My third post in here but i was thinking on this one and it still pisses me off.
In EndWar, you pick from an assortment of battalions the one you will use for your entire single-player campaign, and they have different specializations (an Armored battalion has more tank squads and fewer infantry squads, for example). Now i'd picked up the EndWar strategy guide which has a list of all the battalions, their commanding officers and their unit counts, and i'd noticed that every battle pits you against one of those officers and their (in theory) specialized battalion.
Having grown quite frustrated with the downright AI cheating on Hardcore difficulty and the easiness of Normal, i've been trying to get better at Veteran to the point of someday tackling Hardcore again, at least for the accompishment. And here i'm thinking, hey i could plan individual battles based this 'intel' on my opponents, like i'd be taking on an Airborne battalion with the knowledge they only have a single Transport unit, so knocking it out should give me an edge in the air for spamming Gunships.
So i start the great experiment, opposite an Airborne with my tactic to locate and destroy his lone Transport unit. Up til now i hadn't payed much attention to the different types of battalions under enemy use and about the only predictable tactic of theirs was to rush with a Gunship flight, which duly happens and i duly shred them from the skies. A little bit later i spot their Transport, got my Artillery on the field and let them have it, with a squad of Engineers in a building keeping them too busy to dodge the fire. They get taken out, evac bird grabs the survivors, my Gunships move out across the map on the hunt...
And then i see it, another Transport unit rolling forward, catches my Gunships and tears em apart before i can do much about it, i'm thinking its possible the survivors were quickly put in new vehicles and sent out again, but it seems pretty soon for it... i smash them too, and then made sure of them by completely killing the unit before the evac bird arrived, figuring there's no way they're coming back...
A minute later as im consolidating my positions and holding off everything else the enemy is throwing at me, not one but TWO new Transport units appear, rolling to certain doom against my lines but i'm raging too much to care.
TL;DR, my whole strategy to get better at EndWar by outsmarting the enemy AI fell apart when the game refused to play by the rules.
