Any good tactic?

My key to tactics is adapting my approach to meet the enemy. There is no one size fits all strategy, so being able to replace lost units with the correct units at a rapid pace can make the difference in surviving or not.

The first rule of tactics: Find the enemy, don't let the enemy find you.

You need to know what the enemy has and where. Either scout with planes, or submarines, or use spies to get a picture of what you are facing.

The second rule of tactics: Plan for a 4 to 1 advantage in direct attacks.

So if I am attacking 2 units, I want 8 units. More is better to a point of course, but by having 8 units in my stack I do more potential damage, and the defensive damage that the enemy does will be divided among all 8 units. Of course consider the effects of terrain on your units.

The third rule of tactics: Let artillery do the work

Artillery will kill the enemy from a distance, so you don't lose units in the process. Artillery are also fragile, so they need to be protected. At this point in the war the enemy doesn't have any airbases in range, so I don't have to worry about bombers, so I will put a heavy force between the enemy and my artillery, and just let them bombard, and then move on to the next target.

So instead of blundering in with my tanks I just have some patience and let the artillery do their job. Of course you need quite a bunch of artillery. One or two don't do a lot.

The Fourth rule of Tactics: Shock and Awe

Use speed units to grab undefended provinces. This cuts the enemy territory down, which gives them less places to hide, and gives you more places to hide. It will make your advance faster later. Even if you have to retreat to preserve your units and let them recapture that territory again you have delayed, disrupted, and demoralized the enemy. Some parts of war are psychological as well, so when you take territory even if it was meaningless some enemies may just give up without fighting back. If they do fight back they won't know if they should try to take back the territory that you just stole from them, or maneuver around you and try to run amok behind your lines.

I like to do shock and awe on a large scale when I get a good spy report and have an enemy that isn't paying attention. Racing around behind their lines if I can find a good opening.

The fifth rule of tactics: Don't forget your air support.

While Anti Air units in high numbers are an important part of a balanced stack I also use my own planes to defend my fragile forces. Interceptors on patrol over my units will do considerable damage to enemy bombers. I get nervous if I can't provide air cover for my units.

Of course having bombers of my own is important as well, but that is a more advanced lesson

There is another angle to tactics also:

Attacks don't always go as planned, so how you react is the difference between a minor setback and utter defeat.

Take this example:

I let my attacking front get strung out a bit trying to capture an additional province or two , and left an opening. The enemy (West Texas) had a sizeable force well positioned, and good timing.

15 units in the West Texas group, 11 of which are Armor

My forces at Matador: 3 light tanks, a medium tank, and 3 infantry

And this battle is on Plains, so the enemy armor has a big advantage over my group. If I don't react I will lose my group at Matador, and the artillery group just behind it, and the west Texas stack will then be free to continue on.

I have 48 minutes to either reinforce my position, or abandon it. Abandoning the province and falling back to a better defensible position is far better than to just throw units into the superior force to be lost. If you can't win the battle, fall back and save your forces.

As luck would have it I have 6 mechanized infantry that can be at Matador in 30 minutes. That gives me 13 units to stand my ground against 15. My artillery might win the battle for me, but i will suffer heavy losses.

And I have 9 infantry that can be there in 55 minutes, which is too late. So I will use force march to get them there on time:

I also move my artillery group that was at Matador back behind the lines by about a 12 minute march. This is to make sure that they are far enough back to avoid being caught up in the fight. A close combat attack has a range of 5 km, so I want to make sure my Arty are outside that. This means I have 6 artillery and 3 railroad guns bombarding this oncoming stack of West Texas both before and during the ambush.

That will give me 22 units to defend against 15. Of course 12 of those are infantry, and on plains Infantry staring down a group of tanks makes them just cannon fodder, but with any luck this will delay the enemy enough so that my artillery can make the difference.

After the initial contact with the enemy I feel pretty good about my choice.

Mine:

I lost 3 infantry, and minor damage to other units. Not bad at all.

The enemy:

Lost 5 units, but before I get too ecstatic I realize that a couple of those lost units were already damaged ones, and so the remaining force is still quite tough.

After the second round, including my artillery and railroad guns taking their turn, My forces still look pretty good:

I lost 2 infantry and a mechanized infantry, so I lost 3 units same as the first round.

The enemy:

The enemy lost 4 units, and is looking fairly rough. The commando and one remaining mechanized infantry don't have a lot of fight left in them, and the two remaining medium tanks are damaged.

So now the attacking force has been cut down to 6 and my defenders are at 16 units.

The enemy's last attack brings them down to 2 units:

And up until now my own stack has been sitting there defending itself, responding when attacked and otherwise doing nothing. I now make an attack move with my own 16 stack and finish off the enemy.

Surprisingly I lose a unit in this last battle. 16 against 2, and I end up with 15.

My final loss was 6 infantry and a mechanized infantry lost, while West Texas lost all 15 units. In hindsight the additional infantry may have been unnecessary and just wasted against the heavy armored units. It is hard to weigh their value in the fight, but they did take a lot of losses.

I consider this a victory as I killed 2 units of the enemy for every unit I lost. Other people may have other standards that they expect, but this works for me.

And That is how you assemble a defense to meet an advancing enemy. Give them all the space you need to in order to draw them into your trap. In this case if I had a nearby city to lure them into my infantry and mechanized infantry would have slaughtered the west Texas tanks. You try and take advantage of all the parts of the battle: Terrain, SBDE, forts, and home defense in order to win.

West Texas, eh, Vorlon? Now there's a militia to be feared. Heavily armed rednecks in fast-moving Jeeps and light pickup trucks, with more high-powered rifles than most National Guard infantry units.

Probably vulnerable to air attack though. Bubba doesn't do Stingers.

Hey Vorlon, can I copy what you wrote into my guide? Thanks

SuggestedSuggest wrote:

Hey Vorlon, can I copy what you wrote into my guide? Thanks