I finished an ASL game recently. I was the defending Germans. My opponent played the Americans, and had to control one of two hexes. The map was quite large and, since I didn't know which victory hex he would go after, I had to defend across a wide area. As the defender, I never feel like I had enough units, and the Americans seemed to have plenty of powerful troops, MGs, and demolition charges.
The Americans launched strong attacks on both the right and the left. The attackers on the right ran into bad luck. I only had two squads, a leader, and a MMG on that side to defend, but they hunkered down in a building and did a great job holding off the attackers, and nothing really developed there.
The attack on the left was a different story. The Americans swept through the village and advanced rapidly. The screenshot shows the action near the end. The victory hex is the upper left hex, with an LMG and a red counter underneath the stack. My defensive anchor on this side was an HMG with a good field of fire, but it malfunctioned, then broke, early in the game. Sigh. I did have some strong reinforcements coming in on the left, but the Americans cut them down when they entered and decimated them before they could do anything.
On the last turn, the Americans pushed towards the victory hex. They tried to place a DC on a fine stack of elite Germans (this is shown in the screenshot), but the American squad couldn't survive the defensive fire, so the DC was not set, and they fell short of the victory hex. Close, very close.