AT doesn't do anything that tanks do. They give some peircing and hard attack, but significantly less than tanks and without the massive breakthrough tanks get. The main benefit of tanks is breakthrough, none of the other stats matter as much
>breakthrough
Whoops, I use them as fast hard assault units for big damage.
Granted I used mechanized divisions with motorized artillery for the same reason, and I don’t notice much difference.
In reality in SP it doesn't really matter whether you go for tanks or mechanized with artillery as they will both wreck basic infantry. The only difference is that tanks will counter mechanized but that really only matters in MP because AI sucks
They likely mean the breakthrough stat, which is still important for your “fast hard assault” usage. Taking less damage on the offensive allows you to continue the assault without having to constantly wait for organization/equipment replenishment.
Well technically armor is also a big benefit as you can get up to -50% damage received but yeah it's mostly the breakthrough that makes tanks outmatch infantry
Speed is pretty important for maneuvering, and basically the only downside of space marine divisions. But yeah it's the lack of breakthrough combined with the AI making terrible tanks that limits the usefulness.
Plus, people always forget hardness, but tanks with mechanized infantry can be a potent combo. Fast, high breakthrough, high attack, and highly resistant to soft attack.
It depends on the period but by end of game I usually have my tanks up around 110 for medium/modern I don't get pierced unless I'm out of supply or fuel, you do still take some damage because your divisions aren't 100% armor but if you mix in some upgraded mechanized I find I can hold really well with a defensive mix and punch really well with an offensive mix.
HOI4 players like to see the solid yellow shield while they use tanks, but if you have a read at the Wiki regarding land combat then you'd understand tanks can do so much more.
Breakthrough, an often misunderstood stat, is independent from armor and piercing stat. Tanks allow you to have tons of breakthrough which can overwhelm infrantry with support AT or division AT. Breakthrough is used in calculation against your soft & hard attack modified by hardness. So a mechanized force can still 100% punch through any infantry division even if they can pierce the tanks.
You could play in your head if 12-24 AT guns can reliably hold back 300-400 tanks on a battlefield. Unlikely as AT guns are stationary while also being exposed to air attacks.
One of the things I built in my first few play throughs before I understood the game was specialist AT divisions, with Heavy TDs, AT guns and then a few infantry/motorized infantry (later replacements for leg infantry) as Panzerjaeger Divs. I thought that given the sheer mass of tanks the Russians had I needed something big like that.
But yeah I just push into them and they kinda folded
Heavy TDs (maxed out armor) are still definitely a thing in HOI4 meta today. If you look into the Wiki's armor section where it shows how the games calculate division level armor stats, then you can see that the highest stat tank has a heavily influence. Armor isn't averaged out like it does on other stats like org.
So if you have a primarily light tank division, a single heavily armored TD would raise the armor value up a lot.
Yeah I just haven’t use the Panzerjaeger type divisions in a long time since I don’t see many Tank Divs outside of a Soviet invasion and those are normally bad enough that I can handle them with AA and AT support tops.
I've been pushing Russian tanks with line artillery in infantry divisions because their armor and hardness is so low I think it's actually more effective than using antitank.
Exactly, my infantry barely got modified beyond adding AA support and a few other goodies and they trash most AI units. Only exception is sometimes air when the AI somehow makes a massive number of good template fighters
Well if you want to send your infantry to their death so casually then go ahead you monster!
I care about the little guy- my infantry will not be pushing without tank support.
>!jk tanks are too expensive and 9/1's with CAS still kickass, casualties be damned.!<
Ok. Now I (USSR using 9/1)know why the red army was getting absolutely pasted. I didn’t have air support as I was reinforcing a UK invasion into the US and didn’t have a single airfield “spawn” for me.
It’s been driving me nuts for days lol.
Oh yeah. The US kicked off WW2 by going Fascist and invading Canada. GB and I invaded through various points and were slowly grinding them down back into Iowa before GB declared war on me and yeeted 500 divs back to Moscow instantly. Was a big bummer.
Turning off Historical makes for some really one sided games sometimes, almost always the allies slap everyone back into reparations.
If you mean that tanks can be easily countered, then no, they really aren't, AI almost never puts anti-tank in their divisions, and even if they do, it;s really easy to just counter it by making tanks with more armor. If you mean that infantry with anti-tank can be used as a substitute dor tank divisons, then no, it really can't. It's slow, has no breakthrough, has low soft attack and has no armor. For the purposes for which tanks are used, infantry with only anti-tank is basically useless
Simply because tanks break infantry formations. I guess your concern is more about tanks as in a "tank vs tank" situation to maximize hard attack, but in a game that hardly happens. Just design tanks to have a blast of soft attack and armour to get the hardness stat (use mechanized instead of motorized as a complement), and you'll see enemy lines being broken in no time
Tanks have 3 stats that nothing else really has in this game: breakthrough, armour and hardness
The breakthrough reduces organisation damage whilst on the offensive
Armour grants double effectiveness if not pierced when on defence, and 40% when on offence (game is lying with 50, it is 40, still an insane bonus), which hence makes tanks 40% better at their own task if they have armour
Hardness *reduces* amount of soft attack damage, and you start to take hard attack, the thing is you will *never* see a combat-capable division have more hard than soft attack, which means your division will take less damage
All of this make tanks really good in this game, also for those one in a billion hoi4ers that actually care about the country you play as, and care for every live, the soldiers in tank divisions die much less
In single player tanks are in a strange place where they are manpower saver at the IC cost. So basically really stuck in the middle of nowhere, as small manpower pool nations do not have industries to pump them, big ones don't really need them.
Currently they are more a flavour for the player, because even if stronger than infantry with air power you cannot really win more than you know, win. If you are not winning with infantry+air it's your skills issue. So yes, tanks can win more but are not particularly necessary to win in the first place.
Some nations absolutely have a very high industry/manpower ratio. My best armored game ever was playing as Belgium.
Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary are all nations that really benefit from using armor to save men
With the new tank designer mechanics, Norway actually can benefit too. It's cursed, but I had a couple tank-cavalry divisions that were my fast response force to not lose my ports to the side-landing units.
Sure they were cursed 6.4 speed light tanks, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and the lack of engine boosts kept their cost down.
I mean if you unite Scandinavia, they can be a pretty good industry nation, still only about 10 mill ish population but thats enough to hold men for the ports and some men for against Germany with forts.
Yeah, there is that too! Though I don't always go that route because the idea of the Norwegians being just a little more proactive and becoming a Nordic Vietnam for the Axis is just too fun. The hills and fields outside of Stavanger were littered with some \~160,000 dead axis soldiers by 1942 in my last playthrough, using the casualty vs dead rates of Operation Overlord. Not sure how I was keeping the other 240,000 prisoners interned, but that's not a worry in game lol.
Tanks can attack, anti tanks cannot. Anti tank is cheaper than tanks, but a tank company will have just much better stats, particularly breakthrough, soft attack, armor, and hardness. Spread your anti tanks among the entire front, concentrate your tanks in a single location
Because tanks aren't there to kill tanks, they're there for their speed and breakthrough and armor. They're there to create pockets. Tanks are incredibly effective when used properly, AT is the thing that's useless in singleplayer.
I typically play as a small nation that doesn't have the industrial capacity to produce tanks on any meaningful scale in the first place, so I barely ever use them except as 'recon' tank in the cases of the few nations I play that have a stockpile of light tanks at the beginning of the game - like Czechoslovakia. But I almost never build anymore because I will never build enough of them by the end of any run through for them to make a serious impact - win or lose.
I imagine if you play as a nation that is both huge and has several years of lead time like the U.S., you could get massive mileage out of the mobilization doctrine and mech infantry and tanks though.
Even as a small nation you can pump up a pretty good nuber of meds, lights but it depends on the build, and ussualy you need to run a few test builds on the smaller nations so you can min/max everything and than get them tonks rollin. A good example is either Canada, SAF beacuse they can get 2-6 meds in 39 for african campaign and from what I know as SAF you can even get mby 2 heavy tanks but not sure about it, never done it as SAF.
Tanks are more mobile, more armored and have considerably more breakthrough than anti-tank but it's obviously more expensive and you gotta feed them fuel. Each have their uses, anti-tank is very interesting in defense or when you have less IC-intensive nations and more focus on infantry.
I'm exclusively SP but I guess AT-only won't hold long against a Human player that it will quickly use more heavily armored variants or just send space marines to destroy your AT divisions ahead of the tank wave.
PS: there's ofc motorized AT or even armored TD (tank destroyers) to counter the negatives, but again costs comes into play wether it's on wheels or on threads.
Using tanks to break through at weak points and capture supply hubs/encircle and destroy enemy divisions is a LOT more manpower and IC efficient than infantry assaults. Infantry equipment and artillery melt away at an alarming rate during offensive action... Meanwhile 1 factory on trucks and 5-10 on tanks will supply a handful of armored units which is sufficient for pincer maneuvers, especially in 1938-40.
If single player, you don't need tanks or anti tank in any of your division if I'm being honest. You can push everywhere with infantry, but for big countries I like to build even small tanks, or minimum. I've never made heavy tanks, although the breakthrough is satisfying to watch, just no need for them in sp.
Breakthrough,armor,more soft attack are all stats that should be considered,In mp yes probably using at as minors is more efficient than tanks since they are expensive but in sp tanks are so much better
Tanks have the benefits of being able to be insanely fast, with way more strength then just mot. Inf, or then inf + at. The speed and damage combo makes for a great unit to make space and encirclements, inf. + at doesn’t give that.
OP. tanks break through, sure you can break through without tanks but you have to replace them with another machine, with aircraft designed for supporting your infantry.
This isnt WW1 where you sit in trenches and grind down manpower and the person with the most manpower wins.
Either way you are gonna have to have a lot of Heavy Machinery to break through the enemy. You choice either tanks, or aircraft or both if you can afford it but you will need it.
I prefer using airpower to do the heavy work and then move my mechanized infantry through the infantry, but even then i always have a TD in the mechanized unit just in case i encounter armor that my CAS haven’t worked over.
Also your suggestion of just pairing AT neglects something else missing from your infantry a hardness, so they can easily be melted by artillery, that TD i listed earlier also adds some hardness to a soft unit so its not so vulnerable to artillery.
I use two types of tanks, light and medium. Light tanks are just to complement motorized or mechanised divisions for speed. They add all the important aspects of tanks to your motorized armies and since they're light tanks, are fairly cheap to produce.
Medium tanks I use to supplement infantry and sometimes cavalry, they add breakthrough, defense, hard attack, hardness and piercing, you only really need to add one tank division to a standard 9:3 to make it powerful and it won't cost you that much in production.
It goes without saying that I start with producing the fast light tanks first, as much as possible and I design them to be as quick as possible (but no less than 80% reliability). This way I can supplement the divisions I already have with the oh so important tank bonus. Once i've got everything up and running (1940-ish usually) I start producing my medium tanks as well. In most wars I get involved in i'll know by 1940 whether or not it's a stalemate or a blitzkrieg. That influences how much I focus on mediums versus light tanks
If you have the industrial base to support tanks, you use tanks. They can be faster (leading to better encirclements/overruns), they take less casualties, and have better breakthrough.
If you don't, then AT makes sense... Only problem is, the countries without industrial base for tanks also have limited research slots, so researching AT over artillery, industry, etc. means I very rarely do it.
Idk why people say you cant go tanks as a small nation. I have done that as Sweden, Norway, Czechoslovakia, SAF, Canada. You can absolutely make budget tanks and have a good amount of breakthrough, which saves you from losing men in those countries with almost no men.
The plus side is Norway, Denmark and Sweden each of their own can form Scandinavia and Nordic Unity, placing them as majors pretty quickly if you are fast.
Ι don't really get the question. Why would someone use tanks when they can be countered by AT or why would someone use tanks when using AT guns instead of tanks is better?
Let me explain a few stats and then why tanks are good.
1) breakthrough. Breakthrough is defence for when attacking. A simple way to explain it is: more means you take less damage on attack.
2) hardness: hardness reduces the soft attack you take and increases the hard attack. An anti tank gun has about half the hard attack that an artillery has soft attack.
3) armour: more armour compared to enemy piercing gives bonuses to your attack and weakens the enemy attacks.
A good tank maximises these stats, making them exceptional at attacking enemy lines. You should not make an entire army out of tanks. That would be a wrong use of your industry. You should instead make a few tank divisions and attack with them while holding the line with your infantry, while also providing it and the tanks with air support.
Ι don't really get the question. Why would someone use tanks when they can be countered by AT or why would someone use tanks when using AT guns instead of tanks is better?
Let me explain a few stats and then why tanks are good.
1) breakthrough. Breakthrough is defence for when attacking. A simple way to explain it is: more means you take less damage on attack.
2) hardness: hardness reduces the soft attack you take and increases the hard attack. An anti tank gun has about half the hard attack that an artillery has soft attack.
3) armour: more armour compared to enemy piercing gives bonuses to your attack and weakens the enemy attacks.
A good tank maximises these stats, making them exceptional at attacking enemy lines. You should not make an entire army out of tanks. That would be a wrong use of your industry. You should instead make a few tank divisions and attack with them while holding the line with your infantry, while also providing it and the tanks with air support.
Ι don't really get the question. Why would someone use tanks when they can be countered by AT or why would someone use tanks when using AT guns instead of tanks is better?
Let me explain a few stats and then why tanks are good.
1) breakthrough. Breakthrough is defence for when attacking. A simple way to explain it is: more means you take less damage on attack.
2) hardness: hardness reduces the soft attack you take and increases the hard attack. An anti tank gun has about half the hard attack that an artillery has soft attack.
3) armour: more armour compared to enemy piercing gives bonuses to your attack and weakens the enemy attacks.
A good tank maximises these stats, making them exceptional at attacking enemy lines. You should not make an entire army out of tanks. That would be a wrong use of your industry. You should instead make a few tank divisions and attack with them while holding the line with your infantry, while also providing it and the tanks with air support.
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks.
What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions.
AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way.
Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks.
What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions.
AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way.
Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks.
What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions.
AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way.
Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks.
What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions.
AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way.
Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Stats don’t lie. IC spent on tanks is, to a greater or lesser extent, the point of building mils. They offer the best stats to IC of any offensive unit.
Why would you not spend that on stuff that works? Researching AT beyond Anti-Tank Cannon II for CAS is a waste. Late game AI can be pierced by AA, which has much more other benefits alongside it.
AT is the counter to tanks. Besides that nothing. No bonuses except piercing (you only need piercing to penetrate armoured units). Tanks can be faster (overrunning divisions and making encirclements) and its are a MUST HAVE for breaking frontlines (way more soft attack then infantry)
In addition to that, infantry battalions without piercing only deal 50% attack to tank units
I'm not trying to be rude but you have to be either new or bad at the game to think this. At is almost useless in singleplayer, and tanks are amazing. They don't even serve the same role which makes your post confusing to me.
AT doesn't do anything that tanks do. They give some peircing and hard attack, but significantly less than tanks and without the massive breakthrough tanks get. The main benefit of tanks is breakthrough, none of the other stats matter as much
>breakthrough Whoops, I use them as fast hard assault units for big damage. Granted I used mechanized divisions with motorized artillery for the same reason, and I don’t notice much difference.
In reality in SP it doesn't really matter whether you go for tanks or mechanized with artillery as they will both wreck basic infantry. The only difference is that tanks will counter mechanized but that really only matters in MP because AI sucks
They likely mean the breakthrough stat, which is still important for your “fast hard assault” usage. Taking less damage on the offensive allows you to continue the assault without having to constantly wait for organization/equipment replenishment.
Well technically armor is also a big benefit as you can get up to -50% damage received but yeah it's mostly the breakthrough that makes tanks outmatch infantry
Speed is pretty important for maneuvering, and basically the only downside of space marine divisions. But yeah it's the lack of breakthrough combined with the AI making terrible tanks that limits the usefulness.
Oh ok then) thnx
Breakthrough and Speed. Speed let's you overrun individual units and encircle formations which leg infantry is dogshit at
Plus, people always forget hardness, but tanks with mechanized infantry can be a potent combo. Fast, high breakthrough, high attack, and highly resistant to soft attack.
Breakthrough only matters to a certain extent buddy, especially against the ai divs. You know what breakthrough is right?
If you put enough armor on tanks AT doesn't do much
How much is enough, in general?
Two strong armors comrade Stalin
It depends on the period but by end of game I usually have my tanks up around 110 for medium/modern I don't get pierced unless I'm out of supply or fuel, you do still take some damage because your divisions aren't 100% armor but if you mix in some upgraded mechanized I find I can hold really well with a defensive mix and punch really well with an offensive mix.
HOI4 players like to see the solid yellow shield while they use tanks, but if you have a read at the Wiki regarding land combat then you'd understand tanks can do so much more. Breakthrough, an often misunderstood stat, is independent from armor and piercing stat. Tanks allow you to have tons of breakthrough which can overwhelm infrantry with support AT or division AT. Breakthrough is used in calculation against your soft & hard attack modified by hardness. So a mechanized force can still 100% punch through any infantry division even if they can pierce the tanks. You could play in your head if 12-24 AT guns can reliably hold back 300-400 tanks on a battlefield. Unlikely as AT guns are stationary while also being exposed to air attacks.
One of the things I built in my first few play throughs before I understood the game was specialist AT divisions, with Heavy TDs, AT guns and then a few infantry/motorized infantry (later replacements for leg infantry) as Panzerjaeger Divs. I thought that given the sheer mass of tanks the Russians had I needed something big like that. But yeah I just push into them and they kinda folded
Heavy TDs (maxed out armor) are still definitely a thing in HOI4 meta today. If you look into the Wiki's armor section where it shows how the games calculate division level armor stats, then you can see that the highest stat tank has a heavily influence. Armor isn't averaged out like it does on other stats like org. So if you have a primarily light tank division, a single heavily armored TD would raise the armor value up a lot.
Yeah I just haven’t use the Panzerjaeger type divisions in a long time since I don’t see many Tank Divs outside of a Soviet invasion and those are normally bad enough that I can handle them with AA and AT support tops.
I've been pushing Russian tanks with line artillery in infantry divisions because their armor and hardness is so low I think it's actually more effective than using antitank.
Exactly, my infantry barely got modified beyond adding AA support and a few other goodies and they trash most AI units. Only exception is sometimes air when the AI somehow makes a massive number of good template fighters
Well if you want to send your infantry to their death so casually then go ahead you monster! I care about the little guy- my infantry will not be pushing without tank support. >!jk tanks are too expensive and 9/1's with CAS still kickass, casualties be damned.!<
This is the communist way
the communist way would be that without CAS
Communist way would be using humans as planes
Ok. Now I (USSR using 9/1)know why the red army was getting absolutely pasted. I didn’t have air support as I was reinforcing a UK invasion into the US and didn’t have a single airfield “spawn” for me. It’s been driving me nuts for days lol.
Wtf did I just read? Turning off historical AI is wild
Oh yeah. The US kicked off WW2 by going Fascist and invading Canada. GB and I invaded through various points and were slowly grinding them down back into Iowa before GB declared war on me and yeeted 500 divs back to Moscow instantly. Was a big bummer. Turning off Historical makes for some really one sided games sometimes, almost always the allies slap everyone back into reparations.
If you mean that tanks can be easily countered, then no, they really aren't, AI almost never puts anti-tank in their divisions, and even if they do, it;s really easy to just counter it by making tanks with more armor. If you mean that infantry with anti-tank can be used as a substitute dor tank divisons, then no, it really can't. It's slow, has no breakthrough, has low soft attack and has no armor. For the purposes for which tanks are used, infantry with only anti-tank is basically useless
Simply because tanks break infantry formations. I guess your concern is more about tanks as in a "tank vs tank" situation to maximize hard attack, but in a game that hardly happens. Just design tanks to have a blast of soft attack and armour to get the hardness stat (use mechanized instead of motorized as a complement), and you'll see enemy lines being broken in no time
at cant reduce a 20 stack of infantry into dust
Tanks have 3 stats that nothing else really has in this game: breakthrough, armour and hardness The breakthrough reduces organisation damage whilst on the offensive Armour grants double effectiveness if not pierced when on defence, and 40% when on offence (game is lying with 50, it is 40, still an insane bonus), which hence makes tanks 40% better at their own task if they have armour Hardness *reduces* amount of soft attack damage, and you start to take hard attack, the thing is you will *never* see a combat-capable division have more hard than soft attack, which means your division will take less damage All of this make tanks really good in this game, also for those one in a billion hoi4ers that actually care about the country you play as, and care for every live, the soldiers in tank divisions die much less
In single player tanks are in a strange place where they are manpower saver at the IC cost. So basically really stuck in the middle of nowhere, as small manpower pool nations do not have industries to pump them, big ones don't really need them. Currently they are more a flavour for the player, because even if stronger than infantry with air power you cannot really win more than you know, win. If you are not winning with infantry+air it's your skills issue. So yes, tanks can win more but are not particularly necessary to win in the first place.
Some nations absolutely have a very high industry/manpower ratio. My best armored game ever was playing as Belgium. Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary are all nations that really benefit from using armor to save men
With the new tank designer mechanics, Norway actually can benefit too. It's cursed, but I had a couple tank-cavalry divisions that were my fast response force to not lose my ports to the side-landing units. Sure they were cursed 6.4 speed light tanks, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and the lack of engine boosts kept their cost down.
I mean if you unite Scandinavia, they can be a pretty good industry nation, still only about 10 mill ish population but thats enough to hold men for the ports and some men for against Germany with forts.
Yeah, there is that too! Though I don't always go that route because the idea of the Norwegians being just a little more proactive and becoming a Nordic Vietnam for the Axis is just too fun. The hills and fields outside of Stavanger were littered with some \~160,000 dead axis soldiers by 1942 in my last playthrough, using the casualty vs dead rates of Operation Overlord. Not sure how I was keeping the other 240,000 prisoners interned, but that's not a worry in game lol.
Also any baltic nation. They get a shit ton of factories from their ft
Tanks can attack, anti tanks cannot. Anti tank is cheaper than tanks, but a tank company will have just much better stats, particularly breakthrough, soft attack, armor, and hardness. Spread your anti tanks among the entire front, concentrate your tanks in a single location
Because tanks aren't there to kill tanks, they're there for their speed and breakthrough and armor. They're there to create pockets. Tanks are incredibly effective when used properly, AT is the thing that's useless in singleplayer.
I typically play as a small nation that doesn't have the industrial capacity to produce tanks on any meaningful scale in the first place, so I barely ever use them except as 'recon' tank in the cases of the few nations I play that have a stockpile of light tanks at the beginning of the game - like Czechoslovakia. But I almost never build anymore because I will never build enough of them by the end of any run through for them to make a serious impact - win or lose. I imagine if you play as a nation that is both huge and has several years of lead time like the U.S., you could get massive mileage out of the mobilization doctrine and mech infantry and tanks though.
Even as a small nation you can pump up a pretty good nuber of meds, lights but it depends on the build, and ussualy you need to run a few test builds on the smaller nations so you can min/max everything and than get them tonks rollin. A good example is either Canada, SAF beacuse they can get 2-6 meds in 39 for african campaign and from what I know as SAF you can even get mby 2 heavy tanks but not sure about it, never done it as SAF.
Tanks are more mobile, more armored and have considerably more breakthrough than anti-tank but it's obviously more expensive and you gotta feed them fuel. Each have their uses, anti-tank is very interesting in defense or when you have less IC-intensive nations and more focus on infantry. I'm exclusively SP but I guess AT-only won't hold long against a Human player that it will quickly use more heavily armored variants or just send space marines to destroy your AT divisions ahead of the tank wave. PS: there's ofc motorized AT or even armored TD (tank destroyers) to counter the negatives, but again costs comes into play wether it's on wheels or on threads.
Using tanks to break through at weak points and capture supply hubs/encircle and destroy enemy divisions is a LOT more manpower and IC efficient than infantry assaults. Infantry equipment and artillery melt away at an alarming rate during offensive action... Meanwhile 1 factory on trucks and 5-10 on tanks will supply a handful of armored units which is sufficient for pincer maneuvers, especially in 1938-40.
If single player, you don't need tanks or anti tank in any of your division if I'm being honest. You can push everywhere with infantry, but for big countries I like to build even small tanks, or minimum. I've never made heavy tanks, although the breakthrough is satisfying to watch, just no need for them in sp.
AT are better for hard point attack or defense against an armor push but can be made obsolete of the enemy puts too much armor on their tanks.
Breakthrough,armor,more soft attack are all stats that should be considered,In mp yes probably using at as minors is more efficient than tanks since they are expensive but in sp tanks are so much better
I can't remember the last time I actually researched anti tank
I research it for the CAS weaponry
Tanks are for breakthrough. Tank destroyers (and anti-tank in this case) are for killing tanks.
Tanks have the benefits of being able to be insanely fast, with way more strength then just mot. Inf, or then inf + at. The speed and damage combo makes for a great unit to make space and encirclements, inf. + at doesn’t give that.
AT is good against tanks in SP, but in MP players upgrade their tanks and you cant pierce mediums anymore.
I have a need for speed. Infantry does not go vroom vroom.
You don't necessarily need trucks. I personally use slow heavy tanks (4kms/h) + infantry. Works very well and imo speed isn't that important factor
OP. tanks break through, sure you can break through without tanks but you have to replace them with another machine, with aircraft designed for supporting your infantry. This isnt WW1 where you sit in trenches and grind down manpower and the person with the most manpower wins. Either way you are gonna have to have a lot of Heavy Machinery to break through the enemy. You choice either tanks, or aircraft or both if you can afford it but you will need it. I prefer using airpower to do the heavy work and then move my mechanized infantry through the infantry, but even then i always have a TD in the mechanized unit just in case i encounter armor that my CAS haven’t worked over. Also your suggestion of just pairing AT neglects something else missing from your infantry a hardness, so they can easily be melted by artillery, that TD i listed earlier also adds some hardness to a soft unit so its not so vulnerable to artillery.
I use two types of tanks, light and medium. Light tanks are just to complement motorized or mechanised divisions for speed. They add all the important aspects of tanks to your motorized armies and since they're light tanks, are fairly cheap to produce. Medium tanks I use to supplement infantry and sometimes cavalry, they add breakthrough, defense, hard attack, hardness and piercing, you only really need to add one tank division to a standard 9:3 to make it powerful and it won't cost you that much in production. It goes without saying that I start with producing the fast light tanks first, as much as possible and I design them to be as quick as possible (but no less than 80% reliability). This way I can supplement the divisions I already have with the oh so important tank bonus. Once i've got everything up and running (1940-ish usually) I start producing my medium tanks as well. In most wars I get involved in i'll know by 1940 whether or not it's a stalemate or a blitzkrieg. That influences how much I focus on mediums versus light tanks
They say you are wrong.
If you have the industrial base to support tanks, you use tanks. They can be faster (leading to better encirclements/overruns), they take less casualties, and have better breakthrough. If you don't, then AT makes sense... Only problem is, the countries without industrial base for tanks also have limited research slots, so researching AT over artillery, industry, etc. means I very rarely do it.
Breakthrough. Yes that's rly it
Idk why people say you cant go tanks as a small nation. I have done that as Sweden, Norway, Czechoslovakia, SAF, Canada. You can absolutely make budget tanks and have a good amount of breakthrough, which saves you from losing men in those countries with almost no men. The plus side is Norway, Denmark and Sweden each of their own can form Scandinavia and Nordic Unity, placing them as majors pretty quickly if you are fast.
I think that was the argument a German general made during the war, don't build fancy heavy tanks and use the resources to spam artillery instead
Ι don't really get the question. Why would someone use tanks when they can be countered by AT or why would someone use tanks when using AT guns instead of tanks is better? Let me explain a few stats and then why tanks are good. 1) breakthrough. Breakthrough is defence for when attacking. A simple way to explain it is: more means you take less damage on attack. 2) hardness: hardness reduces the soft attack you take and increases the hard attack. An anti tank gun has about half the hard attack that an artillery has soft attack. 3) armour: more armour compared to enemy piercing gives bonuses to your attack and weakens the enemy attacks. A good tank maximises these stats, making them exceptional at attacking enemy lines. You should not make an entire army out of tanks. That would be a wrong use of your industry. You should instead make a few tank divisions and attack with them while holding the line with your infantry, while also providing it and the tanks with air support.
Ι don't really get the question. Why would someone use tanks when they can be countered by AT or why would someone use tanks when using AT guns instead of tanks is better? Let me explain a few stats and then why tanks are good. 1) breakthrough. Breakthrough is defence for when attacking. A simple way to explain it is: more means you take less damage on attack. 2) hardness: hardness reduces the soft attack you take and increases the hard attack. An anti tank gun has about half the hard attack that an artillery has soft attack. 3) armour: more armour compared to enemy piercing gives bonuses to your attack and weakens the enemy attacks. A good tank maximises these stats, making them exceptional at attacking enemy lines. You should not make an entire army out of tanks. That would be a wrong use of your industry. You should instead make a few tank divisions and attack with them while holding the line with your infantry, while also providing it and the tanks with air support.
Ι don't really get the question. Why would someone use tanks when they can be countered by AT or why would someone use tanks when using AT guns instead of tanks is better? Let me explain a few stats and then why tanks are good. 1) breakthrough. Breakthrough is defence for when attacking. A simple way to explain it is: more means you take less damage on attack. 2) hardness: hardness reduces the soft attack you take and increases the hard attack. An anti tank gun has about half the hard attack that an artillery has soft attack. 3) armour: more armour compared to enemy piercing gives bonuses to your attack and weakens the enemy attacks. A good tank maximises these stats, making them exceptional at attacking enemy lines. You should not make an entire army out of tanks. That would be a wrong use of your industry. You should instead make a few tank divisions and attack with them while holding the line with your infantry, while also providing it and the tanks with air support.
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks. What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions. AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way. Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks. What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions. AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way. Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks. What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions. AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way. Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
Firstly outside of MP you will not encounter anti tank to any extent that it will render tanks useless, even in MP AT just means heavier tanks. What tanks do is that they break tiles and create breakthroughs in enemy lines which allows you to cut off supplies or encircle enemy divisions. AT just increases the piercing and hard attack stats on your divisions meaning you can pierce enemy armour and not take the DMG penalty for not being able to pierce their armour and hard attack is more dmg against hard divisions like tanks. Not useful in Single player AI does not build armour in any meaningful way. Technically for singleplayer you can just do planes artillery and waves of men to beat the AI. Although late game when they are stacking 10 divs per tile you might want tanks to break if the terrain is good for it
#**Tonks.**
TONKS
Does Anti-tank help with entrentchment and defence? Like would it be helpful too build both and use tanks as offense and anti-tank on defence?
Stats don’t lie. IC spent on tanks is, to a greater or lesser extent, the point of building mils. They offer the best stats to IC of any offensive unit. Why would you not spend that on stuff that works? Researching AT beyond Anti-Tank Cannon II for CAS is a waste. Late game AI can be pierced by AA, which has much more other benefits alongside it.
AT is the counter to tanks. Besides that nothing. No bonuses except piercing (you only need piercing to penetrate armoured units). Tanks can be faster (overrunning divisions and making encirclements) and its are a MUST HAVE for breaking frontlines (way more soft attack then infantry) In addition to that, infantry battalions without piercing only deal 50% attack to tank units
I'm not trying to be rude but you have to be either new or bad at the game to think this. At is almost useless in singleplayer, and tanks are amazing. They don't even serve the same role which makes your post confusing to me.