Prestige points when starting Barbarossa

[Grimmblut]

Hi,

warning: Mild spoilers ahead. If you haven't finished the France campaign you may not want to read any further.

I went through the Great Campaign on normal difficulty pretty well so far and didn't have to restart a single battle of the campaign. At the end of the France campaign I started to have some minor struggle with my available prestige points as I've opted to repair my units with Elite Repair. But that wasn't anything serious. Or so I thought.

Now I've chosen to begin Barbarossa instead of North Africa. Apparently, what I've gathered from the introduction, one year has passed. So a lot of my units need an upgrade. The game also offers me to buy a special prototype for 3000 prestige points. Besides from the need to upgrade literally all of my tanks and fighters, I also need to repair my wounded units that are below full health capacity from the France campaign. Additionally, extra core slots are available, so besides repairing and upgrading my units, I should be able to buy roughly two or three new units.

The battle starts with me sitting on a rather small pile of about 1300 prestige points. That's barely enough to bring my units back to full health. I was able to upgrade two tanks and that's about it. I can't upgrade the rest of my units, can't buy new ones to reach my core unit slot cap and sure as hell can't afford that pretty 3000 prestige points toy.

In the battles before I managed almost always to capture every single town and airfield to get all achievable prestige points. I didn't lose a single unit.

What did I miss?

[Path]

What kind of casualties are you sustaining, and how often do you reinforce during battle? Did you pick Liberator (no-brainer choice for higher difficulty settings, but if you're struggling with prestige on lower it'd come in handy there as well)?

Minimizing prestige losses isn't about not losing units -- this should never, ever happen and is a sign you seriously screwed up -- but not sustaining losses.

[Antonio Margheriti]

Yeah my prestige is all whacked too.

I don't know how I sustain so many losses.

I don't have enough prestige to make sure people stay experienced at all.
Most of my units are green. I ditched my campaign after France entirely.

I soften units with arty and bombers, I surround, encircle, mass attack, use engineers and grenadiers, and yet the enemy can still deal ridiculous casualties to me. Instead of pushing freely around the map, I have to carefully siege every point, and end up finishing the scenario on the last turn.

Something must be afoot, if in PC1 I was able to get to Sealion 40' on Normal, and have left over prestige with elite replacements. (I'm not the best or smartest wargamer.)

After France in PC2, I found myself in Africa with mostly damaged units and only 600ish prestige.
The game should definitely not be impossible w/o commander abilities.

[Path]

The AI can't magically cause damage, so if you're sustaining heavy damage while assaulting that's because you didn't suppress the enemy first, or because they have supporting artillery/AT guns that you didn't suppress. If you're having problems suppressing the enemy get more artillery and fewer tanks/infantry -- early game German tanks are kind of ♥♥♥♥ anyway.

Of course artillery is expensive and has to be protected by AA guns and/or fighter screens, but it'll also help cut down defensive losses by suppressing enemies attacking you. Do you ensure that your frontline is covered by artillery and/or AT guns so the AI can't use its full strength against you? If not, high losses are inevitable. Note that infantry usually makes for bad frontliners because they're highly susceptible to damage in the open even if supported by artillery.

[Grimmblut]

From memory my core units consist of:
3 Wehr Inf.
3 Grenadier Inf.
2 Pioneers
1 Scout
5 Pz. IVD
2 err...fat artilleries :) (range 4)
1 mobile AA
3 fighters
1 Stuka
2 strategic bombers

I make sure not to attack enemy Inf. in rough terrain and soften it up with Artillery/StratBombers before attacking it with my Inf, mainly Pioneers. I try to get some more units adjacent first for extra bonuses like Mass Attack and the Scout bonus. Of course I avoid giving the enemy the chance to bolster his defense with artillery or anti-tank strikes against my attacking infantry/tanks. But still, I honestly don't know what happened from France to Russia. Imo the amount of points you get on top of your existing presitige when you change from the France to the Russia campaign is just way to low.

[Edmon]

Originally posted by Grimmblut:

From memory my core units consist of:
3 Wehr Inf.
3 Grenadier Inf.
2 Pioneers
1 Scout
5 Pz. IVD
2 err...fat artilleries :) (range 4)
1 mobile AA
3 fighters
1 Stuka
2 strategic bombers

I make sure not to attack enemy Inf. in rough terrain and soften it up with Artillery/StratBombers before attacking it with my Inf, mainly Pioneers. I try to get some more units adjacent first for extra bonuses like Mass Attack and the Scout bonus. Of course I avoid giving the enemy the chance to bolster his defense with artillery or anti-tank strikes against my attacking infantry/tanks. But still, I honestly don't know what happened from France to Russia. Imo the amount of points you get on top of your existing presitige when you change from the France to the Russia campaign is just way to low.

Run only Pioneers as your infantry, the entench ignore and 8 close defence is too important to pass up. These will be your units to push cities will minimal losses.

[Path]

Originally posted by Edmon:

Run only Pioneers as your infantry, the entench ignore and 8 close defence is too important to pass up. These will be your units to push cities will minimal losses.

This. If you are on the offensive pioneers are the only infantry you need -- they are the best for assaulting in close quarters and that is the only thing you should be doing with infantry.

I'm not surprised you struggle with that army, because it looks terrible. At the very least you need to dump most of that prestige-draining garbage infantry and get more artillery. Your force is critically low on suppressing units and you have next to no defensive fire support, and only 2 units that can actually assault properly in close terrain...

[jvpontilhao]

On my campaign everything is going smoothly with the exception of the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow. The only thing I can think of is that maybe you are at a level of difficulty above me or that you sustained very heavy losses.

It also seems you have WAY too much infantry, I have 4 units of infantry and only struggled at the Battle of Moscow. You really want to swap those strat bombers for tacts and get more artillery. And for me what has worked so far in air combat is having one fighter more than I have bombers, then one (or more if you prefer) fighter(s) goes to engage the enemy airforce while the rest of them escort you bombers.

[ZiffyHead]

I didn't see you mention encirclement.

On tougher fights, you need to encircle and suppress for a turn or maybe even 2, before assaulting.

This adds unrecoverable suppression and eats their limited ammo.

If they can't shoot back they can't hurt you.


Use the cheap regular unmounted infantry, for the first attack to soak up the most damage, as they are cheap to replace.

For really tough VP locations, you may have to bait the enemy into attacking out of the spot, so they don't get the entrench bonus.

You can usually do this, by putting a high value target like an AT or artillery piece next to it.

After the attack, it should be suppressed a bit and weaker.

[Nial]

"Run only pioneers" this is exactly what I DON't like about PC2. Yeah, I could do that, but what army only has specalist infantry.

[Grimmblut]

Thanks for the input. I really don't like the "only pioneers" setup and think that it's a sign of very bad game design. But if that's what it takes I guess I have to do it.

[ZiffyHead]

Engineers actually support adjacent infantry in an attack if they are also next to the target by letting them ignore 50% of the entrenchment.

So, you can use cheap unmounted infantry next to a pioneer for the first attack and ignore 50% of the entrenchment and the losses will be cheap to replace.

It's better in my opinion not to have only pioneer units.

[Path]

Unfortunately the balance isn't there for infantry. It's a pity because in general they've done a good job of encouraging combined arms, e.g., recons and ATs are a lot more attractive now, but infantry is in a poor spot -- they have poor defence and low initiative so losses are inevitable if they engage in battle against any unsuppressed full-strength unit, which means you generally don't want your infantry to do any fighting that can be done by armoured units.

This leaves close terrain, and pioneers are clearly the best choice here -- the other specialized infantry can be situationally useful in some scenarios, but this isn't that common and if that's the case you can convert a few pioneers temporarily. The standard Wehr has no advantage other than being cheap (which isn't an advantage at all when they drop like flies, unless you absolutely must have a sacrificial pawn and there are no auxilliaries) and should never be used at all.

This only gets worse later on as you gain more options for close assault (flametanks are very strong, especially if you get lucky with your heroes), leaving infantry with even less to do. Other than the scenarios that revovle around a single city, e.g., Stalingrad, there seems to be little reason to bring more than a handful of infantry units, which does feel strange given that it was the dominant branch -- I've only played up to Caucasus in the Desert Korps campaign, but to date I haven't really fielded more than 3 to 4 infantry units on any map, and never felt that I was missing anything (on Generalissimus). Of course that also means that Infantry General is a garbage trait (where is my Artillery General?).

[ZiffyHead]

I just don't agree with not using unmounted wehr.

They are 3x cheaper than pioneer to replace.

They take fewer slots.

True they will get slaughtered in the open without support.

But they are good for plugging gaps
killing almost dead units, so your heavies can move on,
they are cheap meat shields,
they ignore 50% entrenchment, if supported by an engineer
they are great bait for tanks when supported by AT.

There is a reason why I never run low on prestige and can always use elite replacements on every unit, except my 2 werh sponges who usually just get greens.