Force Distribution

"And if we are able thus to attack an inferior force
with a superior one, our opponents will be in dire straits." - The Art of War, chapter 6

This is easily one of the most important things I can teach you about CoH. I got to where I am in CoH today almost entirely on distributing my forces better than my opponents could. It's probably not something you have thought about that much, but if you want to get better at CoH, it's something you're going to have to think about very hard now.

In its most basic, force distribution is spreading out your units on the field to defeat your enemy. A very simple example is spreading out two Rifleman squads to beat 2 Volks squads. The Rifleman will do this by grouping up together, and finding an isolated Volks squad that they will beat with ease, and then moving on to the next squad of Volks that don't have the reinforcements to save them because those were already chased off by the Rifleman squads. You should generally try to out-number or out-gun your opponent with a stronger force, while leaving at least part of his units out of the fight. Take a look at example picture one, its hard to see it on the screen but here I have four Rifleman squads engaging two Panzer Grenadier squads. In example picture 2 you can see that I have forced my opponent's Panzer Grenadiers to retreat. This makes fighting his remaining Panzer Grenadiers on the field a lot easier, because I will outnumber him again. Go for where your opponent is weak with your strong forces, and avoid his strong forces when you have weak ones.

"That the impact of your army may be like a grindstone
dashed against an egg--this is effected by the science
of weak points and strong." - The Art of War, Chapter 5

To do things like this successfully, you need to know or at least guess where your opponent has put his units. This is a lot harder than it sounds, you will need to have some ability to actually see where your opponent's units are. To some extent, you can use your strategic points to look but that depends entirely on if your opponent is around a point you control. Your opponent won't just stick his units right front of you for you to see and exploit. In the early game I use my Jeeps or Kettenrads, and the Bren Carrier works fairly good too. Remember that when you send these units out you are not fighting, just looking, stay at a good distance so you won't take much damage. After you find out how your opponent has positioned his forces, you should find out how to attack them most effectively. Sometimes that means just defending the area your opponent is going to attack in the best way you can. For a little more detail in this read my Attack and Defense article. For a good example of this see the example screen shots, as it's pretty hard to explain just everything that is going on and what you need to do with just text.

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Common examples of force distribution are the infamous 'blob' and a Pio horde. These are so strong because they put all of your power into one small area, allowing it to steamroll most players armies simply because they have spread out their armies too much to stand a chance. Now I am not saying you should blob up as much as possible, because that isn't to your advantage, grenades, artillery, and other area of effect attacks will own you. The lesson you should learn from the blob is that putting all of your firepower in one place is generally a good way to storm a position. I would generally advise attacking from multiple directions in an attack, because surrounding your opponent often times makes it very hard for him to run, especially with vehicles that don't have a nice retreat ability. This is not something that you can do all the time, but even attacking from 2 directions instead of 1 can yield really good results. The key to this is timing, if one of your groups attacks and the other is not engaged yet, it will usually be beaten back very fast, simply because you are using only part of your force against all of your opponent's forces. Even if you are fighting outnumbered for a small amount of time, it can have a big impact. Make sure that even if you attacking from all directions, all of your groups are engaged with the enemy at once if that is how it needs to be done, so that one group isn't fighting alone.

Now so far, I have only focused on outnumbering your opponent. This is not always the best option. Sometimes splitting up or hiding your forces is the best way to win. A good example of this is splitting up your forces to capture territory. It could also mean that you need to spread out your forces to minimize casualties against a strong impact unit such as a puma. If you split up your rifles and put them on separate corners of the map you force your opponent to pick a squad to fight with his puma, as opposed to being able to go kill all of your rifles in one spot. Another example of splitting up would be if you can't beat your opponent's army head on, or fighting all in one place is not a good idea for other reasons. Some factions are better at splitting up than others, factions like the Americans and Panzer Elite are better at winning many small engagements, whereas factions that don't have many units to go and split up or have many support weapons such as the British and Wehrmacht are best at fighting large and decisive battles.

I will give a real world example here about splitting up, and then massing and charging. I was playing Ryan "nystrom" Nystrom in the GR.org 1v1 tournament on Semois. He was the Panzer Elite and I was the Americans. He chose to make a FHQ (healing station) in the church, a very central location and a good base of operations for him. He went Logistik Kompanie with 4 man squads. This meant he could mass his Panzer Grenadiers in one place and expect to beat almost any riflespam, especially if he was fighting around the heavy cover of the church (while being healed by his FHQ). I wasn't about to play his game, so I decided to split up my men and focus on the left and right sides of the map where the munitions and small fuel points are. Nystrom had the ability to cut me off from these as his church as right next to my cut-off point for the left hand side. I decided to defend this with 1 Rifleman squad sitting behind green cover (they could be easily overwhelmed, but it would require a ton of men and he would be fighting my men in green cover with his in yellow or red) and sent the rest to his fuel, his munitions, all over the place. Ryan couldn't risk leaving his FHQ with no men around it, or I could simply decap it and waste his resources. For about 10 minutes, I mostly avoided combat around his church, and harassed my little heart out with all my spread out Rifleman, gaining almost all of the map around the church. He would have trouble taking on my Rifleman with Panzer Grenadiers 1 on 1. Eventually he got out an armored car, and started splitting up his men to go and cap the map. It was at that moment I came in with my rifles from all directions and shot out the few sentries Ryan had left to guard his forward base, and then put my rifles around the church to defend against a counter attack, and had 1 squad take down his forward base, or 'decap' it. This effectively shut his remaining forces out of their church. I spread his forces out, and then hit his critical points that were now weak. I already had control of the left and right of the map, and with the center I had near complete map control, which was pretty easy to ride out for a win at a time that Panzer Elite were really over-powered.

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"The art of concentrating strength at one point, forcing a breakthrough, rolling up and securing the flanks on either side, and then penetrating like lightning deep into his rear, before the enemy has time to react."- Erwin Rommel

I will end this article with a historical example of using force distribution to defeat enemies that outnumber you 4-1. In 1969 the Israeli air force pre-emptively attacked the Egyptian air force while it was on the ground. They launched all but 12 of their 200 aircraft in a surprise attack that put the planes over the Mediterranean and kept them so low that radar couldn't detect them and anti aircraft missiles couldn't hit them. The Egyptians were caught completely by surprise. Israeli planes destroyed almost all the planes on the ground and also took down the runways from which they operated. Over 300 Egyptian aircraft were destroyed at a loss of only 19 aircraft for the Israelis. The Israeli planes returned to their airfield and refitted, launching additional waves at the Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordinian air forces. The attack was so devastating that when Syrian officials were warned that the Egyptian air force had been destroyed, they thought the report was false because it seemed unreal that so many planes could be destroyed in a single attack. As a result, they ignored it and lost most of their air force in a later wave in just the same way. This bold attack and concentration of force guaranteed the initially outnumbered IAF air superiority for the rest of the war.

May not be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of Steven "Surprise" Uray.

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