How to engage with infantry & a bit of tanks?

[unmanned]

I play skirmish in OpenRA against 2-3 opponents, and low-tech battles seem very hard, mostly I lose the engagements. I gather a group of 20-30 soldiers (half with rifle, half rocket soldiers), and a few tanks or flak trucks. But the opponents manage to destroy all my infantry rather quickly, especially with flame throwers.

I tried to aim the group at flame throwers, which is quite hard, but still after almost every engagement, infantry is dead.

Is there any simple recipe what to do, or I just need to micromanage 100 times faster than I do?

Googling won't help, since these days it gives you generic slop rather than anything specific, and for DuckDuckGo, I don't know the keywords.

[sayitghoul]

Hi, I am not the best player by any stretch, but I can hold my own. I am somewhere between advanced and absolute sweat. I have my own struggles I am trying to deal with, such as late game Europe FFA where I place 2nd most of the time (sometimes I also win).

If you have a group of soldiers (50/50 rifle/rockets seems out of proportion), then use your tanks to literally tank the damage from the enemy squad. So always have your tanks in front of your infantry.

Once production is up and running, I build infantry in a 25/10 ratio. 25 rifles and 10 rockets. You don't need 50 rifles and 50 rockets, its too much really.

Flak trucks are useless against infantry. If you play as soviets, use the APC or as allies, use the ranger.

Perhaps we can play together at some point so I can give you some tips. I am on most days in the evenings (UK time). We can just do a 1v1 or 2v2 with bots or whatever.

Good luck!

[sayitghoul]

Just a quick build order for you (in terms of infantry/tanks).

I tend to build 10 rifles at the start of the game to protect my base.

Once I have my war factory, I'll have built a rocket or 2 and I will build 1 flak and 1 APC (or 1 light tank and 1 ranger) and 2 ore harvesters. After that, I put production to 10 heavy tanks (/medium tanks) and 5 V2 rockets launchers (/artillery) in that ratio throughout the game. It serves me well most of the time. I like to play as Ukraine, so sometimes I switch it up and send Demolition trucks to an enemy's base.

As soon as your cash is at like $3,000 start building infantry at the above ratio I suggested.

[unmanned]

Ok, good points, so maybe I need to add more riflemen and stop using flaks.

But how do you control the group when engaging? Any keystrokes, any special commands?

[Kesha]

If you build enough tanks, you can just "squish" the enemy's infantry. Sure they scatter (X), but you can roll over them over and over again.

[unmanned]

Well, if you have tons of money, you just don't care of any tactics whatsoever.

And also, I tried that too -- it's same as in Dune -- and tanks think too much and get destroyed too quickly, by rocket soldiers and flamethrowers. I guess, riflemen are supposed to kill them first.

So what keys should I press?

[Blackened]

This is stuff you'd find in the openra academy discord. Without seeing replays it's hard to 100% know what's going wrong. But I assuming you are attack moving at the very least correct? If you're not that is a huge problem but an easy fix (press A and then click to attack move)

If you are and you're still losing there's 4 things to keep in mind.

1) 2-3 rifles for every 1 rocket. Infantry are your true damage dealers. Rockets kill vehicles and defenses and rifles kill other infantry.

2) heavy armor (tanks) in front. A tanks job is to keep your infantry alive for as long as possible. When you start an attack your tanks should be the first things getting hit. But it's important to keep your infantry close behind your tanks. If you send your tanks in too early and they all die before your infantry get into the fight then they weren't effective. Which bring us to 4.

3) Concave. This is likely your biggest problem with engagements. OpenRA's unit pathing tends to string your units out in a long line along the way to their destination. I'll add images to demonstrate my point:

incorrect.png (261.31 KiB) Viewed 14121 times

The red arrow indicates the direction of travel. When your unit's aren't in a good concave and are "Conga lining" only 1 or a few units are in range and attack at a time which can easily get the slaughtered.

correct.png (264.16 KiB) Viewed 14121 times

Imagine those two images running into each other. The 2nd image would easily come out on top. So it's important to stop and spread out your army similar to the 2nd image and then proceed to attack. Otherwise you're likely to lose a battle you shouldn't have.

4) The last thing to keep in mind is vision. Vision is very important in OpenRA as your infantry can shoot further then they themselves can see. So things with bigger vision can help maximize your infantry potential. If you don't have full vision for your infantry but your enemy does, yours will need to move at least 1 cell closer to in order to see them and with how quickly infantry can die that 1 cell can be a life time. Which kinda circles back to tanks leading your attack. They keep your infantry alive and also let them shoot to their maximum range.

Hope this helps!

[unmanned]

Oh, thanks a lot! Very appreciated!

Do I understand correctly that I shouldn't manually aim? (Having the whole group selected)

[Blackened]

Oh, thanks a lot! Very appreciated!

Do I understand correctly that I shouldn't manually aim? (Having the whole group selected)

Oh yes, absolutely! Attack moving is 10000% percent better than trying to manually aim. in fact, in like 90% of cases you want to be using that as your default command. Move command is really only used when you need to retreat or when you want to use vehicles to crush.

[unmanned]

Thanks a lot! Worked like a charm I struggled with Sunstroke map, but now RushAI just marches in a row into my soldiers... to death, or I slowly attack their bases. Well, there's still a way to overcommit, but the results are much better, it's become very simple to play the map now.

p.s. I had played Dune Legacy (reimplementation of Dune II) and Dune Dynasty (another one), and there the most efficient way is to focus fire on those tanks and kill them off one by one (in Dune Legacy, enemies evacuate their tanks for repair properly, and it's a lot more important to finish them off as soon as possible).

[unmanned]

Last question: how do you play with selecitons, so that medics & mechanics not rush under (friendly) fire?

[Blackened]

p.s. I had played Dune Legacy (reimplementation of Dune II) and Dune Dynasty (another one), and there the most efficient way is to focus fire on those tanks and kill them off one by one (in Dune Legacy, enemies evacuate their tanks for repair properly, and it's a lot more important to finish them off as soon as possible).

There's still times where focusing firing is really important but I didn't want to overwhelm you with too much

Last question: how do you play with selections, so that medics & mechanics not rush under (friendly) fire?

Medics and mechanics should also benefit from attack move as their "attack" is the friendly heal. The problem with them is either there is no friendly target to heal or you've target fired a specific unit/building which causes them to just move command next to them.

Unfortunately the best way to stop them from running to their deaths is just to get quicker and and better and microing. You can press stop (s) on them after you give an attack move command or manually move them away. It takes some time to get better at it but I'm sure you''ll be able to in no time!