[15 August 2023]
This guide is for the Ardennes Assault campaign on Hard level. It should be most useful for players who know the basics, but want to master the campaign, achieving gold medals on every mission and campaign scores ~48,000. That means no squad upgrades. Upgrades are like training wheels on a bicycle—you’ll soon find that the campaign is not much of a challenge, even on “Hard” level, if you use them.
Companies overview
You fight the Ardennes Assault campaign with three companies. The default companies are Able Co. (Airborne), Baker Co. (Mechanized), and Dog Co. (bog-standard infantry). A DLC gives you also Fox Co. (Rangers). For the style of campaign described here, your best choices are Baker, Dog, and Fox.
In terms of specific missions for which you have a choice, Baker is generally your best bet for Houffalize, Eschdorf, Tank Grab, Stavelot, and Ouren. Dog is best for St. Vith, Stoumont, and Espeler. Fox is best for Preservation, Watchtower, Armored Assault, Railsplitters, and leading the Siegfried Line final assault. The remaining missions (Total Domination, Hard Point) don’t seem to favor any particular company. One thing you don’t want to do is use Able Co. for the Espeler mission—its paradrops will raise the German alert level and basically blow the mission.
In general, all initially available squads, except Fox Co.’s Rangers and Baker’s cav riflemen, cannot fight effectively until they are outfitted with weapons such as BARs, LMGs, or bazookas, and supported by HMGs and AT guns. The less experience these companies have, the fewer units they will start with on each mission, so the weaker they will be.
Note that difficulty levels 4 and 5 are usually very challenging for most missions. For Tank Grab, Watchtower, Armored Assault, Houffalize and Stavelot at these levels, expect to take 10-20 casualties at least.
I’m assuming the player is already familiar with the many bugs, AI cheats, and other design/execution flaws in Ardennes Assault, but in the mission discussions I will note any mission-specific bugs.
To maximize your campaign score, 1) never reinforce or upgrade squads on the strategic map, 2) minimize your casualties, 3) maneuver on the strategic map to block German escapes only when really necessary—because each movement in enemy territory costs you more casualties, 4) go for the gold medal in each mission, 5) achieve side-missions (the achievable ones), and 6) drag out missions to build veterancy (goal is vet level 3 for all companies) when you can do so with minimal extra casualities. No matter what you do, though, it is very difficult to get a score much above 48,000.
If you want to “cheat” for any reason, you can edit the campaign file, and/or use console commands.
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