I usually feel so useless after having my ass handed to me again and again when I play FH2 that I rarely have the nerve to make a tactics thread, but I had a great long post in the thread about avoiding teamkills, before I realized it was mainly a post about how to nade effectively and since I don't see a thread about that already, I decided to make one. Don't be shy, and contribute your own tips and tricks and let's get a good thread going. In the opening post I'll be covering some sly ways to maximize your effectiveness when chucking explosive death at your enemies while minimizing the risk of Swiss-cheesing your teammates. For the purposes of this thread, I'll also be covering those other explosives you can use in your quest to turn your enemies into mushy red goo, since those seaweed-colored pillows the Brits carry around with them and the shiny green boxes careless Germans always seem to be dropping tend to make quite a bang as well.
The first thing we'll look at is what grenades and explosives we have at our disposal. In the hopes of keeping all of this very simple for new players, bearing in mind we're all noobs once and even those of us who grew up in English-speaking countries have only the faintest grasp of the language, here are all the grenades and explosives in the mod, and what they're intended to kill, and as we'll see, in FH2 only a sucker uses a weapon for a single purpose and no other.
Note that I am categorizing these according to the Weapons page on the FH2 site - you may find, for instance, a weapon listed as American here available for British soldiers on some maps, a German grenade used by Italy, and so on. Also, there are plenty of anti-tank threads already, so I won't bother with tips for those uses.ALLIES
United States of America
Mk II - the classic pineapple grenade, filling up graveyards all over the world.
Mk III - the bumblebee grenade, sending those who displease you to the great spawn screen in the sky.
AN-M8 - the American smoke grenade, widely regarded as a tragic waste of Lucky Strikes.
AN-M14 - the incendiary grenade for destroying the objectives on Point du Hoc.
No. 75 - the Hawkins anti-tank mine, which caused many Americans to tragically throw a flask of liberated brandy at enemy Panzers.
M1 Garand HEAT - rifle grenade that makes short work of light enemy vehicles.
M1 Garand fragmentation - rifle grenade that allows you to give your enemies a kiss full of nails from days away.
Composition B - what looks like some yellow batteries taped together, useful for blowing just about anything sky-high.
Great Britain / Australia / New Zealand / Canada
No36 - the British pineapple grenade, the "Mills Bomb", so common you may as well be born with them.
No69 - a red and purple grenade HE grenade that explodes at the slightest touch, memorably enlivening any attempt to juggle them.
No73 - the powerful "Thermos Nuke". Looks like a flask full of chicken noodle soup, and nearly as deadly.
No74 - the "Sticky Bomb", which looks like maracas.
No77 - the British smoke grenade, which can wound and even kill anyone you throw it at.
Satchel charge - it looks like a pillow full of explosives and appropriately sends many a foe to dreamland forever.
No4 rifle grenade - does what it says on the label. Extremely useful for ending shootouts with players enjoying much better ping than you.
No4 Mills Bomb launcher - allows you to fire a bog standard grenade tremendous distances.
AXIS
Italy
Bomba a Mano OTO Model 35 - a tricky grenade fittingly painted in Halloween colors.
Bomba a Mano L - a goofy-looking red anti-tank grenade with an immensely powerful blast.
Germany
Stielhandgranate 24 - standard anti-infantry grenade which doubled as a way for young Germans to mash their potatoes.
Stielhandgranate 43 - an updated version with as far as I can tell the same characteristics.
Model 39 Eihandgranate - a tiny grenade that looks a bit like an egg.
Nebeleihandgranate 42 - the German smoke grenade which looks similar to a giant olive.
Geballte Ladung (1kg) - 7 stick grenades in one, intended to destroy enemy tanks.
Geballte Ladung (3kg) - the more common geballte, a green box which really does destroy enemy tanks.
Hafthohlladung - odd-shaped device you can smack onto an enemy tank, or if you can't find one, an enemy soldier.
Gewehr Sprengranate - K98 rifle grenade, typically for dealing with enemy infantry but there is also an anti-tank riflenade.
Now that we're all painfully aware that technical designations are for losers, and nicknaming weapons is much more fun, it's time to look at the main uses for the various types of grenades and explosives you may be lucky enough to find lying around the battlefield, or unlucky enough to find raining down on you from the general direction of the nearest ammo box. Since most of the grenades are intended to be used to atomize squishy enemy infantry, we'll look at those grenades first.
How to Throw a Grenade:You weren't born knowing how to pitch a baseball or how to throw a snowball, the same as it doesn't necessarily come naturally to throw a grenade in FH2. Obviously, just aiming in the general direction of your enemy and clicking once will produce some results, but familiarizing yourself with the various techniques of nade tossing is an invaluable skill that will make you infinitely more effective for your team when you put in the practice required.
The first thing to do is to learn how to aim a grenade, which is easier said than done with no crosshairs, and with various throw distances between them. Some are also heavier than others, resulting in much shorter throws than you intended, and if you throw like a girl once too often you may find yourself booted off the server with a -16 next to your name and the knowledge of how to say 'Motherfucker' in several different language. It's not difficult to eyeball the center of your screen and take a reasonable guess at the direction your throw will head, but when in doubt, you can switch to your main weapon and use your iron sights to zero in on your target, and then switch to your grenade and throw. This takes precious seconds, but it's a good way for a careful player to avoid teamkills. Not all grenades have the same throwing animation either - memorize the diffence in timing between throwing a pineapple like a baseball, compared to the lofty toss of a potato masher, versus the hesitant pump-fake of the Italian "Red Devil" grenade.
One of the many skills that separates a good player from a great one (as well as a live one from a dead one) is mastery of the manual power feature you can use when throwing grenades (as well as most explosives). Left clicking will always throw a grenade at full power; right clicking allows you to adjust the power to whatever you need it to be, and the longer you hold the right mouse button the more powerful the throw as the pitch gauge fills up. Be careful, as they don't all power up at the same speed - the Sticky Bomb for instance powers up very slowly. The benefits of proficiency with manual throws are endless - you can drop a grenade just over a wall or fence and kill an enemy when you might otherwise have thrown too far. When chased by an enemy, you can drop a grenade at your feet and high-tail it out of there, only for your enemy to run right over it and introduce his feet to his face. You can throw a grenade up a staircase or into the top of a church tower, instead of uselessly bouncing it off a wall and back into your face, or right out the window of the church steeple. Manual power also allows you to lob a grenade into an open-topped vehicle to disintegrate enemies within, without the grenade bouncing back out and cancelling your Christmas. If simply knowing how much of a grenade monster you are isn't enough incentive, rumor has it that if you kill ten enemies in one round using manual power on your throws, all your grenades turn gold and shiny until the end of the round.
The last piece of advice on throwing grenades for now is how to surprise your enemy with the way that you throw your grenade. BF2 lacks the ability to cook grenades, which means allowing a fraction of the fuse delay to burn before throwing the grenade, the theory being that you cut back the time the enemy has to react and dive for cover. Though you can't do this in FH2 so easily, it doesn't mean it's impossible, and use your ingenuity to find ways to minimize the breathing room you give your enemy. Never forget that they can hear the click and ping of a pin being thrown as well! Enemies with quick reflexes may be so far away they're on the next map before you even toss your grenade, which will now fall harmlessly into an empty room.
So how do you do it? Look for ways you can edit your throw to allow some time to be eaten up before the grenade gets where you want it to go. If you are halfway up a stairway and you know enemies are around the corner, it would be stupid to expose yourself to enemy fire and give them a chance to run, but at the same time, using manual power to roll the grenade just around the corner may give them too much time to run. The solution is to use your environment to bounce and angle the grenade so it takes longer to get there. Anything you can stab with a knife, you can use to bounce a grenade off of, so try angling it off of walls to get it around corners and if you time it right, you give them no chance to run. If you're not in a building but instead in a wide open space, you can throw the grenade high into the air - now it reaches your enemy 2-3 seconds later than it would have, and he's 2-3 times as dead as he otherwise might've been. Exploding too early happens to even the best of us from time to time, but we should always try our best to make sure it doesn't happen.
Rifle Grenades:Though still tricky, riflenades are generally pretty easy to get used to, especially since you do have the option of turning on your crosshair for them. An effective, albeit slightly cheap, tactic is to walk around with a riflenade selected instead of your normal rifle, since it takes a good 5-10 seconds to equip the grenade launcher on your rifle, which will feel like 5-10 years when the opportunity for a great kill quickly passes while you're fumbling with your gear. The rifle grenade gives you the upper hand occasionally, since enemy infantry you encounter will need to hit you fast, and you need only to hit somewhere near them to kill them. Rifle nades are at their most deadly when ambushing enemy trucks, jeeps, and light vehicles, since a near miss will still damage a healthy vehicle and blow up a wounded one, while a hit to the cab or crew compartment will kill enemies inside the vehicle, even if it doesn't destroy it.
The Germans are a bit out of luck in this regard, since their rifle grenades all explode on contact, whereas the Commonwealth and American rifleman both have guns that can fire nades that explode on contact, as well as grenade launchers that for all intents and purposes are like throwing a normal grenade really, really far. Be sure to learn the trajectory these weapons follow, for not only do they allow you to be effective from great distances, but you will occasionally be able to fire completely out of sight (for instance, on the other side of a sand dune). The No4 Mills Bomb launcher and M1 Garand fragmentation grenade are also useful for a bit of disinformation, since they can fool enemies into believing you must be close by, when in reality, you're miles away, waiting for him to poke his nose out the front door to investigate.
(Part 2 to follow..)
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