My s44 Buildorder and guide

[Saktoth]

Since ive been teaching a lot of noobs s44 and i keep having to repeat this, ill put it up here. Information here will be very specific, giving a buildorder which ive found to be good, which is easy to follow. Feel free to contradict me or posting your own guide, this is by no means definitive. This is mostly for large to medium sized maps, rather than small 1v1's.

Infantry capture control points. Control points = mexes, you need them. Supply (Energy) is just used to fire big guns so dont worry about it early on.

1. Go US. US and Germany are the easiest to learn. Do not go Russian they are difficult. At the Inf level Germany and US are almost identical, but US has better vehicles.

2. Start near (But not directly on) a metal spot (control point). Your HQ will capture it.

3.HQ: 2 engineers and then spam nothing but HQ infantry non stop for the rest of the game. HQ infantry are 1/3rd the cost of barracks infantry and you need infantry to capture, so they're always worth it.

4. Engineer 1: Barracks, Engineer 2: Truck, then assist barracks.

5.HQ squads: Capture Control Points (CPs). When the truck is done use it to ferry your troops to more distant control points for rapid expansion. Keep making trucks as you need them to ferry your squads about.

6. Barracks: Adv engineer. This will let you go vehicle ASAP. Afterwards, just leave the barracks idle, it is useless. The only other things worth building from the barracks (rax) are MG squads and pack howitzers. This is because Rifle and SMG squads cost 3x as much from the rax as from the HQ, so just make them in the HQ. Rax can also be used to make more engineers if you need to spend faster and scout squads which are cloaked spies, good for spotting but not essential.

7. Adv Engineer: Vehicle Yard. Assist it with the other engineers. Once the vehicle yard is done, spam supply storage, because vehicles use a lot of supply. If you have spare metal, spend it on another vehicle yard.

8. Vehicle yard: Greyhounds. Spam greyhounds, mix mobile infantry support guns if you like.

9. Greyhounds: Form a skirmishing line behind your infantry. Dont get too close to enemy infantry, or they'll hit you with grenades. Just pummel them from a distance. Push forward a bit at a time, securing with MG's as you go if you're having trouble. Try to keep them behind your infantry, as greyhounds get 1-shotted (and 1-shot) by almost everything other than small arms.

10. ???

11. Win.

MG's: These are only good when deployed. They are purely defensive. Use trucks to get them in position well ahead of any battle and secure areas. Make sure the facing is right before deploying them.

Pack Howitzers: Artillery, keep them behind your troops. They are good against prettymuch everything at long range but they suck at close range. Transport them, they move very slowly otherwise. You dont need them since greyhounds are very similiar, but they can be useful.

Supply: Deploy trucks whenever you are engaging the enemy or setting up a defensive line of infantry. Make sure your greyhounds resupply their ammo from these points. You should have plenty of trucks to ferry your squads so just deploy some on the frontline. Pull any greyhounds that have run out of ammo out of the battle ASAP. If you ever run entirely out of supply entirely, fall back until you re-stock then make a push.

[Jazcash]

Germany and US are almost identical

I shall read no more.

[Saktoth]

Germany and US are almost identical

I shall read no more.

At the Inf level, its true.

[imbaczek]

US riflemen suck due to low range; this is IMHO almost but not quite balanced by their dps. I like GBR much more purely due to longer ranged rifles.

i'd also advise to build a mortar team or two every now and then if there are any kinds of LOS-blocking obstacles or you need to harass higher ground.

[Saktoth]

US riflemen suck due to low range; this is IMHO almost but not quite balanced by their dps. I like GBR much more purely due to longer ranged rifles.

US rifle range is 600, GBR is 680. Thats 13%, not very significant for a unit that moves at the same speed and cant fire backwards (no kiting). It only really matters in the case of supression and if he has supressed you can you havent supressed him you're prettymuch dead anyway.

[Google_Frog]

6. Barracks: Adv engineer. This will let you go vehicle ASAP. Afterwards, just leave the barracks idle, it is useless. The only other things worth building from the barracks (rax) are MG squads and pack howitzers. This is because Rifle and SMG squads cost 3x as much from the rax as from the HQ, so just make them in the HQ. Rax can also be used to make more engineers if you need to spend faster and scout squads which are cloaked spies, good for spotting but not essential.

7. Adv Engineer: Vehicle Yard. Assist it with the other engineers. Once the vehicle yard is done, spam supply storage, because vehicles use a lot of supply. If you have spare metal, spend it on another vehicle yard.

I disagree slightly with these 2 points. They can build a few Adv Engineers to make veh faster if they've got the income as Adv Engineers have better bp/cost. Also greyhounds don't use that much supply so I'd make another veh yard first.

[[Krogoth86]]

1. Go US. US and Germany are the easiest to learn. Do not go Russian they are difficult. At the Inf level Germany and US are almost identical, but US has better vehicles.

I disagree - Great Britain is no different to US or Germany in terms of gameplay as only Russia is unique on this term. When it comes to the infantry it's pretty much Russia < US < Germany < GBR whereas Russia imo is by far weaker than the differences between the other factions which are rather small. Apart from simple range things that get better there also are accuracy and (a bit) damage per shot. It's true though that US and Germany imo are quite comparable in terms of infantry as they both have flamers and the better stats of Germany's infantry gets a bit equaled due to some light MG gunners you get afaik with the barrack's rifle squad (not sure though). No real match for GBR's MG that comes from the HQ's squad though which also makes that "small" riflemen range advantage more important as the enemy most certainly will have to crawl that distance and that's enough time to fire some shots for yourself...

The term "better vehicle" also might not be the best here. Germany has quite good tank destroyers and later on the best tanks.

3.HQ: 2 engineers and then spam nothing but HQ infantry non stop for the rest of the game. HQ infantry are 1/3rd the cost of barracks infantry and you need infantry to capture, so they're always worth it.

I also started with engineers in the beginning but then switched to doing one infantry squad first and 2-3 engineers afterwards (depending on how many flags the map you play on has - with just a few you'll easily have the amount needed to supply 3 engies fast). My experience is that this turns out to be the better strategy as you most certainly will run short on ressources on bigger maps while building your barracks and that way those 20 secs you can capture your flags earlier might be the 20 secs needed to bring some support into place / kill some of Russia's "politicians" or what the exact term was now...

Sending your first squad out without a truck makes sense as on most maps you don't have to travel that much of a distance to the nearest neutral flags and can use the ressources for units / barracks. If that's not the case doing engies first makes sense though...

6. Barracks: Adv engineer. This will let you go vehicle ASAP. Afterwards, just leave the barracks idle, it is useless. The only other things worth building from the barracks (rax) are MG squads and pack howitzers. This is because Rifle and SMG squads cost 3x as much from the rax as from the HQ, so just make them in the HQ. Rax can also be used to make more engineers if you need to spend faster and scout squads which are cloaked spies, good for spotting but not essential.

Well I disagree on this. Imo it makes sense keeping your first barrack spamming riflemen. While there's no discussion about this for Russia this at least makes much sense for GBR as their riflemen are just that excellent. Plus going vehicles too fast makes you lose flags as the yard plus vehicle is rather expensive which then takes even more time to finish that and your enemy might just use those extra ressources to build either a vehicle yard of its own or do a towed gun yard to make howitzers / anti-tank guns whearas the latter which deploys very fast is extremely deadly for vehicles. Especially on small maps just one or two lost flags means an immense amount of lost ressources your enemy can use. Imo it's all about neither going vehicles too soon nor too late...

MG's: These are only good when deployed. They are purely defensive. Use trucks to get them in position well ahead of any battle and secure areas. Make sure the facing is right before deploying them.

Well let me turn this into a general comment on infantry:
I've never built SMG squads. It's nice to get some of them via your HQ but in 90% of all situations and in 99% of all late game situations they are plain useless. Once there is fire on them they start to crawl and are cannon fodder for any riflemen - not talking about MGs or tanks which demoralize infantry.

MGs are a waste of ressources imo too. They have a nice range, stun infantry and all but imo suck. They die to any tankish thing or howitzers and often can be flanked by infantry they can't fire at. When approaching like a single one of them don't let your units waste their fire on them which e.g. riflemen like to do (although they do very little damage). That's one of the few situations your SMGs might turn out nice. Put them to hold fire and let them get close to the MG. Then turn on fire at will again to let grenades finish them off. Still the biggest weakness hasn't been spoken of: Flamers & Bazookas. You really have to have troops around your MG in order to safeguard them which usually fails (as due to the high deploy time MGs mostly are defensive stuff and you don't want your precious soldiers stand around without any job). As the two classes are cloaked they can easily get to them and as for bazookas it's pretty much a one shot kill...

I also never build snipers. While their concept is nice especially against GBR with their free scouts they get uncovered way too easy and you just get one per platoon plus they are rendered rather useless once vehicles show up.

Last but not least there are mortars which are very good and if your game is about infantry battles (for whatever reason) they pretty much decide who win and if that's the case I usually build two platoons of them before switching to bazookas. They're not very accurate need ammo and can't fire even with a yellow star but if they hit it's devastating plus even if they don't do direct hits they cause "red-star-stuns" very fast making your infantry win easily. They also mean some punch to the vehicles so if they keep standing around you've a good chance of killing em.

[Otherside]

Rus > all

/thread

[Google_Frog]

Otherside Russians are the biggest noob trap for 1v1. By the time they have a bax and some inf(ie any unit they can use to defend themselves with) the other side can have HQ inf in a truck in their base grenading their bax.

[Otherside]

thats cos game isnt balanced for 1v1 on small maps

i mean rus > all on team games big maps etc

[Nemo]

We actually spend a fair bit of our balance dev time in 1v1 on small maps

Russia until my most recent change (with commissar cloak radius and move speed) was very competitive on small maps. It was just a bit of an over-adjustment.

As for Saktoth's guide - from my naive designer standpoint, I can't say I ever recommend forgoing rifle/SMG infantry. They are absolutely vital for early expansion and landgrab. I agree that I haven't done a great job of keeping all the barracks platoons useful (particularly sniper, scout and assault) - its something I'll be working on as we move forward. I may change snipers so that only snipers can detect other snipers firing. Wouldn't that be fun? >_>

MGs probably need a look - I agree that their usefulness is a bit fickle - sometimes an emplaced MG is an absolute wall, othertimes the existence of vehs or arty renders them absolutely useless.

As for US/Ger differences - play some 1v1s US vs Germany on a fairly open map, I think you'll start to appreciate that range difference a bit. Given how small they are, that 10% difference may mean an extra 3-4 guys of a 8 man group being in rifle range, and the corresponding damage output increase. I've actually been worrying that US is underpowered on open maps.

For veh differences, its basically a question of ease of use and applicability later on in the game. Greyhound is a great general purpose vehicle at the veh stage - its AP rounds can gib most other vehs, and the HE is pretty decent, and it's fast. The Scott has great armor and a nice HE gun. Scott is probably useful thoughout, but for the greyhound, you'll find that its 37mm has a hard time doing much to armor later on, while Germany's Marder (armed with 75mm PaK 40 gun) is in the top 4 AT guns in the game, its just a more specialized role. Likewise with the 250 - its massively effective at anti-infantry, but its a very specialized role (rather ineffective against other vehs).

As ever, balance is a work in progress. I'm assimilating as much information as I can in order to make decent decisions for the design.

Thanks all for your feedback here.

[smoth]

I think you guys are talking shit, you should fight and the winner is right! Or are you guys afraid of one another? I think you should take to the game.

[Google_Frog]

Russians are vulnerable to inf rush even on 16x16 maps.

[FLOZi]

while Germany's Marder (armed with 75mm PaK 40 gun) is in the top 4 AT guns in the game

8th, at least;

88mm L70 (Tiger II), 17pdr (Achilles, Firefly, 17pdr towed), 122mm (IS-2), 75mm L70 (Panther, JgdPzrIV), 88mm L56 (Tiger), 152mm ML-20 (ISU-152), 85mm S53 (T-34/85)... I'm not actually sure it beats the US 76mm - they are pretty much dead even.

Though perhaps you were taking accuracy into account and cost effectiveness rather than sheer power.

[Nemo]

Availability + power. So yeah, I forgot a few, but still - nearly all of the guns you mentioned (with the exception of 17pdr) are fairly hard to come by (often only on one unit pretty far up the tech tree), whereas the Marder is available from very early game and can do nasty damage to pretty much any tank up until heavies.

[Saktoth]

This is assuming you get to tanks. While it 1-shots vehicles, vehicles 1-shot it too. So you might as well use it as anything else. Greyhounds 1-shot all other vehicles anyway.

I disagree - Great Britain is no different to US or Germany in terms of gameplay as only Russia is unique on this term.

GBR has fewer, more expensive, more powerful infantry and relies heavily on supression. Harder to play, especially with no rax inf. They have no infantry support gun and their deployable MG's are not as cheap and versatile.

The term "better vehicle" also might not be the best here. Germany has quite good tank destroyers and later on the best tanks.

Vehicle, not tank. Their halftracks dont 1-shot enemy vehicles, and are thus inferior though cheaper.

I also started with engineers in the beginning but then switched to doing one infantry squad first.

Engies drain -20, Inf drain -10. HQ makes +20. You waste half your starting metal for 33 seconds as well as wasting the metal from any capped points for 50 seconds. To me this seems sub-optimum, and leads to later rax.

Well I disagree on this. Imo it makes sense keeping your first barrack spamming riflemen.

These cost 3x as much as your HQ inf. Save your money for other things.

[Nemo]

These cost 3x as much as your HQ inf. Save your money for other things.

Meh. I feel like IK's victories over you kinda showed the difficulty of playing this strategy out. Fewer inf = slower expansion = choked for command as the game progresses. It's probably most successful on the 1944_ maps because they tend to have fewer spots.

[Saktoth]

Meh. I feel like IK's victories over you kinda showed the difficulty of playing this strategy out. Fewer inf = slower expansion = choked for command as the game progresses. It's probably most successful on the 1944_ maps because they tend to have fewer spots.

My problem wasnt early expansion, i was even on expansion the first time- until he contained me using british MG's and i was only a bit behind on a HUGE 4v4 map vs RUSSIANS (I was surprised i was not MORE behind) the second time.

And as you say, we didnt play s44 maps.

[[Krogoth86]]

I agree that I haven't done a great job of keeping all the barracks platoons useful (particularly sniper, scout and assault) - its something I'll be working on as we move forward. I may change snipers so that only snipers can detect other snipers firing. Wouldn't that be fun? >_>

MGs probably need a look - I agree that their usefulness is a bit fickle - sometimes an emplaced MG is an absolute wall, othertimes the existence of vehs or arty renders them absolutely useless.

Well at first I'd really reconsider the barrack's platoon sizes as Saktoth is right - they're really far too expensive in comparison to HQ's platoons. When it comes to Snipers I'd totally change them: I'd make you get like two of em instead of one per platoon and buff the range to at least 1000 (the current +200 in comparison to riflemen is rather nothing). Imo they also should decloak on firing but get a way lower decloak range and due to the fact that you get two now they should demotivate much less.

When it's about MGs I think they are ok the way they are but it's just that they make little sense in most situations - when they do they are ok...

GBR has fewer, more expensive, more powerful infantry and relies heavily on supression. Harder to play, especially with no rax inf. They have no infantry support gun and their deployable MG's are not as cheap and versatile.

So isn't it actually easier to play with less infantry than with more? Actually the only real difference for GBR infantry gameplay is that you get a scout in your HQ you shouldn't put between your soldiers. They may not have a howitzer/gun in their barrack's buidlist but mortars do that job anyway too plus as you said vehicles do pretty much the same so there's no real need for them.

I also don't know what you mean with that statement of yours about the MGs. You get a bunch of deployable MG gunners - how should that be less versatile and the higher costs should go into better stats (also I didn't check)...

These cost 3x as much as your HQ inf. Save your money for other things.

I disagree (not on the costs being too high) because going for vehicles simply is very expensive. Let's say that the infantry spammed by HQ would be equal for both players then with the squads from the barracks you not just can attack at an entirely different location but also easily outnumber you enemy. The smaller the map (or i.e. the less flags it has) the more grave this is going to be

[1v0ry_k1ng]

ok

firstly, russians do not benefit from a HUGE map so much as you think.
Ive played about 8-10 1v1s on titan, about 3 of which I was britain fighting russia. the fact is that if you get about 15-20 brit inf in one place with the brens behind the rifle line, maybe a mortar squad rushed out the first brax, no amount of russian spam can get through. it simply dosnt work. you could send 80 russian riufles at 20 brit in with mortars. they'll get supressed and arrive peicemeal and get shredded. the british inf with quickly amass huge HP from exp and those who are targetted by a russian but the russian dies before he kills regen their hp. this constant 'russia is op' stuff is crap, because against a competent player who knows how to focus fire and fight in mixed, coordinated groups the russian infantry is terrible.

also, the m8/daimer light vehicles can one shot other vehicles, but they do far less vs infantry. the sdk250/t60 both knock out alot more supression, MG fire, and AOE than the m8/daimer, and since germany can easily mow down m8s with a marder or two safley out of range behind the inf lines, and russia has anti tank rifles which work well at keeping enemy light veh at maximum range, they dont end up being very effective infantry killers against an experienced player.

and the factions are not that similar:

US has shorter ranges but higher firerates than other nations:
this means their infantry are very little use defensively, and must push foward to get in range (but when in range they kick ass). as a result, to sucsessfuly play US you have to always play agressively, pushing foward. flamethrowers should be constanly produced, both for bumrushing bases and supressing enemy smg hordes (US smgs are terrible).

Germany has average riflemen, long range, meh DPS, but good SMG troops- longer ranged than other nations- and excellent MGs (their MG squad has 3 deployable MGs, everyone elses has 1) which belt out more shots and supression. the long range rifles and excellent MGs benefit a playstyle of leapfrogging foward deploying and undeploying MGs to hold ground. they need to make more use of AT infantry and marders because their primary anti inf vehicle is appalling vs armour. their tanks however, kick ass

British infantry are brilliant but lacking in numbers. To win as britain you must micromanage MGs behind rifle lines, focus fire on indivual enemies and rely on supression weapons so you only take on the enemy peicemeal. if this works out, british inf gain lots of HP from exp and end up as powerful veterns. They can also make commandos for base rape, anti tank and flanking (they have epic dps). however, their vehicles and tanks are the weakest.

Russia is diffrent. Noobs fail comicly with russia most the time. Russia has huge numbers, and their SMG troops have the best weapon (but least health) in the game. Russian inf are constantly dying, so its hard to build up a large number when in battle. large scale conflict does not benefit russian inf hordes, so to play russia you need to try and force your enemy to spread out their forces, where russian numerical superiority or flanking can get the smg troops into range. russian light vehicles are greatly lacking in anti tank abilities, which makes mid game somewhat challenging, but their main tanks are some of the best avaliable.