Effective grenadin'

[CHRISTIEFRONTDRIVE]

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..)

[CHRISTIEFRONTDRIVE]

Fuck That, I Want a Bigger Explosion!

Sometimes, though, a hand grenade just ain't enough to get it done, and fortunately, plenty of maps provide you with several opportunities to use assorted explosives as a poor man's grenade. Everything that anti-tank grenades do to tanks, they really do to infantry, and once you know the strengths and weaknesses of the various explosives compared to normal grenades, you can finally let loose with some smack talking after you scatter bits and pieces of your enemies across the Normandy countryside.

What do satchels, geballtes and Composition B do worse than normal grenades? You can't throw them as far, and sometimes can't throw them at all. You can't drop them out of windows, and they take a lot longer to get ready to use. What do they do better? Nearly everything else. Once you know the various throwing/deploying animations off by heart, you can time a jump to perfection and send some TNT sailing over a wall with ease. You can suicide charge into a room, sure to be shot, and watch amusedly in the death cam as the enemies gather to bayonette your dead body only to end up painting the walls a deep, pretty red. Anti-tank grenades such as the Thermos Nuke and Bomba a Mano L have such a massive blast radius you can throw one on Crete and kill enemies in Tunis if you aim well enough, and perching high up in a building near a spot enemies are likely to gather (near a tank spawn point or an ammo box, for instance) can allow you to crash the party in a memorable way. These also have the added bonus of amusing your teammates by shouting charge from a rooftop near the end of a round and then dropping one at your feet and learning, briefly, how to fly.

I'm Tired of the Kit I Want Always Being Unavailable!

Never fear. While many pick-up kits on maps have no sister kit you can spawn with, there are plenty of what I like to call alternate kits with the same layout as a kit you can spawn with, only with more explosive weaponry. The main ones are alternate submachine gun, anti-tank, and officer kits, sometimes trading one grenade for an equally-effective one, sometimes trading explosives for less/more effective ones, and sometimes swapping smoke grenades for actually useful ones. For anti-tank, the spawnable Boys Rifle kit has Sticky Bombs, but those you find lying around near flags will have the more powerful Thermos Nuke. On the other hand, the German Panzerbuchse kit comes with the (better) 3kg Geballte Ladung, while the pick-up kit has patchwork 1kg version. Alternate assault kits typically feature a different submachine gun and grenade combo. Alternate squad leader kits are especially fun - these kits trade smoke grenades for those of the life-ending variety. I won't say where or on what maps, since I like to think of a lot of these kits as rewards for adventurous players, but a sample of them you can find lying around if you look hard enough include:

Grease Gun/bumblebee grenade (assault kit)
Grease Gun/bumblebee grenade (SL kit)
Beretta/Bomba a Mano L (anti-tank kit)
Beretta/stielhandgranate (assault kit)
MP40/Geballte Ladung 1kg (SL kit)
STG44/Geballte Ladung 3kg (epic kit)
Sten/No69 HE grenade (SL kit)

..and so on. More rare are combination satchel/AP mine kits for the British on some African maps (the German equivalent is 3kg Geballtes and S-mines), as well as Thermos Nuke/AT mine kits (the Germans get 3kg Geballtes and a wrench). Sprinkled throughout the odd map such as Hurtgen and Crete are rifleman kits that trade having any throwable grenades at all, for 4 or 5 rifle grenades, way more than you can spawn with. In Europe, while the Americans can only ever spawn with either just pineapples or pineapples and fragmentation grenades (rifleman), or HEAT grenades (anti-tank), there are a few pick-up kits featuring all-three. Keep your eyes peeled for the odd kit with just a rifle and explosives as well.

General Tips & Tricks:

• BF2 features an unfortunate glitch whereby if someone is killed halfway through throwing a grenade, any player who picks up the dead soldier's kit and switches to the grenade slot will continue the throwing animation. If you're lucky, you may just harmlessly toss a Mills Bomb off the side of a bridge; alternatively, you may be dropping a nuclear bomb at your feet with your whole squad behind you. If you suspect that the enemy kit you're liberating may be booby trapped in this way, avoid switching to the grenade slot until you're safe and alone, and try aiming at the sky or off a building into an empty street when you do.
• Never forget that many of the commo rose buttons make you shout aloud phrases that your enemies can hear, not just your teammates, and if you're sly enough you can use this to great effect when combined with grenades. For example, instead of exposing yourself to enemy fire to throw your grenade into an adjacent room, you can shout "Medic" a few times and drop a grenade at your feet, then leg it and wait for a curious enemy to come investigating. You also might be able to escape danger or keep enemy heads down by saying "Take cover!" or "Fire!" and then throwing a smoke grenade - it can be difficult to distinguish between grenades sometimes, and your enemies may mistake your smoke grenade for a real one for the split-second you need to get the drop on them.
• Bear in mind that colors and camouflage play all kinds of significant roles in warfare and grenades are no different. The British Mills Bomb is a yellow sandy sort of color, which makes it difficult to spot in the desert, whereas it sticks out like a lightbulb in the hedgerows of Normandy. The American pineapple grenade is the exact opposite, camouflaging nicely with leaves and grass in a field, but instantly conspicuous in a contrasting background, such as sand or cobblestones.
• Although you don't want to waste grenades, and sometimes only have 1 or 2 at your disposal (or occasionally none), if you find yourself pinned down and outgunned, throwing several in quick succession can save your life. Whereas an enemy can easily evade a single grenade, if you throw one to his right and then immediately to his left, you can sometimes catch him running from one grenade, right into the path of another. If you're outside an enemy-held house, you can try your luck throwing a grenade threw one window, and then threw the window to an adjacent room in anticipation of your enemies rushing from Room A to Room B, although you would do well to keep in mind that no player in the history of FH2 has ever managed to successfully throw two grenades into second-story windows twice in the same week, let alone the same minute. But as tempting as it is, don't sit at an ammo box throwing grenades! Play with respect.
• Never for a second forget that resourcefulness and creativity are more useful to your team than sniping plane campers in the enemy main, and no weapon has to be used only in the way it was intended. If losers can drop S-mines out of church towers like easter eggs out of a basket, you can always find new ways to help your team to victory if you're prepared to dedicate some time every round to uncovering those techniques for yourself.
• Remember that ammunition kits have 2 smoke grenades. If you're on your way to repair something under enemy fire, spawn as a normal rifleman (or some other unlimited kit), and then grab an ammo kit, using your smoke grenades to cover your advance, or shield the vehicle/weapon your repairing from enemy fire. You may need to go a bit out of your way to find an ammo kit, but smoke grenades are generally better cover than spawning as a normal engineer and hoping that waving your mine detector threateningly in the direction of the enemy will stop them shooting at you.

Well, it's 5am and I my brain has turned to mush. Please contribute your own tips and tricks! See you on the battlefield!

[NTH]

Did you mention that you can cook British AT nades? And use right mouse click if you want to decrease the throwing distance.

[Turkish007]

You encountered a bunker full of Jerries? Are they pinning your squad down with their "Hitler's Chainsaw"? Well, then look no further that your rifle-grenade! Fire one right through the open points of the bunker and BAM! You got it!

[Ts4EVER]

The Stielhandgranate 43 is the best grenade ingame. It has the long throw distances of the other stick nades combined with the splintery explosion radius of the allied nades.

[Turkish007]

Whats the worst? I bet its te Eihandgranate.

[ajappat]

Whats the worst? I bet its te Eihandgranate.

I'd say No.69. Not too great explosion radius and the throwing animation is really really long.

[Turkish007]

Whats the worst? I bet its te Eihandgranate.

I'd say No.69. Not too great explosion radius and the throwing animation is really really long.

Also I dont like the bombs which blast in impact, you hvae to throw it really far, and if you do a mistake; you have no time to run away like you can in timer bombs. 

[ajappat]

But those are the most effective. It also gives no chance for enemy to run away from it. Reason why italian grenades are actually my favourite.

[CHRISTIEFRONTDRIVE]

I'd rather have a No69 grenade than an Eihandgranate, I never seem to kill anything with those little egg grenades where as all I need to achieve a kill with the No69 nades is see the enemy first. Easier said than done, but it's generally effective.

[Turkish007]

The eihandgranate is tha best thing evarrr when tossing it in the basement of that little house in hurtgen.

[TASSER]

Wow I'd like to nominate Andrew for writing a FH manual.

Excellent post man

I'd also like to reciprocate TurkishCommando's comment about the rifle nades into bunkers. I love shooting rifle grenates into second story windows and church towers, anywhere there may be a squad leader hiding, thinking he's safe.

[Turkish007]

Yep, by bunker I meant all kinds of buildings which the enemy can fortify itself inside. I Also love shooting rifle nades, first it goes POP than a loud BOOM!

[CHRISTIEFRONTDRIVE]

Another tip well-known to experienced players but worth mentioning for any new players, is that although support MGs kits are usually unavailable, there's loads of them you can find to pick up near flags, and those kits (unlike the spawn ones) have smoke grenades. MG34, MG42, Bren and Lewis kits have them, although I can't remember finding any pick-up BAR kits on maps like Bastogne with them.

[Chad1992]

Exploding too early happens to even the best of us from time to time

 

One thing i found out to is if you think you will need extra grenades, if you hold right click then stand next to an ammo box you will get an extra grenade.  The game thinks you threw it when you really havent. Only down fall is you now have a live grenade and you only option is to throw it, but its usefull if your going into a building full of enemy you will to nade spam.