Edmon's power 4 has proven to be a very effective strategy in the highest difficulty. His video inspired me a lot when I first played this game. The core of his strategy is by maximizing the effect of encirclement, you can easily force enemy surrender and take a lot of trophies and prestige. My strategy is quite the opposite, I maximize the damage, effectively kill all enemies and takes no prisoners. My core general traits are Meticulous planning + Aggressive deployment. And my core hero trait is overrun (only one).
Overrun and steamroller:
The effect of overrun is to restore your land unit's movement and attack point, it doesn't work on aerial units. It has two conditions though. One is that it only triggers in open terrain, the other is that you have to take 0 damage. The condition of overrun is so restricted that it perhaps only works on tanks. However, once you trigger overrun for 25 times (in AO), you will get the award of steamroller. The steamroller completely ignore the terrain restriction, and once triggered, it takes no return fire. This means, once you can fully kill a unit, even though the enemy could cause you heavy casualty in return fire, you take 0 damage with the steamroller, and you restore movement and attack point. However, the steamroller award is only available to tanks by default. Here comes our hero trait overrun. This hero can be assigned to any land units, and as a hidden effect, it also grants that unit the award of steamroller once overrun is triggered by 25 times. All your infantry units, artillery units, AT weapons and recon units can have steamroller. With steamroller, your engineer can take an enemy city without getting heavy casualty, if you can fully kill it. This means, you can minimize your lost by maximizing your damage. The best defense is a good offense.
How to maximize damage? Why infantry?
I have another post detailly explaining the damage mechanics. Here, I will just give some key points.
viewtopic.php?f=464&t=104832
Damage depends on three factors, namely number of attacks, accuracy, and kill chance. The final damage is basically the multiplication of these three factors. Unit attack stat affects kill chance, current strength decides the number of attack, and accuracy is largely dependent on entrenchment level and experience. Both kill chance and accuracy are capped at 100%. Higher attack stats does not increase your damage if the attack defense difference is larger than 12. However, higher strength always guarantee a higher damage. Obviously, the maximum damage a unit can deal is equal to its current strength, if it has no rapid fire. This means, without overstrength, the maximum damage a tank can deal is only 10, but an infantry can deal 15 damage. A tank can never one shot kill a full strength infantry, but an infantry can kill both full strength tank, infantry, AT or AA, basically any land units given proper situation. In order to maximize your damage, you need to fully overstrength your infantry to 20 strength, which gives them a potential damage of 20. You also need to improve your accuracy and kill chance to make sure you can one shot kill enemy. To improve your accuracy, you need recon unit, and ignore enemy entrenchment. Each entrenchment level decrease 8% of your accuracy. Obviously, engineer is the best role in this situation. But if you have a hero with ignore entrenchment, other infantry can just do a better work due to higher stat. To improve your kill chance, you need to improve your attack stats. Half-tracked transport gives you +4 soft attack, your award gives you up to +3 soft attack, your base attack is 8, which makes your soft attack 15. A common enemy infantry would have a close defense of 0, the attack defense difference is 15. So in a close combat, a 100% kill chance is guaranteed for an engineer even without any heroes. An experienced 20 strength engineer can easily deal 17 - 18 damage in close combat, this will almost guarantee a kill of full strength infantry, even if it is heavily entrenched. In an open terrain, you can use common infantry, which would have a 3 more soft attack. You will still have 95% kill chance in an open terrain against enemy infantry. If you are lucky enough to get a rapid fire (multiply your number of attacks by 1.5/2), your infantry can kill any single unit in a close combat or a soft target in open terrain in this game. Synergized with steamroller, your infantry can easily take out an entire defense complex (AT + AA + Artillery + Infantry) within one turn with one squad without casualty.
Meticulous planning and Aggressive deployment:
Even if our infantry can be a killing machine, but they still move slowly. Here is another mechanics exploit. Aggressive deployment allows you to keep your attack point while in a transport. Meticulous planning allows you to unmount your infantry after it has moved. Combining together, your infantry can move in a half-tracked transport for 8 hexes, and still able to attack, and move with their feet. It can even be further improved with forced march. Once you kill enemy in the city, you restore the movement and attack point with steamroller, and you can force march your infantry to capture the city.
How to select general traits and heroes?
Meticulous planning + Aggressive are mandatory, it takes 4 commander points. Perimeter control is important to have. Terrain experts and infantry general are a good addition, but not necessary. Up to the end of 1941, you only need 3 to 4 infantry units. You can take trench slog for the negative traits. It is 2 free commander points since you don't need to reduce enemy entrancement level. You ignore them with engineers or heroes. Ruthless is also a free commander points, since you want to kill all your enemies and take no prisoner. But if you want to be a good collector and farm some prestige, you can take slow modernization for exchange. You can further tailor your general traits based on your own play style.
As for the heroes, overrun is essential to make this meta work. You will probably need to roll it a bit in the beginning of 1939 DLC. Rapid fire and ignore entrenchment will make your infantry even more deadly. They are the top tiers. I have only got 1 ignore entrenchment and no rapid fire up to the end of 1941:( . Other heroes give you +5 attacks, e.g. butcher, crippling attack, tank killer flag killer, are all good to have to ensure you a high kill chance. Crippling attack is probably the best since you always want to one-shot kill a full strength unit. Aiming assistance is also good to have as it boost your accuracy. The overwhelming + envelopment + scavenger is a very powerful and fun combination. But it is not necessary at all. You may want one to be a good collector. Hit and run, no retaliation are less useful since you are going to trigger steamroller and take no damage in the first place. First strike and readiness are good to have to improve the survivability in defense. Lethal attack is a very good hero. You can assign them to your AA guns, making them practically anti-air veteran. Alternatively, you can assign them to your artillery, to help you reduce some strength of especially tough enemies.
A real example: Recapture of Klin in just one turn
The first glance of Klin, very intimidating. This is the beginning of turn 12. All enemy has +5 strength and a random hero, my infantry just moved 7 hexes to reach the battlefield. He is ready to attack. You can see how much damage my "Red Skull" can deal to a close terrain tank. But it can also deal 3 damage to me if I cannot fully kill it.
I killed the tank without casualty, and my "Red Skull" moved into the city. I used my 15 strength artillery to deal with the recon unit. My artillery has double attack, and lethal attack, zero slot. Of course, it also has steamroller(my only luxury artillery). Two shots took out the recon, and fired another shot to reduce the strength of enemy artillery. My heavy infantry was ready to kill it off, and trigger the steamroller. (my engineer is at the other side of the map. It would be better if it was him)
I used Rudel's Stuka to dive attack another artillery, and my heavy infantry kill it off. My "Red Skull" took out another tank in the city, and forced march to the river bank, and was ready to take out the other two heavy infantry on the river.
At the end of turn 12. I have already killed all defending units, without taking any damage. The only thing my two tanks did was to take out a tank in the open terrain. My two infantry took out two heavy infantry, two tanks, and two artilleries. (with the help of my Stuka and artillery)
Infantry moves faster than tanks, deals more damage than tanks, and have more tactical flexibility than tanks. They are truly super soldiers. I named my strongest war hero "Red Skull"
. The only thing they cannot do is to deal with a tank in open terrain. But you have plenty of other ways to deal with them. You do have issues in Spanish Civil War as you have no infantry in that campaign, that's the only flaw of this meta. Hopefully this post could help some players, thanks for reading.- 3.jpg (694.98 KiB) Viewed 1869 times
