Battleplan Units Guide: Formations, Roles and Combined Arms

Divisions are the words your plans are written in. This units guide covers the formation families in Battleplan — what each is for, how they behave inside a drawn plan, and the combined-arms logic that turns individual formations into a scheme that wins the day.

Infantry: The Terrain's Native Language

Infantry holds what terrain gives and takes what terrain allows. It moves at the pace of a walking man, fights best from cover, and is the only formation that truly owns urban blocks, forests and broken ground. In plan terms, infantry is your presence: it screens, fixes, holds the line and, in the main effort, does the last hundred meters that nothing else can. Its weaknesses are tempo and exposure in the open — infantry caught marching in the open by armor or concentrated artillery is a donation. Draw infantry arrows along covered axes and into ground worth holding, and pair its advances with fires that suppress what would punish it.

Armor: The Tempo Instrument

Armor is speed, shock and a healthy disrespect for open ground. It excels at exploitation — turning a break in the line into a collapse — and at acting as the mailed fist of a main effort along road and steppe axes. Its vulnerabilities are exactly infantry's strengths: close country, rivers without crossings, urban blocks and anti-tank teams with time to dig. The planning rule: armor leads where the map is open and the plan needs tempo; armor follows where the map closes. An armor arrow drawn through a forest is not bold, it is a receipt for future losses.

Artillery: The Plan's Grammar

Artillery does not take ground; it makes ground takeable. In the drawn plan, artillery is timing incarnate — its fires suppress the defense in the minutes the assault needs, degrade concentrations before they matter, and shape where the enemy can mass. The discipline is economy and synchronization: fires spread evenly across the day support nothing, while fires massed on the decisive point at the decisive hour decide battles. When your assault and your barrage arrive as one event, the plan is speaking fluently.

Support and Specialists

The supporting cast decides whether your divisions arrive at all. Engineers make the impossible crossing possible and turn occupied ground into held ground; reconnaissance buys the information your planning phase spends; supply elements are the leash every arrow is secretly attached to — plans that outrun their supply chain are fiction with good graphics. Historical unlocks deepen each family across the campaign, but the roles remain: the question is never what a unit is called, but what job in the sentence it performs.

Combined Arms: The Sentence Itself

The families exist to be combined. The canonical main effort is a sentence: artillery suppresses, armor fixes attention and tempo, infantry takes and holds, engineers keep the army moving, reconnaissance keeps the plan honest. Draw plans as sentences with all their grammar — not as nouns standing in a row. Combined arms is why multi-unit planning exists, and why Battleplan's drawn schemes feel like command rather than choreography.

FAQ

Is there a unit tier list? Roles, not tiers — the best unit is whichever one the ground and the plan need; the best-units guide ranks formations by campaign value instead.

How do officers change units? Recruited officers shape formation performance; a strong officer corps turns average divisions into reliable ones.

Can plans mix all types freely? Yes — grouping formations into one coherent multi-unit scheme is precisely the system's core.

Learn the words, then write sentences — the tactics guide has the grammar.