1.a – Fundamentals of Infantry and Armor, The Foundation of Your Entire Strategy

The synergy between infantry and armor is the strongest synergy in the game. Literally every other unit the game can be thought of in terms of supporting or disrupting this relationship. They are the core units of the game, and failing to understand why or how will severely impede your ability to play at a high level.



For most, the infantry aspect is pretty obvious – the honguide addresses it by name. Many people fail to properly emphasize armor, however, and this is an extremely costly mistake. The rest of this post is dedicated to demonstrating the critical synergies between infantry and armor, and the concepts that this synergy flow into.

1.a.i – Role of Infantry

I’m almost certain everyone who is currently reading this has heard of the classic three jobs in role-playing games: the trifecta of DPS, tank, and healer.



As a thought exercise, try to assign Red Dragon unit types to each of these three roles. I’ll give you some freebies: supply vehicles are your healers, and the other two unit types in consideration are infantry and tanks.



Give yourself some time to think about it. No spoilers.



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Ready? If you said infantry = DPS and tank = tanks, then congratulations! You are wrong.



Let’s go over why, starting with infantry. Infantry fill the “tank” RPG role.



This sounds absurd at face value. In-game, an infantry squad is probably one of the softest targets on the battlefield. They die to pretty much everything, including the smallest of small arms. It is understandable to think that this means that infantry as a whole are very fragile and are thus unsuitable for “tanking”. This thought process is flawed, however, because it does not take into account the main advantages of infantry as a whole: they are numerous, cheap, extremely difficult to dislodge when entrenched, and have some of the best points-per-hit & time-to-kill ratios in the game.

Numbers:

In terms of availability per card, infantry have some of the highest numbers in the game (some militia can get 30+ units/card). Assuming you have built your deck well, running out of infantry completely should be uncommon if you are playing correctly.



Price:

Infantry are some of the cheapest units around for their capabilities, with even the most expensive examples never exceeding 35 pts for the infantry squad alone. When compared to the absolute prices of other units (tanks, AA, arty, planes) they are significantly cheaper than almost everything else, even when including the cost of the transport in many cases.



Cover:

Infantry are the only unit in this game that can reduce the amount of incoming damage by taking cover. Forests and hedges provide a 40% damage reduction, while urban blocks provide a 70% damage reduction. This is on top of the stealth bonuses infantry receive from taking cover as well. Depending on terrain, infantry can become *much* harder to kill than any other unit – assuming that you even know they’re there.



Points-per-Hit:

This metric shows us that infantry are, on an individual basis, one of the best units in the game at taking hits.



Points-per-Hit = (Deployment Points Cost of HP) x (Damage taken)



The Points Cost of HP number is pretty straightforward: Take the total cost of the unit and divide it by the number of hit points it has. What you get is a very rough measurement of the value of an individual hit point, expressed in terms of deployment points. Obviously, this is an extremely simplistic way of judging the value of damage (circumstantial considerations, the only hit point that really matters is the last one, etc), but this example is already complicated enough as-is.



Damage taken is much less straightforward to cover comprehensively. For now, all that you need to know is that of the three types of damage in this game (KE, HE, and HEAT), only HE damage applies to infantry units. Thus, if a weapon does not have an HE damage value listed, that weapon cannot fire at infantry units – the Israeli HVMS comes readily to mind.



So how does this Points-per-Hit number show that infantry are usually the best at tanking shots? An example is in order.



Say we have the following units:

– 10 pt, 10 HP line infantry squad, in the open

– 150 pt, 10 HP heavy tank with 20 KE / 4 HE gun and 20 Front Armor Value (FAV)

– 10 pt, 10 HP vehicle with 12 HEAT / 3 HE gun and 2 FAV



If this hypothetical tank was hit by an enemy tank with the same stats, it would take 1 HP of damage at the enemy tank’s max range.

Points-per-Hit = (15 pts/HP) x (1 HP damage) = 15 pts of damage received



If this hypothetical line infantry squad was hit by the same enemy tank, it would take 4 HP of damage at any range.

Points-per-Hit = (1 pt/HP) x (4 HP damage) = 4 pts of damage received



If this hypothetical vehicle was hit by the same enemy tank, it would take 10 HP of damage at the enemy tank’s max range.

Points-per-Hit = (1 pt/HP) x (10 HP damage) = 10 pts of damage received, total unit loss



In the above example, even though the tank was the unit that absorbed the hit with the most HP left over, the unit that cost you the least points per hit was the unit of infantry – and this is without any damage reductions applied with cover. This is because the tank was individually much more expensive than the unit of infantry, so the value of the damage done to it was higher, even if the amount of damage was lower.



The reason I added in the 10 pt vehicles to this example was to address the other kind of unit that is both cheap and high availability per card – cheap spam vehicles – and to show why it is still not as good at tanking damage as infantry. Since these are vehicles with armor, damage to these units are calculated either using the KE or HEAT damage tables, meaning that unlike infantry they are possible to 1-shot fairly easily, especially since many of these vehicles have only 1 armor.



Even if we take the tank out of the equation and limit the example to just inf and cheap vic, the math still favors infantry:



VHC -> VHC: PpH = (1 pt/HP) x (6 HP dmg) = 6 pts

VHC -> INF: PpH = (1 pt/HP) x (3 HP dmg) = 3 pts



While this example is incredibly oversimplified for the sake of illustrating a point, the point still holds true in a general sense: infantry, especially cheap line infantry, are the best units at taking hits in the game because the points cost of the damage received is the lowest of any unit in the game. The qualifications and exceptions to this statement will be discussed at some point in the future.



Time-to-Kill:

This metric shows us that for their price, infantry have some of the longest times-to-kill in the game as well, something that becomes particularly valuable against some of the biggest threats (heavy+ tanks) in the game. For the sake of brevity, I will be limiting this analysis to cannon-type weapons only.



For this example, we will be using a similar set of units as in the PpH, but with slightly different parameters:

– 10 pt, 10 HP line infantry squad, in the open

– 150pt, 10 HP Heavy tank with 20 KE / 4 HE gun with 20 FAV and a fire rate of 10 rounds per minute (RPM), which translates to 6 seconds per shot

– 10 pt, 10 HP vehicle with 12 HEAT / 3 HE gun and 2 FAV with a fire rate of 9 RPM (6.6s/shot)



Now that time is also a factor, I will be making some additional assumptions:

– Aim time is instantaneous

– All weapons have perfect accuracy



Since I’ve already covered some stats in the previous example, this should go by quicker.



Tank -> Tank: 10 shots to kill, takes 54 seconds to kill (when you’ve fired your 10th shot, you’ve reloaded 9 times, and you don’t have to count the reload cycle for the 10th shot in your TtK calculations)



Tank-> VHC: 1 shot to kill, 0 seconds to kill (aimtime is assumed to be instantaneous)



Tank -> Inf: 3 shots to kill, takes 12 seconds to kill



In this example, the tank is the clear winner, taking nearly a full minute to kill. Infantry comes in a distant second at 12 seconds to kill, while the poor vehicle is killed before it ever has a chance to do anything. This clearly means that tanks are better at tanking, right?



Wrong. This is now where the price consideration takes effect – while on an individual basis the tank is the best tank, we can get 15 infantry (assume no transport cost) for the price of a single tank, meaning that if we adjust for equal points cost, the resulting TtKs are as follows:



Tank -> x1 Tank (150 pts) = 54s

Tank -> x15 Inf (150 pts) = 180s



Assuming no damage splash, it takes slightly more than x3 the time to kill the 150 pts of infantry than 150 pts of tank. This means that you can buy significantly more time against this tank with infantry than with a tank, or you can buy 50 pts of infantry to buy you around the same amount of time vs the tank (60s) and then buy 100 pts of other units that can potentially deal with the opposing tank more efficiently.



Also note that a 4 HE, 10 RPM tank cannon is being quite generous. REDFOR tanks usually have lower rates of fire (usually around 9 RPM), while BLUFOR tanks usually have 3 HE instead of 4 HE (and many have lower rates of fire as well at around 9 RPM). If we take our hypothetical VHC cannon (9 RPM, 3 HE) and test it against the infantry:



VHC -> Inf: 4 shots to kill, takes 19.8 seconds to kill



We can see that the amount of time needed to kill a single infantry squad only increases – and remember, this is against an infantry squad in the open with no cover. Start applying more realistic conditions (weapon aimtime, weapon accuracy w/ infantry size modifier, morale state for non-autoloaded cannons, cover damage reduction, etc) and the result can be a couple of lowly infantry squads being able to buy you far more time than their price may suggest.

Putting it Together:

Now that I’ve examined some of the main advantages of infantry (high availability per card, low price, only unit that can reduce incoming damage, low PpH, high TtK) in isolation, it’s time to discuss how these traits synergize with each other to further cement infantry’s role as “tanks.”

The high availability per card, coupled with the low price, makes it very easy to field a lot of units at the same time. Being able to have a lot of infantry squads on the map means that you can abuse their low PpH and high TtK to buy yourself a lot of time vs enemy units for cheap, and the availability also helps you when you inevitably lose the infantry you have – assuming you’ve built your deck properly, you will usually have some infantry on hand to call out in all but the most grindy of matches.

The cheap price also means that, due to the way the income system works, you can get infantry sooner than many other unit types due to the need to wait less time in order to be able to afford them. The price also means that even the most efficient anti-infantry units need to be able to kill x2-3 squads in order to make their points back, which is something that can take long enough for you to be able to counter the counter. Additionally, in the case of cheap line infantry, by the time one squad is killed off, you may already have enough points to call in another squad, which lets you sustain an attack for longer as you can continue to buy time for your other units to work.

Basically, infantry give you the most hit points and buy you the most time for the lowest price.



There is more to infantry than just meatshielding, though. IRL, due to the rapid development and proliferation of infantry-portable anti-tank weaponry during and after WW2, infantry at close-to-point-blank ranges pose a massive threat to any armor that comes in range due to the infantryman’s ability to strike the tank from positions of ambush and hit their vulnerable side and rear armor. In-game, many infantry carry anti-tank launchers that are extremely potent, with the best examples being able to significantly threaten even heavy tanks from the front once in range. This means that you cannot simply ignore infantry as they are advancing, since once they close the distance they can pose a significant threat to everything on the ground – you cannot afford to ignore them, which complicates your opponent’s target prioritization decisions.



Additionally, due to their high TtK and cover bonuses, once they become entrenched in favorable terrain, the amount of time and resources needed to dislodge them exceed the cost of the infantry itself many times over. If the infantry player is smart, they can also force the attacking force into a close range fight at ranges where their infantry can deal the most damage to the attacker, only adding to the troubles the attacker must face. This means that the best way to deal with entrenched infantry is to make sure that the infantry never entrenches in the first place (ounce of prevention, pound of cure).



Finally, infantry’s natural stealth and lack of movement penalties in forested terrain means that they are one of the best unit types in the game for raids and infiltration tactics, as getting infantry into your opponent’s rearlines can cause significant disruption to his game plan. Their relatively low cost means that if the infiltrators are discovered and destroyed, the loss is not backbreaking.



Because of these factors and more, infantry are the cheapest type of unit on the battlefield that are enough of a self-contained threat to merit a consistent response. Only fools ignore infantry if it is committed somewhere due to the immense potential that even a lowly line infantry squad can provide to a savvy player.



To sum up, your infantry (particularly your line infantry) is the gas for your war machine, as they provide utility that is absolutely required for any strategy to succeed. If you run out of gas, the machine grinds to a halt.



Translation: Infantry buy you a ton of time, are huge threats at close range, and are very effective at drawing aggro for their price. If this isn’t the RPG definition of a “tank,” then I don’t know what is.