AA units

[L'Emmerdeur]

How useful are they for this scenario given the Allied superiority in the air (or am I assuming that incorrectly). Do you just place them at strategic locations where there is a lot of your own units moving through to provide cover or can they (should they) be used more as direct fire units given the short time frame?

[larryfulkerson]

Sometimes you run up against a huge stack of enemy units and fear huge losses in attacking it. You want to reduce the enemy stack of it's power before you "attack" it with your infantry / tanks whatever. Thus you assign lots of artillery and air power to pound it for a couple of turns. Then you notice that all the pure bombardment produces less effect on the enemy stack than you wished. Thus you discover that pure bombardment alone will not produce the needed effect. However soon thereafter you discover that assignment of ONE unit of some kind of land unit in addition to the artillery and air power WILL produce the effect desired. However it's kinda tough on that one land unit. Thus you need a land unit that is (1) armoured (2) relatively inconsequential if lost (3) almost a throwaway unit because it is going to get hurt in the attacks on the huge enemy stack. Thus was born the "ant attack" whereby a land unit, say in this case a lone AA unit, is set to attack the huge enemy stack, at "limited attack", and "minimise losses" settings with lots of artillery and / or airpower to back it up.

True the AA unit will suffer some losses, usually not too much, but the enemy stack will be relatively devestated, suffering 10% or more in this one attack. I've seen AA units used this way, sometimes recon units, sometimes Anti-tank units and rarely armoured units. But this one type of attack done over and over about two or three times, will prep the stack for that final effective attack by "everybody that's adjacent" that will cause it to give ground and fallback.

[Heinz57]

Larry's information is very good. The only thing I'd really add is that AA units tend to have pretty high AA/AP strengths and can add considerably to infantry defenses in hot & contested areas. May be treated similarily to Towed AT in that respect.