Do i need AT in ALL the divisions to neglect the enemy's Armour?

[icedlemon]

Hello!

as said in the title, what i want to ask specifically is that, for example in a battle i have two INF divisions, one with AT one without any AT, against enemy Armour division, will the division without AT still suffer 50% extra damage take because of lacking AP-value? This is not well explained in the Patch note or Dev diary of TFH i believe, or have i not paid enough attention.

 

[Lord Curlyton]

No, as long as one of the active combatants can pierce, the entire side is fine (as far as I can tell at least).

 

[Nasr]

Are you sure about that? So if one division in a stack engaged in battle can pierce enemy armour, then the entire stack is fine?

 

[PEP]

I'm not sure but I thought it was on a per-division basis.

 

[Secret Master]

It is on a per-division basis, unless previous analysis has been really flawed.

But....

In multi-division combats on both sides, if the number of divisions with armor or with penetration capability is not 100% on both sides, you can get scenarios where Division A cannot penetrate Division B, but can penetrate Division C. If Division A targets Division C in combat, that will provide different results than if it targets Division B. Multiple this by 5 divisions on each side, and you can have very confusing results. Throw in the RNG, and you have a recipe for not knowing what's going on.

The catch is that the tooltips for lack-of-penetration don't really tell you explicitly what division is targeting which and whether someone is penetrating in a particular hour of combat against a particular opponent.

If you think enemy armor will be a problem for your line divisions, give them all AT and immunize the entire front.

 

[Jamey]

If you think enemy armor will be a problem for your line divisions, give them all AT and immunize the entire front.

What he said. If I'm fighting armor, I go this route as a default.

 

[BattleMoose]

The tooltip in the combat modifiers only tells you that somewhere in the fight, that at least one division cannot be pierced. With 20 divisions going at each other, this isn't very useful information.

 

[msaaim89]

With 20 divisions going at each other, this isn't very useful information.

20 divisions in a battle? Are you and the Soviets throwing everything you have into Stalingrad?

 

[icedlemon]

If you think enemy armor will be a problem for your line divisions, give them all AT and immunize the entire front.

This is the problem that i meet here.. the AT is really a bad brigade for itself.. except the AP it provides...so i really dont want to build too many of them and loose so much potential of other possible support brigade.
if it really only provide protection for its own division then i will never build them i think.
maybe some CAS can help Infantry win against armor? or anyone knows other alternative solution?

 

[GrandVezir]

This is the problem that i meet here.. the AT is really a bad brigade for itself.. except the AP it provides...so i really dont want to build too many of them and loose so much potential of other possible support brigade.
if it really only provide protection for its own division then i will never build them i think.
maybe some CAS can help Infantry win against armor? or anyone knows other alternative solution?

There are only 3 solutions for infantry fighting armor:

1. Give the infantry divisions an AT/TD brigade. AT is cheap but inefficient against anything but armor. TD is not so cheap.
2. Give the infantry divisions an armor brigade. Probably too expensive to use on every division across an entire front.
3. Blast the armor with air power. Expensive, but not as much as attaching armor to every infantry division. TAC are nearly as good as CAS against armor, and a lot more versatile.

 

[misterbean]

Another solution would be to engage enemy armour with your own armour divisions, when possible. Or the old mot/mot/TD/TD. They may have lost some of their edge, compared to the old days, but they still provide CA bonus, regardless of what they are facing.

 

[sgt.stickybomb]

Why don't you have a specialised anti tank divisions that rome the battlefield and specifically engage enemy armor. a Mot TD TD TD AC is a good example.

 

[Kovax]

If you're playing a smaller country, placing an AT brigade in one or two divisions per Corps works. For GER, SU, or any other major, that's too much micro-managing to preserve one's sanity. Spamming an AT brigade in every division seriously dilutes the firepower of the division for 99% of its other work: delivering SA against opposing INF divisions.

I tend to use a few Armored Divisions (ARM/MOT/MOT/AC) of my own, specifically to engage enemy armor. MOT provides the bulk Strength for the division, and its HA is decent as long as the attached ARM brigade can pierce the opposing Armor. If not, consider an upgrade from ARM to HARM or adding TD. AC is a cheap mobile "filler" unit that provides some nice bonuses, as well as a bit of extra firepower and hardness, for a modest price.

If you have air superiority, CAS or TAC trump armor of any type. While TAC has less Hard Attack than CAS (and CAS has similarly less SA than TAC), it's still roughly 2/3 as good at it, has far better range, and is a lot more durable if/when attacked. Personally, I'll use mostly or all TAC, although some players prefer CAS.

 

[Secret Master]

A lot of good replies in this thread.

Let me boil it down, though.

First, you need some kind of counter to enemy armor, if the enemy will have a significant amount. Since you are facing the Germans, then yes, you know you will see a significant number of armored divisions. It is vital to counter enemy armor, though. Whatever else you may feel about AT or TDs or anything else, the lack of penetration penalty is a harsh mistress. It's harsher, in my opinion, than the old hard-on-soft mechanic, and when you fail to counter it, the enemy gains a substantial advantage in concentration of force in the most critical battles because those armored divisions they bring to the fight are more potent than they would otherwise be. Since those are the battles you want to win, you really have no choice but to defeat enemy armor or face the consequences.

However, the counter to enemy armor can take multiple forms.

1) Immunize the front with AT: I know, AT sucks. But I call this the "no fail" counter to enemy armor. As long as your AT is up to date, and the enemy doesn't have 20 HARM divisions wandering around (and even if they do, if those HARM divisions are not upgraded properly while your AT guns are ahead of time, you might still be okay), you are fine. The key here is it doesn't matter where enemy armor shows up; it's taken care of. No micro, no failing at asset deployment, no nasty surprises. Guderian shows up in Estonia with 15 armored divisions? It doesn't matter; you have AT ready to counter him even if your T-34s are sitting near Kiev.

2) Bombers: I already proved it in another thread, but bombers of all kinds (except STR) are deadly to armor. It doesn't matter what kind of armor it is, what techs it has, how well it's led, unit experience, or supply status. If the bombers can get through, they hit for full damage. Furthermore, you can stack more planes in a combat than you can stack divisions, so even if the land combat is over width, you can always send a stack of TACs to a battle when armor shows up. Also, while CAS is well loved to blast armor, TACs are just fine at it themselves. (CAS are only really better against units with low softness, which not all armored divisions have.) The catch with using bombers is that you must have air superiority, and you need it from day 1. You also need to be able to defend in depth. Bombers don't instantly kill armored divisions (unless you put 30 TACs with 1941 or better techs into a single air strike). It takes some time to wear them down; you also have to micro your bombers to always target enemy armor when it is visible. But armored divisions with no ORG are no threat to your forces.

3) Counter-armor armored divisions: Instead of building armored divisions designed to beat enemy infantry, you can build your armored divisions to defeat enemy armor. This requires knowing where to put them, but the advantage is that you can turn the tables and turn an enemy spearhead into a breakthrough of your own.

 

[misterbean]

And of course, if all else fails, log strike the provinces all around the damn things. So even strategic bombers could come in handy now and again.

edit: this is of course a last resort measure because it will also make it impossible for you to counterattack.

 

[Less]

AT really isn't that bad. Honestly. The fact that it's cheap and gives +5% CA bonus means a lot.

In fact, my spreadsheet shows INF/INF/ART/AT as actually being slightly more powerful pound-for-pound than INT/INT/ART/ART. Sure, the AT division is less powerful 1v1, but when you figure that it's nearly 20% cheaper it (amazingly enough) pulls ahead even vs. soft division. I was surprised by these results. Of course you still have to take into account the increased manpower/officers/supply cost, but there you go.

 

[icedlemon]

Tanks for all the advices you guys provide!

let me clarify myself better.

Well, first of all, this problem with AT didnt come out from any practical situation i was facing. I was trying to create a theoretically good composition of Infantry Corp with some flavor, in a context which:
1. i would concentrate most of my Armour in several army( Panzergroup) and rest parts of my front line, will be most likely consist of Infantry.
2. I micromanage all my divisions.
3. These corps need to be jack-of-all-trade ( and of course master of none) kinda type of things, consist different types of divisions to fulfill different kind of missions.
4. Very hard difficulty
5. The game version is TFH.
The last one is where the problem came from. Before TFH, i really never bothered to use any fancy support unit, my infantry divisions were exclusively consist of only 3 infantry brigades, with the set in mind that i would rarely use my infantry corps to attack well defended lines unless i have good number advantage, in which case the support unit doesnt matter that much anyway. The saved IC would better be used to produce more planes and tanks. I havent played HOI3 since TFH came out, and just again picked up the game recently, (i think you guys might already have had a good amount of discussions about the "new" AP-mechanism, although i didnt find the answer of my question through forum search). I dont want to overlook the AT now, and dont want to place myelf in a bad situation against the enemy armour because of that. ( Although im not certain of the real impact of the "new" AP-mechanism) And i really dont want to build too many ATs because of my old maybe outdated impression of it as a really bad support unit.
So then there's the idea that if the AT provide AP protection to all the divisions in a battle, i would build 1 AT division for every corps as a reserved countermeasure to enemy armour attack; if not, as many of you stated, i would probably go back to my old way and again dont mess with them at all...Which is kinda sad because the new Mechanism was the main reason why i want to re-explore the game and re-design my army composition, and now it looks like nothing had really changed :unsure:.


again thanks for all the replies, some of your advices will definitely be included in my future experiment.

 

[Kovax]

If you're micromanaging everything already, then you might consider getting ideas from my "standard" infantry Corps from when I last played GER:

(1) HQ+2xINF+ART/AA
(1) 3xINF+ENG
(2-3) 2xINF+2xART
(1-2) 2xINF+ART+AT

On the western front, I congregated the ENG divisions from an entire Army adjacent to the Maginot Line, and used those to create a breach at the same time that my army in the East was advancing into Poland. Once a breach was made, the ENG divisions were free to use with their respective Corps again, as needed. Note that they're extremely good at attacking heavily wooded areas, forcing contested river crossings, and eventually assaulting cities, but less powerful than the other divisions on the open plains.

I have a separate Armored Corps in each Army, which gives me plenty of offense against opposing Armor, but the AT brigade in one or two divisions per Corps gives me some local stopping power without having to divert my armored spearhead from the equally important task of surrounding and overrunning enemy formations. The normal INF divisions have sufficient firepower to gang up on and deal with most LARM or ARM divisions, but the single AT brigade provides that critical Piercing number which the infantry brigades' organic AT weapons lack. If the enemy is using HARM or SHARM to generate extremely high Hardness, then you'll need something specifically dedicated to fighting it (like air power).

Normally, I add brigades to my HQs as well, so they become a 6th division per Corps, and tend to boost the commanding officer's level rapidly between direct combat experience and trickle-up from the subordinate divisions. I use either ART or AA with them, depending on where they're being deployed.

I prefer 4 brigades per division, rather than have 5 per division and less divisions, but that's a personal choice; there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

 

[Jamey]

I normally let the AI run my infantry line, while I drive my special forces and mobile/armored forces. The AI is better with interchangeable units than it is with specialized ones. I also don't play on VH. If you micromanage everything, you are probably better off with specialized units. I just don't have the patience for it.

My default infantry (for a major) is: INF/INF/ART/AT

Germany is more Manpower bound than anything else, so I'd use the above as Germany unless I was playing a gimmicky build plan. Same with Britain and the US.

As Russia, I've gone: INF/INF/INF/AT or MIL/MIL/ART/AT because their Manpower and IC are less limited than their Leadership.

As NatChi, I've gone pure INF or MIL for my divisions because you are Leadership limited more than Manpower, and Japan will field little in the way of Armor for you to pierce. I also found myself needing to build a lot to build practicals to get to the point of having an air force or navy, so your IC tends to get tied up there.

All of these plans may change later in the game, when the early limitations on the nations have been reduced by conquest.

 

[Kagernaut]

I'm not sure I would say that AT really immunizes or allows you to neglect enemy armor. True, his armor stat you can ignore, but it would be unwise to say armor that is pierced is useless. Its still low softness, fast moving, and hard hitting, and usually combined with other divisions with similar statistics.
Also, more often than not you will be facing soft divisions, rather than hard ones. I would reccomend having 2 or 3 divisions in each corps decked out with AT, in such combos as 2 INF 2 AT, or the like. The rest can be built normally.

But if you don't want to micro all that, you can just throw in AT in every division.