Infantry Units
Don’t Forget Your Heroes. Each of the three Heroes of the combatant nations plays a unique role in swaying the tide of battle in your favor. All of them have a primary skill that must be activated to be used, but they also gain “passive” secondary skills — i.e., they are in force at all time once the hero has acquired them through your selection — that generally help the soldiers around them. Practice in the game’s Skirmish mode to acquaint yourself with all the ways these super-powerful units can help you. And don’t forget that your Heroes beef up the power and range of any vehicle they enter!
Get the Lay of the Land. Foot soldiers aren’t the fastest recon units, but they’re the most cheaply and quickly produced. Send a few out as soon as the Barracks is ready—but keep an eye on them. If they get killed while you were busy doing something else, you’ll never know what they came across. Paratroop Drops are a good way to find out what’s going on far behind the front lines, but unless you’ve made sure the flight path is clear of AA fire the soldiers might not ever touch the ground to begin exploring.
Turn the Table on the Enemy. There’s nothing quite as devastating to an enemy as the capture of one his buildings. Obviously, the prize is the enemy’s headquarters building; if you can keep it protected after capturing it, you can start building an “alter ego” army that lets you turn the best weapons against him. But any buildings are worth capturing, for several reasons. Capture a Power Plant? As an Allied commander, you don’t need the energy — but you can sell it for resources. Say you’ve taken over a Russian War Factory? Even at Tech Level 1, you can start producing Katyushas to give your opponent an idea of how unnerving those screaming rockets are. Claimed an Allied Airfield? You can now produce Lightnings, the best fighter-bombers in the game.
Of course, you need basic infantry to capture building—and you must have upgraded their training facility with the Capture Buildings skill. Consider that upgrade the first thing you do after the construction of an infantry building is complete!
Know When to Stick Together and When to Spread Out. It’s very difficult to keep your infantry spread out, because they tend to clump up at the Rally Point as they emerge from training. But spreading them out just a bit before moving into combat will help them stay alive longer since enemy artillery bombardments are less likely to take out a whole slew at one time. If you’re trying to destroy a building, on the other hand, you’ll most definitely need their assembled firepower to get the job done.
