Woohoo! Progress! No I have not beaten the stage yet, but apparently the tactic of abandoning the eastern front works like a charm. I executed the strategy terribly (detailed coming) but I still managed to capture the eastern town and kept Brit alive until the newly established position in the eastern town got overrun. This sort of tactics is not uncommon in history, and was used by the Soviet in World War 2 and the Vietnamese against the Mongolians, two examples that come to my mind right now.
The theory of this stage is that you are fighting a defensive battle on open ground, against a force which both outnumbers you and outclasses you in terms of individual unit strength. The enemy's supply line is also much more ample than yours, and they have better, pre-established radar cover. (Thank god they don't have a bunch of jammers)
That means you will lose utterly unless you change the nature of the battle.
Right at the beginning of the stage, I have a planum flatten a piece of rough ground surrounding the enemy's Vision drone, and have a Snake swoop in to kill it before it has a chance to ascend. This robs the enemy of radar coverage of the western front. It has a radar tank on the North West, but the range of that does not extend far enough. The effect of this is that the enemy no longer see where your forces are. They only know that you have a city and a factory in the South, and they will move in to capture it, encountering no resistance.
Build two Nashorn tanks. After turn 1, move your Nashorns out, do the "capture and recapture" trick, and then move the Nashorns back in. This will be your harassment force, which will be left behind to sell their lives as dearly as they could. Save your energy from here. Every repair counts from this point onward. For 3 turns after this, train the Nashorns and the troll you just captured to bring them to level 12. Once they reach level 12, immediately release and let them pursue the main force without radar cover, run into anything and fight them blind if need to.
As for your main force, move them due east at top speed. Do not stop to fight even a single battle, except to finish off extremely weak (<= 3 health) units, and even then try to stage the move so that the fighters always attack at the end of its movement range. Keep your buggies and stings handy to kamikaze any archimedes that you have a clear path to. This particular strategy maximize the utility of your artillery while minimize theirs. Ballistics is almost useless at low levels, so unless the archimedes have infantry to shoot at and kill decisively to level up, it will rain shells ineffectively on your armour column. While you will use your mobile artillery in close range to compensate for the fact that your units are green and won't hit the side of a barn from afar.
For the first two turns, while you still can, stay away from the enemy's vision range even as you are moving. You are enticing them to run into ambushes to minimize damage done.
Capture the city to the south East with a snake, and move the radar tank up North but back west instead of east, to provide extra radar cover for your main force. You should have two radar tank inside your eastern most town while the mainforce is executing the fighting retreat.
Do not be tempted to outflank the enemy by moving anything North too early. Just go due East, and only start veering North near the fortifications of your Eastern most town.
What I did wrong was executing this strategy, but at some point becoming overconfident since I had diverted most of the enemy's heavy tanks into my empty territory without any lost, I lingered near my Eastern most town in an attempt to move North and capture the towns due North to the seige line, instead of keep moving East. I lost nearly half of my forces here, and was delayed for long enough that some of the Nashorns from the East caught up.
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