COH: Panzer Elite Press Build Order

Lately I have been exploring the RTS game franchise Company of Heroes. I have been playing with the Panzer Elite Army, they seem to fit aggressive play-style in early stages of a match. I have a basic build order that allows me to capture a good area of the map and then quickly save up resources for armor units. This allows me to press the map in my favor. Micromanagement is key with COH since there is no basic resource gathering or finite amount of resources like in other RTS games. Holding munition and fuel sectors on the map gives you more resources quicker, the key is to control the map, but also press the enemy into spending what he has.

You begin the game with a Kettenkrad, a fast moving ATV type unit that is fairly cheap. (165 man power) I build another Kettenkrad and then a Panzer Grenadier Squad in the waxing moments of the game.I use the Krad vehicles to quickly grab a large area of the map, giving priority to fuel sectors. Fuel is important early so I can build a Kampfgruppe Kompanie (220 man, 20 fuel) and a Panzer-Jager Kommand. (220 man, 30 fuel) If the map is large I will use my first Panzer infantry squad to claim territory in front of my HQ while the Krads cover the periphery. On a small map I try to immediately build a Kampfgruppe. Sometimes I will build a Logistik Kompanie at same cost first, but for this pressing strategy I prefer to wait.

The Panzer-Jager Kommand is key to produce a couple Armored Cars as early as possible. (225 man, 25 fuel) Having a Armored Car and a grenadier squad rolling out to the front lines before 6 minutes into the game is good. This vehicle can press enemy infantry and most any other vehicle you will encounter this early in the game. The Kampfgruppe Kompanie will allow you to support Armored cars with Half-Tracks or Mortar Half-Tracks to siege enemy fortifications as the game progresses. It all depends on the situation and to make appropriate units that counter what the enemy has.

With gained experience I select the Luftwaffe Commander for off map support. Luftwaffe Infantry are very useful in an early offensive. The come in squads of 5 troops for 260 manpower. They have the ability to repair vehicles rapidly and can build defensive structures, like sandbag walls, barbed wire, or Flakvierling. Kettenkrads can also use a camo ability that helps scout ahead of the front lines. Later in a game Luftwaffe troops can build Flak 88 cannons, causing further chaos.

Fallout 3 Character: Tennison

During her early days in Vault 101 Tennison was a Daddy’s Girl. She devoted all of her free time to study science and medicine. Being stuck in a Vault facility presented little opportunities growing up. The Overseer was dictator over everyone’s actions in her eyes. Even though her best friend, Amata, was the daughter of the Overseer, it didn’t help change how she felt about him.

Her peers called her a “goodie-two-shoes” because of her willingness to help others. This label was soon broken once a citizen of the wasteland. Upon hearing about her father’s “escape” from 101 she initially believed that someone in the Vault discovered something in his research and that he was executed by the Overseer. Tennison returned the favor and shot the Overseer in the head 3 times with his own 10mm Pistol.

Escaping was much easier than what she thought it would be. A big part of her was frustrated that she had not gotten out of that dungeon years ago. Some raiders tried to kill Tennison with knives and pipes. They didn’t know she had a gun. She killed them and took everything they had and was quickly becoming a “gun-slinger” during any moment of tension. She wisely gave up her Vault 101 gear to blend in with the other citizens of the Wastes.

Tennison quickly became a victim of the cruel reality the wastes consisted of. Only hours after being out of the vault, being scarred and confused, she agreed to use her science skills to rig a bomb to explode for some caps. The catch was the bomb was the center of the settlement town of Megaton. It didn’t stop her. She didn’t care what happened to all the people that lived there. She wanted attention, but not the “you’re the stray from the vault” type that locals gave her the first time she walked into Megaton. She wanted to give them the finger, but not just the gesture of fuck you, but to actually wipe them off the map.

Helping blow-up Megaton gave Tennison the opportunity to live in the penthouse of Tenpenny Tower, a massive building in the Southwestern wasteland. It also gave her affiliations with Alistar Tenpenny and his henchman Burke. She would do favors for the residents of Tenpenny. Most of the time it involved murder but it was justified because she was dealing with threats to the tower and residents. After all she now lived there too.

Overtime she began to steal things. Just little things like water or food, but soon she stole to sell things for money. She later started to steal just for the thrill of it, just to take something and get away with it or she would steal to feed her addictions.

Drugs and alcohol were not something widely available in the Vault. Tennison quickly wanted to try everything the wastes could offer. Since she had a very educated background in science and medicine she quickly was able to replicate any drugs she found. She became a drug chemist and was able to develop a nice tolerance to most substances giving her the maximum potency from anything she took. During any skirmish while exploring the wastes, popping a few pills and sticking a few needles helped things go more smoothly. She didn’t think it was to serious, just some Jet or Psycho could go a long way. She also sold ingredients to other drug makers.

As time passed she started to encounter lawmen Regulators who wanted to kill her. Apparently there was a bounty placed on her head. She quickly decided to prove to everyone that the bounty was a joke. She became a Contract Killer. Anyone who tried to kill her would have their ears removed and she would sell the ears for caps. In her adventures she was quickly becoming very proficient at lock-picking, sneaking around and repairing and maintaining guns. She collected a wide variety of guns and later found her science skills helpful with energy weapons.

At the end of her travels Tennison made permanent enhanchements to her body. She became part cyborg. This gave her increased survival skills in the Wasteland, but it would not save her in the end. After stummbling into her father and his former research team, Tennison had a new vision on life, help him finish his work, or die a fiends death in the wastes. She decided to help finish his work and resist any corruption from the Enclave. At the very end, in the atrium of the Jefferson Memorial Tennison initiated the grid sequence on the project purity console, thus giving clean water to everyone in the Captial Wasteland. With this, her own life was lost as she was exposed a leathal dose of radiation in the process. In legend, no one in the wastes would forget the lone wanderer from 101 named Tennison.

Excerpts of Stalingrad [ 3 ]

"...the fighting at Voreonezh was part of a phase for the Red Army of concentrating defence on cities, not arbitrary lines on the map. The new flexibility had allowed Timoshenko's armies to pull back, avoiding encirclement, but they had already been so badly mauled that on 12 July a new army group command-the Stalingrad Front - was established by Stavka directive. Although nobody dared voice the defeatist suggestion that the Red Army might be forced back as far as the Volga, a suspicion began to grow that this was where the main battle would have to be fought." page 75

"These seemed glorious days for German front-line regiments. "As far as the eye can see", wrote and observer, "armoured vehicles and half-tracks are rolling forward over the steppe. Pennants float in the shimmering afternoon air." Commanders stood fearlessly erect in their tank turrets, one arm raised high, waving their companies forward. Their tracks stirred up dust and propelled it outwards like smoke clouds in their wake." page 75

"Struck by the limitless horizon and expanse of sky, and perhaps also influenced by the sight of vehicles swaying crazily in and out of potholes like ships in a heavy swell, the more imaginative saw the steppe as an uncharted sea. General Strecker described it in a letter as "an ocean that might drown the invader." Villages became the equivalent of islands. In the sun-backed steppe, they also offered the most likely source of water. But a panzer commander might spot and onion-domed church tower in the distance, then on arrival, find beside it the rest of the village destroyed, perhaps with timbers still smouldering. Only the brick chimneys remained standing. The carcasses of horses and livestock lay around, their bellies swollen in the heat forcing their legs grotesquely in the air. Often, the only sign of life would be the odd cat, miaowing in the ruins." page 76

Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. Penguin Books: New York, New York, 1998.

Layers

So far I have made some drastic changes. Nearly 90% of the content and posts of my blog have been deleted. What should I add next? Not really sure what direction this will go now. I know what I would like to add but contemplating if it is worth the time.

-Posting walk-through, build orders and screenshots for Age of Empires 3 seems counter productive since the base game is over 6 years old. Still enjoyable and would play today IF my Internet was latency free--HughsNet sucks! Still enjoy the content of the game so more content of it may appear.

-May post the basics of Company of Heroes which also is an older RTS game but, like Age 3, is intuitive enough to be a modern game experience.

-Might dig up some interesting history of RTS and FPS game development.

-I enjoy historical based games and, in turn, historical significance and awareness. This may provoke me to post historical connections and readings to content most likely addressed in a game, movie or show.

-May post content related to Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Steam.

-I was a Geography, Earth Science and Social Science student in college. News or information regarding these philosophies may be touched on time to time.

-I will NOT post any political or religious content.

-Will NOT post any agricultural content.

I have many layers [subjects] I would like to add and want to condense my labels so everything is easy to find. First objective is to not try and do everything at once.

Blog Transition

So it is a new year. I am going to take a new approach with this blog. It will no longer be agricultural related, instead it will only reflect a few nuggets of my personal interest. In the coming days and weeks I will sift out the ag related content and delete it. My new home for ag related material will be at Tumblr which will frequently be a photo blog with picture messaging while out and away from a computer. I am going to take the gloves off my Twitter feed this year as well. No more pretending, every topic is fair game; politics, music, sports, current events etc. and I plan to lay on the sarcasm. I never get reaction when I am serious so I just as well be an ass like so many others on there.

So who actually just read this post? Just say "I did" in the comments under anonymous.

This blog has been a complete failure.

Excerpts of Stalingrad [ 2 ]

These excerpts are mainly from the part of the book over Operation Blue, the German offensive in the spring and summer of 1942 in the Ukraine and southern Russia.

"Several German panzer divisions also encountered a new form of unconventional weapon during this [outside of Moscow] fighting. They found Russian dogs running towards them with a curious-looking saddle holding a load on top with a short upright stick. At first the panzer troops thought that they must be first-aid dogs, but then they realized that the animals had explosives or anti-tank mines strapped to them. These "mine-dogs", trained on Pavlovian principles, had been taught to run under large vehicles to obtain their food. The stick, catching against the underside, would detonate the charge. Most of the dogs were shot before they reached their target, but this macabre tactic had an unnerving effect" page 35

"Field Marshal von Reichenau's notorious order to the Sixth Army of 10 October 1941, which was supported by Field Marshal von Rundstedt, quite clearly makes the Wehrmacht chain of command jointly responsible for the atrocities against the Jews and civilians in the Ukraine. "In the eastern theatre of war, the soldier is not only a man fighting in accordance with the rules of war, but also the ruthless standard-bearer of a national ideal and the avenger of all the bestialities perpetrated of the German peoples. For this reason the soldier must fully appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry." Their duty was to "free the German people forever from the Jewish-Asiatic threat"..." page 56

"For those who reached prisoner-of-war camps alive, the chance of survival turned out to be not much better than one in three. Altogether, over three million Red Army soldiers out of 5.7 million died in German camps from disease, exposure, starvation and ill-treatment. The German Army itself, not the SS nor any other Nazi organization was responsible for prisoners of war. Its attitude was reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II's remark in 1914 that the 90,000 Russian prisoners captured at Tannenberg "should be left to starve"..." page 59

"[General Walther von] Seydlitz had arrived that afternoon by air from Konigsberg, where he had snatched a few days' leave with his wife, before taking over command of LI Corps under Paulus. When he and his wife had said goodbye at the airfield, they never imagined, "that is was a farewell for almost fourteen years"..." page 63

"The fighting which resulted, a gradual compression of over a quarter million Soviet troops, led to unusual situations. According to a senior NCO in the 389th Infantry Division, his grenadier regiment found itself in a merciless battle with what he described as a "bandit battalion" of women soldiers, commanded by a redhead. "The fighting methods of these female beasts showed itself in treacherous and dangerous ways. They lie concealed in heaps of straw, and shoot us in the back when we pass by"..." page 66

Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. Penguin Books: New York, New York, 1998.

Excerpts of Stalingrad [ 1 ]

Stalingrad - The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943, is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. Years ago I had to read, for school and college, most of the time is was fairly dull reading. After college I lived alone for a while, with no dish TV and no Internet. I played some computer games and read two books by Antony Beever. The Fall of Berlin was the other.

A few weeks ago we lost power for about 20 hours so I started reading Stalingrad again at a pace of about 5-10 pages a night. I could make better progress if I just sat for a full evening or two, it is not easy to sit and read like a novel, there is much information to absorb. I have been taking time noting certain information that I am going to share on here. Some of it I find fascinating and some of it disturbing, in the end I think it is all important.

*"During that night of 21 June [1941], the diplomats in Berlin and Moscow could only guess what was happening along the frontier that separated them. Never had foreign ministries been so redundant. Some 3,050,000 German troops, with other pro-Axis armies bringing the total to four million men, awaited the invasion of the Soviet Union from Finland to the Black Sea. "The world will hold its breath!" Hitler had declared at a planning session several months before...

In the 24th Panzer Division, for example, Captain von Rosenback-Lepinski is said to have told his motorcycle recon battalion: "The war with Russia will last only four weeks." Such confidence was, in many ways, understandable. Even foreign Intel services expected the Red Army to collapse. The Wehrmacht had assembled the largest invasion force ever seen, with 3,350 tanks, around 7,000 field guns and over 2,000 aircraft...the Wehrmacht famed for its Blitzkrieg, also depended on over 600,000 horses to tow guns and ration wagons...

Hitler's plans of subjugation and exploitation could only strengthen the "rotten structure" [Hitler believed Russian was a rotten structure, which if you crash in the front door the whole thing will crumble down] by forcing even those who loathed the Stalinist regime to support it. Stalin and the apparatus of the Communist Party quickly recognized the need to shift their rhetoric away from Marxist-Leninist cliches. The phrase "The Great Patriotic War" appeared in a headline in the first issue of Pravda to appear after the invasion, and Stalin himself soon took up this deliberate evocation of the Patriotic War against Napoleon...

The infantry divisions, which composed the bulk of the army, were marching up to forty miles a day, their jackboots roasting in the summer heat. The Landser, or infantryman, carried about fifty-five pounds of equipment, including steel helmet, rifle, ammunition and entrenching tool. His canvas and leather pack contained a mess tin, canteen, an Esbit field stove, a combined spoon and fork in aluminium, rifle cleaning kit, spare clothes, tent pegs and poles, field dressing, sewing kit, razor, soap and Vulkan Sanex condoms, even though carnal relations with civilians were officially forbidden..."

*Beevor, Antony. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943. Penguin Books: New York, New York, 1998.

Apocalypse Man

A terrific show with lots of potential is "Apocalypse Man" from the History Channel. So far there is only one episode that aired this month. I hope for more but even if it only comes to the pilot it has risen my awareness several notches.

Rudy Reyes is a former Recon Marine who in the past decade has spent 3 tour of duties over seas. On this show he demonstrates several ways to survive and make the most out of resources in the event of a world apocalyptic disaster.

Reyes makes a fire with steel wool, shows how to syphon gas with a bike pump, and how to make on the fly field brewed bio-diesel. He also gives ideas on how to obtain information in a powerless world and how to open communication with others. For me I find it important how he indicates that if martial law happens, you need to know how to deal with people on your terms.

Try it out, check your listings. I have the DVR set to record any episodes, I can only hope for a few more, it really is the most interesting show I have seen in a while.