When Is It Best To Buy Vet Infantry Over Regs?

[Andrew H.]

Bah, veteran troops are gamey! I'm sort of suspicious of regular troops, too.

Jason and others are right about the advantages inferior troops (esp. green troops) can have against vets, both numerically and because the numerically smaller troops run out of ammunition first.

As an example, I once did played what I considered to be a company level game as a green attacker vs. vet defenders. The first part of the game went about the way you might imagine the game would go - troops encounter defenders in defensive terrain, tanks fight, artillery falls on both sides; troops fight it out from relatively short range, etc. At the end of this phase, both sides have "low" ammunition, and both sides have taken quite a few casualties (the greens not as many as you might imagine because they run away so quickly), but the defenders have held onto their defensive positions pretty firmly, and the attacking greens are pretty much spent as an effective attacking force.

However, because vets were expensive and greens cheap, I had an entire *second* company of greens in reserve, with full ammo pouches, who could be thrown against the weakest part of the largely ammoless defensive line. This second wave of green troops had very little trouble breaking through the vets.

You still have to be careful with this strategy, though: the reserves are still green troops, and will be slowed down quite a bit if they come under sustained tank or artillery fire, or even get too close to an unsuppressed fully armed vet platoon. But if you avoid those pitfalls, it's a lot of fun.;O

[JasonC]

"What good is immense firepower with the best weapons of the war if the idiots can't tie their bootlaces"

Regulars can tie their bootlaces. Greens can tied their bootlaces. Here is something to try when attacking (with odds, not a meeting engagement), against those who like to max out their infantry quality.

1. take 150mm artillery or larger, as much as fits in the artillery point budget. Don't bother with smaller stuff, since he will just rally. But 150mm plus will kill anybody, dead, and bravery does not help the dead.

2. then take as much green infantry as you can. At most one company with support weapons, all the rest platoons of infantry without the extras.

3. take a few good AT shooters, TDs usually because they are cheaper, to deal with enemy armor. Don't spend too much on armor and especially not on light vehicles. Just get a few good hole-punchers and save the rest for infantry.

4. spend everything left over on extra infantry AT teams, gobs of them. You will find dozens of uses for them, and the coverage of many teams is excellent, even if individually poor quality.

Scout. You have all the men in the world to burn. Do not bunch up and charge, find the enemy first. Let him shell you at range early on to his heart's content. The more time to rally from the morale effects of his artillery, the better. You will win late.

When you find the enemy, fix positions with dense groups of good enemy infantry with your forward platoons. Do not press close, and retreat at withdraw-run speed if heavily shelled or counterattacked. Just fix him, and start drawing his ammo teeth. Then drop 150mm artillery on him, to run him out of men. 4-8 shells per turn on anybody that tries to stand in front of you.

Creep the AT teams forward everywhere, with your TD shooters well back until you have good targets. Constrict his armor (by AT teams) and infantry (by infantry pressure and artillery) areas. When you've back him up enough that you can guess where the rest of his guys are, dump the rest of the artillery on them.

Firefight the remnants with your infantry, from whatever relative range is good for the weapons types. When his fire drops off to nothing you can rush, but not to close combat range. Just get in the same bit of cover and shoot it out.

Take your time and use your higher level HQs to rally people and put together scratch platoons. Roll with any artillery fire missions or infantry counterattacks he launches, just retreating and waiting them out. Keep coming back, first from some other direction with another portion of your infantry, then along the original line when the first, retreated group rallies. Don't bunch up or try to overwhelm him on a tight front - that just invites artillery traps. Wear him out gradually, deployed to proper widths.

What is nasty about it is the way the useful infantry odds moves over time. You start out with a high portion of a larger point budget spent on cheap infantry. So you start with a lot of men.

Your artillery will cut his numbers, no matter what cover he is in or how good his morale is, provided you don't blow the shells too early on non-verified targets. 150mm arty kills anything, and just doesn't care how studly they supposedly are.

He can't afford the numerical losses, because he didn't have odds to start with. He can break any portion of your force, but not all of it, and he can't stop you from rallying. His surviving men will run out of ammo after a few firefights, and lose the ability to influence the battle around them.

His artillery ammo will also eventually run out. The truth is it is quite hard to get any module to kill 3:2 of its full cost worth of greens (to break that many is easy, to kill that many is hard).

The only other thing to worry about is lots of high capacity HE shooters that don't cost much, like defending infantry guns, gun halftracks, SPA, etc. Your AT teams, few good AT shooters, and modest number of support weapons (e.g. mortars to deal with guns) have to deal with those. If you don't have shots set up for them, just withdraw the infantry back out of LOS until you do.

The underlying moral is to deal with the uberinfantry with uber HE, not by matching them symmetrically - and then inundating the rest of the defense with cheap infantry. It is an attrition style strategy, and it can work better than you might think. Try it.