Units · Land
Land forces - the arm that holds ground
Land forces are how nations actually take things. Air strikes degrade. Naval blockades strangle. Missiles punish. None of them put a flag on a hill. Infantry, mechanized formations, armor, artillery, and anti-armor are how territory changes hands.
And they vary more across eras than any other arm. WW2 land warfare and modern land warfare run on the same engine but produce very different campaigns.
Five categories
What's available, what each is for, where each fails.
Hold ground
Infantry
Cheap, slow, ubiquitous. Holds territory, garrisons cities, fights in terrain that punishes vehicles. Shortcut answer when armor isn't available - also the answer when armor stops being effective.
Mobile infantry
Mechanized Infantry
Infantry on wheels or tracks. Keeps up with armor in a breakthrough. The missing link that turns a tank advance into a sustained offensive instead of an armor-only spike.
Breakthrough
Armor - Light / Medium / Heavy
Three tiers, escalating cost and impact. Light armor scouts and exploits. Medium is the workhorse - the bulk of any armor force. Heavy punches through fortified lines but is slow and logistically expensive.
Indirect fire
Artillery
The arm that shapes battles before tanks engage. Modern variants include MLRS and self-propelled howitzers. Vulnerable to counter-battery and air strikes; protected by integrated air defense.
Counter-armor
Anti-Armor Systems
From WW2 anti-tank guns to modern guided ATGMs. Cheap per unit, devastating against armor, vulnerable when caught alone. The reason a defender with no tanks can still bleed an armor offensive - and the reason combined arms includes infantry support for armor.
Era progression
The categories are the same; the rosters and effectiveness differ.
WW2 (1939)
Mass armor era. Light tanks (Panzer II, T-26) early-war scouts; medium tanks (T-34, Sherman, Panzer IV) the workhorse; heavy tanks (Tiger, IS-2) late-war breakthrough.
Anti-armor mostly towed guns and infantry-launched (Panzerfaust, bazooka). Effective but short-ranged. Combined arms still developing as a doctrine.
WW3 (modern)
Modern main battle tanks (M1A2, T-90, Leopard 2A7). Composite armor and reactive armor packages. Mechanized infantry standard, not a specialty.
Anti-armor includes guided ATGMs (Javelin, Kornet) and loitering munitions. Fundamentally cheaper per kill than a tank - so armor-heavy doctrines lose to dispersed anti-armor unless air dominance is established.
Doctrine notes
Three doctrinal patterns we see win in alpha campaigns:
- →Mass armor breakthrough. Concentrate medium and heavy armor on a single sector. Drive through. Exploit with mechanized. Works in WW2; works in WW3 only if you've established air dominance and degraded enemy AT capacity first.
- →Defensive depth. Fortified infantry forward, mobile reserves behind. Anti-armor positioned along likely armor avenues. Bleeds attackers; punishes overextension. The defender's natural posture in modern war.
- →Combined arms attrition. Artillery shapes; armor probes; infantry exploits; anti-armor reserves. Slow, expensive in casualties, very hard to break. The Eastern Front model.
Terrain matters
Land warfare is the most terrain-sensitive arm. Mountains compress force-on-force into narrow passes that favor defenders. Russian winter wrecks unprepared armor. Pacific monsoons stall everything. Desert rewards mobility and punishes supply lines. These effects are real in NationFall - pick your campaign with the geography in mind.
Try it in the demo
Free browser demo. Build your land force. Find out where your doctrine breaks.
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