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What's the best division makeup for Tank Destroyers?

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Portal

Portal

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Oct 14, 2011
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Lately as France I've decided to construct a few corps of Tank Destroyers for breakthroughs, exploitation, general strategic reserves, and spearheads. As I really don't want to go to the expense of armour, and Tank Destroyers build Artillery practical, with is at about 15% at the start of the game and I'm building it with Provincial AA, AA brigades and ART brigades. The provincial AA I'm spamming along the Maginot line, while I'm sprinkling AA and ART in my reformed infantry formations. So, naturally, my Artillery prac is going to be huge soon enough.

But, what div makeup? ATM it's just TD, TD, AC. I might add in a MOT unit, too. The Armoured Car is for adding combined arms without losing speed. So, what's the opinion? It's probably a crappy setup, but it'll probably do the job.
 
Portal said:
But, what div makeup? ATM it's just TD, TD, AC. I might add in a MOT unit, too. The Armoured Car is for adding combined arms without losing speed. So, what's the opinion? It's probably a crappy setup, but it'll probably do the job.
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A unit without combat width and only support units (such as TD, TD, AC) will not fight the enemy but just retreat, kind of like HQs. They wont fight at all.

You also want a decent amount of strength since this is your ability to absorb casualties without losing org. 1MOT+2TD would mean only 5000 strength or only half of what a pretty normal infantry divisions with 3INF+1ART has.

2MOT+2TD is a popular choice.
 
Wait, TD is a support unit?

How the hell did I not notice that.
 
As USA especially against Germany I like 2 arm, 2 td and 1 spart which comes out at 34% softness but that takes a while to tech to.

For France in 39' perhaps 1 arm, 1 td, 2 spart or 1 arm, 2 td, 1 spart. Mixing mot and td means you'll be needing light tank and medium tank upgrades (plus heavy armour for td) arm, spart, and td are all medium tanks upgrades except td armour as previously mentioned.
 
Biggus Dickus said:
For France in 39' perhaps 1 arm, 1 td, 2 spart or 1 arm, 2 td, 1 spart. Mixing mot and td means you'll be needing light tank and medium tank upgrades (plus heavy armour for td) arm, spart, and td are all medium tanks upgrades except td armour as previously mentioned.
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The only really important techs are attack stats, speed + doctrines, which means the only thing really needed for MOT+TD in the tank techtree is Medium tank engine and AT weapons (which you probably would have wanted anyways).
 
Biggus Dickus said:
As USA especially against Germany I like 2 arm, 2 td and 1 spart which comes out at 34% softness but that takes a while to tech to.
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Unless your opponents are absolutely spamming armor I really don't see the benefit in having that much Hard Attack. 2x ARM, 1x MECH, 1x SPART also comes in close to the combined arms minimum, has more SA at lower cost (compared to the arrangement you noted above), and consumes less fuel and supplies for only a modest reduction in the HA output.
 
And TD def/toughness research is a bit of a joke, 8 years worth of levels results in a boost of 0.9 toughness, so like Alex already pointed out, it is irrelevant. In defense department things are a bit better, but still irrelevant most of the time ( but it can be argued that you have less ability to choose defensive battles, so lack of DEF can come into play more often ).
 
Ifernat said:
Unless your opponents are absolutely spamming armor I really don't see the benefit in having that much Hard Attack. 2x ARM, 1x MECH, 1x SPART also comes in close to the combined arms minimum, has more SA at lower cost (compared to the arrangement you noted above), and consumes less fuel and supplies for only a modest reduction in the HA output.
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I have frequently seen Germany with a huge amount or armour especially if they beat Ussr, and this thread is asking about how to use tank destroyers best. My usual armour divisions don't normally have many TD's if any at all.
 
I'm simply building MOT MOT TD TD now, simple an effective. I have no idea how I didn't notice that the unit I created had 0 frontage, and I thought TD was a combat brigade. I feel like an idiot now.

But I have another question. The less frontage my units have, the more units in stacks I can have. So, I plan on going something like GAR ENG ART ART divisions all along the Maginot, in stacks of say, five units per province. The Maginot is hard to breach because of the Level 10 forts anyway, but this brings up a valid question. Why should a country that has high IC and the ability to field enough units to make up for lack of frontage (like, say, Russia) not build 1 combat brigade and three (or four) support brigade divisions? Is it a good idea as Russia to get, say, MOT TD TD SPA motorized divions, or INF ART ART ART infantry divisions, or ARM SPA SPA AC armour divisions.
 
Two words:
Stacking Penalty

Without Human Wave tech and a great Theatre HQ commander, you will run into it when using 2 combat + 2 support division setups.
In addition, support brigades have low DEF/TGH values and usually suffer A LOT in combat or from air attacks. So beside the fact that you cannot really use all this additional frontage, your divisions become quite fragile.

Plus: Frontage is one of the least problems for the SU in FTM. The frontline is long enough that you can easily rely on 3 combat + 1 support divisions, even 4 combat divisions in some places...
 
I thought you only got stacking penalty if the frontage was too low for the amount of combat units? The idea I had was basically building heaps of stacks I could effectively use without penalty because most of it is artillery or whatever.
 
Portal said:
I thought you only got stacking penalty if the frontage was too low for the amount of combat units? The idea I had was basically building heaps of stacks I could effectively use without penalty because most of it is artillery or whatever.
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No. Frontage determines how many units can fight. If the frontage is too low, your excess units can't fight and will wait in the reserve until space is available. That's why you want to attack from several provinces, because you receive 10 frontage + 5 frontage per additional attack angle.

Stacking penalty does always apply and is calculated by adding up all brigades in combat AND reserve and substract the bonus from tech and theatre HQ.


Example for frontage:
If you have 5 INF/INF/INF/ART divisions (3 frontage each) and attack from one province (10 frontage available), only 4 of them can fight. 3 divisions fit perfectly (3*3=9), the last one is allowed to squeeze in the remaining frontage and fight (with no additional penalty), its actual width is unimportant. So you end up with 12/10 frontage.

In theory you could even use a frontage 6 ARM/ARM/MOT/MOT division to fill the last "1" space of frontage, but remember that you can roll encirclement events that increase the frontage by +5 for several days - that would go to waste with a 6-frontage division as final filler.

If your army would consist of INF/INF/ART/ART (2 frontage each), all five divisions could fight in a frontage 10 battle. So the difference between 3-frontage and 2-frontage divisions isn't that great when attacking from a single province.

But if you attack from two provinces, you will have 15 frontage (10 base + 5 from another attack angle), so you can either have 5 INF/INF/INF/ART divisions, or 8 INF/INF/ART/ART divisions - the benefit from low-frontage divisions is quite significant.

And keep in mind that it is NOT important from where your units are attacking. The attack from the second province increases frontage by 5, but the units in your first province can be used to fill that frontage. So if you have 7 INF/INF/ART/ART in one province and 1 INF/INF/ART/ART the other province, all units are allowed to fight: 7*2 + 1*2 = 16/15 total frontage. You can even use cheesy stuff like HQs to attack from other provinces to increase the frontage, even though these units cannot participate in combat (0 frontage).
 
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GAGA Extrem said:
If your army would consist of INF/INF/ART/ART (2 frontage each), all five divisions could fight in a frontage 10 battle. So the difference between 3-frontage and 2-frontage divisions isn't that great when attacking from a single province.
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Interestingly enough, as Blue Emu has pointed out several times, you can actually fill the frontage AND add one more division. Therefore you can actually have 6 INF/INF/ART/ART divisions (2 frontage each) fighting in a frontage 10 battle. That is a more significant difference to 4 INF/INF/INF/ART divisions if you count that in.
 
wukk said:
Interestingly enough, as Blue Emu has pointed out several times, you can actually fill the frontage AND add one more division. Therefore you can actually have 6 INF/INF/ART/ART divisions (2 frontage each) fighting in a frontage 10 battle. That is a more significant difference to 4 INF/INF/INF/ART divisions if you count that in.
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Yup. And for 2 axis attack you can fit 8 divisions (total 32 bdes ), compared to 6 divs of 3xINF/ART (total 24 bdes ).
 
Biggus Dickus said:
ok haha I've heard that defensiveness and toughness were poorly made but I'd thought that would have been fixed for balancing reasons.
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At least now they work, but their impact is still very limited for land warfare at least. For normal setups they only affect the outcome at all when your outgunned pretty badly if I understand things correctly.
 
For me there is no doubt 2x Motorized infantry + 2x TD and after Superior firepower 3x Mot + 2x TD is best utilization of TD.
Commanded by Panzer leader always, this division uses highest combat bonuses available in game .

Its maxumum player can extract from motorized infantry,and its maximal bonus given by TD to any frontal brigade it is attached to.

TD transforms motrized infantry into de facto alternative armored division.
 
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