A March of War: Lazy_Comrade - Chapter 3

The Soviet Defense

Not long after that game with Abby, The SU borders were pretty much back to normal. Or, as normal as any borders could be in MoW. One day in the SU Chat, I got to talking with a player named xiSMGix. I don’t remember how exactly we started, or what we were talking about, but he invited me to join his Battle Group the Soviet Defense. A few minutes later, I was introduced to the player Eleventy_Four. xiSMGix and Eleventy_Four, SMG and 11t4 (or 11ty4, 11ty, 11t, etc) respectively, were brothers in the real world and were the leaders of the Soviet Defense Battle Group. Battle groups (BG) were like clans or armies of players. During the early versions of MoW, players could not play co-op games unless they were in the same BG. However, this was eventually removed, and BGs were largely repurposed to function almost as political parties and support groups. This was true at least during my later days in the SU.

But right now, the Soviet Defense was still in its early stages, and many of its members were not highly ranked. This also included not only me, but both SMG and 11t4. As a new BG, we had yet to make a name for ourselves, but SMG and 11t4 were talkative, energetic, and good at recruiting more comrades into our ranks. Eventually I stopped playing with Abby so much, and started finding my calling as a grinder.

As many players from MoW will tell you, the EA was overpowered. However, none of those saying so will be from the EA. They will swear up and down that they actually need more firepower, and that everyone else is crazy. Fortunately, there is no question whether the SU is OP or not. It’s not. It does have some very good units, such as the Cannon Walker, the Flak tank, and the Commissar, but the CW is expensive, the Flak Tank is slow, and the Commissar received a huge debuff later in the game. Aside from these units, the SU really didn’t have anything that stood out. They were entirely average.

This made them durable and theoretically flexible, but in reality there were not enough units available to be effectively flexible. This severely limited the effectiveness of SU grinders, and many people attempting to infiltrate the SU HC gave up, simply because it took so damn long. Despite all this, I thoroughly enjoyed my SU army, and ground out my path to the SU HC. Along the way, I helped SMG and 11t4 grow the Soviet Defense and support for 11t4. When the two of them were not online, I would recruit and answer questions. I would do this to some extent when they were online, but mostly I let them handle it.

Apparently I was a huge help to SMG and 11t4, because SMG sent me a Private Message (PM) thanking me for being so helpful, and offering to promote me within the BG. I would be able to add people to the BG, and would officially be an officer of the Soviet Defense. Again, I won’t say that this is when everything started, so I won’t. Sorry if that disappoints you. But that was the beginning of the road that the three of us would walk for the coming months, and which is still continuing to some extent today, even if the scenery and companions have changed and come and gone.

Looking back on this time, I don’t remember a whole lot of specifics about players, conflicts, or agendas. All I remember is that Comrade_Makron was the FL, I was growing closer to SMG and 11t4, I loved the SU, and I was making a difference (or at least thought that I was). The community that we were making in the Soviet Defense was amazing, and we were gaining recognition. I was also gaining some recognition beyond the BG as well. I took pride in seeing my name come up as one of the battle front heroes for all to see.

Each front had a list of the top 5 players for the front. These players were the ones who had earned the most amount of BP while fighting on that particular front. Getting to be one of the top 5 took quite a bit of work usually, and this process took even longer using the SU. Although the SU was powerful, the large majority of their units were also slow. And the fast units could not operate effectively without the support of the slower units. Therefore my approach to pve grinding was slow, methodical, and had layers of support built into it.

Towards the end of the game’s life, I had refined my grinding skills, techniques, and patterns so that I could finish a pve game in 6-8 rounds, depending on what map it was and the faction that I played against. This may seem pretty good until I tell you about Darkagma. Darkagma, the founder of “The Way” in the SE, was one of the most successful grinders in the game. He had a grinding guide for players that he wanted to teach “The Way” to, such as Akridd. I too was working on a grinding guide for new SU players, but never finished due to a lack of time.

Once the game was dead, I finally got a glimpse of “The Way” in the form of a video Dark had recorded, and I immediately started laughing. All of my frustration, anger, jealousy, and confusion about my grinding compared to other factions went away. In that video, I immediately recognized the map. It was one of the ones that I had perfected down to a science. It was one of the 6 rounders in my arsenal. I knew that map, the AI spawns, movement patterns, everything about it like the buttons on my mouse. When that map loaded up, I was its master. It was my turf, my domain. That map being selected by the computer meant that my BP/hour would increase, and the SU chances of winning a front went up.

In that video, I saw Darkagma nearly halve the number of rounds that I needed to achieve victory, as well as doing it in about a third of the time. As I watched that damned video, I wondered how the hell we had lasted so long against the SE in the past. If this was “The Way” then the best that I had ever come up with was bushwhacking through a jungle with a mop. However, this gap was not completely due to skill. Although I did learn some things from watching it, the main reason for the time difference was that the SE had fast units that were effective against the early AI units, and that could be deployed very early in the game. The SU had fast units of course, but they were not nearly as effective, and if they were effective, they were not worth deploying early because they were so slow. I was simply, utterly, completely, and hopelessly outmatched.

However, I did not know this at the time. I was happy with my success, and my comrades appreciated my efforts. During this time, Comrade_Makron stepped down as the SU FL. Conveniently, SMG and 11t4 had been building support for 11t4 to be elected as the new SU FL. Once he was elected, my story as a grinder, comrade of the Soviet Union, and player of MoW would change drastically.

Pic Sources:
https://www.gamewatcher.com/news/2013-16-11-fourth-episode-exalted-inferno-launched-on-march-of-war
https://forums.empiresmod.com/index.php?threads/march-of-war.18623/

This video shows the world map changes each day of 2014. In later chapters I will be talking about some of the events that are depicted in this video so enjoy the sneek peak ;)