In Easy Red 2, the intensity of combat is one of its most thrilling aspects, but the game’s mission design can sometimes feel too confined. Many mission objective zones can feel too small and are limited to tight, claustrophobic areas, focusing on small houses or single intersections. While these can be fun, they often devolve into a close-quarters meat grinder, especially at higher AI counts. These objectives can lack scale and mobility and prevent the AI from truly shining.

This guide is here to help you see what is possible when creating immersive missions! I'll walk you through methods to craft battles on a grand scale. You'll learn how to better utilize the game’s maps to create vast, dynamic battles that give players the freedom to maneuver and immerse themselves in more realistic encounters. By applying these techniques, you can design more expansive missions that feel alive, intense, and truly epic – battles that span entire fields, towns, and beyond.

The most critical aspect to creating immersive and realistic battles is proper zone placement and sizing. Here are a few tips and tricks:

Try to create zones that are at least 75 or more in size. The AI does a much better job at utilizing cover and emplacements because there are more options available. When the objective is too small, soldiers are limited to a small area and start to bunch up. This works especially well in urban combat.

Create zones within zones. This allows for attackers to slowly whittle away at defensive perimeters and also forces attackers to push towards the center of larger urban centers.

Try to make zones between 60 seconds to 180 seconds. I suggest that when creating overlapping zones to make the largest zone a shorter time, and the inner zones to be a bit longer. Be careful with making the timing too long, especially with multiple zones. A general rule of thumb is that larger zones should have shorter times, with smaller zones being the hardest to capture. But this really only works when zones are 75 in size at a minimum.

Make sure your zones cover the entirety of a defensive position, and include interesting landmarks. Also make sure that the zone covers any emplacements you have inserted (more on this later).

Zone within a zone.
Overlapping zones.
Forest and fields zones.
Overlapping zones for urban defense.

Setting up spawns carefully and with intention can add a lot to the immersion and scale of your mission. This is the most complex step, so I suggest reading it entirely before starting. The following tips should help you to be successful!

After placing an objective, take a look from a bird's eye view and think about the logical frontline and routes of advance towards the objective. Then, place as many spawns as you see fit (see Attacker Spawns: Configuration below). I generally use groupings of three squad spawns to replicate platoons. Try and place at least 4 to 5 infantry platoons. This is the time to add vehicle spawns as well, and they follow the same principle (but maybe 1-2 platoons). The following image gives you a rough image of an assault on a town (I'm sure there's better options too).

For Attacker spawns, the following configuration is a good starting place. I find that this configuration generally creates more interesting attack patterns and opportunity for defenders to regroup. A general rule of thumb is to set the Attacker respawn timer as 40% of the Defender respawn timer. Again, this applies to both infantry and vehicles.


For Defender spawns, I generally start by placing MGs, mortars, AT, etc inside the objective zone. You can use spawnable emplacements if you like, but be careful that you don't interfere with the flexibility of your "Max concurrent AI" sliders (more on this later).

For Defender infantry spawns, I suggest placing your platoons close to the objective (see Defender Spawns: Configuration below). Don't worry, the respawn timer will nullify any advantages of being closer than Attackers. Placing the Defender infantry close to (but not inside) the objective allows them to occupy the objective quickly. Vehicles should be placed around 100-200 meters further away. "Why not use the spawn setting 'AI only once' and place them directly into the objective?", you might ask. This again allows for the flexibility of your "Max concurrent AI" sliders (again, more on this later). If it really makes sense for there to be AI in the objective from the very start (perhaps for a beach landing mission), then place 1-2 "AI only once" spawns on the objective.

For Defender spawns, the following configuration is a good starting place. I most often set the respawn timer to 5 minutes (300 seconds). A general rule of thumb is to set the Defender respawn timer as 250% of the Attacker respawn timer. This applies to both infantry and vehicles.


VERY IMPORTANT: Make sure you add an additional "Player Only" spawn to each of your platoons with no respawn delay!
Artillery can be placed as usual (using "AI only once" spawns).
Aircraft should used and configured the same way as the other units.

The following are some screenshots of different spawn layouts depending on the type of mission being made. You will note that there are a variety of types of spawns, including "AI Only once" spawns because I know what I want my "Max concurrent AI" sliders to be on.
Juno Beach: amphibious landing with a variety of different spawn types.
Advancing the Beachhead: rural battle with a variety of vehicle and infantry spawns.
Tebourba Tunisia: urban combat with a variety of spawn types and distances.

Repeat these steps for each phase you would like to include in your mission. I would recommend picking major map landmarks as different phase objects. Think town-to-town, woods-to-woods, farmland-to-town INSTEAD OF street-to-street, house-to-house, trench-to-trench. Remember to reevaluate the frontline and Attacker/Defender positions for each phase to add realism.
Here's a general idea for a 3-phase mission on the Bulge map.

This is the final step, and might take a bit of fiddling with. Generally, I prefer to set the Attackers "Max Concurrent AI" slider to at least 50, with the Defenders having anywhere from 10-20 less than that. The flexibility of the sliders allows us to scale our mission the way we want without too much work fiddling with "Only once" spawns. If we want more Attackers, we have more than enough platoons for the 70 total available given by the sliders. If we want less, than the flexibility is there. The same applies for the Defenders. The respawn timers created earlier help us maintain mission balance no matter how many AI we want. However, I will note that you may want to lower the objective capture time for lower AI counts. But this open to experimentation.