That mission is pretty rough, Helmut. It took me several tries to get through.

My general recommendation is to stay with the heaviest tanks you can get and shell the vinyard relentlessly until you can move forward to the northern objective. The key to holding the village is the artillery batteries up near the lighthouse (I think it's a lighthouse). Capture those, group them, roll them someplace well out of the village but still within firing range, and then use the Attack Ground (default G) command to lighten the load on your tanks. Supplemented with regular tactical aid (tank busters down the main street and heavy artillery throughout), they should make it possible to hold all those points.

Once in the village, a few heavy attack helicopters can also be of great use, since by then the enemy should be out of anti-air units. Anti-tank infantry in the buildings can work, but I'd advise against it since chances are you'll flatten the entire village before the mission is over. This is one of those scorched earth missions. Not much is left of the French countryside once it's over.

God I'm such a whiner. But it seems no other genre treats its people with such disdain. First, under this 'fog of war' nonsense they hide all these sneaky traps and tricks waiting to 'surprise' the player, then they make you capture the map one way, then turn around and capture it back the other, then when that's all through they dump a heap of resources at  you and pretend it's a 'last stand'. There's more rehearsal in one of these missions than at Stratford-upon-Avon, more deceipt and trickery than in the Tour de France. Sheesh.

I didn't understand that you could give up some of the control points and still win the mission. In that first French mission you can give up all parts of the town except the centre and still win, in the church mission, you can give up all the control areas as long as the enemy doesn't complete reinforcements and still win. I still had to redo the final five minutes to get my anti tank dudes away from the church to escort my heavy artillery safely across town away from the eventual counterattack. Did you capture that secondary objective? That heavy rocket barrage was just the ticket to keep the bridges clear. Accurate, devestating, and most of all timely. Air support tank busters are nice and all that but 20 seconds is an eternity in this game.

Anyone else have this game for a little multiplayer?

Don't worry, it's not about crushing the life out of another player through tactical superiority and logistical mastery, I just want to see how they have set it up and how fun it is. I'd rather play with someone from here than the net at wild of course. Should a tactical nuclear weapon slip through to parch your soil and fry your children it would all be in good fun. Not to worry likely for in the suckage dept., I have been rated a solid 1100 e.s.s.s.^*

* Equivalent sponges of suckage per second.

Those nasty Reds have been crushed! The Chinese are turning around and heading for home. The credits are rolling! Exultation!

That was part of the package I bought and I've duly played those missions as well. It was interesting because in this combination the Soviet missions were interspersed with the American ones, which I thought was kinda neat. But I can't imagine that standing alone as an expansion package. A lot of the Metro and Stalker voice talent was in here as well.

So are you up for a little PvP?

I also haven't got it installed, but I'll roll it out soon... perhaps once your sharply honed skills have atrophied a little, so I stand a chance. ; )

I've restarted Company of Heroes. I'm surprised that a game that I remembered being virtually identical to WiC is so different. CoH is much harder and much more grinding is required to get through a mission. The fronts of contact are wider with more surprise assualts coming from all over throughout the missions. WiC is much more focused for the player and while it sometimes uses up insane amounts of assets in a frenzy of action, it's actually easier to keep things straight.