Flares, Smoke, and Evasive Strategies
In playing I have noticed many players (not necessarily people from Heavengames, but the vast majority of all people) make huge mistakes when dropping flares or popping smoke, or in using evasive strategies in general.
The most general advice I can give is to micro manage every unit. If you spam the cheapest units that are still in the role (such as light attack choppers or light tanks) you can only have a maximum of ten of them. That is a really small number in comparison to the hundreds of units for other games. When you have this few units, you need to control each one individually. There are several things you can do with both smoke and flares that will truly help keep your units alive and fighting.
Smoke
The first and biggest mistake I have seen made with smoke is that everybody has their tanks all in the area of one or two smoke grenades, but they have all their tanks deploy smoke at once. This means that they will all have to recharge before they can deploy it again. By that time they will be dead. If you have all your tanks together, you need only deploy one. The shrouding effect of the smoke is an area affect; it blocks anything within its radius from being attacked. One of the most useful things you can do is have one tank pop smoke, and when it wears off have another pop smoke. Then you can have nearly continuous cover while you fight or run.
The second mistake that is almost equally as likely to cause an ally to cringe is having your tanks run out of the smoke. The whole point of the smoke is to be under cover. If you are going to win a battle and want to be attacking, you shouldn’t be deploying smoke. There is absolutely no reason to deploy the smoke grenades if you aren’t running for your life. Deploy your smoke and stay there; it’s your safest bet. Once one smoke wears off, retreat a bit and pop smoke again. This is to prevent enemy artillery units and TA attacks from hitting you. If you deploy smoke one tank at a time and stay within the smoke radius, you should be able to prevent attacks for up to a minute or two!
Flares
The main problem one sees with the average player and flares is much the same as the one with the smoke. It is slightly different in a couple ways, though. One of them is that the flares are not an area affect. This would seem to indicate that you would want to drop all your flares at once, but this is not so. The enemy (whether the AI is auto attacking, or the player is controlling it) tends to have all the Anti-Air or infantry units attack the same chopper at once. If you see the missiles all traveling at one chopper, try to drop flares while they are traveling. If you can’t get there in time, select that same chopper (if its alive, it may or may not be depending on the opposing force) and be ready to drop the flares on the next salvo. They will keep attacking this chopper until it dies, almost every time.
If you were unable to dodge the first salvo, but survived it and dodged the second, there is a good probability that that chopper is nearly dead. One thing that you can always do is leave that chopper behind. It seems counter-intuitive in every way, but to build new units you have to let old ones die. If your chopper has low health and they are about to launch another salvo that you can’t avoid, then your best bet is to have all the choppers run except the hurt one they are targeting. They will waste all their missiles on the one chopper, giving you yet more time to have the others fly away. If you do this then you can nearly always survive a massive ambush by as many AA’s as you can imagine by losing only one chopper at the most.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. If you have 3 scout choppers that get ambushed by four or five heavy Anti Aircraft vehicles, your best bet is just to drop flares and run because the first salvo will kill every chopper immediately. Just remember this is an exception, not the norm.
General Evasive Strategies
This is likely the hardest one to explain because it applies to all roles and is different for every single one. It even varies depending on the situation within the role. The most general advice I can give you would be to always have an escape route planned. If you are going into a contested or enemy held city, have escape routes planned. If there are only very narrow roads and you are Armor, you might want to spread your tanks out until you see the size of the enemy force to prevent traffic jams. If you are Infantry and afraid of being run over, make sure there are buildings to hide in or trees to take cover inside. If you are Air, expect where an ambush would be held and know your safest way over a ridge or high building.
Air
You need to know where the enemy AA is as much as possible before you begin attack an attack on a base, because you are insanely vulnerable. If you don’t know what is in a region and have no way of finding out, (don’t forget you can recon as a TA resource) but must enter a possibly hostile area, remember these few things. Anti-Air can not shoot over big buildings. If you attack from over the building at the TV station and run into AA, drop flares (preferably how I explained above), and fly behind the building. The missiles don’t travel through, and you are safe. Be able to find a cliff or ridge before attacking so that you can be assured you will have a route out of there if things get hairy.
Armor
Infantry and Aircraft are your two biggest threats, even though it would seem enemy armor is. Simply put, Armor takes a long time to kill other Armor, but a couple Anti-tank infantry squads in buildings will instantly kill a heavy tank. A couple heavy choppers and you can kiss your heavy tank squadron good-bye. To make things easier you can always enter with your tanks in a loose line so that if enemy forces start attacking ferociously, you can retreat without causing a traffic jam. To avoid being hunted down by aircraft, you need to remember that their missiles can’t go through tall buildings or over ridges either. Find a place where your tanks can only be attacked from directly above and you will find the attacks on you are lessoned as it takes much more time for them to attack you. Many missiles will miss naturally and then the smoke will make the rest go off all around your tank, leaving it unscathed.
Infantry
Infantry is likely the hardest role to have run away from anything, as it is the slowest and can be run over, which is extremely devastating. The best thing you can do is have some sort of cover nearby that you can run to if you need to hide or an area where you have an attack/defense bonus. Buildings work well for this. Another thing you can do is find a bit of land where the infantry can run but tanks can’t. For example, if there is just a small bit of forest that extends far horizontally, your infantry could run through the small bit of trees to safety while the tanks have to drive all the way around. If you are running from aircraft, simply stay in the trees.
Support
Support generally doesn’t need to run away, and even if it does, it is typically covered by the other roles. Pop smoke if you have repair tanks, artillery, etc. There are several things you can do with your artillery, however, that will help keep it safe. Once you fire three different attack ground orders (If USSR, one volley if US), your artillery pieces need to reload before they can attack again. This takes about 20 seconds. In this time you can move your artillery a little bit away from where you previously had it. This will help make it harder for the enemy to find your artillery, which, if you are giving them enough trouble with it, will be a key target to eliminate with a TA ability or opposing artillery. Keep them moving and spread out your artillery as well. You don’t need them to be all next to each other as that condones one small TA, like a tank buster, to destroy 3 heavy artillery pieces. Aside from making it harder to track all your artillery and eliminate it, having the bombs or missiles come from slightly different directions would increase confusion and hopefully make the enemy choose the wrong direction to run and hide in. You may find them running from one strike to another, never understanding why they keep getting bombed. This is, obviously, what you want!
Thanks for reading my article! If you have any suggestions or comments on how to improve it, let me know by sending me an email at sailingrules8888(at)gmail(dot)com. Also, feel free to comment on it in our Strategy Forum!
