Kommissar

I agree with all of your points, especially the first one. Don't rush. There are only a couple of times I've found myself up against the clock, and countless times I should have waited until I'd scouted a bit more before committing a large force. I would add some additional tips for single-player: 1. Keep your tanks and vehicles buttoned if you're within 500m of the enemy or unless there is a very specific reason to have them unbuttoned (e.g. you're expecting a long range tank battle). Unbuttoned vehicles are a death trap and your commander is usually KIA within one or two light mg bursts. It's even worse for half tracks. 2. The TAC AI is good, but aside from scripted events, the AI is not capable of reacting to you on a tactical level. In other words, it can't reinforce a weak flank once it becomes apparent you're going to break through. It can't move its troops once spotting rounds start falling around them. You on the other hand, you can should modify your plan once you make contact with the enemy. As well, you can have some confidence that, once you've found a weak spot, the AI is not going to be able to do much to prevent you from exploiting it. 3. Keep a reserve. A full strength platoon at the end of a battle can make much more of a difference than it can adding one more platoon to the initial attack. 4. Split up your squads. It makes fire and maneuver easier. It reduces casualties when the squad takes high caliber fire or would otherwise get wiped out (you just lose the team, not the whole squad). 5. Never just advance the main body of your infantry force at the enemy. You need suppressing fire at the very least, but ideally smoke, tanks to provide immediate direct fire, and artillery spotters at the ready. 6. Dismount your infantry early and often. If your half-track takes an AT gun hit, you're likely to lose the whole squad in the half-track. While you might expose your troops to long range MG fire that they would otherwise be protected from, chances are you want to attract that fire as it gives away the enemy position and you can respond. Even then, losing one or two guys to harassing fire at long range is much better than the risk of losing the whole squad. 7. With tanks, use target briefly and target light. Put one or two rounds in a building if you suspect that it may be occupied; target briefly allows you to do this. If you're running low on HE, give it a turn of target light. 8. Avoid a fair fight wherever possible. Sending your platoon to fight an AI platoon in the woods, for example, leaves the result mostly up to luck. You hope your smg guy will spot the other squads smg guy first. There is very little you can do to affect the outcome. This plays to the AI's strengths, not yours.

Pretty sure that Firefly should have been able to KO the Panther at about the 20 minute mark.

Problem with a Pacific game, as others have alluded to, is that most battles won't be very fun or suited to the CM2 engine. Iwo Jima might be OK for a first-person shooter, but the terrain and fortifications are not going to work well from a CM2 perspective. A good comparison is the various attempts to recreate a D-Day beach scenario for CM2. There have been numerous attempts, but none have been particularly successful. The beaches aren't good, scaling the cliffs is hard to simulate, and the clearing of the trenches atop said cliffs also doesn't work very well.

In the Courage Conquers campaign, just have your tanks blast every building with one or two HE shells. It will dislodge or kill most of the defenders. You want to make heavy use of your armour, because the Germans possess very little AT beyond 200m. I had the same problems with HTs during the campaign. They were just steel coffins, particularly for whatever poor sap was mounting the MG. I just dismounted infantry before there was any possibility of hostile contact and made sure the HTs stayed buttoned up to prevent casualties. You are best to rely heavily on your tanks and only use the infantry to mop up.

As others have noted, the main drawback with WEGO is that lose the ability to give orders for a minute - which is a lot of time for bad things to happen. There have been times when I've seen spotting rounds come in early in the turn, and would have loved to be able to tell my men to get out of what I correctly deduce will be the ultimate target of the strike. Unfortunately, by the time I get to issue orders, it's too late and the rounds are already on their way. Likewise, I've had situations where I've sent multiple units forward and realize (after the first one) that the enemy has LOS on the movement area and/or a minefield. I'd love to be able to tell the next group of guys to stop, but you have to watch helplessly as they charge forward, seemingly oblivious to the guys that just got cut down in front of them. I've found that the "pause" command can be useful in mitigating some of the above-noted problems with WEGO. Start your move command at 45 seconds, for instance, because that way you only expose your guys to 15 seconds of fire before you can decide (if the TacAI hasn't already) to stop them if they take more fire than anticipated.

"The Fleeting Moment" campaign is probably the best demonstration of the strengths and weaknesses of the Italians. You get a fairly decent force in terms of training and motivation, but with all the equipment problems noted above. I found that in the campaign, the tanks would do about 90% of the work in the battles, and the infantry were really only good for drawing fire and exposing enemy positions to your tanks. The Brixia mortars were the lone bright spot in what was otherwise abysmal equipment.

**Spoilers** I gave this one a whirl. Here are my thoughts: Mission 1: If I played it again, I would just wait for the tanks to show up. I lost a lot of men assaulting bunkers and other positions that tanks would have taken out with ease. The bunkers create a bit of a strange result; whereas every other Italian soldier in the battle runs for the hills upon taking any sort of fire, the guys in the bunker just sit there (i.e. they don't bail out no matter how much fire they're taking). Mission 2: High quality airborne troops versus low quality Italian conscripts = a giant massacre. I think I took more casualties from a couple of random minefields than the defenders in this mission. All in all this was a fun mission, even if it was just sending around my SMG-equipped death squads to hunt down fleeing Italians. Mission 3: So much for the cakewalk that I understand this battle to have been historically. I imagine that after seeing the town surrounded by Shermans and taking a few rounds from the HMS Rodney, that the garrison's commander would have raised the white flag. The defenders were billed as being low quality, but there were a lot of AT guns and MGs to contend with. And bunkers... When I had tanks early on, I thought the bunkers would be easy to take out. But no - after nearly depleting my HE shooting at bunkers, they were still up and running. I tried changing the angle and elevation, but despite all the "penetration" indicators, the bunkers seemed impervious to fire. This was very frustrating. Coupled with copious amount of mines at choke-points, this mission felt like a bit of a slog. CMx2, especially on WEGO, is not at it's best in urban combat, and this was no exception. It was a bit disheartening to lose 40% of my attacking force in a vicious assault in what was probably a quick Italian surrender IRL. In the end, I liked the map design and mix of units. It's evident a lot of thought went into the design. On the negative side, I thought this campaign laid bare many of the problems that still persist with how the mechanics for bunkers are handled. To be honest, I think the campaign would be drastically improved if the bunkers were replaced with trenches.

That's difficult to do in many of the maps in the Courage Conquers campaign. Keeping your tanks out of panzershreck range (~225m) while still covering your infantry is already a feat in most of the urban maps.

You should never need to rely on the HT machine guns in Courage Conquers. You have more than enough tanks to provide covering fire. As other's have insinuated, having someone man the mg on a HT is a good way to earn a purple heart. Basically, you should use HTs the way you use normal trucks. Finally, never ever have your infantry disembark where they are vulnerable to small arms fire. It goes about as well as the landing craft at Omaha.

Darn. I was afraid that was the answer. I remember back in CMx1 you would occasionally see KOed tanks come back in later battles. Now if your tank gets bogged it might as well have been completely destroyed. On a somewhat unrelated note, one thing I would like to see in campaigns is the ability to manage personnel a little bit better between battles. For instance, if one of your tanks gets bogged or has its main weapon destroyed, you could put the crew into other vehicles that have taken casualties. Likewise you could assign a couple of infantry to an MG team that only had one survivor in the previous battle; you could reorganize three understrength platoons into two full strength; etc.

The campaign is a bit strange in that you have to be very judicious with your tank HE, but can let it rain with the 105mm arty (I think you get about 1200 rounds in the second scenario). As others have mentioned, your tanks firing HE at targets they can see is not that bad as it has a fairly high chance of causing casualties. I've found most of the Germans are in buildings in the scenarios so far (I'm mid-way through mission 3) and when I fire MG rounds at them, they just run to the next building or hide out somewhere where they ambush my infantry or tanks. I generally use the target briefly command in the hopes that the 2 or 3 shots fired takes out the infantry. I'd also agree that the panzershrecks seem to have very good aim so far. I remember in CMx1 you'd be lucky to get a 30% hit probability at 100m, but now it seems like they're hitting 60% of the shots at 150m. Question. If your tank is immobilized because it gets bogged in the snow (or tracks are damaged by combat), does it make it to the next mission or not?

Yes but you have to endure the "School of Hard Knocks" and "Razorback Ridge" scenarios on the way to it.

Good point. If the force of hitting the AFV at full steam wasn't enough to trigger the charge, how could hitting the ground after the ricochet cause it to explode?

Ah OK. Sorry for the redundancy if this is a known issue already being worked on.

I appreciate that this post is anecdotal and not based on testing (although this would be extremely difficult to test) but I'm finding that infantry are extremely vulnerable to shots that ricochet off a nearby tank. To be clear, what I'm talking about is a situation where an AP shot from, e.g. a Sherman, bounces off the frontal armour of, e.g. a Stug, and then flies up in the air and lands near some infantry. I'm consistently taking casualties from AP shells landing 20-30 m away. I understand that there might be random shrapnel and that there is an explosive charge even in AP, but the lethality seems off to me. In the Chaumont 2nd round scenario, for instance, I lost 6 guys from 3 ricochets.

*Spoiler alert* Yeah I had a lot of difficulty with this scenario as well. I was a little bit frustrated by the LOS for my tanks. I attempted to flank one of the Shermans with a Panzer only to have my Panzer not see the Sherman because of some tree/hedge then sit there while the Sherman turned around and took it out. Combined with a lucky bazooka shot from ~175m, I was practically out of armour. I tried unsuccessfully to get some panzershrecks in position to take out the thanks. At that point, I decided to call off the attack rather than throw away the 60% of my infantry who were still alive.

I played the Wargame series (Airland Battle, Red Dragon) where they do reveal all the stats at play. It leads to hilarious posts containing complex mathematical formulas crunching all the numbers together to suggest e.g., that the veteran T-80U should be 5 points cheaper to buy in the game. I agree with the other comments about the benefit of the "mystery".

Sometimes you just have a run of bad luck, like when your penetrating hits do not KO and theirs do. I was losing IS-2s to Stugs at 1000m+ in the soviet campaign, so I'm not sure why you're having trouble penetrating their armour with the 88 on a Tiger.

And I don't have a problem with some of the crews coming out guns blazing (and potentially defeating a smaller force). It's just that when Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid came out shooting, they didn't still have the benefit of the cover from the room they were holed up in, which is what the problem/bug appears to be in CMx2.

**Soviet campaign mission 1 spoilers ahead** I was playing the first mission in the Soviet campaign recently. I figured going up the middle would be dangerous, and kept my men to the flanks as much as possible. This was a fortunate decision, since there are a lot of bunkers at the German second defensive line (and mines). After some nasty fighting, my men were able to come in from the flanks and rear of the positons and take out most of the units in the trenches. Somewhat surprisingly, it was taking out the bunkers - from the rear - where I took most of my losses in the battle. I would have a platoon (in one situation two) covering the rear of the bunker with LOS on it. One of my squads would throw a nade in the bunker and it would be knocked out, but most of the crew would survive and proceed to exit the bunker. I was expecting a Saving Private Ryan-esque massacre of the crew retreating the bunker. The problem is that crew would still be "inside" the bunker from the game perspective because despite all my platoon opening up on them, the bullets appeared to ricochet off the back of the bunker. This didn't work both ways, and the defenders were able to shoot my guys just fine. If it happened once I could chalk it up to bad luck, but it happened on every bunker that I took out with infantry from the rear. It got so bad that for the last couple of bunkers I sent in one or two guys to nade the bunker, and told the supporting squads to hold fire for a turn so that the defenders would actually leave the bunker tile and could be eliminated. I don't know if this is a bug or intentional, but it certainly strikes me that troops who are in the same tile as the bunker that was just destroyed appear to benefit from it's complete cover from the rear (but are also able to shoot out of it). I'd be curious to know if other people have experienced the same thing.

"One other thing of note.. Russian SMG squads are from the same DNA as Chuck Norris... I actually am at a loss dealing with Soviet infantry. In different scenarios, its hard to sneak up on them, they see you before you see them, however I am the one always advancing so that's probably why, however even with HQ, and spotter units in over watch, looking in the direction of my advance, still see nothing, so I have to spend an enormous amount of resources using artillery and direct fire, because I have no faith at all with my infantry. They never spot anything quick enough, even on Hunt....sometimes even defensively the soviet infantry will get first shots.. even though they are advancing.... Still fun, not complaining, but Soviet infantry are far superior unless beaten to a pulp.. even then the single soldier or crew, turns into Rambo with their SMG's and will cut a german squad in half... the average is 2-4 casualties" Yeah, there were a lot of posts about this issue in the past, particularly as it relates to how to clear Soviet SMG infantry out of the woods. As you said, even one demoralized infantry-man can significantly reduce the combat effectiveness of a platoon in a few seconds. I infer from your post about sneaking up on them that you're in close quarters. The consenus in the previous posts was that you should do everything in your power to avoid close-quarters battles with the Soviets, even on seemingly favourable conditions (e.g. you outnumber them, they're retreating, etc.). If you find yourself in the woods, you want to make use of indirect fire commands.

I recently saw the movie Fury, where a handful of Shermans attack an ATG battery and IIRC correctly the ATGs manage to miss 3 or 4 rounds of fire only to get obliterated when the Shermans return fire. I remember thinking if this were CM, the ATGs would have taken out the tanks within 30 seconds, with the tanks maybe spotting 1 of the ATGs, and the artillery barrage that followed would likely wound a couple of loaders on the ATGs. My major pet peeve with ATGs at the moment is how - and I appreciate this is anecdotal - it seems like there's always one guy who manages to survive the hellish onslaught of HE and services the gun just fine by himself a few minutes later.

I appreciate the OP is not particularly serious, Battlefront staff must be rolling their eyes at this one. It seems like, more than anything else on these forums, threads are started on complaining about the lack of new content or pushed back released dates (e.g. "In a post in 2011 Steve said this game would be out Q4 2012 but it's now mid-2013 and no release date...").

To echo what Michael said, the problem is that you don't win the war in Afghanistan with artillery strikes. You win when you create conditions such that groups like the Taliban have no popular support. Civilian casualties create immense resentment and strengthen the Taliban. I'm not saying that command didn't get it wrong in that particular instance, but sometimes they have to make tough decisions balance the immediate needs of the troops versus broader political goals. We all remember the dialogue about the merits of the mission in Saving Private Ryan, and Upham's reference to the Charge of the Light Brigade in response. "Forward, the Light Brigade!" Was there a man dismay'd? Not tho' the soldier knew Someone had blunder'd: Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die:

"Generation Kill" is worth a watch for CM:SF fans.