Does anyone really use these for other than homeland defense? I can understand if you are playing some small African region and you need a lot of cheap protection fast. But I don't DO defense.

Does anyone use them for offense? Do players pack up loads of hand-held ATs into trucks and drive them to the battlefield? Do others wait for the slow wheeled and towed AA to catch up with their main body?

For a long time I have just considered these "field pieces" to be neusances - something to be disposed of at a garage-sale or something.

But every time that I take China I get saddled with tonnes of these things. This time I am playing Japan and so did not start out with the huge arms resources that my US games had. Therefore, at first, I am forced to use any units that I can get my hands on.

So now I am torn - on one hand I have a habitual distain for these things. Certainly a stack of LOSATs has more fire-power and armor than a stack of soft hand-held TOW missiles. But I did some calculations and pound-for-pound hand-held and wheeled ATs are much more powerful than the motorized type. That is, if you want to stuff the most AT fire-power into a transport aircraft, then a bunch of 90 ton hand-held Japanese J-87 AT units carry much more fire-power than the one or two 700 ton motorized AT LOSAT units that the plane could carry.

Once I discovered that it had a firing range of over 50 km, I used massed towed artillery to good effect in my battle with South China.

But then again, both the soft and hard ATs have a range of just 4 km, which means that they are useless until the enemy arrives in an adjacent hex, and then at least one of the soft ATs is bound to get hit before its stack can kill the enemy unit. And they are so slow!

So what do you think? Does a mobile tech level 113 army have a place for offensive hand-held and field-pieces?

I think it depends on how fast your moving your boarder, and how strong your airforce is. On a fast moving boarder those leged and towed units are just going to slow you down. And the only time you would acualy want them to move to attack is when you are in a densly populated area. (IE taking strong points). Basicaly they would only have to walk a hex or four before they beging attacking the next unit. If they are walking further then this, then that greatly lessens the value of these units. However if you have a strong airforce then these units wont have to walk as you can airdrop them into postion. (if they are air dropable that is).

for me I usualy dont use them. My forces usualy consist of fast reaction forces. Where I can go great distances over land with my mechanized units. Although I do carry foot infantry for para-droping deep inside enemy territory, But these units are more about there close combat stats then anything else. I never bother with Anti tank armor, so defenatly not anti tank infantry. I am not a huge fan of arty either, so if I do have some they are always mobile and never towed. Although I do like a good missle luanch platform and these are all mobile. And I dont use ground AA, unless it has extreme ranges. As I prefer the fast reaction of my own fighters to an enemy situation. (although I will still use long range AA when aproaching a heavy Aircraft fabrication hex like Russia likes, becouse they usualy have dozens if not hundreds of aircraft flying around these). So it would be a defenate no for handheld for me, and no for towed. Maybe if I did more fighting in europe I would prefer these units.

I use them, but only in specific cases. Towed artillery & long range ATGs make an excellent garrison booster, pounding enemy units before they can get into range and weakening their morale. I let my fast movers take towns and then swap them out with these slow movers to help guard them when the assault team moves out again. Also, sticking medium range AA guns dispersed across many urban hexes can really do a number on enemy aircraft looking to cause trouble, as they'll get plinked from many directions at once and have no where to run until they die out completely. A city the size of Chicago with a 40km+ towed artillery unit in every hex is pure heck for any attacker to try to crack. And you can afford to do exactly that because towed units are cheap. Still, I concur that AT infantry are kind of useless, as the actual ATG field guns do a much better job against armor.

So in summary, towed guns are lousy for offense but excellent on defense, as you can buy & upkeep a lot more of them for the same cost as just a tiny number of self-propelled units, and usually in a lot less time as well.

As far as infantry goes anything that is para-capable is useful for blitz attacks. In the opening of a war I will have my main force up against their border with paratroopers standing by. Loaded en masse into cargo planes they are then sent deep into enemy territory (often the opposite border) to flash-capture any non-urban production facilities. While I don't use them for cities very often, and certainly not military bases, when you grab every oil well in an enemy country on day one you'll find that their ability to move up those tanks to stop your invasion suddenly becomes problematic for them very, very quickly. True, they often can't hold up against a strong counter attack with enemy armor, but if that happens then those same enemy forces have to be pulled off the front line, making my main assault go smoother. And I can just click "destroy" on any facilities I captured if I think that I can't hold them. The biggest problem that I have with paratroopers is extraction, as I need to either walk/drive them to an airfield or send in big helicopters to the field, as those cargo planes can't land just anywhere. (Later tech VTOL units can, but that's another story)

While regular foot infantry are not the best units for close-quarters (read: urban) combat, they are the best bang for your buck. Again you can often build & upkeep entire stacks of foot troops for the cost of just a couple of APCs, and when you add the totals together the foot troops will offer a lot more firepower and stamina than their APC counterparts, dollar for dollar. If you've got a big city in front of you and enough transport trucks to move them, then yes regular infantry should be part of any stack in your assault. Also, since they are pretty much physically incapable of outrunning their own supply lines, you won't have to worry about them running out of fuel & bullets at a bad time the way more mobile units often do.

Finally, units told to "entrench" vanish from the map, reducing overall clutter, and that can be a nasty surprise to someone who didn't check first & just assumed they were just generic garrison units.

I use them as defence, for offence I use motorised AT vehicles and rocket artillery, since my main tactic is blitzkrieg, but as for AA, it depends on the country I play. If it's Serbia or any other country with small airforce, I have to use a lot of AA, but I keep legged AA home.

At times. I use them to take ungarrisoned city hexes but mostly I use them to slow up the counterattack thats sure to follow my invasion. I take a few AT units and a towed Arty and will helo them in to a key bridge or ungarrisoned city type hex along the suspected route the enemy will send its reinforcements. This usually buys me enough time to get all my units to the first objectives and establish supply. Then Ill proceed with the next phase.

I like the towed and legged units for this because of the way units behave when out of supply. With multiple fronts , I sometimes get too focused in one area. If the units run out of supply in someway, the wheeled and tracked units will try to path back to a supply source which usually means they are pathing right into the enemy . With towed and legged units , they move slower, thus Im able to rescue them easier with Helo's or send in some kind of reinforcements.

Other than that , I use them mostly as my garrisons. Playing with Ruges mod however is making me rethink this somewhat, Im thinking I may have to go with something a whole lot beefier both as defensive units and on the air insertion method.

I scrap legged infantry at game start with the exception of Special Forces or Green Berets depending on what country I am playing. I normally scrap all towed artillery also. However, there is an exception to that also. The artillery unit M777E1(LW155) 155MM is an excellent unit to accompany para troops on deep insertions. It has a medium reaction time, only 153 tons in the field and a range of 61km with upgrades. I will add one stack (7 battalions) to each drop leave them in the captured city/facility and move the para units out 1 hex in a star pattern. Once that supply starts flowing the arty holds its on when the AI counter attacks. The intent is to reduce attrition of my leg units since often they are cut off and have no barracks to withdraw to.

I like these too.

This is one of those situations where it all sort of depends on what you're doing. In general I don't use leg infantry units and towed artillery, but there are exceptions. While in general they lack the mobility that I want my units to have, this becomes a non issue if you're specifically looking at units for airmobile operations. One of the things I've been experimenting with is the use of "airmobile support groups".

Take 6 standard Mi-6 Hook helicopter units. Have two of the units split into halves, and then merge the split units back with units that are still full strength. This will give you 4 "heavy duty" Mi-6 Hook units with 36 helicopters each that can carry 720 tons of cargo. Send one of the "heavy duty" units into reserve or off by itself somewhere because it's not needed for this specific application.

Now, there are an almost infinite number of ways to go about setting up the rest of the support group. The one that I chose was to go with:

3 X G5/52 155 mmm howitzers
2 X Special Forces Infantry units
1 X AD-M1 Sentry AA unit
1 X Eagle III Recon unit.

In use I have the three helos carry these units to an appropriate spot, unload the ground units and then just sit there. The ground units entrench. The artillery and the AA unit can cover a 5 hex radius with their fire (assuming you have the VLAP and ERF-BB ammunition technologies). The recon unit does the spotting for them as needed. The special forces infantry are there just to keep other units at bay if the stack should get attacked by opposing ground units. Keeping the helos with the rest of them boosts the effective rate of fire of the artillery and AA units. When I decide that they've done what they need to do in that spot, I just load the ground units back into the helos and send them to the next place I need them.

I could have used the "mobile recon" unit for the recon slot in the support group, but I wanted a unit that had at least minimal combat capabilites. Obviously I could have punted the special forces infantry units and substituted more artillery or AA units.

One of the limtations to this is that the spot that you send the support group to has to be a spot that your supply network covers. Otherwise the artillery will try to move off to the closest spot that it can get supply from.

Now, don't get me wrong here. The vast majority of my army consists of good mechanized infantry units backed up by heavy self propelled artillery units as well as tanks, MLRS units (9K-62) and long range AA units (SA-20 S-400 Triumf and/or its higher tech western counterparts). The "airmobile support group" is simply a niche player. But it can come in really handy if you have a few of them available when some country that had been neutral suddenly declares war on you creating a long unguarded flank that has to be covered somehow. Or if for whatever reason you just don't have enough of your self propelled artillery stacks where you need them.

Unfourtunatly BG made most of the leg A/T and ADA units non-air dropable so I usualy try to keep my Carl Gustav's in reserve with my airborne cappable leg infantry for when I need to take an in accesable area or small island using transport helos or planes. With heavier leg A/T I use them to garrison bunkers and moutian hexes with towed arty and leg ADA to slow down an enemy advance until my heavier units can arrive. Remember if your playing a country with limited petrol reserves they can make the difference between Life and Death.