Support AT or even line AT works just fine stopping German tanks. And doesn't use fuel, and costs less supply.
Against the AI, this is true. And if you just care about piercing, AT is fine.
Against more cunning human opponents, and when you care about things other than piercing, the HTDs suddenly take on new importance. It's a lesson I learned in a trial of fire and sword, but it's worth bringing up.
So, let's say you are facing hard core German panzers with all the bells and whistles. We're talking armor ratings above 50 (even in 1940) and hardness ratings of 65% or better with just MOT (if the Germans brought MECH, it's going to be higher than 70%). What do you do to help the infantry out?
Well, you can stack AT guns. And that's certainly not a bad option. I can get piercing to around 50 without too much effort and cost if I'm willing to double up on AT. It's not bad, and will serve me well in generic situations.
But...
... AT guns have significantly less HA than HTDs. HTDs also have more piercing, but I'm not just talking about that. We're looking at this from several angles. When facing panzer divisions with hardness ratings above 60 or 70%, you might want more HA
per division in a fight so you can wear down those panzers faster. In those cases, the HTDs perform much better, despite the additional supply draw and use of fuel.
Here's the catch, though.
Against the AI, if I'm feeling cheesy, I can spam HTDs and use their armor bonus to generally push along the entire front. It's messy and inelegant, but it works when the AI has insufficient AT.
But against a human player, this kind of spam is impractical (as I told people on the forum for around two years), because even garbage AT can pierce HTDs of comparable year if they are in INF divisions. However, creating a small cadre of INF divisions that have some HTDs in them
for the sole purpose of countering armored offensives becomes valuable. In these cases, the only job these few special HTD divisions have is to block panzer offensives. When not blocking panzers, they don't even sit on the line. They rest and wait for another thrust.
In practical combat, the benefits became obvious during a particularly grueling game as the Soviets. For complicated reasons, I spent 36 months defending Leningrad and the surrounding area from a long series of German armored offensives. (In 1945, the Germans nuked Leningrad in a final attempt to break the line; that's how serious the fighting in the area had become.) The HTD divisions I had built spent many months fighting there (they did get some rest periodically), so I accumulated tons of data in real live combats against humans who weren't messing around.
What I noticed was that having a few HTDs in a division that was otherwise INF spread around those losses from enemy fire quite a bit. I'd lose a few HTDs to combat, but the ratio of HTDs to enemy tank losses were at times exceeding 1:6
and that didn't count attrition losses suffered. Divisions with high HP and a small percentage of non-infantry kit equipment tend to take minuscule losses from enemy fire on their non-infantry kit equipment. It was no contest in terms of relative IC costs; the HTDs were killing far more IC worth of German tanks than they cost.
Those who have used HSPAA in Space Marine formations know all that. But there was something else that surprised me more.
When divisions take strength damage, they lose equipment. And if a division has a high number of tanks, then you lose a lot of tanks whenever a division takes damage. But a lot of players forget that the equipment lost has a direct impact on division stats. A panzer division might have an armor rating of 60 on paper, but if it's lost even a few tanks, that value and several others drop precipitously. The end result was that those German divisions with fancy Panthers and Hummels and MECH and whatever else rarely fought at 100% and had severely reduced stats...
...reduced to the point that there were times German panzer divisions
could not piece the INF/HTD divisions they were facing. It was rare, but the fact that it happened at all shows the lopsided nature of the losses. The HTDs weren't even optimized for armor in their variants (the XP went into guns). But German panzer formations were taking such huge losses that if they didn't stop fighting to rest and reinforce equipment, they were facing INF divisions they couldn't pierce.
Obviously, using HTDs is not for everyone. The Soviets have access to plenty of oil and fuel, so unless they lose Baku, the fuel cost isn't a big deal. And the Soviets have plenty of domestic chromium with which to build HTDs. So, it works for them in a way it might not work for some other countries.
