Playthrough: Heavy Tank Spam

jubjub bird wrote:

Day 15, Part Two: The Colombian Front

My heavies finish upgrading around 10am local time. Even without my Tacs for support it's still an amazing front line:

Here are the stats for the rightmost stack, which gets a plains boost:

I'm more than frustrated at the way my night has gone and it's time to take my frustration out on Colombia. There are several stacks near my front lines. Colombia hasn't seemed to be the most active player, so I decide to gamble and simultaneously surprise attack three stacks at once. This puts me at risk of being seen before I can engage in melee, giving Colombia the opportunity to fire on me with artillery and pull their units back, but if they don't see me it means all three of my stacks will engage before any of them can be fired upon.

It works. He chose the wrong couple hours to be offline, and all three of my stacks attack simultaneously just before day change. My Navs wipe out his battleships before they can fire a shot. The war has begun, and I've struck a huge blow to start.

Elsewhere, my heavies finish plowing through WBC and move into Alaska. Status at the end of Day 15:

Stats at the end of Day 15: 597/14 k/d, 357/2 provinces

Panzerace: 259

Alaska didn't have a very big army and attacking them allows me to swing my front around to the right, making it into more of a north-south line. It ends up not being a much bigger front at all. They were also still an active player and I wanted to take them out before they had a chance to surprise attack me.

And yea, with Colombia I got a little lucky. I'd been paying attention to their activity levels at various points in the day and they seemed to be most active during my mornings and evenings, so I figured they were either near my timezone and busy with work throughout the day or were on the opposite side of the world and would be most active during my nights. I took that into account when deciding to attack, gambling on my read being right, and was lucky enough that it was.

Very nice. Those HT stacks facing Colombia do 100 damage to suns. Subs! Is there anything they can't do?

z00mz00m wrote:

Very nice. Those HT stacks facing Colombia do 100 damage to suns. Subs! Is there anything they can't do?

And attack from range

Niceeee

Pity about that counter attack losses

They also can’t drop a nuke…

Nice playthrough! Also thanks for showcasing some UI bugs, I forwarded them.

freezy wrote:

Nice playthrough! Also thanks for showcasing some UI bugs, I forwarded them.

Day 16

Scores: 770 / 240 / whatever

Following my demolishing of Colombia's front-line stacks, the biggest army results come in about as expected:

Diplomacy: Cuba and I message and agree on peace terms: I'll leave him to continue farming achievement gold if he promises not to defend Colombia.

Construction: Prop Centers in my core, which are dipping below 100% morale.

Production: More heavies, baby. I also upgrade some of my L2s to L3.

Moves:

My heavies continue their progress into Colombian territory:

As I capture provinces and cities I notice that Colombia has been building industries everywhere they've captured, surely slowing down their production capabilities. They also failed to invest in production building upgrades, and I sweep through so quickly that I'm able to cancel some productions and pick up some extra manpower.

Colombia attacks me with a few attack bombers and sends some strat bombers at my cities, but my AA and Ints are able to handle them easily. With Colombia's closest battleships already destroyed I'm even able to patrol my Navs for some extra air defense.

He allllmost caught one of my ACs running unguarded but I was able to re-consolidate with AA just in time.

As I get ready for bed I notice Colombia consolidating units into a mega stack. I get close enough and see that it's 46 units, including four L2 ATs, with a total of almost 900hp. Ugh. I can either stop here and bring my Tacs down from West Texas in the morning, risking a nighttime attack by Colombia's artillery, orrrr... just plow forward. Screw it, let's attack it. I give the order and go to bed.

My stack before:

The Colombian stack, with stats:

This is what I wake up to the following morning:

My stack took out 46 units in melee combat without taking a single loss.

Colombia continues trying to reinforce their position but it's no use. My Navs take out another naked battleship, and my Ints get in on the action by taking out a naked disembarking convoy (2 meds and a heavy, ouch). By day end, I've pushed through most of Central America and I've taken out the majority of their units.

Elsewhere: Unfortunately not all my overnight news was good. I thought I'd scouted all of Alaska's units and sent a militia to capture what I thought was an empty province. It wasn't, and I took yet another unit loss. That's alright, the rest of Alaska falls easily to my rampaging tanks. I finish off West Texas's units, still frustrated at my losses the previous day. I leave some buffer provinces and save their capital for last, which locks in my conquests in Central America. I make some small advances into West Montana, which has some surprisingly strong units--L3 LTs and L4 ACs. Still no match for heavy tanks.

I keep spies in Colombia and move some into AI New Mexico to see what they've got going on.

End of Day 16 stats: 774/15 k/d, 434/2 provinces

Panzerace: 352

Days 17, 18, and 19: The End

Scores going into Day 17: 950 / 130 / whatever

Points needed to win: 1308

We enter day 17 with four remaining active players, including me. Cuba is no longer a threat by peace treaty, Alaska is a couple provinces away from being fully eliminated, and Colombia is being pushed back across the Panama Canal. These last few days are a little anti-climactic, so I'm going to try to wrap them up in a single post.

My spies got Colombia and New Mexico. Colombia is still producing units (Ints and heavies, too little too late) in their core. New Mexico has the typical AI assortment of units, with some decent stacks that include artillery and anti-tanks. They're going to have to wait until I can get some more units nearby.

My status at the start of Day 17:

Colombia:

New Mexico:

My immediate goal is to cross the Panama Canal, which I do pretty quickly:

By the end of Day 17, I've started to run around his cores with my heavy tanks. I think at this point he quits the game, because his units stop moving shortly after this.

I capture a bunch of territory from West Montana. Northwest Territories declares war. Alberta declares war. End of Day 17:

---

At the start of Day 18, the scores are now: 1040 / 110

I hollow out the core of West Montana and start to advance into Alberta and Northwest Territories. I've basically eliminated Colombia at this point. Here's the state of things around midday:

I attack Oklahoma, successfully capturing the capital before day change and preventing revolts.

End of Day 18:

---

At the start of Day 19 I'm just short of a victory with 1220 points.

War declarations keep coming, including my neighbor to the east, Louisiana. I move a few units over to try to fortify my defenses before bed, and wake up to a stack of about 15 units attacking. They managed to take out two infantry, one militia, and a poor Tac that had arrived at the airfield overnight. Four more frustrating losses overnight to an AI.

I take out my frustration on all my remaining neighbors. I sweep through New Mexico, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories. I notice that Arkansas has come back online--gee, how convenient to come back online just before the game ends so that you can score some gold despite not playing at all. Not on my watch. I send a stack of heavy tanks on a rampage through their territory, taking out over 50 units.

By day end I've added 26 cities to my total for a sum of 1480 points, and the game is over.

I spammed out 94 heavy tanks over the course of the game, most of them produced as or upgraded to level 3. I lost more units than I should have but still did pretty well in final stats:

Most notably, my Panzerace achievement now sits at 422, meaning I took out 305 PVP units with heavy tanks over the course of the game. Not bad. Now it's time for a break.

Some general thoughts on this, in no particular order:

• The results of relying on melee combat were predictable, slowing my progression and forcing me to cycle new units to the front lines as my fighting units accumulated damage. This wasn't as much of a problem once I got a critical mass of heavy tanks, though--I didn't even come close to losing a heavy tank during the game, and I think the only time a heavy got below half-health was during my poorly-planned overnight invasion of West Texas. They did so much damage and had so much HP that even against Colombia's mega-stacks my heavies came out mostly unscathed.
• I obviously benefited from the lack of activity on this map. I don't know if I joined the wrong map somehow or if I just got unlucky with the number of first-time players. Every country east of the Mississippi River went inactive on Day 4. This impacted my approach, because despite AI being incredibly annoying (and even managing to take out some of my units, ALWAYS while I'm sleeping), they're usually pretty predictable. I sought out human players to attack and eliminate, which caused me to journey up the Pacific coast and led to awkwardly long borders. Heavy tanks are great defenders but they're so damn slow that it was hard to keep my borders defended well. Without buffer provinces I don't think it would have been manageable.
• Related, I never really appreciated the 1:1 attack:defense ratio of heavy tanks until now. We often only look at one side of the equation depending on the strength of the unit (attacking values for attacking units, defending values for defensive units), which actually undervalues heavy tanks. The fact that they were just as strong in attacking vs defending made them more flexible than I expected, and several times I was able to choose whether to attack or defend based on my opponent's weaknesses rather than being forced into using my own units' strengths.
• I consider 19 units lost to be a pretty terrible result, especially on a map like this. I think a standard ranged approach would have resulted in a faster win with far fewer losses. Even the giant stacks that my heavies marched through easily (like Colombia's 46-unit stack) would have been shredded just as easily by RRGs or upgraded artillery.

Very nice write up, thoroughly enjoyable to read.

This made me laugh:

Haha thanks, yea I can be a little petty. It didn't help their cause that I was pissed off at Louisiana and looking to take it out on anyone and everyone.

I also realize now that I never posted any casualty counts. Here's the final count of my war with Colombia. Happy to post other wars if folks are curious.

And here's my final army. Lots of ACs and Tacs produced towards the end to clean up provinces and hold off AI attacks.

This playthrough was indeed very impressive and astonishing to read. Very well done with the game as well!

imagine using blueprint heavy tanks

Very nice read! It is too bad that you had it on a map with so little activity, but yeah you can't command that. It seems as if the heavies have a way of becoming ranged units, at this level, in terms of the return damage being taken when utterly smashing up enemies, like that 40-stack you took out with hardly any losses. With the extra advantages that you can't be rushed and your enemy can't run once you're locked in melee.

Still all the effort you took just showed what we really already knew: HT are just not a viable unit at anything but these playground maps. Any serious enemy could have mopped the floor with you anytime.

jubjub bird wrote:

Haha thanks, yea I can be a little petty. It didn't help their cause that I was pissed off at Louisiana and looking to take it out on anyone and everyone.

I also realize now that I never posted any casualty counts. Here's the final count of my war with Colombia. Happy to post other wars if folks are curious.

Could you post the casualties for the West texas war? Thank you

Oof, definitely my worst one

Way to go

Loved every minute of it