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TFH - Heavy Armour Divisions vs Medium vs Light

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Tomnoddy

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HA 4/5kph
Tank Destroyer 6 kph

Motorized, Engineer, SP-ART 8 kph
Rocket Arty 9 kph
Armoured Car, L Arm, Mech 10/11 kph


A division can only move as fast as it's slowest brigade, right?

The "piercing attack" mechanic makes Heavy armour divisions absurdly powerful, since many enemy divisions cannot deal with them at all. But they are SLOW. Like 4 or 5 KPH slow - no better than infantry, arty, or AT brigades. Thus, my heavy formations tend to consist of 1 HA + 4 INF, they are used for holding the line and for breaking the enemy's.

So, does one then give up on the idea altogether of exploitation forces, or does one equip medium armour exploitation divisions, or light?

A medium division consists of 8kph brigades, so that means Medium Armour, with an Engineer, an SP-ART and two motorised inf.

In my light divisions, there is only room for the fast stuff. One AC, one L-Arm and three mech inf.


In my current game as France, i decided to build only heavy and light.. which is kind of an historic British perspective on armour - dividing into infantry and cavalry tanks. I decided i didn't have the leadership to maintain all three types of formation (means keeping the medium armour techs and SP-ART and Engineer techs current). OTOH, I have wasted some leadership keeping Carrier and Interceptor doctrines up to date... I wanted to try it in this game, expecting to fight Italy and Japan, but so far they're shy.

The problem is, in 1943 i managed to create a break in the German lines at Aachen and made a dash with my L ARM to a beachhead i established in Amsterdam. This put a whole load of German divisions in the Netherlands and northern Belgium out of supply. But i'm having trouble resisting the breakout attempt. The L armour divisions just don't have the penetration to deal with German armour. On about my 5th reload, i really want this encirclement to work after 3 years of stalemate. Might try swapping AT or Heavy brigades into my light divisions once everything is in place.. but that's probably gonna be an issue... can't get the heavy stuff to move fast enough.
 
Yes, when fighting a mobile offensive war (like Germany for example) I tend to stick to medium armour.
However, for France it can be worth rushing to heavy armour to hold the line, as a sort of mobile fort.

What you could try is (if you have the time and know it in advance, which is a bit late now, but still):

Upgrade the AT brigades to TD. Tank destroyers are faster than AT, making them useful additions to, for example, motorised divisons. It would give your light tank divisions the piercing they need (I think it's enough at least)
 
if you don't research Heavy Armor then TD is as fast as Medium Arm so they can still be valuable additions to Marm divisions.
Marm divisions are allready pretty good on cost versus speed versus performance, a TD brigade will give value versus hard dvisions and good penetration, especially with AT researched ahead of time you can hopefully penetrate Heavy Armor.

If you don't research Medium Armor but do research Medium Engines then SP Art gets pretty fast and are an option again for Light Arm divisions.
Larm + AC + 3x Mech doesn't seem optimal to me as it's very expensive with a lot of width and bad armor and bad penetration. That's is 4 bads versus 1 good (speed).
I'd opt for Larm + Mech + AC and optionally SP Art and then build more of these divisions.
 
Likewise, I would consider LARM+3xMEC to be way overpriced and far too lacking in Piercing for its cost; it's highly vulnerable to counter-attacks by enemy armor. AC is a lot cheaper than MEC, gives a slight speed boost (or reduced movement penalties) to the other brigades, and uses less fuel and supply. My own exploitation divisions are generally LARM+2xMOT+AC (possibly substituting MEC and another AC for the 2xMOT), and I follow those with either standard ARM+2xMOT+SPART (or with AC instead of the APART) and/or a few slower TD+2xMOT+SPART if you need higher Piercing. Adding TD to the lighter, faster divisions as sebas379 suggests would slow them to a near-crawl, but they'd be better than HARM in several respects, and similar in most others, aside from the higher Softness and lower Armor values.
 
HARM is definitely OP against anything but HARM. If you are going to use HARM/INF/INF/INF then there is really no reason not to spend the negligible amount of IC (compared to the HARM) to upgrade that to HARM/MAR/MAR/MAR or HARM/MTN/MTN/MTN, and you end up with a division that can be much more versatile.

I don't like ARM. It's a 50% price increase for comparatively little stat increase. The only major difference is in armor levels and piercing levels, but the only actual difference you encounter is when fighting other ARM/LARM (since everything else either pierces both or pierces neither and vice versa). Due to this I go strictly LARM for exploitation, with LARM/MOT/AC/AC, and let the AT/TD handle the enemy armor. Call it the American Doctrine I suppose. Multiple AC really lets you fly across terrain, especially bad terrain, and get easy overruns virtually anywhere. 8 KPH and no movement penalty even in mountains is pretty cool. Just make sure that you are redeploying infantry with AT in their wake and you'll be fine.

Don't really use MECH much unless I'm USA, it just comes too late. Also I dislike multiple MOT/MECH in an armored division, since you really want to pour as much firepower onto the field as possible by keeping a low frontage.
 
Well, i finally managed to eliminate that pocket, after 4 hours of save-scumming and micromanagement. The worst thing was, that despite the best efforts of the french navy and the royal navy, the jerries were able to run convoys from Emden to Rotterdam to keep everything in supply and only lost two transports in a whole month. I eventually told all 5 of my carriers (yep... screwed up build priorities..) to port strike the hell out of Rotterdam , which made the breakout attempts less vigorous. I eventually captured the port, but even then, the 15 divisions inside that pocket rarely went out of supply.

Light armour + 3 x Mech + 1 AC

they're expensive for an infantry division and lack piercing ability. Against normal inf/panzergrenadier divisions they do great though, having only around 50% softness and a combined arms bonus.

A lot of the problems were because the estimated enemy power/our power on that front was about 15% in favour of the Germans. In this game, units don't just give up the moment they get cut off. In fact given the ludicrous ease with which enemy transports can bypass any blockade, encirclements may not always be the best way to go.

If i had my time again, I would have dropped the HARM rather than the medium. In previous games as France, i've been low on manpower (as everyone else reports) but this time around it's 1943 and i've got 200ic and 900MP. Intervention in the spanish civil war gave me war laws a few months early, also the germans never tried to force a crossing of the rhine or meuse, they just spent three years staring and making rude gestures across the river.

I wonder if i could build a division of TD to follow the LARM into the breakout? So long as this division avoids fighting and combat delays, it should be able to keep up, i can detach one brigade at a time and turn the light divisions that stay behind to maintain the pocket, into tank killers?
 
Not completely related, but I am making my first foray into armor in this game. As Japan, I have built 8(!) armored divisions consisting of LARMx1/MOTx2/ENGx1. I am now upgrading from LARM to ARM; I hope to deploy a corps of each in Caucasus and perhaps Kazakhstan. I expect to meet somewhat stiff resistance so, how have you dealt with a Mechanized enemy? I only have 36 Infantry Divisions with 0 support brigades and I have no idea how I am going to help out in the Soviet front while still defending against USA. This is going to be one tough nut to crack.
 
The main issue about fighting in the Eastern USSR is that there is almost 0 infra out there for most of it so your stuff is going to be constantly running out of fuel/supply. So you have to be VERY mindful of that - or have a air transport fleet :D lol. It's a slow grind, and you need to make SUPER certain that your stuff isn't going to get killed off because it can't move.
 
As the US or the USSR i basically only build ARM when i am building tanks, you can build so many arm than harm and you can still maintain a steady advance. As Germany I like updating my starting larm to arm and build some more arm for france but i actually perfer larm larm mot eng for barbarrosa. Barbarrosa is about logistics, encirclment and keeping that front moving backwards as much as possible. Larm imo does a better job of this than arm, especially since the ai doesn't tend to build a ton of arm.
 
AmpsterMan said:
Not completely related, but I am making my first foray into armor in this game. As Japan, I have built 8(!) armored divisions consisting of LARMx1/MOTx2/ENGx1. I am now upgrading from LARM to ARM; I hope to deploy a corps of each in Caucasus and perhaps Kazakhstan. I expect to meet somewhat stiff resistance so, how have you dealt with a Mechanized enemy? I only have 36 Infantry Divisions with 0 support brigades and I have no idea how I am going to help out in the Soviet front while still defending against USA. This is going to be one tough nut to crack.
Click to expand...

the best way to help out against the soviets is to take valdivostock and knock mongolia out of the game. i wouldn't go any further west than that. i have tried but the inf is so bad and the vps are so small, they don't really contribute to an overall win. the best thing might be to move all your bombers to the german front and help bomb the crap out of the soviets. if you are feeling generous/lucky if you can get an army to finland to help hold the front there, that will help a lot.
 
In multiplayer games I found that using Harm-mot(mec)-TD-AC-AC as the backbone of your tank forces makes your army simply too strong to be dealt with. It gives the perfect combination of armour, piercing, softness, CA bouns and hard and soft attacks and thanks to ACs bounuses it has enough speed to outrun infantry and other HARMs without ACs.

For nations like Soviet union you can just spam Harm-mot(mec)-TD-AC-AC. For nations like Germany you might want more flexibility. For speed the best you can have is LARM-MECH-AC-AC-AC. It will outrun pretty much everything and still have enough punch to give a decent fight against every non-heavy or medium armour division.

For rivers, cities or rough terrains the best armour division you can have is something like HARM-MAR-MAR-ENG-ENG.
 
So I beat the Soviets :D. For a time there, it seemed like all hope was lost; Nationalist Spain and Western France were invaded by England and USA respectively, Iraq revolted out of Italian hands, and Soviet Union repulsed the initial German advance. However, I was able to get my two most battle hardened armies to march toward Persia (they joined us!) and attacked the Caucasus and Kazakh regions with 24, 3xInf/1xRArt/1AT and 8 1xArm/2xMech/1xEng/1xSpRArt divisions. I think the key to mmy victory was wearing down Soviet reinforcements in the Far East, whilst knocking down their tanks with At and Cas. Apparentl Cas always penetrates armor, so that may ne of use to OP
 
Funny enough I came to the same conclusion about the best Asian armored divisions :p (except I added a SpRart). As to HARM, the onky things that can penetrate HARM is other HARM and CAS. Since the penetration mechanic only functions for a division (that us, only a division penetrating gets regular damage) then, specifically with counter HARM divisions, one should emphasize Hard Attack. I would do this by stacking a Harm division with 1 HARM/1MECH/1SpART/1TD for max hard attack to emphasize the Hard Attack of the unit.

This seems silly to me btw; I much prefer the much more flexible approach of having ARM for breakthroughs and stuff and just use CAS as a general anti-armor role.
 
AmpsterMan said:
Funny enough I came to the same conclusion about the best Asian armored divisions :p (except I added a SpRart). As to HARM, the onky things that can penetrate HARM is other HARM and CAS. Since the penetration mechanic only functions for a division (that us, only a division penetrating gets regular damage) then, specifically with counter HARM divisions, one should emphasize Hard Attack. I would do this by stacking a Harm division with 1 HARM/1MECH/1SpART/1TD for max hard attack to emphasize the Hard Attack of the unit.

This seems silly to me btw; I much prefer the much more flexible approach of having ARM for breakthroughs and stuff and just use CAS as a general anti-armor role.
Click to expand...

Failing that, Arm are faster than HARM. Encircle, cut off their supply line, use Tac or - in a pinch- Strats to log strike their province. It doesn't kill the bloody things, but it does render them harmless (pun intended).
 
Agreed on that. The issue I see with HARM is that the only thing that can defeat itit one to one at a tactical level, is yet another HARM unit or CAS (after a LONG time) The best way to defeat HARM is at the operational level; logistic strikes, encirclements, and low infrastructur; and at the strategic level with reduction of Industrial capacity of a nation by either bombing its cities, or reducing IC used on war materials by attacking convoys and such.
 
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