Starting Commander Selection

Blitzkrieg



Festung Armour





Festung Support



Jaeger Armour



Infantry



Mechanised



500

30

11

240

60

260

30

4

60

Keep them in the halftrack and use them to ignore suppression when closing on Machine Guns or to give them some armour against other infantry.



You can also pop the Grens out and put something else inside. Options include: PanzerGrenadiers and Pioneers.

PGrens may be better close up than Grens, and with Schrecks can have some anti-tank utility.

Pioneers with a Flamethrower make a very, very poor substitute for a proper flame halftrack.



PGrens may be better close up than Grens, and with Schrecks can have some anti-tank utility. Pioneers with a Flamethrower make a very, very poor substitute for a proper flame halftrack. Mobile flank capping.



Late game “I need to get to this point and cap it quickly and/or Infantry on foot will die”.



Use it empty as an expendable scout/decoy/minesweeper.

Ostheer has a strong core, and further one with a more or less linear tech structure. The Common Commanders should enable you to get a good grasp of their core units and standard gameplay. These commanders have none of the abilities that change basic gameplay (such as Fuel to Munitions or Troop Training), nor do they have call in units that allow you to mostly or totally rely on doctrinal units rather than teching. Such call in units as they do have are either limited to one at a time (Artillery Field Officer, Command Tank) or are not generally something that you want more than one or two of anyway (Elefants, Mechanised Gren Groups)Whilst the expense and accessibility of Ostheer T4 and Panthers is contentious for competitive 1v1 games this should not be taken as in any typical of the experience of the casual or starting level player.You may pick only 3 commanders for your loadout, you will generally want a diverse choice that can be useful in many situations.This is a solid choice. Like vanilla it's not exciting, but the classics are classics for a reason. It has a Recon plane to let you (and your teammates) see what is going on so you can avoid (or cause...) trouble. If vehicles get in trouble you can pop smoke and hopefully escape to repair and come back. The Command Tank will also boost the durability of your units. These 3 abilities make it a good choice for keeping your armour alive, something which is absolutely crucial.The Stuka strafe gives a handy punch for dealing with all kinds of targets and tactical movement can occasionally be handy.The only real reason for caution with this doctrine is you may come to rely overly on it's defensive abilities and suffer losses when you play with other commanders. Without a Command Tank some situations will be more dangerous for you, and you may try to pop smoke to get out of a tight spot only to discover you don't have it.This will tend to lead you down a less mobile path, as two of it's abilities are essentially static. However it will be helpful on narrow maps with choke points you can lock down. Again you have Panzer Tactician to help preserve your armour and the Command Tank for general defensive buff. Railway Artillery is expensive but useful for breaking up defences - either by forcing the enemy to relocate or by the more traditional method of smashing him to bits. It can also be dropped behind you as you retreat to discourage pursuit.The PAK-43 is something you should rarely need - because usually you need it when you are fighting tanks but don't have enough fuel for your own - but when you do you will be glad you have it. However as a static installation you need to be careful where you put it and be very careful about letting it get captured and turned on you. However it doesn't need line of sight to be effective, so as long as something else can spot for it.Behind terrain or buildings and backed up with units or bunkers to keep it from being mobbed it can be very effective, if you are fighting enemy units in front of it with other units opposing players will often be too busy to notice it firing and the only clue they have it is there will be their tanks exploding much faster than they otherwise would.Hulldown can be useful on some vehicles, but generally your armour is mobile and best used on the move. Staying static is an invitation for them to be bombed/strafed/hit by artillery. However Ostwinds become very good at shooting down planes when set up, and the range boost on other armour can be handy for fighting things such as a the M-36 Jacksons.You won't always want a Mortar Half Track, but on the occasions you do you really will. This is the only way to get one in Common. Relief Infantry is not something I use a lot, nor smoke bombs- though both have their uses. The howitzer will be occasional useful, especially in the sort of indirect fire battles that will often prompt you to get an MHT in the first place. Sector Artillery is niche, but far from useless as the video demonstrates.This has several useful abilities for fighting armour - and almost all games that go long enough come down to that. Elefants can pick off units from long range, especially if using focus sight and even better with Spotting Scopes. In addition it has the Riegel 43 that can cripple enemy vehicles and leave them easy meat for the Elefant and other AT.Finally, and perhaps most importantly in the current meta, it has Recon & Bomb Strike together which give it the ability to destroy Soviet on-map artillery such as the ML-20 and B4. The B4 is a popular choice to use against your OKW teammates' trucks and heavy armour but they have few ways of countering it themselves and are reliant upon Ostheer players to do so.Even outside that application Reconnaissance is always handy and the bomb-strike valuable against point targets - such as his headquarters after he just retreated there. Savvy opponents will often move armour under repair once they see a recon plane in the area without you even needing to launch a bomb strike they would probably dodge anyway. As such the threat alone helps diminish their field presence.This will be very munitions intensive, as every ability here will use them including the AFO abilities. In addition heavy infantry play will use munitions as well for MG-42s, Grenades and Schrecks. As most team battles focus over fuel in preference to munitions you may find issues with using this commander to the full or being sparing with what you do. That said the AFO complements mortar heavy openings quite nicely and can contribute to you winning early indirect fire battles.However there is very little here however that helps armour, though both the Light Artillery Barrage and Fragmentation bomb are handy against Paks, and there is very little here apart from the AFO abilities to help you win the battle against US infantry that are often hard for Ostheer.The Spotting Scopes and Artillery synergise well together, allowing you to see potential bombardment targets passively and without recon. However as this is dependent upon true-sight to gain LOS it will be much affected by the map. The Command Tank is always useful for its AI power and defensive aura.The Smoke Bombs are one of the more unusual features; as they are delivered by aeroplane they will not arrive immediately. As such whilst they can be used reactively to screen damaged tanks and allow them to escape this will not happen as instantly as the smoke release of Panzer Tactician. However they can also be used offensively to block line of sight for enemy mgs to allow infantry to get close without suppression and to screen tanks from enemy AT Guns before an attack. You can also drop them directly onto enemy weapons to shut them down entirely or force them relocate or manually attack ground. Finally, they are relatively cheap so can be used as a diversion to make an enemy think you will attack through it whilst you actually attack from a different direction.The Mechanised Grenadier Group is something of an odd-beast. Foryou buy a Grenadier Squad with an MG-42 in an unarmed and moderately armoured halftrack. However a base gren squad isMP, the MG-42 isMUN, so really the trade is:to saveMUN and get the halftrack. This, as I have previously said in relation to the similar Mechanised Assault Group , does not seem like a good deal.What you can do with it:Very rarely is this unit worth it, however.If you wish to be really gonzo you could try going Pioneer spam into T2, skipping T1, using this to get Grenadiers and the free MG42 would be worth it because you spent lots of munitions on putting flamethrowers on your pios. I' m not even going to attempt to make that work but more power to anyone who manages it.