For my first post about strategy I figured I'd start with something very generic, which is the decision to play a tank, mechanized, or infantry company. Back in V1 I started with infantry(FJ to be precise) and played mostly infantry forces for almost all of V2(along with a smattering of mechanized and tank companies). With V3 though, I seem to keep leaning more toward mechanized or tank forces.
Infantry Companies
Infantry forces are always a solid and reliable choice. In FoW, infantry tends to be a great jack of all trades sort of force with excellent resilience when on the defense, and typically more close assault power than tank units. Best of all in many cases they also typically have a large number of points left over after filling their compulsory choices which enables them to get the best selection of support choices. Moreover, infantry will typically defend in most missions which can be a significant advantage in forcing the burden of attack onto your opponent(with the new missions in V3, this is less significant).
Their are also fortified infantry companies which will be able to defend even when faced with an infantry opponent. The fortifications these forces bring can be quite useful in impeding an opponents attack, or in protecting one's own troops. However, too many fortifications can prove a serious detriment as they take away points needed to purchase troops. Therefore, I'd typically recommend taking a minimal complement of fortifications.
One change inaugurated with V3 was to require that infantry companies which have more than one fully armored non-recon tank platoon place any additional fully armored tank platoons in reserve if the mission has the reserves and prepared positions rules. (fortified companies must put all fully armored tank platoons in reserve in these situations). The reason for this was to make infantry forces look and act more like infantry companies and less like the tank delivery systems some infantry forces resembled. It does however, cause infantry players some trouble when defending vs. a force with lots of armor, especially in mobile battles where anti-tank guns and the like may have trouble getting into position.
The solution to this is to slightly change the nature of one's support platoons. The key phrase in this case is "fully armored tank teams" as many tank destroyers(M10s, Marders, Achilles, etc) are not fully armored and so instead of taking 2 tank platoons in support of an infantry force(as many V2 infantry lists did), one should take one platoon of tank destroyers and one platoon of tanks. Alternatively, one might put a huge number of points into a single tank platoon (such as a large unit of Tigers, Panthers, IS2s). This does offer some significant advantages in concentration of force and firepower, but can sometimes make it difficult to respond to multiple simultaneous threats. When using but one armored platoon, It's often advantageous to leave some of the platoon behind in a good firing spot in cases where an opponent will likely present multiple threats. A few infantry forces also allow the selection of an individual warrior tank(such as Barkmann in the case of the SS lists in Earth and Steel). This can offer a very significant advantage as they deploy after most of the opponent's forces and can always be on the table regardless of the reserves rules.
On the attack, well supported infantry forces have the best ability to quickly seize objectives from dug-in opponents. However, they tend to be slow moving and have limited ability to redeploy, so deployment and planning for how and where one will attack is key. On static defense, infantry have no equal, however their ability to redeploy is exceedingly limited, so deployment is critical. Oftentimes, I can correctly predict whether a defending infantry player will win or lose based solely on their initial deployment. Proper deployment requires analyzing where the objectives are in relation to terrain and what forces the attacker has at their disposal and predicting what the attacker would be most likely to do given these factors. Typically it is not possible to defend all objectives perfectly, but by placing strong forces at the objective which is most vulnerable can often tempt the attacker into taking the longer or otherwise more difficult route to get to a different objective. This can often buy time for reserves to arrive or mobile troops to respond.
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