Your greatest victory and worst defeat

[Mustang]

I have soo many big wins that I can't even count them, but they were all against low-quality forces. Even when hugely outnumbered, the human player will always beat an AI with tons of low-quality troops. The hard part is when the enemy has better troops than you do. In the old SP3 during the NATO Campaign (as West Germany), I had a lot of good fights. I remember the one where you had to assault into a city. I went around the south edge of the map, plastered a route into the city with MLRS, took its victory objectives, and my tanks ambushed the enemy counterattack. I took maybe 13 casaulties and the enemy thousands. That would probably be one of my best wins, but I haven't played as the lower-skill-level side very much, which is the real challenge.

My greatest defeat took place just a week ago in PBEM. I bought a tank company, some snipers and humvees, and loaded the snipers into the hummers. It was a city assault against Iraq, and I was overconfident because I assumed that the other guy had just bought a lot of insurgent infantry. So I blast through his infantry and get funneled into a narrow ally. I don't get ambushed, so I thought things were going well. I send a humvee force around their north flank, and they make good progress. Suddenly, on turn 3, the enemy cluster artillery opens up and fries my tanks, while an enemy long-range RPG shot kills one of my Abrams with a side hit. My tank company is decimated, and my Humvees get taken out with rifle fire. I knew that the Iraq OOB had both government and insurgent forces, but had no idea it had MLRS (imagine Iraqi guerillas owning MLRS!). I have one tank left and a few humvees at the end of Turn 3, and the other guy asks me if I want to continue. I'd have to conquer the whole city with one tank, so I surrender. Imagine the US Army getting beat by terrorists in 9 minutes!

[c_of_red]

The Iraqi army has had the Soviet version of MLRS since the early 80's I think. It is used with HE, Cluster munitions and Chemical weapons.
As another suggestion, when playing PBEM or F2F, it is always a good idea to take a peek at the encyclopedia and see what your opponent might pull out of his trick bag.
It isn't 'gamimg the system' since EVERY army keeps track of just what their opponent is running in the way of kit.
Even without the Cluster munitions, you were fried.
The terrain channelled any units coming across the river above the map center thru the gap you took. While the program won't notice that, A Human can't miss it. With more experience playing humans, you will learn not to take the most obvious route. You should have either;
gone along the top edge of the map by buying a bulldozer and plowing a route thru enough buildings to make a path for your armor ( which the US did in Iraq. That is why they bought those armored D-7's from the IDF)
Gone along the river where it curves to the left (past the Arms depot and taken the last bridge (going top to bottom).
Or taken the risk of a helio assault. I had everything covered except the top route. I really didn't think you had the experience yet to think of that, so I took a sort of chance. Sort of because if I had seen buildings being rubbled on the replay, I would have slid all my units toward the top and left the bottom bridge open. That worried me some because your arty would have been able to catch my infantry running thru the streets and hurt them pretty bad.
Do you want to finish the current game or start another?

[Mustang]

The bulldozers would have been immobilized crushing the buildings, woulnd't they?

The real reason I lost was because I was overconfident. I didn't think that your guys would put up much of a fight at all, and expected to take a quick route through to the objectives and then hold it against an infantry charge. IMO if you didn't cluster bomb my tanks I'd be able to rush through the kill zone with light losses and take the airport. But because you had cluster arty, it didn't matter what route I took because my force was soo small that just one barrage would cripple it.

[pdoktar]

If I remember correctly old SP2 had the Fulda 80´s campaign. VERY difficult. Facing lots of t80s and bmps. Once I beat a 18x force in points. Think it was the defence of Frankfurt. Extremely difficult battle that was.

But clever use of smoke and TI against the otherwise hard-to-kill T80s carried the day (and the day after and the day before). (Hint M1s couldn´t be trusted at this job)

I truly recommend that campaign for everyone who wants a serious challenge against the AI. I spent almoust an hour each scenario, thinking tactics and defensive fire arcs, artillery missions, where to lay smoke, what missiles to use and where and trying to keep away from the murderous enemy rocket artillery.

[Mustang]

I remember that one, it was too hard for me. I eventually did complete the campaign. Frankfurt was actually pretty easy, though- I dumped smoke right on top of my positions, so the enemy couldn't see me at all! The key was to have an armor-heavy core with a lot of light artillery to lay down smoke. The northern flanking movement is more of a threat, but in close terrain your Abrams have a better chance at ambushing the enemy. Eventually I did complete the campaign, but only by cheating a lot on the last few missions. It was a well-designed campaign, at least. It's more fun to match wits with a good scenario designer's plan than to just massacre hordes of incompetent AI.

[pdoktar]

Damn, I should´ve figured out the dropping of smoke DIRECTLY on top of MY positions. Used some infantry units for that, though. We have a saying that don´t go beyond the sea to fish.. I just did that with my smoke missions.

[Uberpooch]

I recall that SP2 campaign. As I recall, the final mission involved an assault on a Soviet-held city, which was across a river with only a couple of crossing points. That scenario was a nightmare, because getting to the bridges meant exposing your units to fire in the flanks from Soviet T-80s for a kilometer or so, and there were so many Soviets that there was no easy way to take them out. After 6-7 tries, I finally won the scenario through a combination of prodigious use of smoke ammo, leapfrogging advances, and sheer luck. Only about a third of my units survived the battle, but the final victory still ranks as one of my favorites.

My worst defeat came in another NATO-WP campaign (I can't recall which one). On the first turn of the first scenario, a MiG came in on a bombing run. One of my Stinger units successfully shot it down, whereupon it managed to crash right on top of my HQ unit, wiping it out. Dead HQ=campaign over.

[pdoktar]

You may here be referring to the extremely hard Fulda gap campaign, that came withn the SP2 game. Never got that far to assault a soviet city, but those t80s and extreme difficulties ring a bell here..

[Sarunas]

I recently successfully defended German villages with a mixed battalion kampfgruppe of 1 tank coy and 2 pzgr coys plus support elements, spring 1987, versus circa two regiments of soviet combined mechanised/armored troops (>200 apc's and 148 tanks destoryed, 3000 troops KIA, 10 aircraft downed) for the loss of maybe 70 people and 7 Leo2A4 (all to PGM's) and 5-6 Marders and Luchs'. What a two-night nailbiter that one was!

[pdoktar]

Maybe in real-life it might even take three nail-biting nights.