Möbius Front ’83: Tips and Tricks on Campaign Tactics

To play Mobius ’83 you need to leave behind some expectations of how similar games behave. Think like chess you need to carefully arrange units to deny areas, protect one another and in some cases sacrifice units. You will fail if you try and grind or rush units.

• Units always inflict damage at full effectiveness, you need to ensure a threat is destroyed.
• Check the deployment points for each rounds, this will indicate if you need to be on the offensive or defensive if your points come first and the enemies in round three you will need to rush and visa versa if you start with few points.
• Unless later rounds have few points for reinforcements avoid specialists in the first round, wait till you know the enemy unit composition before going heavy on Armour, AT or Arty.
• Most units cannot “run and gun” this are reserve for tanks, assault guns and helicopters.
• Avoid moving infantry up to other infantry if you think they will be likely to advance themselves.
• Even units which can “run and gun” the damage inflicted is less, this means you need numbers to ensure a kill.
• Most units with AT have the ability for a one shot kill, assume the worst out of any encounter and play it like you would chess.
• Don’t treat tanks like tanks, while you can use them offensively it’s more through careful advance and sniping out threats.
• Both sides are similar in terms of numbers even the most basic unit should not be thrown away needlessly, again consider chess a prize needs to be valuable to be worth losing a unit to.
• Losing any HP is a cost to be avoided, given most units don’t have “run and gun” a unit with 1HP is of little use on the offensive.
• Infantry should always be in the treeline or rushing to the next treeline, the only time you can keep them out of trees is when the enemy have no “run and gun” units.
• Your riflemen are the backbone of your front line, they have good HP and instakill AT cannot target them. Despite that don’t bleed your HP needlessly as you will need this backbone when you advance.
• Keep the specialist infantry teams back at first they only have 2HP and risk being tag teamed by enemy helos and artillery.
• The low speed of infantry mean it is essential to keep your APCs and utility vehicle safe.
• If you can take out the enemy transport it becomes possible to bypass infantry and rush objectives.
• Physically blocking enemy movement is important, guard forest passes and block movement to your weak but valuable units.
• Secondly area denial is also key, distribute your units the enemy will rarely risk there units to AT.
• Units with deployable weapons are vulnerable while being set up, given a chance the enemy will try and pick these out.
• Deployable weapons hence are more about denying the area as much as making a kill.
• artillery can only damage soft targets while they are a threat keep infantry within APCs or in the middle not the edge of woods.
• Armour is able to reduce one or two points of damage, this means light armoured units are immune to small arms and need heavy machine guns or AT weapons to damage. Tanks with two points of armour are immune to even heavy MGs.
• In a bad spot popping smoke might save you from losing a unit to group of tank or assault gun that might advance, between smoke and the “run and gun” this will have reduce their damage enough than your armour can survive even when quite outnumbered.
• The following turn you will be unable to shoot out of the smoke from your unit so you must “run and gun” or withdraw.
• Focus on the objective and avoid engaging enemy units which are slow or are little threat to you.
• Sometimes doing nothing is the best thing a unit can do, if reinforcements are still coming up or you don’t have good LoS, wait, next turn will be better.
• Be cautious and keep tabs on the balance of power, wait for the right moment then strike with your full force when a gap or opportunity appears.
• Fog of war is essential, use infantry in woodlands to get sight into the next open area to avoid getting any nasty surprises.
• Use tree cover to send fast units to a different flank, because the enemy tries to defend the objective you encroach by changing target you can attack the area with fewer enemy infantry.
• When advancing through woodland passes send a jeep before a tank, or for APCs dismount an infantry into the pass tile to gain sight while blocking the APC from harm, if you think there is any chance of the next clearing containing hostiles.
• Ambushes only work for a single unit, following enemy units know to avoid or attack the threat, ambushes don’t work on anything with “run and gun” unless you have the armour or numbers.
• Use R for the ruler tool to plan placement, movements and threats from fields of fire.
• Take care as LoS is more generous than field of fire, you can see into tiles that are blocked by woodlands.
• LoS updates while units move, run a unit past a opening and keep eyes peeled for a brief peek, helos work great for this.
• You can’t disembark from vehicles that have moved.
• You can embark and move in the same turn, even with a landed helo.
• You can still move or shoot with transports after units disembark.
• Helos and SAMs also have LoS and field of fire blocked by forest, use forests to get airbourne infantry up close to SAM objectives.

By Will play for money