Part 6: CCA #1 - Ok you guys can stop watching this game now

The Russian campaign is a short one, but it take place concurrently with the Stars and Stripes(NSDF) campaign.

In the Venus mission, Commander Alexei Doyestevski is tasked by Colonel Romeski with holding off the American advance just after their main force has landed on the planet. An NSDF Recycler is planning to move to the front line and wipe out the CCA forces there. The Russians devise an ambush. After the Recycler chooses one of three passes to move through, a Golem Walker would be moved to a checkpoint, and Alexei would ambush and drive it back to its field outpost, catching it in a pincer maneuver. As an insightful and no-nonsense Comrade, Alexei sets up a gun tower and already has a powerful fighting force ready to scrap the Recycler and its escort as it approaches his base. With several key allies, the commander pushes into the American outpost and destroys it utterly, saving the CCA forces and allowing them to make their way off the planet. Romeski, however, steals away the glory by reporting all successes to General Karnov personally. The Soviets use the Cthonian Flight Log as a decoy to safeguard Professor Chestikov and his premiere science team and move them to Titan to continue their work with the Cthonian artifacts. However, a new enemy presents itself: The NSDF Black Dog Squadron, a ruthless and merciless elite faction within the NSDF who are very well equipped. Braving the minefields and artillery on the path, Commander Doyestevski reaches the launch pad and the CCA forces move to Io to take the Fury Relics.

On Io, Commander Doyestevski is given the task of rescuing a beleaguered tank battalion from a serious Black Dog assault. He leads a team of Grendel bombers into the Black Dog base and wipes it out completely before returning to base under dangerous conditions. Arkin's betrayal has landed one of the three Fury Relics in Soviet hands, and it then becomes priority number one to move the transport column off of Io and to Saturn's Moon, Titan, where it can be fully exploited. Although a lot of things seem to go wrong and a strange English-speaking man in the Recycler gives Alexei a hard time, in addition to Romeski stealing the credit, he gets the job done.

Because of Roboky's joke, there is now LP Bingo available for all updates in any LP I do with these clowns. Will you get a bingo?





You can thank Fish Noise for a lot of this nonsense, although the Tank voicepack was my idea

Mission 1 is pretty easy, but long. Think of it like NSDF Mars Mission 2, it's just time consuming but at least you get some heavy attack forces coming your way which can stimulate your scrap economy. Building more than 1 gun tower would have been wise if I remembered I get attacked from the rear, but it's no big deal if you've got tanks on the field. Don't build Hangars & Supply Depots so close to each other because it messes up pathfinding and generally gets in the way. The overly convoluted plan to use a single Golem walker to ambush a huge force like the Recycler's escort is really dumb and you shouldn't do it. The Golem only has about 15 or so shots and it's just a gigantic useless paperweight. If the Recycler makes it back to the base, it probably helps build up an even more dangerous force and makes the mission a bit harder but something like that shouldn't happen. The Recycler only turns around if you interdict it in one of the passes, which is why it charged bravely into my gun tower. It choosing the eastern pass was a stroke of luck.

Mission 2 is where I started realizing what a moron I was for saying that Sniping was pointless in this game because what I thought I was doing for fun just to have extra firepower turned out to be a sound strategy in other missions, it's making me rethink the mod that gives me more shots. There won't be as much save scumming as there was in these two updates in the future, save for ONE mission in TRO, which I'm not sure how well they fixed (they changed a lot of the missions since I beat them). The Black Dogs are dangerous as hell. They have a lot of tanks and they're all firing SP-Stabbers, which I've established is a big deal. They move fast, their scouts have rockets, and if your APC is near any of them, it gets prioritized and demolished. There is going to be a lot said about the Black Dogs and their spin-off game on the N64 (Battlezone: Rise of the Black Dogs) when we reach The Red Odyssey and actually get an understanding of the squadron. Anyway, the Redux version makes this mission much easier because the Howitzers are broken, this is something you're gonna see all over TRO, and it won't be even as slightly beneficial as this was. Just get the APCs to the launch pad ASAP and you'll do fine.

Mission 3 is very simple. I was ramming my head into it as hard as possible for no real reason outside of mounting frustration from sleepiness! Anyway, when the two scouts appear and you're warned to avoid them, there are big circular areas you can hide in but the top path is useless for this because the hiding area is too close to the spawning in dudes. I just sniped them and moved on. As soon as the Recycler blows up you can leave and just win but I figured I'd wipe everything out (Explosions!!) and get my squad back. It doesn't work like this. I don't know if it's because the two guys spotted me earlier or because the path you take always has the returning Black Dogs running down it (which would be bull) but yeah, the mission always ends with me bunny hopping back to the barracks.

Mission 4 is, again, very simple, but not remembering it and going in blind makes you think "ok I'm going to get attacked, need to get a tower up to defend myself and build a force." All of these are the wrong options. The sniping is honestly inconsequential because you only have a maximum of 7 guys to have to stand toe to toe with and the rest can be gun tower'd. Building forces from a factory, especially where I built all that stuff, was a huge mistake. The tanks just fly out over the Lava which, as said, is ALL dangerous. I don't know the developers did this, but I don't think the AI was as stupid as Redux's "improvements" make it out to be half the time and I don't remember a lot of pain in this mission from the original. The AI doing what it did on the bridge is something that I am almost confident never happened before the community patches. Basically, just build a barracks, snipe the scouts and take them, head up to the bridge and take out those guys, then build a gun tower and silo and hold the line. You don't have to destroy the base but if you do it right you are basically scrooge mcducking in biometal so there's no reason not to.

And, I have to say again, I did not edit in what happened at the end of Mission 4. That was entirely in-game. I do not have an answer for this. My defense is this quote I don't have the time stamp for sent to Coolguy and Orv and anyone else who'd listen: