Profile of Svalbard SD

I saw one major engagement that possibly cost you the game + several minor things you should work on. Apart from these issues you played well, so just keep your unit preservation/teching/timing/mining work up, it is good.

I watched the replay with FoW on, so these are not hindsight things - just stuff you could've/should've noticed yourself.

The big moment was when you went in to destroy the emplacements with your PzIV. You had a Pak too but you didn't use it, and you need overwhelming firepower to quickly kill emplacements or force brace and then defend yourself while they are in brace. You only went in with the PzIV and then didn't respond to the Cromwell and two PIAT squads attacking it. Leaving your armour stationary against PIATs is a death sentence for your unit, which is what happened.

You could have followed up with your mortar halftrack on the nearly dead Bofors after your PzIV died, but didn't bring it up after the Cromwell withdrew. That basically saved the Bofors, meaning your infantry and Pak could not enter the area for the rest of the match.

Also your Teller placement on the river crossing was poor - had you placed it on the crossing rather than to the side, that Cromwell would've definitely hit it.


The other things:

* You had three Grenadier and two Panzergrenadier squads and used all of them for AI, even though the opponent hardly had any infantry. You could have given your Panzergrenadiers some Panzerschrecks for AT+anti-emplacement work (mortar halftrack smoke on Bofors+Panzerschreck attack could've been one such option)

* At 21 minutes you tried to faust a Cromwell even though it hadn't been hit by your StuG or Pak. Medium and heavy tanks will only receive engine damage from snares if they're at ¬75% health or below at the time the snare is used

* In the latter stages of the match you faced Churchills with your vet1 StuGs but didn't use Target Weak Point even once, meaning they escaped damaged more than once

* You didn't keep your StuGs on Prioritise Vehicles, which is recommended for pure AT units to make sure they don't waste shots and reload time vs non-vehicle targets as enemy vehicles could suddenly appear

* You also had infantry sitting around doing nothing in many instances all throughout the match. You seemed to be waiting for the arrival of your tanks, but even before that happens you should keep up the pressure by taking cutoffs and points when you have such overwhelming infantry advantage

Your opponent abused the permanent+free UC recon much more than emplacements, which should've been an easy kill for you in this match. There are cases of retarded sim city play in this game (most often with the Advanced Cancer Regiment commander) but this one was not it.

I thought I'd just add this here as a note:

One trick to use with Fireflies to circumvent the slow turret traverse is to make the tank rotate and thus get that glorious "bwooosh" 17pdr to face its target quicker.

I was trying to do that based on a tip by Stormless or HelpingHans, but it's not working. Maybe i should give it another try. Thanks for pointing it out.

An alternative is to keep an eye on unit badges in the top-right corner.

I love how people like randomly assuming certain units represent SS in this game. Especially as no Stormtroopers existed in WW2.

I find the vet bonus bulletins more useful than others - units gain much more powerful offensive and/or defensive bonuses with vet compared to minuscule accuracy/RoF/speed/etc bonuses from bulletins, so getting to those meaningful bonuses quicker is more useful than having negligible 2-5% effects IMO.

So if you use early-mid game units that can use 5-10% vet gain bonus bulletins (Panzergrenadiers, Panzer IV, Mortar, HMG, StuG and some others) and deploy two or more of them, I would say use the vet bulletins.