer to being over, Abby was defeated by the AI. Her command HQ was destroyed, and she was out of the game. In siege mode, both players have an HQ building that they have to defend from AI assault waves for nine rounds. If the HQ is destroyed, you lose. In co-op however, if one player is defeated, the other can continue alone fighting both AI armies. This is what I did.

It was the fifth round, so I had to hold out for another five rounds, counting the start of the fifth and the end of the ninth. I decided that there was no way I was going to be able to hold the lines right at the AI deployment areas, since they were far from my base. So I decided to do a fighting retreat. I slowly moved my remaining troops back towards the base, keeping the AI busy and slowing them down. Meanwhile I was building up secondary and tertiary lines of defense by deploying more units on captured nodes and near my base. I heavily used what artillery I could, and made those units a priority to deploy.

By about round seven or eight, I had lost a lot of men, and there was no definitive “line” between my units and the enemies. I was losing a lot of my firepower due to my weaker army, and I could not kill the enemy units fast enough, especially those damn EA grenadiers. Many of their units were simply running past mine and attacking the HQ. Meanwhile, every round that I lived through, Abby was ecstatic. After being defeated, she decided to stay and watch me finish. Throughout the rest of the match she was typing messages in the chat, mostly in caps, along the lines of “You can do this!!!!!” I appreciated the support, but it was also a little distracting.

As round nine began, I did my best to kill the closest AI units to the HQ and form walls with my units to block their paths. Eventually my last unit used all its action points, and I clicked the end turn button. Now we just had to wait. It seemed to take forever. Unit after unit would run up and attack the building. With each one, the HQ’s HP would drop, little by little. It was starting to catch on fire by the time the AI was done. But it wasn’t destroyed. Round nine was over, and my HQ was still standing. If Abby was yelling before, then she became a banshee in that chat. She couldn’t believe that I had done it. I remember her typing “WE NEED TO PERFECT THIS FORM OF WARFARE AND TEACH IT TO THE UNION!!” At the time I was really happy with my achievement, even though I highly doubted that I had invented some new strategy, or that many of my fellow players wouldn’t have done exactly what I did. But for the first time, I felt that I could make a difference beyond just winning battles and following orders. I felt that I could become somebody in this game. That feeling never went away.

Thanks for reading!

Links to Previous chapters:
https://steemit.com/story/@lazy-writer/a-march-of-war-lazycomrade-chapter-1
https://steemit.com/story/@lazy-writer/a-march-of-war-lazycomrade-prologue

Pic Sources:
http://swain1234.deviantart.com/art/March-of-War-promo-2-390896624

http://marchofwar.wikia.com/wiki/Grenadiers