Restarting Grand Campaign, needing a hint or two

[DanielHall15]

I played my way merrily through the Grand Campaign not thinking much for long stretches, but I have finally arrived at Stalingrad and I get slaughtered. Long story short, I don't have enough infantry with high XP, and the Soviet SMG's are merciless.

So I have to restart at square one. I didn't pay attention to the XP cap early on in Poland/France and didn't really start leveling up additional units until about '41.

The question now would be, how many unit types do people actually make backups for, and in what amount. I see that you definitely want a lot of spare infantry and panzer units, aka the front line grunts. Same is true for fighter and probably bombers, too.

Is there much point in getting spare artillery leveled up, f.e.? It is a pretty significant prestige investment, and I just don't find my artillery dying all that much.

Recon, on the other hand, dies constantly. Not bothering with those, they get replaced as they get blasted to shreds.

I thought about trying to get to Barbarossa with the following units, all with at least 200 XP:

10 Wehrmacht Infantry
10 Pioneers
4 Greanadiers
4 Mountain Infantry
2 Bridge Pioneers

5 Pz. III
10 Pz. IV
+ whatever I can skin the French/British for

10 Bf 109
3 Ju 87 (I find those to be dying really fast by '41)
6 He 111

That is a lot of prestige, obviously, but are those units even going to be enough? In my to-be-abandoned playthrough, I found myself buying lots of StuG III's by Case Blue, because they were cheaper to Pz. IV's, and you can't properly prepare for those, since they only become available in late '41, and I find the earlier anti-tank weapons to be major pains in the behinds.

Any suggestion at all?

[huckc]

I've found anti-tank units worthless in the German grand campaign, all the way thru including the very end. Regular tanks do everything better, including anti-tank, and are much more versatile. The Jagpanther in particular is comically overpriced.

Don't get any Pz IIIs, wait a couple scenarios for the 4s which are much better with a higher cheap upgrade trajectory until the panthers drop.

Don't buy so many fighters, you get a ton from heros that automatically join you throughout the campaign. I bought too many and finished with a glut of them. Only buy two or three max.

Strategic bombers are extremely useful mid to late game, but I'd only get 4 or so max. The best way to kill an IS-2 in open terrain is to ammo dump them with these guys. They gain xp so fast that if one gets lost it's easy to replace.

Artillery? You'll want to buy a few of these and convert any range heroes to nebelwerfers. The soviet SU-122 capturables are fantastic too since they have a high defense to mitagate counter enemy artillery. Extremely useful late-game when the enemy loves shelling your defensive artillery.

[DanielHall15]

Really, no StuG III F/8 either? I found them quite usable once they got over the no-XP hump, and they are significantly cheaper than Pz. IV's.

I didn't play much with strategic bombers in my first attempt early on because the Ju 87s just seemed more effective, but that changes when you first encounter KV-1 variants during Barbarossa, and, worse, KV-2s. The latter kept wrecking me until they were out of ammo, so you are obviously right with that.

The reason why my numbers for units are so high is because I want to be able to replace unavoidable losses. Every 200 XP backup I can bring to '42 spares me the pains of seeing 0 XP unit after 0 XP unit die in vain.

[MerleDixon]

Save some experienced Pz.III and upgrade them to Pz.IIIN. They are awesome in close terrain, even in Stalingrad. Backed up with Arti (in the case of Stalingrad with Wurfrahmen or Nebelwerfer) they are real monsters.
Anti-Tank is very effective if experienced (and only then). With "New Rule" enabled in Options, they get +2 Att per star, so u can have early StuG's with 20+ Att.
Very helpfull are the captured KV's, especially the C-Models even in lategame.

After Stalingrad the war and game turns and u need a lot of prestige, so u need to hold back as much as u can. My first playtrough years ago ended with the lack of prestige and i had no chance to stop the red hordes wich arrives in GC'43.

[DanielHall15]

Well, it's going badly. Although I built up a stock of 50-odd units of which most have two or three stars, i have been getting whacked by the British and French during the France campaign (currently at Dijon).

And i find the reasons for this hard to pin down, because I had little trouble the first time through with the small core I then had, but this time I lost at least a dozen units in the previous three battles and I actually lost Reims (with a stubborn French infantry with 1 strength point holding on to Reims proper at the end of the last turn) just prior to Dijon.

Meanwhile my prestige is pretty much zero (actually, to start Dijon: 2 prestige left) and I noticed that I do not get any prestige per turn anymore and the tool tip says Soft Cap: 100%. However, according to this ... http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=309254297 ... I should still get prestige per turn, since my units are nowhere near averaging 400 points given the huge amounts of infantry I levelled up and that I have not used overstrength since the Poland campaign for my almost universal lack of prestige. The most I had during this Grand Campaign was about 4k before the split in the 1940 campaign, since then it has gone nothing but down, down, down.

Is the guide actually correct with the 400 point average? Or, rather, what is the number of units this gets broken down to? Is it broken down to the total number of units I have, or is it actually broken down to the number of units I can actually *use* in the current scenario, because in that case I might be well over the 400 point threshold.

But shouldn't I still get 20% of the prestige per turn...?

Help...??

[Morgian]

I was using less infantry and more panzers. In the air I rely mostly on fighters for air superiority and put less weight to bombers. I like to have some artillery, but not overmuch. I don't use antitank at all like huckc. I have a couple of experienced paratroopers, though.
My most experienced units are the artillery and aeroplanes, followed by the panzers. I take less care of the infantry, as long as I get to keep most or all of these units alive.

[CroHomeguard]

If you're getting your a s s kicked in France in 1940, sounds like you're doing a lot of things wrong.

First of all, almost no artillery in your army? Arty should be 20-25% of your force.

Do you use elite reinforcements much, probably all the time, during battles?

The overall number of 50 (I make that 55) units by Barbarossa is optimal in my opinion, but the composition...
30 infantry units?! No artillery? FIFTEEN tank units, purchased, not including all the capturable French/British armor? You must be mad. No wonder you have 2 prestige points left.

In my current playthrough on General difficulty, I'm beginning GC 43 East, 50 000 prestige, 50-ish veteran units, 10-15 panzer units. I never bought a single tank unit, I have the 2 starting panzer units, Kerscher, the PzII guy, all the others are French/British/Soviet captured units. The weaker French and British ones have been converted, of course.

4 mountain infantry? No, unless you're roleplaying a Gebirgsjager division, in which case you would decrease the number of regular infantry. 2 bridge engineers? No, man. They're circumstantial anyway, and you'll never deploy 2 regiments. For rotation, you don't need 2 because they shouldn't be gaining experience anyway because they're not a fighting unit!

10 Wehrmacht infanry? Way too much. You simply won't have the time to use/rotate them and you'll end up with no prestige and a bunch of s h i tty, non-experienced, hero-less units.

6-8 fighter units are optimal in '43, including the gifted ones means you should buy 2-3 squadrons.

3 squadrons of strategic bombers, each of the other type. Why? Because of the upgrades, first you have the Do17 and the other one available, the Do17 is terrible but its upgrade comes faster than the other one's (He or the Ju, I don't remember).
Anyway, the point is to always have one model of the best bomber as soon as it's available.

Here is a link to a great post on the Forum. The subject is actually the composition of forces according to historical templates, but we talked about the general number of units in your core force as well.


http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=121&t=77530

[PoorOldSpike]

Re artillery, I'm a self-propelled nut because you can just trundle them into range and fire in the same turn, whereas towed arty has to be towed up but can't fire til next turn.
So that makes SPA about twice as efficient because it can fire EVERY turn..:)