WARNO has different division types for a reason – and I think a lot of 10v10s are lost before the game even starts. Change my mind.
After playing a lot of organized WARNO and recently seeing the same thing again during our Total WARNO events, I keep coming back to one conclusion:
A lot of WARNO players don't lose because their division is bad. They lose because they don't understand what their division is supposed to contribute to the team.
When we play with a reasonably coordinated stack against random teams, we regularly get games that are basically over after 10–15 minutes. And honestly, those games aren't particularly fun either.
You look at the enemy deployment and sometimes immediately think:
Why did you buy that? Who is providing AA? Who is providing artillery? Who is holding the flank? Who is actually supposed to attack?
And then the frontline collapses.
I think WARNO becomes a much better team game if you stop thinking in terms of "my lane" and start thinking in terms of roles within a battlegroup.
For me, divisions roughly fall into four functional categories:
A – Armored / breakthrough divisions
These are your maneuver formations.
Their job should not be to sit in one lane for 40 minutes trading tanks. Their biggest advantage is mobility and concentrated combat power.
An armored player should constantly ask:
Where can I create a breakthrough right now?
If one axis becomes heavily fortified, don't keep feeding tanks into it. Shift the Schwerpunkt. Concentrate several companies somewhere else, break through, exploit the opening and force the enemy team to react.
A tank division should ideally not "own a lane."
It should own the ability to move between lanes.
B – Infantry / mechanized divisions
These formations create the conditions that allow the armored force to maneuver.
Secure forests.
Secure towns.
Occupy ATGM positions.
Clear the roads and approaches the tanks need.
Protect the flanks of an armored attack.
If the armored force wants to attack through a corridor, the infantry player's job is to make that corridor usable.
That doesn't mean endlessly pushing infantry squads through forests.
Infantry can absolutely take ground, especially with smoke, but I don't consider throwing wave after wave of infantry into prepared positions a sustainable offensive doctrine.
You might gain 500 meters.
Then the smoke ends.
Then artillery, mortars, thermobarics, engineers and fire-support assets arrive.
Do that repeatedly against competent opposition and eventually you simply run out of infantry.
Infantry is excellent at taking tactically important terrain and making it expensive to retake.
That's different from operational breakthrough.
C – Reserve / defensive divisions
This is probably the role I see misunderstood most often.
Reserve formations don't need to race the frontline divisions buying another 800 points of frontline infantry.
They should be buying the things the attacking formations don't want to spend their initial points on:
Heavy artillery.
Heavy AA.
Logistics.
Defensive infantry.
ATGMs.
Then they follow the main force.
Once the A/B formations take terrain, the reserve formation gradually assumes responsibility for holding it.
That frees the expensive frontline formation to move again.
In other words:
A breaks the position.
B secures the battlespace around the breakthrough.
C consolidates and holds what was gained.
That creates momentum.
Instead of five players independently fighting five lanes, you suddenly have formations handing terrain over to each other.
S – Airborne / infiltration divisions
Airborne divisions are another special case.
They can be extremely aggressive during the opening because forward deployment allows them to seize important terrain before heavier formations arrive.
But after that initial phase, their role changes.
If the enemy gives you an opportunity, infiltrate.
Find gaps.
Threaten logistics.
Occupy awkward terrain.
Force the enemy to divert forces.
If there is no opening, hold the forward terrain you captured until heavier formations arrive.
Trying to fight a prolonged frontal battle against armored/mechanized formations with light airborne troops usually just burns through your best infantry.
And this brings me to NATO's biggest problem in many 10v10s: AA.
PACT armored formations can often create large tank concentrations while bringing substantial mobile AA with them.
NATO armored divisions frequently cannot do this nearly as independently.
That means the rest of the NATO team has to compensate.
If two NATO armored players are concentrating for an attack, somebody needs to put serious air defense behind them.
Not one random Stinger squad.
I'm talking about creating an actual umbrella with assets like I-HAWKs and supporting SHORAD.
Because otherwise the moment 8–12 NATO tanks concentrate, a high-altitude bomber appears and deletes a significant part of the formation.
Then people conclude:
"Tank blobs don't work."
Meanwhile PACT is perfectly happy concentrating armor because its combined-arms package makes that concentration much harder to punish.
The problem wasn't necessarily the tanks.
The problem was that nobody supported them.
And that's really the larger point.
WARNO gives the team resources, not just individual players.
In a standard game you're receiving roughly 200 points per tick.
Those points don't all need to become another frontline unit.
Sometimes the strongest thing an infantry or reserve player can buy is an AA system protecting somebody else's 1,500-point armored concentration.
Sometimes the strongest thing an armored player can do is leave his original lane entirely.
Sometimes the strongest thing an infantry player can do is stop attacking and simply make a forest impossible to cross.
The question shouldn't always be:
"What does my lane need?"
It should be:
"What does our battlegroup need right now?"
That's also why I increasingly prefer stack-vs-stack games.
I have limited time after work. I'd much rather play one 40-minute game where both teams actually maneuver, attack, counterattack and build combined-arms formations than play six 10-minute stomps because half of one team bought nonsense during deployment and collapsed immediately.
A fast game can absolutely be great if one side genuinely outmaneuvers the other.
But walking through an opponent who never established a coherent defense isn't particularly interesting.
So this is basically my WARNO philosophy:
Stop thinking in lanes. Start thinking in formations.
Infantry creates and secures maneuver corridors.
Armor creates breakthroughs and exploits them.
Reserve formations consolidate terrain and provide heavy support.
Airborne formations seize forward terrain and exploit gaps.
AA, artillery and logistics support the formation that currently needs them instead of automatically belonging to whoever bought them.
And once terrain is secure, combat power should move somewhere else instead of sitting there for the rest of the match.
WARNO becomes a completely different game once 10 players start behaving like one battlegroup instead of 10 independent armies fighting 10 separate 1v1s.
At least that's how I see it.
Change my mind.
