[Panzer Elite] Highway 69 - Mission 4

[Akranadas]

Highway 69

Critical to Operation Market Garden, the British 30th Corps' tanks are advancing along Highway 69 to relieve the paratroops. Kampfgruppe Lehr has been mobilized near Valkenswaard. Their objective is to occupy the town and delay 30th Corps.

[Susurrus]

I found this hard and really bizarre.

Hard because:

The constant waves of troops, and more importantly, vehicles.

The Churchill AVRE can destroy roadblocks in one shot, rendering them useless..

There simply isn't enough MP to support a large enough defence force for 20 minutes. I was reduced to almost nothing by the end (i think 2PG units and 2 half-dead Marders).

Those stupid Priests. In the end I tooled up 2 PG teams and sent them at the Priests location right at the beginning of the level, just waited for them to turn up, then blew them up..

Bizarre because: You can capture the strategic point for the medal after then attack has stopped, and the enemy are fleeing, and still gain the medal.

[Hirmetrium]

Clever use of shrek grenadiers will prove invaluable. Run up to early trenchs, grenade in, capture the nearby point, hop in. The bridge to the lower righthand side was easily defended the whole game because my single shrek squad was untouchable.

Build an extra marder 3 and send it to kill the artilery when its spotted - its poorly defended.

Spend your veterency on defensive bonuses to keep your men alive, and try to trap many of the northern points. 2 marders fixated on the road will do fine, and shrek squads will cover the gaps.

[Emberstrife]

There's another solution I lovingly dubbed "tank massacre".

Once you capture the town, send all your forces(except for the armored cars) to the northern edge of the town. Capture all the points leading up to the northern bonus objective point including it, garrison and upgrade the second building from the edge of the town into a Medic HQ, then place two marders in a line directly north of the Medic HQ, and two marders directly south of the HQ.

Assign 3-4 panzergrenadier squads, preferably with Assault rifles(the marders will perform the anti-vehicle role, but the enemy will deploy lots of piats in assaults) around the medic HQ repairing the marders, giving the PGs defensive veterancy and the Marders offensive veterancy whenever possible.

The northern marders will cover the northern road and will see the most action, due to enemy vehicles pouring out from both the northern bridge and the northeastern highway. The two southern marders will engage flanking units from the northern road and a steady stream of units from the southeastern bridge; however, due to the bridge being a narrow chokepoint, enemy tanks will mostly kick the bucket before they can fire back, so these marders will not require repairs very often.

The enemy Priest will appear on the coastline of either the northern, or the southeastern island. Once he does, drive up one marder to your side of the riverbank(do not attempt to cross the bridge), lockdown and annihilate the priest, then quickly retreat the marder back to your killzone, repairing it if necessary.

If you are going for the medal objective, capture all the road points and deploy a logistics car right behind your northern marders to prevent the enemy from uncapturing the northern point. The marders will successfully stop anything attempting to engage the deployed car.

Don't bother with capturing the southeastern island, since it's impossible to hold it anyway. Don't bother with roadblocks, because the AI will spawn an AVRE which will crusade through all your roadblocks on the map every time you build any. Don't bother with booby-trapping buildings, just use your two armored cars to clean out anything that slips through your defensive line.


By the end of the mission all of your units will have triple veterancy and no vehicle/squad casualties. Victory is sweet only when it is absolute.

[Susurrus]

@ Emberstrife: Dunno what difficultly you were playing on, but on the hardest setting I was always attacked by two Priests, one in each of the locations you describe.

[Rottweiler|Soul]

Defensive-Vetted Tank Buster squads by the dozen. Prying open the trenches and taking them over early is a good idea, because they will last - along with the troops in them - the whole mission.

Plus, Triple Def TBs can be employed as fire squads by rushing the Priests when they show up - they can run past the waves of Churchills and Cromwells with relative ease.

[Emberstrife]

I played on Expert and saw that there is mostly one Priest, although sometimes the game spawns two. As such I regarded the two priests being a bug.

[Teh Humungus]

I have beaten the mission twice on expert, and had two priests each time.

[bluetrin]

I found this mission to be one of the hardest to complete with the bonus objective ...

Will try again with all of your tips. Thanks vm

[Count Fenring]

I want to thank Emberstrife for his tactics on this stage. I trounced the brits.

Although before I killed off the element holding the town initially, I snatched a few points on the outskirts first. By the time the big brit forces arrived, I had plenty pumped out. I have a great deal of patience and I am pretty good at sniffing out game triggers, so I try to use as much prep time as I am able.

It was also not just a trickle of enemy coming from southeast bridge...it was alot for me.

I played on hard and had two priests, one from the northeast and one from southeast. Your suggested marders arrangement had me hole both of them right quick since at that point they were both veteran shooters.

What also helped was that I took the two 57mm AT guns for my own use.

Thanks,

Count Fenring

[DrCloud]

I made a complete mess of this mission the first time around, and although I did somehow hang on until the timer ran out, I failed to get the medal.

Second time around, I noticed that there doesn't seem to be a time limit for the early objectives (in particular, the one that involves heading into the village and kicking the brits out), so you can spend as long as you like roaming the map with your initial infantry squads and capturing all the points. You'll probably come across infantry trying to build barbed wire, vickers emplacements and mortar pits, but you can usually kill off the builders before they finish construction. If not, incendiaries will take care of most problems.

If any of your squads suffer losses then you can reinforce at your halftrack or create a forward HQ.

I found that taking the time to capture most of the map sectors made things a lot easier. I used my first CP to buy roadblocks, which I then built all over the place, although they didn't seem to achieve much. I also booby trapped all of the strat points and quite a few structures. There's no penalty for going a bit over the top, and it also means you'll end up with a big stockpile of resources to spend on stuff later on.

In the process of all this, somehow I ended enough CPs to get sector artillery even before I had taken the church. Sector artillery is useful for dealing with the big mobs of enemy units that appear later on. You might also be able to use this as an easy way to get rid of (at least one of) the Priests, but I didn't try it.

You could also use the AT airstrike ability to similar effect, but you don't receive that until right near the end of the mission.

Once you've taken the church, try to cover all approaches with Marders, while keeping enough infantry around to mop up anything that gets too close (or breaks through). You can also use nearby squads to repair when there's a quiet moment. I'm not sure what the best placement for Marders is, but I had one parked on each of the main routes and, with occasional repairs, that seemed to suffice.

I don't know how much of an advantage deploying a Marder gives, but since you hopefully won't need to move them that much, you might as well do it. They can still rotate when deployed.

You'll probably want to keep a close eye on the bridges leading from the southern "island", as the enemy will send tanks and troops across these early and often. For some reason I didn't have the same problems with the north. In any case, if you focus too much on the main road (which the briefing seems to encourage - if the enemy troops were well-behaved and followed that nice red arrow, things would be a lot simpler), you may suddenly find a bunch of british tanks and garrisoned infantry in your base.

I upgraded most of my squads with shrecks, with just a couple of assault rifle squads for anti-infantry support. Again, keeping a halftrack nearby (or building forward HQs) to reinforce your squads is really useful. The brits like sneaking into your base, so this saves you from having to retreat depleted squads only to find them getting picked off by a bunch of roaming commandos.

I didn't bother with the 57mm AT guns at all. If you try to grab them before upgrading squad size, you'll have to sacrifice a whole squad to man them... and I kinda prefer the mobility of normal squads with shrecks anyway.

You can remove the Priests (which appeared top right and bottom right for both of my playthroughs) with a couple of shreck squads. The Priests aren't really defended at all, although if you're unlucky you might wander into an attacking force since the points at which they enter the map are nearby.

Clearing out enemy slit trenches with incendiaries and then jumping in with a squad (or two) of shrecks is really helpful. I managed to capture one shortly after the "defend the road" timer started, and it didn't collapse until about 2 minutes from the end.

When I played, the brits had a forward HQ on the right of the map, close to the main road. It might just have been my imagination, but I think it was in shooting range of the slit trench I "borrowed"... in any case, their HQ promptly fell down. The trench placement seems to be fairly random, so your mileage may vary.

[adamsun]

Normal level.
The first run was very bad, there was no enough resource to build units, roadblocks were destroyed, enemy came from all directions, artillery fire…

Then I come here and read above posts to get some hints.
The second run, I occupied half of the map before it started, need rollback to build new defense line and get new units.

After a few more tests, it is clear that all points(except the one near the church) can be taken as long as units will not contact the two Bren Carriers. At the end, they are blocked in NW and SE islands. All other enemy units are destroyed. Set tank traps and barbed wire lines all over the map to limit ememy’s movement, convert all buildings into medic centers.

After taking the church and near-by point, build 3 Marder units.
I have two defense lines, one at SE island below the top fuel point. Set tank traps by the house. Tank trap can not stop tank cross by the river, so set one Marder at river side.

Another defense line is near the first strategic point. Two Maders for enemy from North and North-eastern. The third Mader is placed on the highland, near the trench. This Marder should be able to cover enemy tanks that attack the trench, also it is able to cover(cross the river) the top part of SE island, including future Priest there.

Sent one anti-tank unit to NE island for Priest there.

When enemy tanks come, defend the trench first; when trench is almost destroyed, rollback units in/near the trench to the two houses, make sure the Marder can still cover SE island cross the river.

Enemy tanks will try to take the first strategic point first, as long as this point is not taken, other areas are safe(from tank attack). As long as Marders are prepared in time and Priests are destroyed ASAP, enemy cannot break these two defense lines. Artillery and air force are also very helpful.

Hope this is helpful.

[hooahguy14]

this mission is SO IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i can defend, i just cant get the medal! i think the new patch made the AI a lot harder.
every time i try to repair my marder, the arty comes in and blasts my men repairing it! its a dead on shot every time! argh!

EDIT: after the 7th try, i finally did it! i took all the points but the last one, then took all my men and rushed the last point when the brits began retreating.
to deal with the Priests, i sent a halftrack with tank busters to the northern one, then used Heinkels for the last one.

[blueish45]

I used adamsun's trick and occupied the map before knocking out the command tank. Then literally covered all the 3 entry points iwth road blocks AND brabed wires. took me about an hour, but never fired a single shot in the entire game because they were all stuck at the entrances :) maybe its just luck but those AVRES seemed to forgot to fire their mortars.....