The Awesomeness of Arty

Note to Goth: re Company of Heroes

Goth, due to your chronic ineptitude at any game, the logical conclusion of this discussion would be that you'd end up wanting me to play with 1 trio of engineers against your unrestricted mass army of whatever you figured out how to build. The sad fact is that I'd probably still win, dancing around your lethargic German stooges, imolating them from their pea-like testicles outwards, much the same as my lone infantryman successfully anihalated a whole squad of Todes's elite officers in a previous stouch. "WTF!? Bayls upgraded to flamethower!" would come screeching over TS as your stubby little fingers mashed the keyboard in panic and my lone squad of barely-armed pseudo-combatants marauded around the map dodging the friendly arty raining down on your own units.

We played a "No Tanks" match last night, so there was little point me choosing armour. My lazy, economical playing style means I don't like moving units, and I like to watch a bit of TV while pwning inferior opponents, so I went for the (largely) static arty option. I do this pretty much every game, so that my gameplay is predictable enough to give the opposition a chance to tailor their own tactics to suit. Still, you squandered this chance and elected to play the most retarded option available to you as Axis. I have no idea what this was because I didn't sight any of your units unless they were cartwheeling through the air, limbs flailing as uselessly as yours were in a desperate and ultimately useless effort to somehow combat the tide of your own incompetence.

At the start of the game, the Allies were quick to blow the 2 bridges, sealing off critical routes to the Allied heartland. Presumably, the Axis spent the opening minutes blowing each other in a frenzy of incompetent indecision about who should build the first motorbike. We also sealed the middle road, all without me building a single offensive unit. To us, this was simple and logical; to you, an incomprehensable strategy as far beyond the realms of your limited cerebellum as the punctuation keys on your keyboard. Unlike your real-life reaction to being served your own arse with a side of cold mashed potato grenade and a 105mm shell casing, you spent the game trying to build a bridge and get your beleagured troops over it. Sadly it was a bridge under constant artillery attack at the south end of the map. Like Bart Simpson proving his mental inferiority to a hamster by repeatedly touching live electricity, you condemned wave after wave of your own troopers to an explosive death by marching them boldly to this one spot on the map. Once there, they stopped and stared at the smouldering pile of impassable rubble that you'd commanded them to march across, and even I could sense their little digital hearts break as I clicked "fire" during the next commercial break. The savagery of their explosive transformation into a red mist was a sight to behold if only you'd managed to tear your viewpoint from whatever inanimate tree you appeared to spend the bulk of the game subjecting to a thorough, pixel by pixel examination. The continual thunder of my incessant barrage of high explosive was perhaps drowned out by the flatulant symphony conducted in your tortured bowels as your overworked digestive system fought its own pitched battle about which of your four lunchtime Whoppers to attack first. Regardless, I eventually ceased my artillery bombardment of your hapless troops when the ground became so pockmarked with craters, your continual deluge of e-tears was rendering the entire area a drowning risk for the allied troops now swarming over the map.

At one point I came back from a lengthy excursion to the little Admirals' room, saw Todes's Ostwinds lumbering towards my massed artillery. Unfortunately there were no allied troops in the vicinity as they were busy in Todes's base destroying his Ostwind factory. By "Ostwind" I mean "tank". And by "tank" I mean the tanks we agreed not to use during the game. Anyway, the 5 massed Ostwinds (aka tanks) managed to manouver into place so that they all shot each other in an attempt to fire on my arty, but nevertheless managed to destroy most of them before being killed themselves. In a cunning and startling tactical move, I rebuilt them all half a screen away closer to Goth's base, which was sufficient to fool the Axis for the remainder of the game.

To describe the ensuing carnage would be boring repetition except that in a no-tank game, the number of tanks (including Ostwinds) was amazing. This may have started with someone calling for a group reinforcement which unfortunately contains a tank killer. I saw this sitting idly on our side of the map for most of the game. In response, it looks like someone on Axis built a tank to combat the allied tank, at which point someone else built a tank and then suddenly everyone had tanks. Not me though. I didn't even build a tank factory, and avoided using my most powerful Commander option because I knew it contained a (forbidden) tank killer unit.

So yes Goth, there was some arty, and yes it fell upon your pointy little head for most of the game. This post has merely served to confirm your tactical inability to counter this eminently vulnerable, motionless, and resource intensive unit and as such, reinforces to everyone that it should be the strategy of choice for an easy win against you. I admit however that as with the Todes game, it does get tedious playing a game in which you don't actually see an opposing soldier for the duration, except for the flaccid and hollow moment of "triumph" when I finally built a jeep and trundled over to your ruined base, to find it populated solely by swastika bedecked corpses, bums naked and poingnantly skyward, littered around the burnt-out remains of a headquarters that was the opus of a capitulation not seen since the Darlington Sizzler head chef saw a salivating Tossed Salad approaching the all you can eat buffet in 1998.