VR Designs

And once again: Welcome back to Advanced Tactics Gold college! I am happy to see that you are still with me. Today we are going to take a closer look at artillery. Artillery deserves your full attention since it allows you to damage your opponent without endangering your own troops. Artillery is crucial to attaining victory!

Artillery functions differently from the troop types thus far discussed. It does relatively little direct damage in the form of killing enemy troops. What it does do is decrease the enemy troops their readiness substantially as well as lowering their morale and entrenchment somewhat. For example: 2 artillery attacking 40 unentrenched infantry will only do 3 kills, but they will reduce readiness with a whopping 40 percent.

Keep in mind that readiness is one of the most vital statistics used in combat. For example: 60 of your infantry and 2 armoured cars assaulting 40 enemy infantry with 125 entrenchment will on average lose 14 infantry versus also 14 enemy infantry losses and will have a 60% chance to take the hex. Not bad you might think…

However if we had first used 5 artillery guns on those enemy troops we would have gotten their readiness down to 55 and their entrenchment down to about 60. If we would have attacked after the artillery barrage (with the same troops as in previous example) then on average only 2 infantry would be lost versus 20 enemy infantry lost and a 98% chance on successfully taking the hex would be realized.

I hope this example has shown you why building artillery is a good idea. Artillery comes in two sizes: artillery and heavy artillery. Regular artillery can attack from 2 hexes away and heavy artillery from 3 hexes away. Heavy artillery however is double the price to construct while it does almost the same amount of damage. The reason to get Heavy artillery is not to increase casualties and readiness reduction, but to increase structural dammage. The heavy artillery does 4 times the amount of structural damage that regular artillery does. Which brings us to sieges.

In previous lessons it was already shown that substantial enemy garrisons will be able to “hedgehog” in or around a town and be able to hold off your attacks. To repeat: Towns allow up to 200 entrenchment score for troops garrisoned in it. This, plus the advantageous landscape modifiers and the fact that most towns will be a source of supply makes it possible for the defenders to hold on indefinitely…

Indefenitely? Well…. Not if the attacker brings some artillery units with him. With artillery you can bombard the town without having to engage in costly battles. Yes artillery barrages will soften up the defender for assault, but the key here is the fact that artillery does structural damage to locations as well. By reducing the defending town to eventually 0 structural points you will destroy the supply source of the defenders. Without supply the defenders will become sitting ducks within just a few rounds and defeating them will be easy.

Artillery is not just a good weapon for the offensive player, the defensive player should use it as well! In defense you can use artillery to cause readiness damage to enemy spearhead units and that way slow them down. Also the defender can add artillery to town garrisons that are under siege. They can use this artillery to try to take out any enemy artillery that is laying siege to it. Usually the artillery in the town has an advantage in entrenchment and landscape modifiers to any artillery on the outskirts of the town.
Furthermore artillery can be used well in the role of coastal defense: it will defend together with any navy in port against enemy ships assaulting your harbor and can also be used to bombard any ships blocking your ports.

It should also be mentioned that from level II research onwards Infantry Guns have an artillery range of 1. This allows these infantry attack support guns to double as light artillery. An infantry gun has artillery attack power equal to about a third of the power of regular artillery.

Then there is a special troop type only available to the Russians: the Katushya. The Katushya is a specialst weapon since when you use it in attack it will fire all its rockets and will then dissolve. It is thus a once-use-only weapon. (like all rockets) However when used properly it can help you assure victory versus a strong defense. Do not use the Katushya in artillery barrages but let it join in a land attack. That way it will force to retreat a lot of the defenders in the first combat round and make it much easier for the remaining attackers in the remaining combat rounds to force enough extra retreats (and kills) to make the enemy unit retreat or panic.

Keep in mind there is an artillery attack stack maximum. You can only fire for 100 artillery stack points into a hex, once you exceed that number you run into the law of diminishing returns. Using artillery in regular land attacks does not increase artillery stack points, but does increase regular battle stack points.

Artillery might seem all powerful… However it is very vulnerable in land attack. When you ever see unprotected enemy artillery: attack it!

Artillery is also very vulnerable to airstrikes. You will want to have air superiority or huge amounts of flak guns present when you mass a lot of artillery in the same hex.

The punch of artillery slacks off significantly when attacking hexes that give the defenders a lot of cover… attack effect is reduced with -50% to -75% when attacking forests, mountains and urban hexes.

You will notice that artillery moves at a speed at best 2 hexes a round. Add 1 horse per artillery gun or 1 truck per 2 guns to mobilize your artillery and get it more quickly were you want it. Heavy artillery is to heavy to be carried by horses, it needs trucks. Instead of trucks you can also use halftracks or trains to mobilize your artillery.

In a previous lesson we discussed using tanks “en masse” to breakthrough on a small stretch of enemy frontage. Doing an artillery barrage on that small stretch of enemy front before your blitzkrieg-style tank attack will greatly improve your chances of quick breakthrough. If you combine artillery and tanks properly you will basically follow a ww2 soviet offensive doctrine. If you have the production power and the raw materials to build both artillery and tanks I advise you to do so!

This “Red Army” advice concludes this lesson. I hope you learned something and I will hopefully see you next lesson again. Next topic will be fighters, dive bombers and level bombers.

Best regards,
Vic

Welcome back to Advanced Tactics Gold college! In the last lesson we discussed the use of tanks. We have seen that enemy tanks are usually able to defeat, outmanouver and encirlce any infantry based army you might have. The obvious counter strategy when faced with enemy tanks is to build your own tank army. However you might be pressed for raw materials, have oil shortages, or more likely: you might have another front to worry about that requires all or most of your tanks.

The cheap stop-gap solution versus enemy tanks is to add anti-tank weapons to your infantry armies. Anti-tank weapons come in 2 varieties: anti-tank guns and bazooka’s. Both are cheap in production cost and in raw material use. Bazooka’s are the cheapest and cost only 250 production points and 1 raw material. Anti-tank guns cost 1000 production points and 5 raw materials. Both provide decent anti-tank capability, especially when they are well entrenched. However the core operational downside of both troop types is their lack of mobility.

The lack of mobility means you’ll have to equip your whole front with anti-tank weaponry, while the enemy tank strike is usualy only going to be focussed on a smaller part of your front.

It might thus be a good idea to mobilize anti-tank guns and quickly move them up to the part of the front where they are needed, but the added costs of trucks or halftracks will make this expensive. You might be better advised to construct some assault guns or tankkillers and put those in your mobile anti-tank reserve. Once the enemy has shown the direction of his attack you should drive your mobile anti-tank forces to a hex with high entrench value in the path of the enemy: a town, a forest or a mountain would be ideal.

Now what exactly is the difference between the anti-tank gun and the bazooka? First of all the anti-tank gun is a “rear area” troop type. This means that the gun will live to see another battle when an enemy attack is stopped. So theoretically the anti-tank gun will be able to build up a lot of experience and gain an edge. However in practice you’ll find out that your frontline units will have a hard time surviving blitzkrieg style offensives. Secondly the anti-tank guns are bigger and are quite an easy prey for enemy divebomber attacks. If you do not have air superiority you’d better go for bazooka’s instead of anti-tank guns.

Don’t rely on the anti-tank gun in offensive use. It performs 3x better in defense then in offense. And it truly needs the added modifier of entrenchment to be truly cost-effective. In defense when 5 anti-tank guns with 100 entrenchment are attacked by 5 light tanks the light tanks have only a 10% chance of succesfully taking the hex, on average 2 light tanks (production point cost: 4000) will be lost versus only 1 anti-tank (production point cost: 1000). However the heavier the tanks get the less impressive the anti-tank guns performance will be. When 2 heavy tanks attack 5 anti-tank guns with 100 entrenchment they have 40% chance of succes, on average 0.8 heavy tank will be lost in such an attack for about 1,5 anti-tank gun.

Bazooka’s perform about the same in defense as anti-tank guns, though admittedly they perform slightly less well, and they cannot be protected from casualties for they are “frontline” troops. Compared to anti-tank guns they will have a harder time building up experience.

However bazooka’s can also be used to some extend in attacking tanks, especially when mixed into a larger infantry unit. For example 20 bazooka’s have a chance of 20% of succesfully taking a hex from 5 defending light tanks. Another example: An infantry group that costs the same ammount of production points as those 5 defending light tanks, like 32 bazooka’s and 20 infantry has a 65% chance of succes in the same attack, losing on average 12 troops (production value 2000), while killing 2 tanks (production value 4000). Bazookas will not perform much worse against heavier tanks, unlike anti-tank guns that really lose punch versus heavy tanks. Bazookas use hollow charge projectiles that are deadly to almost all tanks from close up.

My advice is whenever possible to use anti-tank weapons in combination with a small force of tanks in reserve. When the enemy armour attacks and breaks through your lines you should use your (mobile) anti-tank weapons to create a blockage and stop or delay them, while using your own armour to flank the enemy advance and if possible cut-off their spearhead.

Furthermore when on the defense it is always wise to put just one or two anti-tank guns in towns and mountain roads behind your current front, they will entrench up to 200 points when given a few rounds to do so and will then be a very hard nut to crack for any tanks trying to take such a hex by force. Call it insurance for disaster.

As a last note it should also be pointed out that flak guns have some limited value as anti-tank weapons. 3 or 4 flak guns should perform the same as 1 anti-tank gun. When fighting a defensive war without air superiority it is a good investment to buy a little bit more flak then you would normally do since they will help you defend against armoured and air attack at the same time.

Not sure what the next lesson topic will be. I think it is about time to discuss artillery.

Best regards,
Vic

Welcome back to Advanced Tactics Gold College! Today we will be looking a bit closer at tanks. The first thing to notice about ATG is that there are quite a lot of different types of tanks. The core types of tanks are: the armoured car, the light tank, the medium tank, the heavy tank and the tank destroyer. In this lesson you’ll learn when best to build what type of tank. In this lesson I will be referring to armoured cars as tanks, I hope the reader will bear with me and accept that the armoured car could be seen as a very little tank on wheels.

If you are not playing a stone-age game you will start with the research to produce the armoured car and the light tank from the start of the game. The other types of tanks require research investment before you’ll be able to produce them.

In previous lessons it has become painfully obvious that infantry is very good in defence and “excessive” amounts of rifle or smg are necessary when you try to take ground using infantry only. The core point of this lesson is that you should use tanks to attack infantry. Tanks perform really well in attack against infantry because the armour on the tanks protects them from the small arms fire that the rifle, smg and machinegun defenders put up. For example doing an attack with 10 armoured cars on 100 entrenched infantry has a chance of 80% to succeed and is likely to cause 45 infantry kills for only 2 destroyed armoured cars.

The types of tanks you can build vary from light, like the armoured car to heavy, like the heavy tank. Production cost of an armoured car is just a 1000 production points where as production cost of a heavy tank is 5000. Production of an armoured car costs 10 raw materials per car, while production of an heavy tank costs a whopping 160 raw materials per tank. And although the heavier tanks are much more expansive to build then the lighter tanks they do not perform that much better on the battlefield versus infantry. For example: 10 armoured cars attacking 100 infantry have an 80% chance of success, 5 light tanks versus 100 infantry only have a 55% chance of success and 2 heavy tanks versus 100 infantry only a 30% chance of success. So if your just fighting against infantry make sure to build the lightest tanks possible: armoured cars.

However when your facing enemy tanks the advice is reversed. Heavier tanks perform better in tank-to-tank combat then lighter tanks. This is because heavier tanks have better armour and higher calibre guns. So when facing enemy tanks ideally you will want to field tanks one class higher the enemy is fielding. So if the enemy is fielding armoured cars, you will try to field light tanks. If the enemy is fielding light tanks, you will try to field medium tanks. For example: If you attack 5 enemy light tanks with 5 of your own light tanks the chance of success is 62%. If you attack 3 enemy medium tanks with 5 of your own light tanks the chance of success drops to 35%. If you attack 2 enemy heavy tanks with those 5 light tanks the chance of success even drops to 13%.

So the balancing act a good player has to perform is to find the sweet spot in production choices that makes his tank force as cost-effective as possible versus infantry, but also against enemy tanks, while at the same time not using up to much raw materials. Good luck with this balancing act!

Other advice that is important is the fact that tanks perform a bit better in offensive use then in defensive use. All things else being equal: try to use tanks in offensive use. The heavier tanks are relatively more vulnerable to infantry attacking them then the lighter tanks, so be sure to protect them by adding some sort of support with them like light tanks, machineguns and infantry.

Furthermore tanks are vulnerable to air attack. We’ll discuss that in a later lesson in more detail, but for now its important tot realise that tanks cannot fight back against their nemesis: the divebomber. The heavier tanks are relatively more vulnerable to air attack then the lighter models. Be sure to have air cover for your armoured units or when that is not possible to have flak guns with your armoured formations. Hiding your tanks in towns and forests can also help a lot, when faced with a loss of air superiority.

Talking about landscape types… Its important to realise tanks perform best on flat plains. The more cover the landscape allows the less well the tanks perform when attacking. Forests, swamps, towns and mountains give penalties on tank attack varying between -50% and -75%.

Swamps and Paddies are the only landscape types that give tanks a defensive penalty as well. Swamps and Paddies are normally not accessible by wheeled and tracked subformation types, but when roads are present they can enter.

The Tank Destroyer deserves some special attention. This tank is specialized in attacking enemy tanks. It performs well in offensive and defensive use, but versus enemy tanks only. It is superior to even the Heavy Tank. For example: 2 Tank Destroyers attacking 2 Heavy Tanks have a chance of 65% of success. However tank destroyers are especially vulnerable against infantry counter attack.

Assault Guns also deserve mention. They are basically medium tanks that are equipped with a fixed gun, instead of with a moving turret. This gives them a disadvantage in offensive operations, but makes them about as good as a medium tank in defensive use. Its cheaper to produce then the medium tank due to its simplified design. Assault Guns are best used as mobile anti-tank forces or in offensively engaging light tanks and armoured cars. (at the moment the assault gun is slightly to strong, this will be fixed in upcoming patch v2.06)

Super Heavy Tanks are not available to all players. Only players playing a regime ruled by the German people can build these behemoths. They require 9000 production points to build as well as 240 raw materials. You should only build them if you have way to much raw materials and complete air superiority and are facing an enemy with strong medium or heavy tank forces. And to be honest: even in those circumstances I question the wisdom of building these gigantic monsters. The super heavy tanks beats all other tanks including tank destroyers in tank-to-tank combat, however it is vulnerable to infantry counter-attack.

All tanks use oil and you should always keep an eye on oil supply and oil use. Do not build more tanks then your oil stocks can handle. When you are out of oil the tanks lose a lot of mobility and fight with big penalties!

Concluding I want to advice you to exploit the mobility of tanks! Yes armour is good in attacking infantry, but instead of trying to attack the enemy all over the line you should aim to attack at a couple of chosen “schwerpunkten”, annihilate the enemy front on those few hexes and then drive your armoured units deep into the rear of the enemy. Once you have two or more breakthroughs you will be able to connect the pincers of those “panzer drives” and form pockets. Enemy troops captured in pockets will quickly run out of supplies and then will be easy prey even to your infantry formations. Forming pockets is the ultimate way to win!

I hope you learned something today. The next lesson will be on anti-tank weapons.

Kind regards,
Vic

Welcome back! I enjoyed writing the first Advanced Tactics Gold College lesson so much that I turn to the second lesson ahead of schedule. Today we will discuss mortars and machineguns. Both troop types only require research to produce them if you are playing a stone-age game, otherwise basic research is already acquired at start of a game. Although these troop types require raw materials, the requirements are very low: machineguns require 1 raw unit and mortars 2 raw units. Production cost for machineguns is 250 and for mortars 500. (rifles & smg’s cost 100)

In the last lesson we discussed the relatively weak offensive potential of infantry. An easy way to boost the offensive power of an infantry attack is to add mortars to your attacking infantry units. 1 Mortar has about 4 times more offensive firepower then 1 rifle/smg. Furthermore it is a so called ”rear area” type, which means it can only be hit by the enemy if the ”frontline” troops of its unit have been defeated. As a side-note it should be said that the effect of a mortar placing a hit is not of the same quality as rifle or smg placing a hit due to their kill and retreat effect percentages being lower (10% instead of 25%).

To make optimal use of your mortars make sure to mix them with enough cannon-fodder infantry to protect them from enemy breakthrough and subsequent dammage. This is vital. And this advice goes for all “rear area” types. Basicly giving a unit 75% frontline troops when at 50% retreat setting will keep your “rear area” troops most of the time. Their continued survival due to being “rear area” will allow you to build up high experienced mortars in the course of a number of offensives.

Also keep in mind that mortars count as 1 stack point, just as rifles and smg’s do. Since they have about 4 times more offensive power that means that when confronted with stack limits for your attack you can better attack with mortars, since they will allow you to stay within stack limits while increasing your attack power. For example the attack power of 30 mortars and 70 infantry is about the same as that of 200 infantry, while only having half of the stack points.

Furthermore mortars pack offensive punch while having infantry move speed. They dont have to be mobilized to move effectively, like artillery guns do.

Mortars also still function reasonably well in defense, though they lose half their power in that role. However the are still “rear area”, so if the unit isn’t completely broken they will survive the battle.

At best I would add about 1 mortar to every 20 rifle just to let them build up experience by continued kills and survival due to being a “rear area” type. To be honest I would in most circumstances advise players to not buy to many mortars. They are relatively expensive compared to their effect and they require expert play to squeeze out their few relative advantages.

The machinegun is the reverse of the mortar, where as the mortar gives offensive boost this is the troop type you should buy to increase the defensive strength of your infantry units even further. In defensive use it has about 10 times the power of a regular rifle or smg’s. However it is not “rear area” type like the mortar and it is just as vulnerable as regular rifle or smg’s , so you will always want to mix them with cheaper troops to take casualties. There should be some optimum ratio for defensive use of machineguns, but I am not sure how to calculate, i think 1 machinegun on every 10 rifles or smg’s is about right.

Especially when well entrenched in for example forest, mountain or town the machinegun will prove a deadly defense against infantry attacks. The machinegun is defenitely a more interesting buy then the mortar in my opinion.

The mortar and the machinegun might seem like a more cost-effective buy then rifle and smg’s and actually tempt you to put a lot of them in your units, but be warned! They die just as easily as cheap infantry when under air or artillery attack. (or panzer attack for that matter) This means that when you buy a lot of them you end up using your mortars and machineguns as expensive cannon fodder. This is something that you should not let happen to yourself, cannon fodder should be as cheap as possible!

That concludes the lesson for today. I hope you have learned something. Next lesson we’ll discuss using tanks.

Kind regards,
Vic

Welcome to Advanced Tactics Gold College. I am planning to give a number of lessons that will help the novice player with his strategy and tactics. Probably most of these lessons will also be usefull to more experienced players since I regularly note that even experienced players sometimes miss important things. I will start this ATG college course of with a discussion of the different types of equipment and troops available to you. Today we will start easy and discuss rifles and submachineguns (SMGs).

Rifles and SMGs are the 2 variants of basic infantry that are available to all regimes. They can come come in level I,II,III and IV variants. Both requiring the same “Rifle/SMG II/III/IV” research fields. It is only if you start a game in stone-age mode that you still have to research a seperate “SMG Infantry” research field before you can produce any SMGs, in all other cases Rifle and SMG are immediately producable upon starting a new game.

Rifles are more versatile then SMGs and can be used in any landscape type. However if you know that a lot of the fighting is going to take place in close quarters like urban and forest terrain you are advised to produce SMGs instead of Rifle. SMGs are only 10% more expensive to produce, but they give 25% combat bonus attacking and defending in forest, fortification and urban landscapes.

You should use rifles and SMGs in defense only, unless you can mix them with some more offensive equipment like for example mortars or tanks. The thing is that the offensive attack value of these infantry types versus other infantry is 13. Their defensive attack value is 26. That means you need to attack at 2:1 odds if the enemy is not entrenched. And finding an unentrenched enemy is highly unlikely! except in the desert plains. Rifle and SMG both have an entrenchment increase of 40 per round and get auto entrenchment in almost all landscape types.

Lets say you face enemy infantry with 100 entrenchment points. That means that in combat their hitpoints will be doubled. If you just attack with infantry versus such an entrenched enemy infantry position you would need at least 4:1 odds. The same enemy, for example well entrenched inside a town can easily get 200 entrenchment points, which would require any infantry-only attack to have at least 8:1 odds to have a chance to succeed.

These odds, especially in towns and fortifications, give the defender the option to make it impossible for the offensive side to take a hex with infantry. Simply by putting so many defending infantry into a hex that the enemy will run into attack stack problems to execute the attack. If for example the defending side has 70 infantry in a town with 200 entrenchment then the attacking side should attack with at least 8 times more troops…. 560 infantry. The problem however is that even when the attacker can attack from all 6 sides the land attack stack maximum is still only 250. So the attacker cannot really make his numbers count. The only options left for an attacker is to either attack a few turns repeatedly with overstacked attacks and suffer horrendous casualties or to lay siege. We will get back to this when we discuss artillery.

So be warned and use infantry defensively! They may be weak but when well entrenched they can pose a formidable obstacle.

A noteworthy exception is adding infantry to offensive tank units. It does not help that much in offensive power as the infantry will at best act as cannonfodder, but it does help to protect your tanks from any possible counter attacks in the enemies turn.

If you got the oil and the raw resources you might consider mobilizing your infantry by building trains, trucks or halftracks for them. All can carry 20 infantry a piece. This way you can get quickly get a defensive unit to the place where it needs to be.

Thats it for today. I hope you have enjoyed this lesson! In the next lesson I will turn to machineguns & mortars.

Best regards,
Vic