[1v1] Assault Grenadiers, How to Stop?

Title

It's not the Assault Grenadiers causing the problem. Assault Grenadiers usually have a hard time with USF - they tend to lose an even fight with a Rifleman squad.

Your main issue was not retreating from lost engagements. You tend to have your squads fight to the penultimate man regardless of the situation. This cost you a fortune in reinforcement costs and meant you lost multiple squads on retreat.

COH2 is in many ways a game of manpower. Every time you kill a model the other player has to pay to reinforce it. Every point of manpower they spend on reinforcement isn't being spent on more units. This damage to your opponent's manpower supply through reinforcement cost is known as Manpower Bleed and it works both ways.

If you're not going to win an engagement and you're taking more manpower losses than you're inflicting then retreat. You never want to lose an infantry fight and suffer more manpower bleed than your opponent.

Learning to judge which engagements to fight out and which engagements to retreat from takes some practice but really helps in the long run.

A few more specific things:

MG42
In the early game most of your problems were caused by the enemy MG42. When facing an MG42 you need to micro your squads individually. Keep them close enough together that they can help each other but far enough apart that they can't be simultaneously suppressed. When one squad gets suppressed micro the other around the MG's firing arc and flank it. Two rifleman squads can handle a single MG42 with little difficulty if you avoid clumping your squads together.

Build Choices
The first mortar worked out pretty well but remember that every mortar you buy is a rifle squad you didn't buy: you need to judge which you'll get more value from. I'd probably have gone for another rifle squad instead of a second mortar. The general rule is three Rifleman squads if you go Lieutenant and four if you go Captain.

Going for the Stuart in response to double Axis light vehicles was a good plan but with your fuel cut off it came out too late to make much of a difference. If you don't have the fuel income to get a light vehicle out quickly you can tech weapon racks early and grab a Bazooka. Given you went Captain tier you could also get an AT gun.

Remember your Riflemen get a snare (an AT grenade that applies Damaged Engine) when they hit Vet 1. Throw that on a light vehicle to stop it escaping and your bazooka squad or AT gun have a much better chance of securing a kill.

AT Infantry
Bazookas do very little damage against infantry so be careful to keep your AT squads behind your other squads. If your bazooka squad is forced to retreat you've lost your AT defence for a bit. This happened to you a couple of times when you led with your Captain.

Hey Zackman, I played a really good game with you other day as OKW on crossroads, we're about a similar level so I think we face a similar "meta" and have similar execution ability in terms of our micro so I hope this helps you.

Assault grenadiers are like crappy sturmpioneers with sprint and infiltration grenade, but weaker dps, so I try avoid close range stand offs and bleed them from cover while they charge. Like others mention it has no faust, so the earlier vehicle you can get the more you can bleed them for free i.e m20.


From this post and playing you the other day I feel like you default to stuart and leave a big early mid game pace slow down, which I think isn't a great choice especially since you actually play quite aggressively early on with your rifles, so lieutenant into either quad/m20 helps you snowball your aggression, particularly as the luchs and scout car are both off meta right now.

One thing I noticed you didn't really do with your riflemen when we played was that you rarely utilised early ambulance on the field . A soft retreat into ambulance on the front early on can give you massively more field presence, and can often bait enemy vehicles into your bazookas diving ambulances. I often move my ambulance around to heal my capping rifles, just like an ambulance!


When I play USF against Ostheer there were 5 things I did I found that were game changers in terms of my improvement:
1. using m20, it can really punish sloppy aggressive mg42 play
2. buying BARs early instead of nades, and giving my RE bazookas as mid game AT bridge
3. ambulance as a forward point early on to same manpower bleed and put even more pressure on ostheers weak field pressure
4. always having a flame thrower doctrine available for building maps, either RE flamer or assault engineers, and if they really spam mg in houses a mortar for smoke + attack ground flamer is my ultimate low micro backup
5. balancing side tech needs with a sherman rush