Kinda like your allies in STW/MTW/RTW?
Btw @ Satis:
I played the last session of the demo yesterday and here's my tactical learning, which are by no means complete and relevant to all of the game.
10 Tactical Observations
1. The CPU generally rushes straight for the point-scoring territories in the points-based skirmish.
2. The CPU is generally slow at capturing territory in Annihilate skirmishes.
3. Bottleneck defence is useful, as in most games. I found that establishing defences on the bottlenecks on my 1/3rd of the map quite a good tactic. It allows you to have enough ammo/fuel points which being just managable by your initially small troop capabilities.
4. In this case, the demo gives me a troop limit of about 57 and 3 bottlenecks to block-up. I did this in the end successfully with the following at each bottleneck.
1 x AT gun
1 x MG team
2 x MG nest
1 x engineer squad
1 x ranger squad
5. However, at some point, the CPU launched a solid 10-20 minute offensive at one of these points. I would have been unable to hold the position without removing troops from another bottleneck. In the end, after intense fighting i managed to hold off the attack by adding these extra units:
1 AT gun
1 ranger squad
1 engineers squad
6. During this attack, the rest of the bottlenecks were idle, so I used a ranger squad to go forward and raid in order to: a) distract the attack, b) do as much damage as possible with just a little squad. It worked very well indeed. The ranger squad encountered only german motorbikes and engineers near the occupied territories. They were dispatched with ease. Every now and then, the ranger squad would encounter a german tank on its way to the original offensive. The rangers easily outran them thanks to their "Fire Up" ability.
7. The beauty of the defence against the german offensive was not the allocation of units, but the flexibility of all available units, and the use of entrenchment obstacles.
8. Ill draw a pic of the set-up. As you can see, the tank traps protected the sandbags from breakthrough tanks. I would call in artillery strikes on the bridge when things really got shitty. In the end, i had built a 105mm of my own. MG's and rangers deal with the infantry. Tanks are dealt with by Rangers, AT guns, and the 105mm. The wire was there to slow down the infantry, but in the end it wasnt used because the bombardments would just clear it every time. Notice that there are no MG teams here. This was because i moved them to the other bottlenecks.
9. The real bitch were enemy snipers and artillery bombardments. The snipers were dealt with in the end by placing the bunkers slightly more forward. The artillery bombardments we avoided...by retreating. I would hear the bombardment coming, then rush everything back well behind the AT guns where a medic station would await any injured. Luckily, the CPU didnt coordinate the bomabardmments well with the ground troops, so i was able to re-position everyone for the next wave.
10. After the main assault was over, the germans never recovered for some reason. It seemed they ran out of resources, but i dont think this is possible. Winning the map was fairly easy, i pushed to the bottlenecks on 2/3rds of the map by advancing each of the 3 groups i had. Once i did this, i was happy enough, and quit.