Best commander skills?

Basic of all: Plain Fighting, Explosives, Supply/Ace Forces.
Artillery: plus Artillery Barrage and another one of Supply/Ace Forces.
Tank: plus Blitzkrieg and Tide of Iron.
Infantry&Navy: don't waste your eye covered on that.

I had a lot of thoughts about anti-armor too, but I reached a different conclusion. It cannot be good enough to stand against other 5 skills.

For tank, plain, explosives, tide of iron is a must. They all outperform anti-armor in terms of output. Also, one supply(or ace forces) is a must, so that leaves one slot, blitzkrieg vs anti-armor.

Anti-armor increases +8 damage against armored. This only includes armored car, tank, heavy tank and super tank. Generally the first three are dealt with super tank or artilleries from range, so anti-armor becomes not that important here. You can take them out without taking much damage yourself. Super tank is probably the only target this skill can be useful, as often you can't deal them only with artilleries and have to involve your super tank too, meaning direct combat. Even so, it's just 8. Not to mention this skill is absolutely useless against aliens. Overall, the range of target and its effect is too small to be useful.

Blitzkrieg, on the other hand, avoids retaliation 24% of the time. Assume you attack and get attack in 1:1 ratio, then it means the skill reduces damage intake by 12%. However, tank attacks much more frequently than it defends, as it can fire multiple shots, so actually it is higher than 12%. I'd say around 18%. This means you'll have roughly 18% more chances to attack than if you didn't have this skill. Let's look at anti-armor in contrast. For demonstration I'll choose super tank here: it has roughly about 40-50 damage (depending on tech) let's call it 40 avg. This thread obviously implies you're considering this on eye-covered general, so ideally at some point you'll have perfected it. So let's add 5 stars: that's +28. Plain fighting gives another +20. Tide of iron is a bit complicated, but it still increases more than its normal output. If we disregard that then it is an underestimate, but they still add up to 88. Anti-armor gives extra +8, and that's 8/88, less than 10%. So from the perspective of numerical comparison blitzkrieg outperforms anti-armor.

What about for artillery?
The necessary skills are: plain fighting, explosives, artillery barage. They can't be replaced. Let's put supply here: that leaves three candidates: ace forces, anti-armor and urban-fighting.

Anti armor: artillery has less output than tank, so although it's largely imprecise let's call it 30 on average. that still makes +78 for perfect general. 8/78 is something like 10.2% increase. You must also not forget that it is only effective against one group of target among 5.

Ace forces: according to Erich von Manstein level up increases health (not max health) by 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 for each level up. It also reduces damage intake by 2 each level. The usefulness of this skill varies depending on the initial level of the unit. For health, from 0 to 150 total increase. Damage coefficient reduction is very useful too. The mathematics invovled is too complicated here so I'm not going to get into that, but we can safely assume that Ace forces increases this survivability of level-up by 80%, and survivabilty can be converted into total damage the unit can do for his life.
Overall: this skill depends on the kind of mission, nevertheless is quite useful.

Urban fighting: +20 when in city. Not useful in general level, as offense is the best defence (again quoting Erich von Manstein here). Also nearly useless during Cold War. But in some situation it can be very very very good. Hold the grond is a fantastic example: combined with plain fighting, it's +40 output. Mad. It can also be used in defending a critical city against aliens.
Overall: not recommendable to be used widely, but giving it to one art general might be a good idea.


Anti-armor is in no ways better than the other two candidates. I see no reason to use that skill for any type of general at all.

Health coefficient in WC3:
50%-100%: 4/4
25%-50%: 3/4
12.5%-25%: 2/4
0-12.5%: 1/4

I was under the impression that anyi-armor was a useful skill, and that it worked on aliens, so thanks for the information. I actually just reset to have another go, as i had basically thrown away all my metals early game on first run and because you cannot gring metals like on EW i was stuck

Corrections:
Anti armor actually increases +12 if maxed.
For the sake of simplicity I will assume that your tank&artillery tech is max. (You will reach there anyway)
Supertank damage: +45
Field artillery damage: +47
Rocket artillery damage: +45
(They are average damage)

So, let's do the calculations again.

1. Supertank
base damage (+45) + plain fighting (+20) + 5stars (+28) = +93

Now let's consider the effect of tide of iron.
100%~50%: no change
50%~25%: -25% base damage (-11.25) + iron (+24) = +12.75 (~13)
25%~12.5%: -50% base damage (-22.5) + iron (+24) = +1.5 (~1)
12.5%~0%: -87.5% base damage (-39.4) + iron (+24) = -15.4 (~15)

Total average output:
100%~50%: +93
50%~25%: +106
25%~12.5%: +94
12.5%~0%: +78

Average output increase of anti-armor:
100%~50%: 12/93 = +12.9%
50%~25%: 12/106 = +11.3%
25%~12.5%: 12/94 = +12.8%
12.5%~0%: 12/78 = +15.4%



2. Field artillery
base damage (+47) + plain fighting (+20) + 5stars (+28) = +95

Effect of artillery barrage:
100%~50%: no change
50%~25%: -25% base damage (-11.75) + barrage (+24) = +12.25 (~12)
25%~12.5%: -50% base damage (-23.5) + barrage (+24) = +0.5 (~0)
12.5%~0%: -87.5% base damage (-41.1) + barrage (+24) = -17.1(~17)

Total average output:
100%~50%: +95
50%~25%: +107
25%~12.5%: +95
12.5%~0%: +78

Average output increase of anti-armor:
100%~50%: 12/95 = +12.6%
50%~25%: 12/107 = +11.2%
25%~12.5%: 12/95 = +12.6%
12.5%~0%: 12/78 = +15.4%

3. Rocket artillery
same as supertank.



Conclusion:
Anti armor increases output by +12 when in effect, which is less than the three skills: plain fighting, street fighting, tide of iron(artillery barrage).

This is an increase 11.2%~15.4%.

The amount of output increase itself is not bad, but the big problem is its target range. Among the three types of units, it is only effective against one. Even among the four armoured units, it is mainly effective only against super tank, as with the other three direct combat can be avoided. Most importantly, it is completely useless against aliens.

For reference, blitzkrieg can be assumed to have 12%~24% survivability increase, which is interchangeable with total damage dealt. Considering the narrow target range anti armor cannot be better than blitzkrieg either.

The value of supply and ace forces is hard to compare numerically with that of anti-armor, but still they cannot be worse than anti-armor.

I didn't notice until now that you did the corrections yourself! Good job