Help! Getting ass handed to me in AOW: High Treason

Cafe Society
1

Fellow dopers, I need reinforcements!

I’m trying to play through Atari’s Act of War: High Treason which is a lot like the Command and Conquer games but also a lot harder. And I’m currently stuck on about the third mission.

Basically, so far it’s been like this:
I rescued the guy on the roof and the CIA took him away. No problem, I can do commando missions all day long.
I rescued the plane at JFK, same deal. All I had was a small squad to manage and no base to look after or resources to gather. Easy.
I went to the “Keifer tower” (and is it just me or does this game seriously rip 24 off?) and was not able to rescue anyone there but I did make it out before the building blew up.

Now I’ve gone to Ft. McCoy to confront people who are supposed to be on my side and they keep kicking my ass all over the map. Here’s the situation:

I get one dozer to start with. I can build a barracks, HQ and vehicle depot but I think that’s it. I have about $15,000 to spend on troops, buildings or upgrades.

I get about eight or so heavy snipers. They seem useful but they die so fast when enemy vehicles show up. I don’t know where to place them for maximum damage and minimum loss but I know putting them in the bushes doesn’t help.

I also get three large AFVs. I have found that leaving two of them stock and converting the third one to an artillery canon is pretty devastating.

When I build a vehicle depot I can build buggies, which are about as useful as they sound. Everything is bigger than a buggy.

Now here’s the problem: the enemy just mobs me, sending squads of guys to pound at various areas of my base. Once they’ve chewed me down, I get a call from some helpful lady somewhere who says she’s found me a nice field to set up on. The only problem is, she never tells me where it is!

I have explored directly east of where my base is. There are large barracks there full of enemies. Attacking these buildings proves fruitless.

I have explored southeast of my base. There is a large baseball field which I think might be the field the helpful lady was referring to. Unfortunately, it’s being used as a staging area for an army that doesn’t like me very much.

Southwest of my base is another barracks collection full of rocket soldiers. Hostile AFVs appear out of everywhere if I try to attack these buildings.

Northwest and west of my base is my objective, heavily guarded.

North hasn’t been explored much but is too close to the objective not to be heavily guarded.

Northeast requires going by East and thus dying painfully.

So I’m stuck in the middle of the map getting massacred. Anyone who is familiar with this game, please help!

2

Ok, I managed to beat this bitchy mission unassisted. It turns out there is no training field per se but there are huge houses with money in them. I was able to build OICW units which were awesome against vehicles and infantry. So after holding off attack after attack after attack I managed to rescue the guy I was supposed to rescue and managed to evac everyone through heavy opposition. If anyone wishes to tell me this game is going to become more fun later on, I would be happy to hear it although I’m not sure I’ll believe it.

3

I actually loved the game, though I’m not sure whether the High Treason thing is an expansion pack. Dunno, didn’t play that one, though I know one came out. Ah man, time to find an online retailer methinks . . .

A few tips; snipers are best coupled to protect rocket-launcher infantry from getting rushed by men. The way you’d usually do this is to set up a rocket-launcher team around a corner from a tank throughfare and set the sniper a bit back from them again. Kind of like:



| o o o |
| * * * |
|       |
|       |__
|       X
|        __  
|Y      |

Where X is the rocket team (plausibly in a troop carrier, so it can drive home and get repaired, or paired with a medic if they’re availible (can’t remember if AOW has those) and Y is the sniper. * is enemy infantry and o is the tanks. You’ll need to do a spot of micromanagement ever so often - dumping the rocket soldiers from the APC if there’s lots of tanks, for instance - but it beats manually defeating the tank rushes.

4

Yes, High Treason is the expansion pack although it runs just fine even if you don’t install the original AOW first.

Thanks for the advice. I did end up using a similar formation to defend my base. The OICWs (which have anti vehicle and anti personnel modes) were out front defending while the snipers sat in the back hurting whomever got too close. The main problem was that I couldn’t build any more snipers. I was given eight of them at the beginning of the mission and once they were gone there was no way of replacing them. There’s no medic units but there is a medevac chopper, which was not available in this mission. I imagine the game will become more fun as the build tree opens up a bit more.

Is there an APC that they can fire out the windows of? I had three Stryker vehicles and they didn’t seem to be able to shoot out of those. I didn’t try buggies because they were too vulnerable.