I just play easy for fun, especially after work. It used to be easier. do not worry about difficulty, just have fun. Having fun is the most important detail.

yeah, but i want to defeat medium

yeah. won my first match against middle AI :-)

In the beginning of a match it's all about speed, initiative and early victories. Capturing victory points and even resource points is not as important as getting those grenade boxes as well as iron and fuel before the enemy gets it. It's essentially about getting an advantage and then building upon it, without letting the AI recover. Then at some point after losing for some time the AI thinks there's no point in fighting you anymore and just sits at their base.

My early game looks like this. I get my troops to mid, have engineer multitask capture some nearby points, while my inf picks a fight it will surely win, like 2 vs 1 of another inf or engineer. The point is either destroy the unit entirely to get its weapons, or deny the AI the time to capture resources and cause it iron bleed by needing to constantly replenish troops. Meanwhile as soon as I have 150 iron I request another engineer, and then another one, turning them into grenadiers from the boxes or whatever weapons are there on the map.

Early on my priority is fuel so that I can get the barracks built ASAP. Once my barracks are online I have several solid options right away, ex. I can get flamethrower guys as Rusviet and go burn the enemy's barracks which is usually enough. Or I can then rush for 1st reserve and bring light machine gunners. I place those at mid along with a bunker, creating a fortified position the AI will waste units trying to capture for quite a while.

By this point I either have serious infantry advantage, or a few mechs, so I can go and destroy AI's base and win.

Even if the game stalled and AI is sending mechs at you, you can still fortify somewhere with field cannons, blast the mechs and salvage the resources for your own purposes.

i thank you. really nice :-)

I still feel like this game suffers from the issue where one ♥♥♥♥ up is so bad that it's impossible for you to ever recover what so ever.

Congrats on your victory.

Most RTS games anymore require meta-knowledge, speed, and precision. Even people who play StarCraft have it down to a mathematical formula, it's insane. The same is true with IH. It wasn't like this so much in Command & Conquer. There were all kinds of ways to fight back and turn over a win. You just had to watch out for NOD players in Tiberian Sun, because they'd steal and sell your construction yard.

On some maps of IH, you can plug in a bottleneck with a bunker and a few supporting infantry. The AI doesn't know how to get around it. With this strategy, I can win without ever having to build a single mech, even against an insane AI.

You can always try easy ai, or put a ai on your team

really doe, if you're losing against medium AI you're definitely doing something critically wrong. im not trying to be an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but like, i'm a casual player of this game and i can beat 2x insane AI on my own.

1. pump out a lot of basic infantry units in the beginning, engineers as soon as the game starts is a nice way to get the upper hand as you can pick up weapons and therefore save resources. avoid taking weapon caches with your basic infantry if you can, have the engineers pick them up instead.

2. control resource nodes. it goes without saying that more resources > more units > more control, have 1 engineer unit doing solely this until all nodes close by are captured, use your basic infantry for control of the victory points in the early game, the medium AI usually only sends 1 squad each to a victory point node, so if you're facing 2 medium AI and you're alone you've just balanced out the battle, add a 3rd unit on top to ensure victory.

3. retreat your units when they get to low hp, losing a resource node due to a retreat is better than losing the units defending the node on top of losing the node

4. an easy way to cheese early-mid game is to pick one or even two heavy MG's in your reserve and pump them out asap, then place them near a chokepoint like i.e a bridge. it will be a while before the AI starts pumping out mechs, so these weapon systems provide a lot of value for their cost in the early-mid game. remember to back them up by an infantry squad or two if only to soak up damage to preserve the heavy MGs. your primary goal should be to get the 400-480 iron needed to pump them out, but don't let that stop you from making engineers neither.
if you REALLY wanna make sure a position is held solidly, make a bunker there as well.

5. using cover and angling units within those covers properly goes a long way, if you can have 2 covered units covering each other you're in a solid position defensively.

6. once you get your 2nd reserve out, its time to make a push assuming you've now got solid control of resource nodes and chokepoints covered. its really up to you to decide which mechs/infantry to use along with your 2nd reserve. as the AI will also have mechs at this point, i recommend getting at least some anti-mech mechs or gunners to micro the enemy mechs down. also, the AI is pretty dumb, so if you know what unit is under fire by an enemy mech, just have that unit flank around it, that way it will turn its back on the rest of your forces and you can then score rear (critical) hits on it. if the flanking unit dies in the process its still worth it, since you have just traded an infantry squad for a mech (dont try to flank a mech using a mech, they're too slow)

7. use backpeddling a lot when you move your mechs away from the battlefield. its vital that its front is faced towards the incoming fire when its retreating, or it will likely die.

8. using control groups (ctrl+1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/0) goes a long way, get used to doing this as it will save you a lot of time and effort. mastering the keyboard is just as important as mastering the mouse, if you're restricted to using the mouse for everything you're essentially playing at only 50% efficiency, i.e clicking the minimap using the mouse, clicking unit portraits with the mouse, clicking units on the field with the mouse, clicking abilities with the mouse - all this can be (mostly) avoided using control groups.
for example, if you double click "1" the camera instantly picks and moves the camera to control group number 1, and likewise for any other control group. this is particularly useful when you're attacking multiple enemy positions at once as you can zip back and forth between your unit groups for improved micro. its also incredibly useful for retreating.

9. final piece of advice i'll give is to remap your controls to something more efficient, like putting "attack move" on "A" instead of "Z" and backpeddle on "Q" instead of "C". most units have 2 abilities, put these on "W" and "E", that way you've always got your fingers near the most important hotkeys. keeping "Retreat" on "R" is fine. moving "Repair" to a different key (default; H) is also recommended, but not as important.

p.s use SHIFT a lot to queue orders for your units up, again this is vital for obvious reasons.
it could be taking the proper path for movement to a location, or simply to capture resource nodes effectively.

sorry if some of these tips seems like "duh"-advice, but i figured i had to go really basic about it, if you're having problems beating the AI on medium difficulty.

I don't know why medium is so hard, they are sending units like they are free, they micro all of them and retreat all of them to reinforce. I had a 20 minute game where I reinforced 10 units and the medium did 100. WTF... Also their engineers are killing my machine gunners in melee, like seriously?
They buffed the AI, but now medium is too hard and easy is too easy.
I can beat the insane AI in starcraft2 and cant beat the medium in IH?

Originally posted by Shield Brother:

I don't know why medium is so hard, they are sending units like they are free, they micro all of them and retreat all of them to reinforce. I had a 20 minute game where I reinforced 10 units and the medium did 100. WTF... Also their engineers are killing my machine gunners in melee, like seriously?
They buffed the AI, but now medium is too hard and easy is too easy.
I can beat the insane AI in starcraft2 and cant beat the medium in IH?

Same here. I'm feeling the same. Trying to figure a good strategy out, but it feels like even with the tips.. I'm not doing something right or the AI is too overpowered.