Against the AI, I'd be using them for their armor and not their piercing.
Why build tank destroyers?
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Against the AI, I'd be using them for their armor and not their piercing.
I put SPGs into tank divisions. Majority of what you attack is enemy infantry, and vs AI even enemy tank divisions rarely break 50% hardness. Breakthrough values > enemy attacks are wasted; extra soft attacks are not and will melt the defending line significantly faster. On flat land you can drop 6000 - 9000 soft attack on a target province using 3 40 width heavy SPG with xp/planning bonuses. Even absent that kind of extreme, more soft attack is > more breakthrough once you have enough breakthrough.
You could also make a specialized division like heavy SPG + mountaineers or something, but the penalties for heavy tanks on bad terrain hurts this. Still, inept AI often fails to pierce it
.I wouldn't use SPAA much on a major, but if I'm a grown minor looking to make a naval invasion landing into Axis or USA air superiority is a tall order. Dumping a couple SPAA into tank divisions is not only a tiny fraction of the IC, it also doesn't require local air bases.
I'd just use them in a kind of generic Space Marine template. Run a normal infantry division, but remove one of the INF battalions and replace with a heavy TD. I wouldn't bother putting an AT support company in it since it has the TDs.
The goal would be to have enough TDs to cover 100% of infantry divisions on the front line as you push. Unless the AI has AT in every single division facing you (and its the AI, so it wouldn't), they will lack piercing against most of the line.
For as long as AI powers neglect armor as much as they do by now, production of anti-tank guns and tank destroyers exclusively serves roleplaying purposes in single player. In game terms it is a pure waste.
Multiplayer without AT and TD against competent opponents sounds like suicide to my ears.
Would be nice to find a plausible balance here i think.
Multiplayer without AT and TD against competent opponents sounds like suicide to my ears.
Would be nice to find a plausible balance here i think.
Not everyone plays majors; and for minors single-handedly opposing Axis consisting of say Germany, Britain, Italy, Nat Spain and likely Japan as well Heavy SPAA is a god-send gift. You're unlikely to face (much) supply issues when your whole army is like 20-30 divisions altogether with key provinces held by 2-4 of them each.
Seriously, the [vanilla] game is very different once you [artificially] commit to extra limitations, and quite a lot of stuff appears in new light.
Gaining Air Superiority through MIC-on-planes is outright out of the question if you're at 1:50 MIC ratio.
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I've never played a minor, and have no interest in doing so, but I get your point.
Yes! Within the same class (i.e. heavy) you're allowed to upgrade 1 tech level (i.e. convert HT II into HSPA III) while only paying the resource cost difference and occupying your MIC for a while (generally, conversion is twice as fast as producing).
Captured equipment can be converted too.
Joe should also know, since OKW gets the same combat loss reports STAVKA does.
It's closer to 4.5:1 if you count dead Hummels on top of the Panzer IVs my TDs have killed.
Can be an issue, but it's a weird set up.
If you spam enough HTDs to cover all your frontline foot infantry divisions, you may not have enough IC to build that many real panzer formations.
So, the quartermaster corps doesn't have to worry about how to supply 10,000 Panthers on the eastern front in armored thrusts near Moscow, but it does have to think about to supply 12,000 StuGs spread out across the front from Leningrad to Stalingrad.
But I suspect that you're the kind of guy who optimizes logistics in the game anyway, so
I'm sure you can handle it.
Do you mean making sure as Germany to have a path of 10 INF from Berlin to the USSR border and having 1942 logistics researched before I invade in 1941? Maybe...But I suspect that you're the kind of guy who optimizes logistics in the game anyway, so
I'm sure you can handle it.
Do you mean making sure as Germany to have a path of 10 INF from Berlin to the USSR border and having 1942 logistics researched before I invade in 1941? Maybe...
Some random guy of no consequence approves:
(And I picked this particular random guy of no consequence specifically because he is more famous for other things.)
Seriously, I'm not the best player, but I credit all of my Soviet wins to superior execution of logistics compared to my opponents playing Germany. And a good number of my wins as Germany against human opponents also hinge on this. Like the time I trapped and destroyed 15% of the Red Army in Romania when their logistics collapsed in the face of my panzers running full throttle with no supply issues.
How do you prevent getting supply screwed when making breakthroughs in line? I push literally one province and sometimes the game will drop me from 50+ supply to 4 supply in that province (still fine in origin province). This makes tank encirclements arbitrarily infeasible when it happens.
Aside from Germany and maybe the Soviets I never encounter enemy medium tanks in single player. Does anyone know why AI doesn't build them?
It's not programmed to make advanced evaluations of template use cases and doesn't have strong pre-defined templates to use in absence of that (though the latter can show up in mods).
It's the same reason AI doesn't use paratroopers at all, or design competent ships to counter stuff it's encountering.
In theory France should have them in decent numbers, but we all know the AI isn´t very bright.
So lucky for you! Other people often need to worry about enemy tanks! Supply is much easier to deal with than German tanks.
So if you don't need to pierce enemy tanks, then no need for TD.
For 40w, it is very cheap to put an Heavy TD to infantry, and get both piercing and armor bonus against 1941 AI German infantry (more armor than 31 is enough)
For 20w, It looks better to have your leg infantry in defensable terrain and your TD infantry in open terrain.
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