It was the contention point of that side! They had napalm spam arty, and I had mortars with decent range that I used to break inf/IFV morale before their or our pushes. I was holding the left flank, controlling a town between one of our areas and one of theirs. It was a 4v4, clocked in at slightly over an hour, was incredibly intense and the number of players meant I didn't play an enormous role in losing/winning. Then yesterday I played my first real match. That's what I did to get me used to the idea of playing MP. You can say you're a newbie and doing arty, then deploy a FOB and some arty units, and just provide support (counter-arty, attack enemy AA, enemy towns, etc). You get to focus on just a handful of units. In tactical battles, you get very few points for troops, and very few points during the battle. There's always a few servers running that at any time. Definitely start with 10v10 tactical battles, like Umiman suggested. Not enough strategy games with this sort of conventional-military feel, the closest I got before was C&C Generals and that's anything but realistic.īonus points if you play pure North Korean decks without abusing their good arty units.īut seriously, if you can take a couple of minutes to literally sit looking at the game screen and become OK with the idea of losing and the general feeling of being overwhelmed, it is an amazing experience. I will totally admit that half the reason I play is because it scratches my mil-sim-ish itch without wasting my entire life getting into a good group for ArmA and then spending 90% of my playtime hiking through countryside or eating storms of AI bullets from a kilometer out. Kinda helps support the feeling of actually commanding the units instead of being the god-commander that most RTSes have, especially when you throw in things like order delays, mechanical failures, panic, &c. If that's not really your speed you can always just spam tanks with a little AA support, that lets you contribute without much micro beyond "front towards enemy" and "don't send your Rookie M60A1 Pattons against those Elite T-90s".īut really the main thing to remember is that you're never going to be perfect, you're always going to lose some stuff because you couldn't react quickly enough or the unit AI made bad life choices when pathing. Even with generalist decks I usually have my control groups completely filled with stuff that needs to be babied. are actually concealed, all that crap? You gotta be really on-point for that. heli A2A grab-ass, making sure your infantry and TOW jeeps, &c. Shit like hair-trigger evacing your aircraft, manually toggling the radar on your G2A launchers to shoot down enemy aircraft without leaving them open to A2G radar-seekers, moving goddamn everything away from incoming arty spam, playing games of heli vs.
Granted, if you're going to play with a normal-ish deck, you really have to be on point with your micro, it's much more important than your macro (as long as you remember to click new units in when you can afford to). Just microing around a handful of really damn good units can still be useful, especially if you do it to support what someone else is doing, and the teams are large enough that the match usually won't rest entirely on you specifically holding a certain area. Ozy, you can still play it on a more tactical level if you build an elite-trended deck and play 10v10s.
I used to have a screenshot from an Asgard match in AirLand Battle of a fuckin' ocean of Soviet MBTs sweeping over the map, literally in the hundreds, and not even all the cheapo spammable ones. Fuck those guys and their useless dead-weight.Īlso worth noting that you can have 10v10s with pretty substantial point counts.
The only real problems are finding matches that aren't chock-full of morons.