That pretty much what you need to defeat a good doom fortress. I'm sure that a few of the people posting on this thread havent experinced one yet

PACT definitely has a much better way of dealing with Doom Fortresses directly (hello Buratino, hello Smerch), but NATO is a slightly more hand tied on this unless they make a much more substantial artillery investment or have mortars on hand.

If they are on a forest with slopes, or there is an adjacent unsecured forest... I think one can try the fight fire with fire strategy by blindly flamethrowing parts of the forest with the fire on position icon and playing the "Battleship" board game of trying to hit the right units before sending cheap infantry in to verify the situation.

Since forests don't cover the entire map, it is often wise to just bypass them and go for something else and bait them out of their cover.

It's not a Doom Fortress if there's no vehicular flamethrower. And the complaint is the lack of ways to take one out. I said back in OP that artillery works the best. Everything else in the game has multiple counters, up to the point that there really isn't a counter system. Except this thing.



Again, I'm stupid: could you point those out for me? Artillery as a counter is already accepted so please don't list strategies based on that.

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List of things to do according to the thread:

- Bomb the hell out of them. Either they leave, or they die. Win-Win. It is best if you already have artillery beforehand, not dedicated to that.

- DGaS tactic: Ignore, and move somewhere else, while still showing a threat to the fortress: It's a pack of useless points standing there, idly in a forest.

- Split units and attack on at least two fronts. One of the fronts might take the blunt of the attack and die, but the others will take the hell hounds out.

- Blindfire with your own flamethrowers.

Four solutions. Enough for you guys?

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Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.



This logic is not internally consistent. Is terrain valuable or not? Because if it is, then Doom Fortress just won; it's standing on the most valuable piece of terrain in the map and held it without firing a shot. And if it is not, where will you go?



May work, or may not. Flanking is a good idea in general, but the problem of this particular case was outlined in OP. Do keep in mind that it's better to stun two groups with the hidden flamethrower than to destroy one.



Better get lucky, because return fire will be accurate.

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I should have added that every of these solution depends on the situation and should be thought of, blahblahblah... It's kind of writing "warning, may contain nuts" on a peanut butter jar.

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Artillery is your best option, but it will require several costly artillery pieces and lots of supplies and will also take some time. In larger forests the artillery is easily avoided as I constantly move my units around. You must also consider the fact that your artillery can be countered - do you then counter the artillery, or continue to hit the forest, and risk losing your artillery?

Ignoring some forests on some maps is feasible, but on some maps you will be severely limited unless you control certain forests.

Split units is can effective against lightly defended forests, but your problem is that you have to actually get into the forest yourself in the first place. Also your timing will have to be perfect, because I have often killed several double groups of infantry in quick succession at close range with a single flame tank.

Blindfire with flames - total waste of time, because I will simply burn your flame tank, or just edge back out of range.


Your best option is probably a combination of split units and artillery - this has sometimes removed me from a forest, but it will not easy, it will be expensive to buy your units, and you will incur many losses, against a defence which has probably cost me around $100.

I don't think that there are massive issues of balance, but I think that maybe the flame tanks need reduced range, less effect on armour, longer reload time and they should be come visible/targetable when firing, and for a few seconds afterwards.

Most of what you said basically sounds like heavy defenses working as intended.

I just realized though that an artillery bonus against armor in woodland would not be realistic. It would be realistic against infantry because of the flying wood splinters and the airbursts but those would make artillery actually less effective against armor.

I did have an incident where I was able to use a flametank to stunlock and rout a total of TWELVE good tanks. Three groups of four. I just sprayed down each group in turn and kept on switching targets.

That's insane and there's no possible way that should be able to happen.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the fire suppression, oxygen and cooling systems on modern tanks make them able to survive even severe napalm attacks. I really do think the effects are far too heavy. It would obviously cause them to button but buttoning is not really modeled in the game...

Yup this is the problem. If this trick was expensive to pull off then it might be fine that it took a lot of points and effort to counter, but it isn't. Saying "just go round" is pretty much tantamount to admitting that point for point there isn't any way to counter it. Avoiding the forest isn't exactly some tactical masterstroke when all the force was bought for was to keep you out of the forest anyway!

It also isn't really in keeping with the way the rest of the game is balanced. If you put tanks in forests they can be countered very cheaply with the right infantry. If you put riflemen in forests they can be countered cheaply with flame units, and probably other things. If they have good rifle stats but bad AT stats they can be driven out with cheap tanks. If they have good AT stats but bad rifle stats then better rifle infantry will beat them. If they have good stats in both then riflemen that only have good rifle stats will beat them, point for point. Combinations of the above can be beaten cost effectively with the right combinations of counters.

But there is literally nothing that you can move into a forest that will cost effectively counter a few flame tanks plus some crappy infantry for spotting. All you can do is drop a lot of uncorrected artillery on it and hope that you're aiming in about the right place. If they have a couple supply trucks in there even that won't be enough and you'll have to move some stuff in after and hope that your arty stunned or killed enough stuff. If it didn't you probably won't even know until half your force gets bathed in flames and routed while infantry chews up your defenceless units.

I guess I'm still not seeing what the huge deal is about this. There are numerous ways of countering flame tanks.

800 points is a strawman-- 200 points of mortars does it quite easily, heavier artillery would do an even better job, and if you don't have artillery you can't really expect to clear defenses in terrain that's not friendly to tanks.

You can also just rush them with superior numbers from multiple directions.

Even though I agree that flame units are probably somewhat OP, especially in terms of realism (1k flamethrower range? What?) I find this degree of worrying about it to be rather puzzling.

I just hit level 40 yesterday and while I have been somewhat annoyed by this tactic a number of times I haven't found it too big of a problem, and that was before I learned how to clear it with rolling barrages.

You are calling 100 points of flamers and infantry unreasonable and too hard to clear? What?


I just move shells into the forest. Considering that I am using those artillery the entire game and getting kills and stuns with them the entire game, your cost-effectiveness claim here is also false.

I don't like forum arguments and again I don't want to sound argumentative or contradictory. But countering this is trivial. I would support a 25% reduction in range but would that really make the game as safe as you apparently want it to be for units trying to rampage through heavily defended forests with no prep barrage?


We haven't done that-- we've offered seven or eight methods of clearing the forest. But the fact remains that with any static defensive emplacement, the most effective way of dealing with it is to simply go around it, thereby dislocating (neutralizing) the units within the emplacement. You may want this not to be the case but it is the case.

Just on a realism note: Entrenched positions, especially in woodland and urban terrain, are in fact FAR MORE difficult to clear in the real world without prep barrages unless you want to take very heavy losses in terms of both armor and infantry. Flame tanks are defensive units that go some way toward modelling the difficulty of doing that.