Grenadiers in operations

Grenadiers are a fun troop to play and a lot of people like to play them. They can make short work of player bases and the normal NPC bases. When attacking player bases with a grenadier medic combination it is common to loose no troops which is a big plus IMO. However, like all troops they have things that they are not very well suited for. To understand why grenadiers are no a good operation troop you have to think a little bit about the differences between operation levels and player bases.

The first big difference between an operation attack and a player base attack is the goal. For a player base attack the goal is to destroy the HQ with as few losses as possible. For an operation attack your goal might be to destroy a strategic defense that is making an area hard to attack, it may be to destroy as many defenses in the attack pathway as possible, or it may be to do as much damage to the core as possible. In an operation attack it should never be a goal for your troops to live.

So, the first two goals that we have come down to DPS. In a typical deployment grenadiers can do a maximum of 4120 DPS (It is actually lower than this because they miss so much) a full set of zookas do 51,648 DPS. So, lets take the case of attacking the core. Say it takes 30 seconds to get to the core, so you are able to attack with grenadiers for 3:30 seconds. The maximum amount of damage you could do to the core would only take all zooka's 16 seconds to do. That is one and a half shocks. As you can see it almost never makes sense to attack the core with grenadiers. In almost all situations it is better to take all zookas and shock the defenses in range. In the situations where that is not reasonable, hookas or scorcher zooka are options that will probably do more damage to the core than grenadiers will. A similar argument can be made about attacks where the goal is to clear a path.

The one case where grenadiers can be useful is when you are attempting to destroy a specific defense that is making a set of defenses hard to attack. The typical example would be a lazor near a bunch of boom cannons. You cannot attack that with position with any troop type really and polishing off one of those boosted operation base lazors takes more than one attack's worth of GBE. But if there is a set of flame throwers at the position and distance from the lazor you can take it out with grenadiers. This turns out to be a very rare occurrence. If you see something like this and it is not in the notes be sure to point it out in the chat and let people know why you want to use grenadiers.

Finally, one thing I see a lot of is people attacking with grenadiers with the goal of farming GBE. There are two styles of this. One is when the person is not attacking the pathway to the core. This strategy used to be a good one. In the lower level ops the boosts on the rockets were fairly low and it was actually possible to take out a lot of stuff this way. In the ops that we do these days the boosts are so high that the GBE cost to destroy defenses is just to high for this to be a good plan. When someone tries to farm GBE along the pathway to the core, it just takes longer than attacking with another troop type would.

I hope that this helps people understand why we do not want you to use grenadiers on operation levels. If you have any questions, comments, or disagreements let me know so that I can make this article better.