Countering mechanized infantry?

    This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to our Cookie Policy.

    • In my oppinion, Arty is thekey to be successful.
      Success means killing more troops while taking minimal losses or damage.

      I like the MRLS, but it is a longrunner.
      I made good results with towed indeed. They are early buildable what means you can mobilize many until they get the airassault feature and they anre the perfect anti-inf weapon.

      Yes they lack range later, but you know what you build and can react on that with choppers or somthing else...
      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
      Dorado Games
      DE - Team Lead
      Conflict of Nations




      "That was not me, it was already broken!"
    • Old thread this one
      But the Mech infantry & AFV are a popular combo used well and deliver decent anti air
      defence quite capable of inflicting substantial damage and taking out air units.
      when am attacked or going after this combo i prefer to use terrain as the advantage
      and where possible engage them on jungle terrain for attack -50% & -25% Mountain terrain -50%
      and build outpost for my defensive force , once battle commences engage with air units
      artillery great if you have it in range
    • General SRM wrote:

      737373elj wrote:

      akara211 wrote:

      MrBookShelf wrote:

      Mechanized infantry had above average defend damage to aircraft and helicopter.
      Be sure to heal your aircraft and heli if you are using them. Avoid losing them if possible. More safely way will be using artillery.

      Also don't forget common tactic like Garrison.
      Is it okay if I use normal artillery?
      Just... don't use Towed. Mobile and MRLs strictly and only, if you ever need artillery.
      What's wrong with towed? MRLs can't be airlifted and after 20 days in the game you'll get remote engagement abilities in the motorized infantries with mortars. So what's the point?
      - because their damage against hard targets (which is pretty much anything that could pose some sort danger) is pretty bad, on top of that it's the slowest artillery and has the lowest range... yes you can airassault but deploying after that takes like 90 minutes, which is plenty of time for enemies to get closer so at best it makes for a quick escape
      - MRLs can be airlifted at T2
      - the ranged option of motorized infantry is lackluster at best; their range is terrible and the only attackmodifiers they get are negative ones ... if you're gonna make use of ranged attacks waiting until day 20 definitly is not the play to make; you could take away their ranged upgrade and not a single thing would really change (except maybe for 4x? opulon mentioned something about mortar inf and 4x)

      the point ultimately is that if you're going to do artillery you might as well commit to it and do mobile artillery or mrls
      I am The Baseline for opinions
    • Disembarking takes 60 min from air assault :)

      In old times towed where able to attack while disembarking, which got taken out therefore made the air assault a lot weaker.

      Their range of course is their main weakness compared to other artillery units.

      Toweds are only usefull in early game, but they learn the ability far to late, to be a real consideration. Gunships therefore outclass them heavily.
    • The air assault ability is most useful in defence. You can have one artillery stack cover a very large front, defending several choke points. It allows you to deploy its firepower wherever it's needed at short notice, rather than having to move units overland to the place where you're being attacked. It also allows you take better advantage of angles on ground routes and use terrain modifiers more easily. You can pair them with air assault AA to protect them from enemy air attacks, and you can use air assault TDs to protect them from melee units while they disembark. The airborne officer can give them an attack boost as well.

      I think they're really good. The flexibility offered by air assault allows you to be more unpredictable and catch your enemy out.
    • The problem of Towed is the same than Mobile Artillery.

      It's a defecting game ---> If someone, by day 18, is doing the transition to MRLs, you will get gradually rekt without any retaliation ability.

      However, Towed artillery in early is fine, if albeit a bit pricey (and hard to synergise with air/naval).
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.
    • Opulon wrote:

      The problem of Towed is the same than Mobile Artillery.

      It's a defecting game ---> If someone, by day 18, is doing the transition to MRLs, you will get gradually rekt without any retaliation ability.

      However, Towed artillery in early is fine, if albeit a bit pricey (and hard to synergise with air/naval).
      I don't really see it like that, to be honest.

      TA isn't a good counter to MRLs, but that doesn't make them less useful beyond the early game. It just means you have to use a different unit to counter MRLs.

      Destroyers aren't very good at countering Cruisers, but that doesn't mean Destroyers become obsolete after your opponent gets Cruisers.
    • Their advantage over Gunships is that they can deal damage without receiving it; they can avoid AA while in helicopter mode and still get into range for a shot. Because they are ground units, you can use them in stacks of 10 rather than 5 without efficiency penalties, which actually gives them more potential damage value per stack, plus they're better against hard targets anyway. And they're a little bit cheaper.

      Their advantage over MRLs is mostly down to the air assault capability. You can put them down wherever you want within a 400 distance radius. That doesn't have to be exactly where you want them to shoot from: you can disembark them a bit farther away, perhaps to avoid detection and/or counter bombardment, then move them into position to fire, then fly them away again before your opponent can respond. They're a heck of a lot cheaper than MRLs, too, and they only require a L2 Army Base, so you can generally afford to build them in multiple cities at once, field much more of them at a time and replace losses faster. Quantity over quality sometimes wins out.

      I'm not trying to argue that TA is better than MRLs or Gunships. Only that they have some unique abilities that can be utilized to your advantage. There's nothing stopping you from having TAs and Gunships (I find this combination quite complimentary, in fact) or TA and MRLs. I just disagree with the idea that the emergence of MRLs in a game suddenly renders TA obsolete, any more than it renders obsolete other ground units that have different roles.
    • Hmm, interesting.

      So, i have some questions about that.


      1°) How do you handle other artilleries in terms of range and any ability of "dealing damages without receiving it" ?

      You need (if i'm not wrong) to have T3 (Day 25) TAs to get the same range of the Mobile Artillery lvl 2 (day 3-4), for example.


      What when you encounter Mobile Artilleries lvl 4, or MRL lvl 3 ?

      Is really the 33% cheaper cost worth it in terms of artillery counter fire ability ?

      I still remember how our 30 towed artilleries were destroyed by the 20 PK mobile artilleries, without being able to shoot ONCE, in our challenge :D



      2°) How do you handle the 1.0 speed in hit&run against 1.3 units (or 1.5 speed rush units)


      3°) How do you handle the relative loss of efficiency tied to the fact the unit is a anti-infantry focused artillery, in a game where the trend is "more and more hard hp" ?


      4°) How do you avoid the "i rush you in forced march to force you to take off and then i exhange my ASFs to destroy your artilleries as choppers" methods ?


      5°) How do you handle the relative loss of protection of the artillery against units that have way better Damage curves ?

      The Artillery goes from 10 to 15 soft hp, where the threats to the artillery go from 7 to 12, or 4 to 9, and even the ASF becomes a air to ground threat against it.


      6°) How do you handle radar signatures ?

      No radar is airmobile (could be a cool buff ! ) , so i suppose you use awacs to not be blind at the edge, but don't you feel a bit naked with such unit as the only able radar support ?


      7°) How do you handle the infrastructure cost in airports and airfields to ensure that your artilleries can fly here and there

      Doesn't it nullify a bit the cost advantage ?


      8°) How do you handle the "hour of disembarking" to be able to fire

      In fact, how do you force your opponent to still be there for one hour, instead of (for example) waiting 30 minutes, then 30 minutes rush to get you, or just leaving the (small) range


      Thank you for your feedback. I do have some "bias" toward TAs, but mostly because, as the corvette, i NEVER had them being used efficiently against me, and you know how it is ^^.
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.
    • Right, I'll have a go at this.

      First, though, I must qualify it by saying that I haven't encountered a lot of the situations you describe, so I'll have to theorise. The other thing is that I too have a bias here: I really like airborne units. They're a lot of fun to use and I've never come across anyone who is able to deal with a large scale airborne army in a public game. I've never played an alliance challenge and I probably never will, so we are perhaps looking at this from different perspectives (and certainly from very different levels of experience!)

      So: I'm not using airborne TA on their own. I've got airborne TDs, airborne infantry, airborne AA, special forces. I have helicopters as well and I've got a lot of ASFs. The whole strategy falls apart very, very quickly if you don't have air dominance! I like to try and destroy other people's airbases if I can, so that they can't bring in air support easily, even if they've got it.

      I don't really find the cost of building airbases to be that much of a factor - by that point in the game you've got enough not to worry about it. The time it takes to get a new airbase operational can be a hindrance when you're trying to advance quickly, though. Resources, not so much.

      Radar: you can still get mobile radar up the front to see what's about. But yeah, you can't pair it with the artillery stack for air assaults. So AWACS, ASFs even, to find out what's out front. I like using special forces to scout about behind the line.

      Airborne TAs can make use of movement-route angles and terrain bonuses more effectively, I find. You don't have to march them slowly across a mountain range to reach that optimum firing position: you can fly straight there! You can choose a position for bombardment that doesn't allow the enemy stack to retreat out of range or charge directly at you during disembarkation (because of the angles). If they do try and move, you can plonk some airborne TDs down in front of them to block them off; you can directly assault them with airborne TDs/inf/Specs to hold them in place.

      I am not going to use my TAs to go toe-to-toe with MA or MRL in a hit-and-run skirmish. That would be an immeasurably stupid thing to do! They dominate in that situation, so I'd try to avoid playing that game. I think air assault can enable you to do this. You can swarm an arty stack and hit them from multiple directions at once, because you can land units all around and behind them: that eliminates the "run" part of their "hit-and-run" tactics. You can disembark out of their range, wait for them to be on cool down timer, then move in to attack (the range difference isn't all that much for you to close the gap in time before they can shoot again - use angles); then you can fly off again before they've reloaded.

      Now, I haven't put all of this into practice before (last time I encountered MRLs, I destroyed them with helicopters and missiles, not TA!). But I think it is doable. And like I said, airborne is fun! It allows you to be very unpredictable. Conventional units plodding along the designated movement routes for hours on end; airborne units suddenly turn up unannounced anywhere they want! I like this.

      What do you think? Mad? Complete cobblers?
    • WalterChang wrote:

      Right, I'll have a go at this.

      First, though, I must qualify it by saying that I haven't encountered a lot of the situations you describe, so I'll have to theorise. The other thing is that I too have a bias here: I really like airborne units. They're a lot of fun to use and I've never come across anyone who is able to deal with a large scale airborne army in a public game. I've never played an alliance challenge and I probably never will, so we are perhaps looking at this from different perspectives (and certainly from very different levels of experience!)

      So: I'm not using airborne TA on their own. I've got airborne TDs, airborne infantry, airborne AA, special forces. I have helicopters as well and I've got a lot of ASFs. The whole strategy falls apart very, very quickly if you don't have air dominance! I like to try and destroy other people's airbases if I can, so that they can't bring in air support easily, even if they've got it.

      I don't really find the cost of building airbases to be that much of a factor - by that point in the game you've got enough not to worry about it. The time it takes to get a new airbase operational can be a hindrance when you're trying to advance quickly, though. Resources, not so much.

      Radar: you can still get mobile radar up the front to see what's about. But yeah, you can't pair it with the artillery stack for air assaults. So AWACS, ASFs even, to find out what's out front. I like using special forces to scout about behind the line.

      Airborne TAs can make use of movement-route angles and terrain bonuses more effectively, I find. You don't have to march them slowly across a mountain range to reach that optimum firing position: you can fly straight there! You can choose a position for bombardment that doesn't allow the enemy stack to retreat out of range or charge directly at you during disembarkation (because of the angles). If they do try and move, you can plonk some airborne TDs down in front of them to block them off; you can directly assault them with airborne TDs/inf/Specs to hold them in place.

      I am not going to use my TAs to go toe-to-toe with MA or MRL in a hit-and-run skirmish. That would be an immeasurably stupid thing to do! They dominate in that situation, so I'd try to avoid playing that game. I think air assault can enable you to do this. You can swarm an arty stack and hit them from multiple directions at once, because you can land units all around and behind them: that eliminates the "run" part of their "hit-and-run" tactics. You can disembark out of their range, wait for them to be on cool down timer, then move in to attack (the range difference isn't all that much for you to close the gap in time before they can shoot again - use angles); then you can fly off again before they've reloaded.

      Now, I haven't put all of this into practice before (last time I encountered MRLs, I destroyed them with helicopters and missiles, not TA!). But I think it is doable. And like I said, airborne is fun! It allows you to be very unpredictable. Conventional units plodding along the designated movement routes for hours on end; airborne units suddenly turn up unannounced anywhere they want! I like this.

      What do you think? Mad? Complete cobblers?
      I feel like you hit and missed the point at the same time:
      Yes, they do go pretty well with a build focussed around airassault and as you've mentioned yourself relies heavily on having airsuperiority to allow for the fast redeploy via airassault; especially since you don't depend on them to do the heavy lifting in terms of killing ground units and its rather a teameffort

      BUT

      it was more about a direct comparison of TA to MA and MRL; in general when talking about artillery it's usually used to do most of the heavy lifting aka killing every groundunit that comes into range and not so much supported by specops, tds etc also helping to deal with damage; because at the core of the TA vs MA/MRL lies the inability of TA to reliably deal with armored units in general (and early on since you don't have airassault really any unit that moves faster), so the moment you bring "but my entire strategy complements this units weaknesses" it feels like devolving into the kinda silly "but i counter with unit x" that people love to do so much.
      Also i find it a bit hard to believe that you dont find the cost of airbases to be much of a factor (especially if you have 2nd and 3rd airbases as fallback if one gets desotroyed) if a lot of your army is probably relying on supplies to get mobilized in the first place; but then again airassault strats only really get rolling mid-late into the game simply because many units dont get airassault ability that fast.

      small sidenotes:
      - wouldnt really call them that much cheaper then MRLS since imo the electronic cost matters a lot more than the supplies required;
      - i feel like towed artillery is only really good in scenarios where you don't rely on it to fill the arty role

      Opulon wrote:

      3°) How do you handle the relative loss of efficiency tied to the fact the unit is a anti-infantry focused artillery, in a game where the trend is "more and more hard hp" ?
      yeah; it kinda feels weird having so much stuff that excels at dealing with soft targets and then the only soft units are 5 different kinds of infantry and towed artillery; i feel like they could be a bit more generous with as to what constitutes as hard and soft targets e.g.: the more "fragile" support units like radar, mrls or sams... iirc cow even introduced "light armor" or something like that lmao
      I am The Baseline for opinions
    • Teburu wrote:

      I feel like you hit and missed the point at the same time:Yes, they do go pretty well with a build focussed around airassault and as you've mentioned yourself relies heavily on having airsuperiority to allow for the fast redeploy via airassault; especially since you don't depend on them to do the heavy lifting in terms of killing ground units and its rather a teameffort

      BUT

      it was more about a direct comparison of TA to MA and MRL; in general when talking about artillery it's usually used to do most of the heavy lifting aka killing every groundunit that comes into range and not so much supported by specops, tds etc also helping to deal with damage; because at the core of the TA vs MA/MRL lies the inability of TA to reliably deal with armored units in general (and early on since you don't have airassault really any unit that moves faster), so the moment you bring "but my entire strategy complements this units weaknesses" it feels like devolving into the kinda silly "but i counter with unit x" that people love to do so much.
      Also i find it a bit hard to believe that you dont find the cost of airbases to be much of a factor (especially if you have 2nd and 3rd airbases as fallback if one gets desotroyed) if a lot of your army is probably relying on supplies to get mobilized in the first place; but then again airassault strats only really get rolling mid-late into the game simply because many units dont get airassault ability that fast.

      small sidenotes:
      - wouldnt really call them that much cheaper then MRLS since imo the electronic cost matters a lot more than the supplies required;
      - i feel like towed artillery is only really good in scenarios where you don't rely on it to fill the arty role

      Opulon wrote:

      3°) How do you handle the relative loss of efficiency tied to the fact the unit is a anti-infantry focused artillery, in a game where the trend is "more and more hard hp" ?
      yeah; it kinda feels weird having so much stuff that excels at dealing with soft targets and then the only soft units are 5 different kinds of infantry and towed artillery; i feel like they could be a bit more generous with as to what constitutes as hard and soft targets e.g.: the more "fragile" support units like radar, mrls or sams... iirc cow even introduced "light armor" or something like that lmao
      I take your point, and I agree that the MRL is the better artillery unit - I don't think anyone could argue with that, really, and it's reflected in the higher cost for mobilization, research and building requirements.

      But I don't agree that it follows from that that Towed is therefore not worth using beyond the early game. It does offer something a bit different from MRL and it's easier to mobilize in larger numbers. The original point in this thread was about how to counter mech infantry across a large front. Towed artillery seems like a pretty ideal solution for that to me - possibly even more so than MRLs, in fact.

      My main point, I guess, is that you aren't necessarily comparing like with like here. MRLs are the 'apex' ground unit - you aren't going to fight it successfully with other ground units on its own terms. You need to try to circumvent its strengths and fight it on different terms, and TAs do offer a way around of sorts (if only with the support of other units). But you don't always need the apex unit in all situations anyway, and it's not always the best fit. If you want to mobilize lots of firepower and get it to the front quickly, TAs are arguably more suitable.
    • Let's not forget that the MRL is the better artillery unit "in the long run".

      If one was to focus on the MRL asap, he would (ironically) use arguably the worst artillery of them all. Expensive, hard to produce, frail, and clumsy.

      It's at day 18 that the MRL takes its place as the apex ranged unit.


      Before that ? Either Towed Artillery if nobody on the map is doing any kind of artillery / airforce and you are confident in your micro
      Mobile Artillery if you want to be a bit more commited.


      Airmobile is great for dynamic mobilisation, but the 1 hour disembarking without shooting reduces drastically it's firepower against "non noob" opponents.
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.
    • Opulon wrote:

      It's at day 18 that the MRL takes its place as the apex ranged unit.
      ... if somebody you're likely to be fighting against goes for it.

      If they don't, then building MRLs yourself could ultimately end up being a waste of resources. It'd be overkill, unnecessary, inefficient even. I'm guessing, but isn't that probably the biggest difference between public games and alliance games? You don't come across optimal builds in your opponents very often, and it seems to me that concentrating on units that get the job in front of you done is better (in terms of the best use of your resources) than concentrating on theoretically optimal builds.

      (The OP in this thread, and the subsequent conversation about artillery, was focused on countering high level mech infantry, not on different artillery types countering each other.)

      In any case, I'd say it's never a waste of resources to conduct Intel espionage in order to find out what other players are doing!
    • Well, if it's JUST about countering mech infantry in late, towed artillery can... somewhat work... if the other guy is incompetent. Can't really say more. Same can apply to any kind of infantry, really.


      Any balance thinking must be made on the basis of equivalent investment. If you have Towed Artilleries, and he has Mech Infantry, then to make the field even :

      You have to add on your side a unit that costs some comps, and no electronics. In other words, you have yourself some infantry (motorised, or mech, or naval ), or Recon Vehicle, and he can have either some strike fighters, or some ASFs, or some gunships, or some attack helicopters.

      Naval Infantry would be reasonable. On his side he would probably pick a few gunships, or ASFs.
      Running an online alliance is pretty much like running a small company, except you need to find other way than money to keep your employees productive. May they play or work, they are humans.