Managing Prestige

[Telephone]

Now that many people are completing campaigns, I'm curious as to how people are spending prestige. In my playthrough on classic, I found I never had enough prestige. There are a lot of choices that offer players so many different potential playstyles, which is one thing I really like about this game.

How're you all allocating prestige? (I think I captured all the potentials below but may have missed some)

-Cards (purchases in conference)
-Division upgrades (in conference, really like five choices between range, force pool, intel, operations, logistics, engineering)
-Division upgrades (from leveling up during scenarios)
-Specialist/regular steps
-Alternate path unlocks

[charles_d_berger]

I start off by focusing on specialists, especially self-propelled artillery and recon for my armor. I don't buy cards, with the possible exception of an airborne division later on.

Otherwise it's a balance of reinforcement steps, while trying to save as much as possible for HQ upgrades - engineering and ops are must-haves, logistics up to level 2, and command radius up to 10. Anything else is optional in my opinion. Intel 3 is nice to have, but I usually can't find the prestige, at least not until the final conference.

[KingSix]

What is confusing for me is that some missions are barely playable if you don't purchase river crossings but there is no sign-posting for this. Even one really difficult minor river to cross. Then when you realise your mistake it is not possible to restart a conference.

You think you are best to save up prestige to use up on rebuilding your often 1-stack units at the beginning of rounds (a weird carry-over from previous missions, without any alert) but ought to have splashed out a bit more at the conference.

[charles_d_berger]

Well, you are learning the game. Pontoon bridges add a lot of flexibility, but they are by no means essential to completing the missions up through Overlord breakout. After that, yes you really need them - but surely you would realise that by then!

If you are frequently having to rebuild 1-step units, you are definitely spending too much prestige there and need to refine your tactics to take fewer losses.

[Tigga]

I agree with Charles regarding crossings and losses. Proper river crossings are only needed on the last conference. I wouldn't go without pontoons, but you could. If you're constantly reinforcing one-step units you're probably picking the wrong fights.

I've been playing on Hard. I have a few must-haves for HQ.. Feint and Set-piece are very useful from mission 1, a not-awful HQ range is nice, and motor-pool phased in selectively (Brits in Italy on conference 2, US in France and Italy on conference 2, everybody on conference 3).

After those HQ upgrades I always like to have a card of paratroopers: typically I use them to secure secondary objectives when I would otherwise fail, though sometimes I'll use them as supply-cutters. Maybe not in the first conference (first 3 missions are easy enough to get 100% on) but it's nice from the second onward.

From there it's mostly building a pool of nice specialists and keeping my steps high. I try to have the maximum amount of specialists possible in each mission, and also try to recycle the "good" ones back to the HQ once the mission is near competion so they don't disappear. The pool of specialists is often such that I have a few spare, which is nice as it means I can tailor them for the mission. Infantry with priests can be quite effective on missions where you have to go fast without many tanks.