I'm making this thread to provide a lesson on the power of Haig tactics. There are a lot of folks on this forum firing flak in my direction for my choice of doctrine. After reading this lesson, there will be a lot of dedicated Haig fans making life unpleasant for the few cementhead tankers left sniveling around.
I selected a British long campaign and bought only French units including 2 platoons of riflemen, 6 special forces 'suicide squads', 3 heavy Char B tanks, 5 light H-35s stubby things, 3 rickety old Laffy armored thingys for ambulances, 4 mountain guns, 2 AT guns, ammo dump & trucks, command post, FO truck and 4 horse wagons plus 3 cargo planes were imported from the USA for dropping special forces in places they least want to be.
For support I purchased various infantry platoons including 4 riflemen, 2 engineer, and 2 AT platoons.
Game set-up:
France 1400 points
Germany 2500 + AI advantage + hard battle setting
First fight I have to do a delay action in Brussels. I will use Haig strategy to effectively delay the bad guys. I sent in 3 cargo planes with 2 squads each to behind enemy lines for recon and artillery hunting. On the way, the first plane was shot down and crashed into a village killing all on board, the next was damaged and dropped early right on top of a pack of German tanks, and the third was on target in a southern village. The squads dropped among the tanks were butchered by the tanks while the ones in the south were only showered with artillery. We achieved 'surprise' by showing off to the Germans the fearlessness of our troops.
My deployment strategy was in a Hanibal formation of a weak centre protected by only my core units with strong wings of massed infantry. I placed half of the support infantry in the north and half in the south set on AI control to swoop around to the enemy rear and crisscross across until the enemy is eliminated. Unfortunately they didn't budge an inch once the battle started and only defended themselves where they were. [:@]
Another upset was the mountain guns are not actually artillery and only fire directly. No artillery is a big chunk of Haig's system missing but the infantry alone will surely be enough.
Here is the early battle situation. The Germans have shot dead my snipers hiding among the few bushels of trees out in the field and moved against my centre. One of my core infanty platoons is beat up and retreating. Notice the Germans have mostly tanks without the vital infantry it needs so there's not much chance of them winning the fight.
