I queued up for a 1v1 ranked match in Company of Heroes tonight, hoping to get some live experience in before the day was over (I had previously played a LOT of CPU skirmishes in the public beta over the past few weeks and had played another CPU skirmish this afternoon). Unfortunately, I slipped up and chose to queue up as a British player instead of an American player, so I was in for a bit of a shock when the game booted up and all my pre-match prep work was suddenly thrown out the window.
Luckily, before the patch and before the beta, I played quite a bit of 2v2 British, so I wasn’t completely unprepared. In fact, I think I did fairly well, winning in a concession after about 17 minutes of play.
My opponent, cipo72, executed an odd tactic. He spent much of his time in his base, building up for what I assume he thought was a stab into the heart of my base. He loaded up anti-infantry transports with Panzer Grenadiers armed with Panzershrecks, which are ideal for base-rushing. However, and perhaps this is just indicative of how unfamiliar he is with what I thought were common British tactics, my base was definitely not where he expected it to be. I usually open up the first few minutes of my British game with a base move to an ideal resource node to start building up fuel (preferably) or munitions. Which meant my base was now in the centre-right of the map, and he unloaded all of his troops right into the middle of nothing. Luckily even though I had abandoned my starting base sector, I could still see what was going on inside of it. After I realised what he did, I sent a single Stuwart light tank, took a pot shot at his troops (and sustaining some serious damage from his Panzershrecks during a hurried retreat), and baited his forces to where my hastily-redirected infantry sections lay waiting. As a result, I decimated all of his infantry halftracks and forced his grenadiers into a complete retreat.
Now the point of this story is this: I did not intend to choose the British as my faction when I queued up. Yet, despite re-watching the replay and going over scenarios in my head, I can’t figure out what the appropriate counter would be if I had played as the Americans. His attack was completely negated by two factors; my Stewart whose opening canister shot (which was just to attract his attention initially) ended up gutting three of his four squads, and the fact that the British ability to move their base ended up with me losing none of my critical structures. Neither of those factors would have helped me as Americans. I get the feeling that despite the fact that I had practiced so much as the US and gone through build orders and scenarios over the past few days as the Americans, I could have easily lost that match shortly after that attack.
Time to go back to reevaluate my strategy I guess.
