Question: Soviet infantry bt vs. infantry/tanks

[Revenant]

So, first battle against Finland and I gave them bloody nose. It was only a marginal victory though, even as I occupied all objectives and subsequently routed entire enemy force. It was because I bought two batteries of heavy mortars as support and got some kind of penalty to my victory score.

My losses were fairly low, only two tanks and one engineer unit. Counting whole units of course.

I changed "normal" engineers - those without satchels and FT - into para enginners, because the normal ones do not have heavy equipment and paras have satchels and SMGs which proved useful.

Now just to get right ratio of artillery in my force to get rid of that penalty.

Concerning AT guns, I will probably disband them later and buy SP variant as it will really be a pain to use them exclusively.

[Wiking]

That artillery penalty is so that the player doesn't just flatten the map every time. Artillery really is the big decider a lot of the time, but it comes at a considerable cost. Also most infantry battalions, even in the Soviet army, don't have the luxury of calling in unlimited artillery barring special operations.

Be warned that the early SP-AT the Soviets get is very slow albeit potent. You won't see proper SP-AT until 1943 at the earliest, and even then the Germans have the edge for a long while. I would at least allow yourself a pair of T-35's or T-28's that you can upgrade into a pair of KV-1's later on. That's a pretty fair allotment of heavy armor considering the size of your force and is far from invincible. Their slow speed also means that when you commit them, they are pretty much stuck and can't rapidly redeploy across the map to help another sector.

Makes for a more interesting operational challenge