With the release of Act of Aggression, Eugen Systems' new RTS drawing near, a decision was made. A decision to reveal and write down all that we know about R.U.S.E., that's not already covered elsewhere. Update: AoA dissapointed :(
The result of thousands of hours and competitive games played, all poured down into this tutorial.

Note that there will not be a lot of (basic) strategies in this guide, as we felt that there are already several other excellent guides out there doing that. For new players we recommend reading the first part of this tutorial , R.U.S.E Basics and Newb Air Guide .
Hopefully both beginners and experienced players will learn something new after this. Don't forget that the pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them! Alright, let's get to it.

One of the first things that new RUSE players learn is the importance of recon units. However one of the mistakes that we've seen many players make is to position these units in a place that blocks or limits their sight, for example behind or in the middle of a forest.

You should always aim to place your recon units at the edge of forests facing your enemies and never in the middle of or behind one. Look at the pictures below and notice what a significant difference there is in their line of sight when the units are moved to the right position.
Furthermore try to always move your recons around a bit in the area where you are planning to deploy them to find the place that gives them the largest scouting area.

Strategy note: Use this to your advantage when fighting the enemy as well. Position your units and bunkers behind forests where its harder for the enemy to recon them. Also, if you have a stack of AT-guns in a forest, place one in front of the rest to not allow the enemy to see the rest, thus provoking the enemy to rush into your seemingly maldefended position, only to be ambushed by the rest of your AT-guns.

While RUSE lacks a reverse order button, the A.I is programmed so that when you order units right behind their current position, they will reverse to that location. This is very useful if your tanks are being chased by units that can’t fire while moving (eg. AT-guns or infantry) as it allows you to fire off shots while avoid being hit.

This is a short and simple one. If you have tanks positioned outside a town containing hostile infantry, place them in a manner so that they have line of sight deep into the town, basically on line with the road that goes into said town. When/If the enemy decides to attack with those infantry, you will be able to pin them down early and damage them en masse. Always make sure though, that you leave enough space between your tanks and the city, otherwise you might easily lose your tanks to charging infantry.

Edited 4/July/2018

Most of you may already know this, but for those who don’t, there’s a way for infantry to destroy buildings and bases instead of capturing them. A popular use of this is to kill supply depots that you know will just be re-captured if you take them and for killing undefended enemy depots with paratroopers during the early game.

Firstly, activate the automatic fire on buildings function in the gameplay section of the options menu. Then all you have to do is place an infantry unit very close to an enemy building, as they use their grenades (70m range) to kill it.



Strategy Note: If an enemy tank is firing at your infantry while you are trying to destroy his building, move your infantry so that the building is between him and the tank it is standing very close to the enemy depot, that way the tanks HE rounds will damage both your infantry and the building.
On the other hand, if you are sure that your infantry unit will die, you might as well capture the building, so your opponent has to recapture it, while he loses some time and therefore income at the process. This is especially useful if your opponent plays a nation, that does not normally use infantry (like France), forcing him to build a completely useless barracks.

Okay, now we come to the fun parts. In RUSE there are 3 different ruses which lead to the production of decoy units: fake air offensive, fake offensive and fake ground offensive. What few people know is that there is a very easy way to tell fake units apart from real ones. As you may have noticed when trying to control your own decoys, you can not select both fakes and real units in one drag of the mouse. Instead you must micro the fake and real units separately. This is what we are using to tell the enemy decoys apart from the real ones. Let’s start with ground units.

In the pictures below we can see 8 unidentified armored units with 4 of them being fakes. To reveal the fake ones, first drag a box (left click and hold) around all of them and release it when all the units are inside the box. Then you will see that only the real units, in this case the 4 unidentified tanks in the middle, will get marked.

More or less like the previous one, but with a few small differences. If there is more than one real unidentified unit, you won’t be able to tell which ones are real, however you can learn how many of the planes you see are real. The steps are the same as for detecting fake ground, except that you must not release the box that you drag around the planes.

In the first picture there is just 1 real plane among several decoys, so we get to know exactly which one that is.
In the second picture we have 3 real planes among fake ones, so we only get to know how many are real.

You basically do the same thing as previously mentioned in steps 5.0 & 5.1. Except that when the enemy has a paratrooper among his planes, only that will be marked and no other planes, whether real or fake.

In the below picture only the plane carrying the paratroopers gets marked, despite the existence of both real and fake planes around him.

This is a bit of an unproven concept based on a few observations. We've not properly tested this, but felt that it was still interesting enough to mention it. To keep it short, using fake offensive instead of fake air assault appears to give more diversity in terms of decoy planes. For example when using fake air assault only, you will nearly never ever get decoy fighters as Germany or UK. However when using fake offensive, either alone or combined with fake air assault, you seem to get more variety in terms of decoy planes.

But as previously mentioned we've not tested this properly, and sometimes when you use fake offensive, you still won't get any decoy planes that fake air assault wouldn't have given you. The reason we wrote this was hoping that it would lead to you guys experimenting with this a bit, and perhaps enlighten the rest of us in the comments if you find out the exact conditions needed.

Ahhh, we've come to our most valued treasure. Although it's not used as much anymore since the strategies in competitive games have become very similar often making it easy to guess what the enemy’s planning, and using a RUSE for decryption at start can cost you, it's still a handy thing to know.

First let’s go over a well known fact, if you apply decryption on a sector with an enemy building truck it will show where it intends to build a base. More specifically, there will be something like an arrow starting from the truck and ending at the intended base location. The end of this arrow is of different length for each and every base in the game (nation doesn't matter).

Now to find out which base the enemy is building, place a “ghost” of your own bases over the end of the aforementioned arrow. If they match in length, the enemy is building the same base that you have a ghost of, if they don't then try this again with another base of yours. In the pictures below, you’ll see the enemy trying to build a base. When we first put a barracks over it, its arrow is too short.
We try again with an Anti-tank base and in that case the arrow is too long. But when we finally try with an Anti-Aircraft & Artillery base the arrows match perfectly, meaning that the enemy is planning to build an AA/Arty base.

Strategy note: It’s recommended to do this at the start of the game on the enemy HQ sector, and not waste a RUSE to decrypt a single truck mid or late game.

As the RUSE tips suggest, having multiple buildings of one base will increase the production speed and decrease research time. The research time differs from nation to nation which Germany having the lowest with 25s per research and Italy having the longest with 75s per research. All of the other nations stand at 50s per research.
We've found it interesting to know how much a second (or third) base actually decreases the production and research speed, making it possible to perfectly time your rushes or adjust your researches.
The system is actually pretty simple, the second base of each building will reduce production and research time by 50%, the third one by 66%, the fourth one by 75% of the base value and so on.
For example, if the Italian M15 research (or any other) takes 75s, having a second armor base will have the research time decreased to 37.5s, a third one will have your reasearch done in 25s.
So as a Italian player you will need two more bases to match the German research speed.

This is especailly useful when doing a rush and building a proxy base (where you put for example one armor base next to your HQ and another one close to your opponent), when you know your Italian armor base will be there in way less than 75s, it may just be worth it to build another armor base next to your HQ, to have that research done when you want to start pumping out tanks.

The below table will show you the minimum amount of bombers needed to kill an enemy HQ under perfect conditions. If you use blitz, you may need extra bombers in some cases, also the angle from which you decide to bomb plays an important role as well. Make sure to always bomb in such a manner so that as much as possible of the HQ (or any other base you may be bombing) is hit by it, i.e diagonally over the rectangular HQ building.

There's also an unproven theory out there that supply trucks about to enter the HQ may absorb some of the damage dealt by the bombers, however we can't fully stand behind this and it's just something you may test for yourself and see.

This section will go over how many fighter-bombers you need to kill units with different armor values. We skipped armor value 1 since all fighter-bombers can one-shot that. Instead we replaced it with units with 1 armor that are in a forest (common for armored recons). Note that the testing done for this section was done on stationary units. Chances of fighter-bombers missing their target increases if the target is moving.


* Known instances where you may need 1 more fighter-bomber in some instances, for example if the target is moving.

Buildings and units in RUSE have different resistance values. It is a way to describe a units health and a buildings resilience. While it's not exactly known how the resistance works against damage etc, it's at least a way to know which buildings are equally resilient.

The testing for this section was done on buildings with a resistance value of 750: Supply depots, Barracks, Airfield, Armor, Artillery & Anti-air, Anti-tank, and Prototype base.
Secondary HQs for example, have a resistance value of 1000 hence you might need an extra fighter-bomber against those. When it comes to bunkers this number varies greatly among them and obviously the number needed for a main HQ is going to be really high.

In the below table you will see how many fighter-bombers are needed to kill a building with a resistance value of 750

So here we are. Finally. Thank you for reading this tutorial, whether it was just one section or all of it. We really hope that you have at least learned one new thing after reading it, so all this work won't have been for nothing :P.

We'd like to thank European Union and Bry for helping with the screenshots, Deagle for proof reading, Xxx for proof reading and testing, Soulmaster for testing, Lemieux for advise and finally Shepard for helping to write this and providing ideas.


Leave a comment if you find any errors (spelling or factual), have a question or want to say how you learned something new! And in the case that you actually learned something new and liked this tutorial, don't forget to like and favorite it!