I'm at a loss of what to do against vetted grenadiers. They work equally well against me when I play brits as they do when I play americans. They're cheap. They're good at all ranges - just closing in on them doesn't mean they'll be defeated. Grenades do laughable damage to them despite them just standing there and taking it. Every doctrine has something that makes grenadiers better - For the Fatherland, Assault (this game's problem) and Inspired Assault + Zeal. Assault meant that for every one of his squads I needed two, preferably three. One to absorb the grenades, another to kill the grenadiers and a third to kill them before the nebels force back the other two and cap afterward assuming no more grenadier squads remain in the area.
Sure, I made mistakes in this game - I always start doing so the less each individual squad means and by extention the less capable my infantry become no matter how or what I do with them (late game). The more tanks, nebels, pumas etc. there are one the field the worse my gameplay becomes; it's pretty much my weakness. It feels to me like the further the game goes on after the point when people start getting strafe, nebels and such, the less your particular abilities as a player matter and the more it matters who presses what win-button when (not that the game turns skilless or that you can't sort of counter it with skill, it's just what I feel), despite the additional opportunities for tactics/skill/whatever you wanna call it that the mid game and beyond offers you. I'm going to watch this replay myself and go over it.
I seriously don't know. Nothing bites on the grenadiers, vehicles are unusable due to paks and geschützwagens while I have 0 of my own artillery to use on him (manpower shortage - fuel I had in abundance). The rangers however, sure didn't help... they felt more like a strategic hindrance really. Their effective range is short, they cost roughly 1/6 of a riflesquad to reinforce with huge upkeep, the bazookas die last and they still need grenades to win against grenadiers. Think I'm just gonna go for the howitzers whenever I use infantry doctrine again unless I go against PE.
I might have won this game if it had continued for 10 more seconds though by sheer attrition. But if there's one strategy I hate to use it's attrition, yet it feels like you don't have another choice playing as americans.
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I always feel like I'm cautious to a fault when watching my own replays... my pressure was confoundingly low during the early game, which is as far as I've watched when writing this. I really don't like 1) taking needless, ugly casualties 2) walking into machine guns and ambushes, which is part of the reason. The other part is that as a player I'm not very aggressive by nature, I much prefer steadily and very manpower favourably bleeding my opponent dry, restricting his options and having him in a constant state of pants down in the dark.
