Tactics Talk: Erlenberg Defense

One of the biggest mistakes the defending teams make (on just about all the Assault maps but especially Erlenberg) is push into the enemy team too early.

Remember that on Defense mode there's only two ways you can lose: The other team kills your whole team, or caps your base. And they only have 10 minutes to do it. The clock is in your favor.

That means that usually the winning strategy is to push out to contact, in a position where you have hard cover, and fight from there, falling back if necessary. Key positions are E2. D5 (or maybe E5), D7, and D9. Sometimes it's helpful to sneak a medium into D1.

TD supporting fire from B2, B4, A0 and A8. If you take those positions and stay patient you'll almost always win, especially if there isn't more than 1 arty in the game.

Pushing south of E, in the early game, is almost always a bad play.

I had a game this morning where our VK 100.01P pushed all the way down the 6/7 line nearly to their spawn. But WHY? This battle had no arty and the enemy spawn in Defense mode has no value. All he did was get himself isolated (and finally killed) and took his gun and armor out of the fight that mattered.

Likewise our T-10 kept trying to push the 5 line. Problem is, he was pushing into 3 enemy heavies basically alone. Why? There was no value to that play. Sure enough he got killed and we were down a top tier heavy.

Be patient, make the enemy push into you, kill them. The clock is on your side. Tick tock, tick tock. 

Now in the mid/late game you may get an advantage - I've often had games where we went up 10-5 - and then it may be ok to push into them if you have enough HP for it.

But in the early game, take a defensible position, and be patient. They don't have the luxury of sitting back, they have to come around the corner, cross the open field, and push into your guns.

GLHF!

Got tips for playing defense on Erlenberg? Share them in the comments below!