VR Designs

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

The Wargamer.com posted my developer notes on Advanced Tactics Gold today. The notes include screenshots, highlights of new features as well as some thoughts on future VR Designs titles. Click here to read it.