Beating SM?

Does anyone have any good tips on beating an SM player? Tbh, it seems that they always steam roll everyone in every game I've seen it used, and I don't know how to stop it.

Yea, i dunno either man.. The most success I have had is by using Iron Fist and letting them just throw stuff at me untill they go broke. But that is not a very effecient way to go about it..

I heard somewhere that Anti Air is actually good, but I havnt witnessed it myself.. From what most people say, it is easy to deal with sM, all you have to do is x, y, and z.. But when the strats main unit attacks like a tank, defends like an infantry, isnt effected by terrain, costs about the same as a tank, and can move just as far as Blitzkrieg without any real downside, I think there is a problem. I just wish they would nerf it meaningfully already, because im tired of it myself..

As an SM player myself, I can say there are quite a few ways to beat SM. It depends a lot on if it's across continents or on one landmass, like Eurasia or Europe. When it's across oceans, you kill their bomber stack which now has crap defence before it reaches you. If/when it does, spam infantry in nearby cities, and take back the cities they took, which have a now smaller stack of crap defence bombers.

In one continent, there are multiple ways too:

1. Out-expand them. Use Blitz, SM, Imp, or any strat with transports. Take as much as you can early game before they start creating their bomber stacks. When you have more territory than they do, spam units at them and win.

2. Defend like a boss. Use PD, IF, Imp, GW, or GC. WALL EVERYTHING. When they break a wall, spam infantry/militia into it and place a single unit next to it so they can't immediately wall it. If they do take it, they'll have a smaller now unprotected stack; you can either let it move on and whittle it down as they try to attack you, or you can turnblock it to death. When you kill all their bombers, invade using whatever tactics your strategy is made for, and use epic defence to never lose a capital to their bomber stacks.

3. Stealth the hell out of them. Use GW, MoS, SM, or DS. Two tactics to use here, the first applies only to SM. Firstly, as stated above, use single units to mess up their walls. Use marines and stealth bombers to destroy their stacks, and use marines to go behind enemy lines to take back everything they may have rushed into. Second, after and as their invasions fail, spam marines to every one of their cities. 2 turns before reinforcements, break their walls, and take as many cities as you can as the turn before reinforcements. If you take enough, they won't have enough units to take their cities back, and you'll win soon after (or they'll ragequit, this is funny).

4. Spam bombers back at them. Use SM, and just play it better. Learn the Math and mechanics, some tricks, and play smartly, and their bomber stacks will go up in flames. Or rather, down in flames.

5. Just die. Use TG, NC, LB, DS, or None. With TG, spam your tanks and expensive transports at them, while defending with crap infantry. With NC, build destroyers everywhere and try to get them to go on land. With LB, build as many expensive units as you can, and use your useless ARB to crush their bomber stacks. With DS, spam helicopters to defend whenever they break your walls. With None... I've never played None, so I wouldn't know how to fail against an SM.

Hopefully these four tricks will help you beat me and other SM players. Hopefully you won't take the 5th part as sarcasm, and actually use those strats, so I can laugh as you utterly fail.

Scritto da FrancisL.Sampson, 06.07.2012 at 00:30

I heard somewhere that Anti Air is actually good, but I havnt witnessed it myself.

kidUSA, do the Math, anti airs are not cost effective at all. Consider that with the AA upgrade, for 180, you get 12 defence and 7 HP against bombers. For 180 spending on militia, you get 24 defence and 42 HP. The only time you should buy anti airs is when you're trying to defend a city far away from others, so you can't spam infantry into it, or if you have a huge wad of cash and have a giant bomber stack coming.

Cheers, and happy bomber hunting!

Its quite simple actually, just destroy their income and also just get around them. SM is heavily reliant on expansion and money, without those two things, an SM player is screwed

Scritto da V-dog115, 06.07.2012 at 10:51

Its quite simple actually, just destroy their income and also just get around them. SM is heavily reliant on expansion and money, without those two things, an SM player is screwed

Then the only problem I have is not expanding fast enough, because they always end up getting enough land to steam roll me.

Scritto da Gking19, 06.07.2012 at 10:57

Scritto da V-dog115, 06.07.2012 at 10:51

Its quite simple actually, just destroy their income and also just get around them. SM is heavily reliant on expansion and money, without those two things, an SM player is screwed

Then the only problem I have is not expanding fast enough, because they always end up getting enough land to steam roll me.

What strat do you usually play then?

It depends, in 5K games I'll play GW, in 10K PD, and 15K and above, MoS.

Play in a scenario with bombers not allowed, you probably beat it in turn 1.

Scritto da raetahcodeupon, 08.07.2012 at 03:48

Play in a scenario with bombers not allowed, you probably beat it in turn 1.

I'm not going to play only scenarios for the rest of my afterwind career. >.>

Scritto da Gking19, 06.07.2012 at 12:12

It depends, in 5K games I'll play GW, in 10K PD, and 15K and above, MoS.

PD should easily beat SM >_>

Scritto da V-dog115, 08.07.2012 at 12:30

Scritto da Gking19, 06.07.2012 at 12:12

It depends, in 5K games I'll play GW, in 10K PD, and 15K and above, MoS.

PD should easily beat SM >_>

I'm not a great PD player, generally I use GW or MoS.

If your GW, spam marines and counter attack him everywhere.

Beat SM? You don't beat SM, you leave the game imediately and try to get everyone else too and don't amuse them. Maybe then they will stop useing it once they realize it takes the fun and fairness out of the game. If you use blitz which is the ONLY way to expand as fast but then you can't defend against their just as fast but OP bombers. GW spamming marines only works if you can keep up even slightly with their expansion which is impossible with the lower range on GW transports. SM player can take so much land and surrond you in a few turns then no amount of marines can save you.

Guys, SM is beatable. You just have to know, how to play against it.
For example, IF and PD are great counters to SM if you are able to guess, where he might attack next.
SM is all about cash. If you manage to take out his main cash-supplying countries, it's weak. For example people
tend to use PD or GW Ukraine far more than SM Ukraine nowadays, 'cuz it works better. Also, people are looking
for more and more alternatives instead of SM Spain, which doesn't work as well as it could. In fight for France, it loses to PD UK and only Spain + Italy won't make SM work (at least in a team game).
In 15-50k games, SM becomes more and more unbeatable, though, so in high-cash games, there should be something to prevent SM's OP'ness.

This^

as an SM player, I can tell you that you need to kill us fast, usa a cheap strategy in a place that you can spam lots of units with the maximum income, and always keep pressuring the sm player by wall fucking and breaking his walls. Kill him with massive stacks of infantry, take advantage of sm's low defence and you will win

Yes but I never see an SM player in a 10k game but when low ranks who make 50k games which there is no need for and that is the only game open there is always an sm player. The biggest problem is you don't know hwo is playing SM when you are picking countries and unless you pick a country very close with IF PD and GW you can't expand nearly as fast and if you aren't right in his face at the start of the game by the time you can attack him he has expanded too much and is getting plenty of money then it is over for you.

Scritto da Wildchild92, 13.01.2013 at 16:09

Yes but I never see an SM player in a 10k game but when low ranks who make 50k games which there is no need for and that is the only game open there is always an sm player. The biggest problem is you don't know hwo is playing SM when you are picking countries and unless you pick a country very close with IF PD and GW you can't expand nearly as fast and if you aren't right in his face at the start of the game by the time you can attack him he has expanded too much and is getting plenty of money then it is over for you.

You can even use SM in 3k or 5k.

Hmmm...well looking back on it I have but it isn't very common which I can stand. If it is 1 in 10 games an SM player rapes everyone I could live with that. If it is more then a 10k game it is like a guarantee there will be atleast one.

As a SM player, we depend on money, loads of it!

When there is Spain, Beat back the expansion by taking France or Italy, but attack with plenty! (allies can help joint attack)

when there is Ukraine, They be taking Russia, you can be Russia and drain their income by taking Rus NW, By controlling the 2 richest cities they need they would lose money sometime.

Though the Ukraine one may not work, there is Turkey for backup.

On the topic of anti aircraft:
I've been looking into anti-air, and as a avid PD player, I've found the only places to use anti-air on a euro map is on the "tide turning" points of berlin, sweden and rome. Those are the points were if the bombers break those points on their journey west, it's over, they have plenty of cash. Anti air is what you buy with the spare cash you have saved up, and are not the first thing you buy inna turn. But if you in the situaton of many pd players where you have more money than reinforcements, use the less efficient anti- air to make sure berlin rome and stolkholm are yours. With the sudden interest in DS, in my opinion anti-air has gotten stronger.
-Freeland

As a SM player myself, several of those methods bug me, but the only one that really shuts me down is PD. Using SM, you get a bomber with 8 attack for 130, and with PD you get an Infantry with 7 defense for 60 (50 with upgrade). Theoretically, the bomber would have to be taking out roughly two and a half infantry per bomber for that bomber to be cost effective, but it's not. Take advantage of this and make your opponent pay for every city they take. IF the SM player has the income to produce more bombers than you can get infantry to an area, build infantry anyways.

However, and this is of importantace, find a way to predict where the SM player is going to attack. As a Sky Menace expert, I find the best part about the strategy isn't the powerful bombers with moderate defense compared to tanks, but it's the fact that I can basically attack anywhere I want to. A SM stack has 15 range on it, while tanks have 7, and a PD infantry stack has 5 (6 with movement upgrade). They can attack any unwalled city that is in range, and can even go across water. The more experienced SM players with appear as if they're very random, attacking places that seem like they wouldn't be the optimum place to strike. The agile bombers can easily go around large infantry stacks and attack undefended cities, but with more skill, the player has to anticipate which city will be undefended. Over time, if several bomber stacks are successful, they can inflict massive collateral damage on areas, which will damage your income and reinforcements to the point where it becomes incredibly difficult to get your infantry to the area that's being attacked, and the other player can then start to wipe the stacks out, take the area, and move closer to your capital and repeat a similar process until you've been bombed to death. Note that this is not dealing with Europe games, as this eventuality normally happens between a Europe player and an Asia player fighting in the Middle East where reinforcements are very high and both sides have lots of money.

Tips to counter this- 1) don't leave cities unguarded if they're close to where the action is going on. An empty city is a beacon for an SM player to take. 2) predict where your opponent is going to strike. This can be difficult, but if you have a 100 stack of PD infantry in one city, and 7 militia in another city, the SM player is going for the easy target. You can use this to your advantage and put your infantry stacks where you think you're going to be attacked. If you have trouble with this step, trying putting decent amounts of infantry in any important city, which will whittle away the bomber stacks as they attack. When the amount of bombers has been reduced to be managable, you can resume your previous attack strategy. 3) there is no law that says your cities have to be attacked. They can be gone around, and the bomber stack can attack somewhere else, so don't start building the trenches before your opponent gets so into the fight that they don't think to attack somewhere else.

Scritto da clovis1122, 09.02.2013 at 20:20

countries, funds etc etc

You said all good countries, I've never seen a people playing sm greece and sm poland. Do you even play any other strategy?

Simplest way of defeating SM users:

Listen. Basic rule of AW: you can only capture cities with GROUND UNITS.
Most (if not all) SM users will have two armies to get each city: one is the assault army (comprised either of bombers or stealth, only idiots do both), and then a take over army (1 transport, and at least 1 ground unit: CAN BE ANYTHING).

In areas where there's lots of area between cities (even for SM bombers), let them come, then annihilate the take over army. The bombers can attack your city, but they cannot take it.

In areas with high density populations/cities: make walls, then destroy the takeover armies.


And AA is good if your city is on the front line, you know it's about to be attacked, you have limited reinforcements (in that city) and have quite a bit of cash. In that case, it's better than inf, temporarily, as it still sucks against all else. Keep in mind that AA is expensive, and that their range makes them quite useless.

All this is very good advice. Only problem is it is alot easier said then done though. SM bombers just have so much range they are hard to intercept and usually their transports stay with them. You can barely catch their bombers in the open and even then when they do expose theirself that doesn't mean you have anything you can hit it with. These idea would be good in a perfect world.

Scritto da Selow, 13.04.2013 at 17:14

Simplest way of defeating SM users:

Listen. Basic rule of AW: you can only capture cities with GROUND UNITS.
Most (if not all) SM users will have two armies to get each city: one is the assault army (comprised either of bombers or stealth, only idiots do both), and then a take over army (1 transport, and at least 1 ground unit: CAN BE ANYTHING).

In areas where there's lots of area between cities (even for SM bombers), let them come, then annihilate the take over army. The bombers can attack your city, but they cannot take it.

In areas with high density populations/cities: make walls, then destroy the takeover armies.


And AA is good if your city is on the front line, you know it's about to be attacked, you have limited reinforcements (in that city) and have quite a bit of cash. In that case, it's better than inf, temporarily, as it still sucks against all else. Keep in mind that AA is expensive, and that their range makes them quite useless.

Basically, you're assuming you can choose which units you fight. Sadly, the units with highest attack/defense are the first to have at it-
thus the 'takeover armies' don't get hit. Usually if the SM player is already mixing some soldiers with bomber stacks it implies they have the backing and financial means to do so- From that we can postulate that the SM player's bomber stacks are sizeable enough to take on even the strongest hit.

That is the flaw in your point. While it would be a great idea to attack the small 'takeover armies'- that just doesn't happen.

Hello,Well you see SM is a quite offensive start.If u get weak SM player will crash you easily.If you want to defeat them keep expanding and try protecting your countries And protect your first turn expansion countries aswell along with that try crashing there Economy by getting his cities and keep strong and pressure on Him.If you do that you will surely win but Remember every SM player will go offensive they wont defend that much PD is best against them in my opinion.

While using SM bombers have a weaker defense of only 5 which is the weakness of SM. its weird how they made anti-aircraft to defend against them but they didn't add the fighters which are anti-air and can attack and catch up to the bombers easily destroying them

In Europe, if you play RA/TG, move your units from caps to walled cities around and let him take the cap and retake next turn. You can even bait him. If you have decent income, you will win cost wise (he will be losing costwise as he will be losing transports and his stack of bombers will be gone so you can start counter offense). However good SM will try prevent that by taking nearby port cities so keep that in mind. It works only in Europe, as you can generally reach capital from other cities and surrounding regions in 1 turn. Won't work in Asia. I pick SM there myself. The thing that works is trapping by building a wall around a would-be attacked city and attacking insiders next turn with your own stack.