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Weekend Challenge Battle


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19 hours ago, mirekm61 said:

do you have something for this week?

Sorry for the delay in getting this battle posted, real life was interfering with game time. This battle is one for CMFB, yes @Bulletpoint I was thinking of you! It is meant to be played from the Axis side only vs the AI. It features an Axis platoon with some support against an unknown Allied force. Battle conditions are similar to the weather I was seeing out my window here in Southern Ontario while creating the scenario. It can be found from the following link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k5v42gds4y7e2so/AADyXv9MCabs64EVeJJFv0jua?dl=0

The previous week's battle had some issues with scoring for spotting objectives. The game only awards points to you if you spot ALL the members of a unit, seeing just the AT gun or MG is not enough. You need to see the third ammo bearer as well to receive the points. Well as one can guess, in this game, by the time you have spotted all the members of a unit, odds are they have either killed all your men or you have taken them out. This was not my intention for this battle.

I am going to try to come up with a new scoring arrangement for Challenge battle #1 and will update this thread when I am done. 

Challenge Battle #2 follows a more traditional scoring method. You will be required to seize objectives, destroy the enemy and above all, keep your casualties low. I hope you enjoy the battle.

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4 hours ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:

This battle is one for CMFB, yes @Bulletpoint I was thinking of you!

 

4 hours ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:

It features an Axis platoon with some support against an unknown Allied force.

 

4 hours ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:

You will be required to seize objectives, destroy the enemy and above all, keep your casualties low.

Thanks, sounds good. Perfect antidote for the huge scenarios I have been playing lately. Too bad it came a bit late for my weekend gaming session, but will look forward to play it ASAP and report back how it went.

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Ok, I now booted up the battle, and... it's going to be a tough one. Forest, heavy snow, darkness means really poor LOS, and that retreating US units could appear anywhere means I have to be careful about overwatch.

I'm itching to toggle off trees to better get an overview of the shape of the ground, but I will honour your conditions to play on Iron mode and with trees permanently on.

One strange thing: The unit portraits for the German infantry shows a tank commander poking out of the hatch. I guess it's because they are Begleitsgrenadiere?

Edited by Bulletpoint
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1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:

Ok, I now booted up the battle, and... it's going to be a tough one. Forest, heavy snow, darkness means really poor LOS, and that retreating US units could appear anywhere means I have to be careful about overwatch.

Your men should have a serious advantage in fire superiority once contact is made, hopefully this will help to counter the effects of poor LOS.

1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:

I'm itching to toggle off trees to better get an overview of the shape of the ground, but I will honour your conditions to play on Iron mode and with trees permanently on.

The battle is just for fun and if the trees on takes away the fun factor, feel free to turn them off. I only suggest playing with them on so you can get a true understanding of what your men are actually seeing in battle. 

 

1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:

One strange thing: The unit portraits for the German infantry shows a tank commander poking out of the hatch. I guess it's because they are Begleitsgrenadiere?

I would believe this is correct. AFAIK the only way to get Begleitsgrenadiere in game is through the armoured formations.

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6 minutes ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:
1 hour ago, Bulletpoint said:

I'm itching to toggle off trees to better get an overview of the shape of the ground, but I will honour your conditions to play on Iron mode and with trees permanently on.

The battle is just for fun and if the trees on takes away the fun factor, feel free to turn them off. I only suggest playing with them on so you can get a true understanding of what your men are actually seeing in battle. 

I'll take it as part of the challenge - after all that is why I stepped up :)

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http://jvoxthu.png

 

Ok, you did it to me again. 

I knew the way to get a excellent score would be to not lose my men. Figured I could get the points if I was 13 or under in losses.

Needless to say, you managed to get that first location to ambush me in a sense and somehow I lost 10 men in that first fire fight. So I knew I was never going to make that goal.

Other than that, I did fine on the rest of the mission taking out your GI's, Did not need to worry about losses, just get the job done. 

Not bad , snow lost one stug for me before he moved far, so I had two to work with two stugs to support my troops.

 

But I really wanted the 400 points for low losses. ( not even close)

 

Again you did a pretty good job with placement and movement of your AI troops. This is good training for how well you are doing and a quick way on getting some feed back.

 

You need to put it out there that it should be only the first playing of the game  (blind) no looking in the editor and just believe in the honor system as to having people post scores thus. At least we can compare our results with each other. 

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vIQ15a1.jpg

gnkvDHF.png

Final positions

U62PyIz.jpg

 

My plan was to push up the left side of the map with two squads, and one on the right to capture the intersection.

I spent the first many turns advancing very carefully, using bounding overwatch, creeping forward, carefully placed MG teams to cover fire lanes, etc. Eventually I realised that the visibility was so low that I could probably move faster.

I did some speculative fire with the StuG and later found I managed to knock out an MG position that way. However, I also spent quite a lot of ammo shooting at positions I later found empty.

Got a sound contact for the first US squad and plastered it with HE and MG fire. Losing 3 guys to friendly fire shell fragments... It was effective though, later I found a whole US squad destroyed there.

Then, once I advanced and did a tiny bit of recon by fire, all hell broke loose and both sides lost a good deal of men.

About your intention that the Germans have superior firepower to make up for the visibility; I am not sure that's true. The German Stg44 doesn't really give much advantage even in a close fight like this - probably it's better than the K98 but it is very inaccurate and mostly it just makes noise. Meanwhile, the US Garands, tommy guns and mounted machine guns are also murder at these ranges, so I'd say no side had the advantage in small arms firepower.

I had expected the US to have bazooka teams, so was surprised to find AT guns hiding in the hedges at these short ranges.

At this point, I started making mistakes and thought I could easily flank the first AT gun with a small team. When that was wiped out, I tried sending another from the other direction, but with the same results. Finally, I tried to rush the gun with a StuG at close range - well, it did manage to knock out the gun, but turned out it had a good friend a bit further up the road that took out my StuG (and of course it was the best one with the most ammo left).

At this point, I realised I was not going to win any points for casualties, and that I could say bye bye to the tomato seeds :)

However, I pressed on, and finally made it to the point on the upper left side of the map where my two remaining StuGs could get LOF to the building. I then secured the rest of the final objective and called cease fire because I did not want to risk more casualties hunting down the last US teams in the forest.

 

Edited by Bulletpoint
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XAXvIMw.jpg

sdgl6vO.jpg

 

Nice scenario.

Its quite incredible just how bad visibility is in this one.

Ive had several instances where squads literally walked into each other before seeing anything resulting in heavy casualties to whoever spotted the opponent a second later.

I didnt get the farm objective because there is a single guy just casually sitting in the middle of my men and they had no idea. I was certain the zone was clear but it ended up not being the case.

I never even kew there was a second at gun until i read the forum posts after the battle and went back to look for it on the end screen. Turns out i had hit it perfectly with area fire because i expected a mg there.

 

On 2/12/2019 at 11:50 PM, Bulletpoint said:

About your intention that the Germans have superior firepower to make up for the visibility; I am not sure that's true. The German Stg44 doesn't really give much advantage even in a close fight like this - probably it's better than the K98 but it is very inaccurate and mostly it just makes noise. Meanwhile, the US Garands, tommy guns and mounted machine guns are also murder at these ranges, so I'd say no side had the advantage in small arms firepower.

I disagree with this asessment. The Stgs are a significant step up in firepower and vital to a successful mission unless you play very gamey and simply shoot every single piece of decent cover with stugs before moving anywhere close. The americans only apear to have similar firepower because the visibility in this scenario means they almost always get the first shots in against moving oponents in the open at close range.

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12 minutes ago, holoween said:

The americans only apear to have similar firepower because the visibility in this scenario means they almost always get the first shots in against moving oponents in the open at close range.

Actually I opened up the firefight by some recon by fire, so both sides were stationary.

Still, I don't see any big advantage of the Stg44 in this game. It's not useless, but not very useful either. If I had a choice to have a squad armed with Garands or Stg44s, I'd go with the US rifles. At close range, eight fast aimed shots are better than 2-3 wildly inaccurate bursts of fire.

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49 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

Interesting. But most of those guys are armed with MP40s. And what happens when you close the range to 40-50m as in this battle?

since the pure stg troops are quite low in numbers i gave them a lmg42 team for each squad

short range

long range

so at short range there was almost no difference between mp40s and stg44s but at longer range the stg just keeps on being deadly. i might later do some more tests at longer range

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If we focus on the test where it's close range and only Stg44 on the German side, we find that the Germans took 12 casualties, and the US took 16.

The US started with more men: 39 vs 27.

So, with roughly 25% fewer men, the Germans caused 33% more casualties.

Each German caused 0.59 casualties.

Each US guy caused 0.30 casualties.

While it's only one single test run, I think it's a good indication that I was wrong about the Garand being superior to the Stg44. At least at very close range. So thanks for testing it out.

 

However, the results seem skewed by the fact that the US guys started to run away very quickly, then getting gunned down in the open.

To improve the test, it might be an idea to make two firing lines using only fanatic scout teams, to make sure only the right weapons and equal numbers are used, and that the running away behaviour doesn't affect the results too much.

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48 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

If we focus on the test where it's close range and only Stg44 on the German side, we find that the Germans took 12 casualties, and the US took 16.

The US started with more men: 39 vs 27.

So, with roughly 25% fewer men, the Germans caused 33% more casualties.

Each German caused 0.59 casualties.

Each US guy caused 0.30 casualties.

While it's only one single test run, I think it's a good indication that I was wrong about the Garand being superior to the Stg44. At least at very close range. So thanks for testing it out.

 

However, the results seem skewed by the fact that the US guys started to run away very quickly, then getting gunned down in the open.

To improve the test, it might be an idea to make two firing lines using only fanatic scout teams, to make sure only the right weapons and equal numbers are used, and that the running away behaviour doesn't affect the results too much.

even at longer range stg is better

There will eventually be a point where the m1 is better but that is at ranges where hmgs, mortars and other heavy weapons dominate.

 

If anything the running away actually helps them because it increases the range. The reason they are running is that they are taking a lot of casualties in a short time and lots of supressive fire. Both are things that significantly effect any battle so i see no reason to exclude them from the effectiveness test.

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25 minutes ago, holoween said:

The reason they are running is that they are taking a lot of casualties in a short time and lots of supressive fire. Both are things that significantly effect any battle so i see no reason to exclude them from the effectiveness test.

True, but usually teams are spaced out more, so each team will not have so much concentration of incoming fire.

25 minutes ago, holoween said:

If anything the running away actually helps them because it increases the range.

It also means they stop shooting and leave cover. It will be interesting to see if/how that behaviour changes with the upcoming patch.

 

25 minutes ago, holoween said:

even at longer range stg is better

It does seem like it, yes. The 6 vs 3 casualties seem consistent with the ratio from the closer tests too. Also, at this range, there's no running away on either side.

Edited by Bulletpoint
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20 minutes ago, JoMc67 said:

Ahh Yes...The High Casualty Rates that CM gives with Automatics at all Ranges...It's the Gift that keeps on Giving 😞

While I admit I was wrong about the Garand being better, I still think the Stg44 is undermodelled, actually. The pixeltroops don't really fire it like an assault rifle should be used - short rapid bursts. And at range, it fires very slowly for an automatic rifle.

Edited by Bulletpoint
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I am going to need a bit of time to finish up the briefing for this weekend's challenge battle. I plan to have it up later tonight. 

It is a CMFI battle featuring American Rangers attempting to clear a bridge and secure a foothold into town. The recon element sent forward to scout out a path, were machine gunned by our own forces while returning to the lines. The lone survivor, clutching a blood soaked and bullet riddled map, manages to groan ".... gun..  by..   bri....." before passing out. Looks like the attack will go in blind.

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Here is this weekends Challenge Battle.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k5v42gds4y7e2so/AADyXv9MCabs64EVeJJFv0jua?dl=0

Since the first battle had issues with scoring and the second battle arrived late, this battle will be the start of a revamped Weekend Challenge battle process. All Entries will be given points based on the following scoring:

Total Victory: 10 points

Major Victory: 8 points

Minor Victory: 6 points

Tactical Victory: 4 points

All other scores: 2 points

First player or players to get to 40 points will be in the running for the tomato seeds. To qualify, you must submit your FIRST play through only, playing on Iron mode. To qualify, please post a end game screenshot only of your results by 11 pm EST Monday night. Please also keep any spoilers to a minimum.  For this battle only, please post a second screen shot, with all the icons OFF, of the houses in town. Points will be deducted if you have caused severe damage to the houses.

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3 hours ago, Heirloom_Tomato said:

Here is this weekends Challenge Battle.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k5v42gds4y7e2so/AADyXv9MCabs64EVeJJFv0jua?dl=0

Since the first battle had issues with scoring and the second battle arrived late, this battle will be the start of a revamped Weekend Challenge battle process. All Entries will be given points based on the following scoring:

Total Victory: 10 points

Major Victory: 8 points

Minor Victory: 6 points

Tactical Victory: 4 points

All other scores: 2 points

First player or players to get to 40 points will be in the running for the tomato seeds. To qualify, you must submit your FIRST play through only, playing on Iron mode. To qualify, please post a end game screenshot only of your results by 11 pm EST Monday night. Please also keep any spoilers to a minimum.  For this battle only, please post a second screen shot, with all the icons OFF, of the houses in town. Points will be deducted if you have caused severe damage to the houses.

Why didn't you use a preserve objective to track building damage - surely far easier than picking through a screenshot?

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