Poor Bloody Infantry

[Big Dog]

I need help trying to understand how to use infantry, particularly on the advance. I am not new to wargames, been playing since 1963, computer games since their inception. However, this game has me bamboozled. I'm talking about the training missions, too!

Everytime I try to advance infantry, they simply turn into corpses. In the attacking training mission, on easy, whenever I advance on the second or third line, my infantry dies. I have tried to use historic tactics. I have tried to use the tactics the training scenarios suggest. I have tried crawling, crouching, open formation, line formation, close formation, but nothing seems to work. My tanks generally win the day (maybe because the defenders are spending too much time killing my infantry), but most of my infantry is dead.

It has gotten to where I never use my infantry. I really want to like this game (Yes, I have loaded the Uber Patch). I am not saying that advancing infantry should not be vulnerable. However, my poor use of them makes me frustrated. It is also making my recruiting them very difficult, becasue they do not want to serve in my army.

[Nikki Mond]

Yea infantry on infantry, the exposed attacking troops die as soon as they move into somebodies LOS.

There is one sort of tactic I use with my LMG gunner or HMG. Use Area fire as opposed to using the direct target. Especially if you are facing enemy infantry that keep popping up and down.

An MG 42 can score alot of hits on an enemy that is out of view but sighted. It takes a little bit of micro management for 1 kill tho.

Same with grenades. Area target grenades will allow you to throw over walls. But targeted fire won't.

[SlapHappy]

Agreed Big Dog. Infantry small arms fire is just too accurate at range overall.

See this link I posted in another thread:

http://www.angelfire.com/art/enchanter/range.html

[SlapHappy]

Originally posted by Nikki Mond:

Yea infantry on infantry, the exposed attacking troops die as soon as they move into somebodies LOS.

There is one sort of tactic I use with my LMG gunner or HMG. Use Area fire as opposed to using the direct target. Especially if you are facing enemy infantry that keep popping up and down.

An MG 42 can score alot of hits on an enemy that is out of view but sighted. It takes a little bit of micro management for 1 kill tho.

I would agree if I could get my MG's to act as a support/area denial weapon, but I can't because they're not currently modelled that way.

[Nikki Mond]

Originally posted by SlapHappy:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Nikki Mond:

Yea infantry on infantry, the exposed attacking troops die as soon as they move into somebodies LOS.

There is one sort of tactic I use with my LMG gunner or HMG. Use Area fire as opposed to using the direct target. Especially if you are facing enemy infantry that keep popping up and down.

An MG 42 can score alot of hits on an enemy that is out of view but sighted. It takes a little bit of micro management for 1 kill tho.

I would agree if I could get my MG's to act as a support/area denial weapon, but I can't because they're not currently modelled that way. </font>

[SlapHappy]

Sure Nikki, but what I want to do is spread fire on the horizontal plane, not the vertical....

You know, the way you would effectively utilize a MG?

[crazyman56]

ToW does not allow horizontal attack (stupid) and nearly all the HMG cant even be moved.

[SlapHappy]

And yet at one time they could...someone posted some old screen shots from back before the game was picked up by Battlefront.

They clearly show a team moving and the setting up an MG-34 HMG on a street corner.

[Oddball_E8]

dont forget to use the assault order instead of the move order... once i started doing this (and moving in incremental steps) i saw an immediiate drop in the number of casualties on my side...

[Mrhanky50]

Yea infantry on infantry, the exposed attacking troops die as soon as they move into somebodies LOS.

There is one sort of tactic I use with my LMG gunner or HMG. Use Area fire as opposed to using the direct target. Especially if you are facing enemy infantry that keep popping up and down.

An MG 42 can score alot of hits on an enemy that is out of view but sighted. It takes a little bit of micro management for 1 kill tho.

Same with grenades. Area target grenades will allow you to throw over walls. But targeted fire won't.

oooh thanks for the tip regarding nades over walls! I was being rather frustrated by my Inf guys commiting suicide everytime they were faced with a fence!

[Dietrich]

They really are poor bloody infantry. So many defensive battles have gone for me this way: my infantry mow down the charging enemy troops, and my tanks and/or AT guns knock out all but one of the enemy's tanks but get knocked out themselves in the process; then the lone enemy tank machine-guns or steamrollers my remaining infantry -- most of my infantry could have survived to that point, but they're useless against the tank and get wiped out. And it's as if the AI tank has infrared sights -- it systematically hunts down and takes out my infantry no matter where they are, prone in cover or not. In real combat, wouldn't infantry be able to hide from a tank, sneak up on it from behind, and plant some kind of explosive on it to damage its tracks or traversing mechanism or shove a grenade down the cannon barrel? Effectively tanks in ToW are overpowered versus infantry. German infantry, for one, had grenade bundles to attack enemy tanks with (and the JSH mod improves their lot by giving them such, though it seems a bit much for three or four guys in a given Gruppe to have two 'geballte Ladungen' each).

As far as infantry surviving in general, I have found it effective to apply real-world German squad tactics (even when you're not playing as the Germans). In the advance to contact and before launching an actual assault, have your men hold fire and have them be prone when not moving. Having them hold fire until attacking or providing covering fire makes it harder for the enemy to spot them. When enemy targets come into effective range, select the squad's machine-gunner (or closest equivalent), have him target the enemy in question, and de-select Hold Fire. (German tactical doctrine called for use of only the MG in delivering fire while the riflemen hold fire until ordered otherwise by the squad leader.)

As realistic as most other aspects of the game are, I dislike that not only are HMGs given only two men but they cannot be moved at all. (Did the game developers feel it would be too gamey for a HMG to be moveable, or did they feel it would involve too much animating?) Having just two men manning an HMG means that the enemy has to take out only that many men to render the gun useless -- you then have to send two more guys to the gun to bring it back into action. The immobility of an HMG, combined with the inability to check lines of sight during the setup phase except by visual guesstimation, means that one could place one's HMG it what looks like a good position but actually affords it only a narrow field of fire. (Of course, if a keyhole position is what you're going for....)

Also, the infantry have no *light* mortar support. As it is, one usually has no more than a platoon's-worth of infantry, but an early-war German platoon, at least, would have a 50mm mortar. (I suppose, though, that if light mortars were added to the game, they would be immobile just like HMGs.)

One thing that really hurts the infantry's survivability is that trenches are visible to both sides even during the setup phase. (Is this un-camouflage supposed to presuppose prior reconnaisance?) In real warfare, trenches would be camouflaged as much as possible, since if they aren't camouflaged, the enemy can just send a patrol with a forward observer, spot your positions, and call down artillery on you before you even know the enemy is within visual range. (In accord with this, the AI typically begins a battle by shelling whatever trenches are on the map. I deploy my infantry well back from the trenches and under cover and wait for the preliminary bombardment to end; sometimes I don't even bother sending them forward into the trenches.) Also, having a unit in a trench seems not to help it last much longer than if it were prone on open ground. There seems to be no way to have a rifleman or LMG-gunner stay ducked inside the trench except when firing.

On a lighter note, thanks Nikki for the tip about area-fire grenading. It had always been so frustrating when my men grenaded themselves or hustled round a corner only to get mown down by the enemy lurking on the other side of the wall.

[Gnasher]

Dietrich,

You can sight the HMGs in the setup phase by selecting the unit & hitting enter. This gives you the view of the unit on the ground. I always use this method to check fields of fire for my MGs & AT guns before starting a battle. There's nothing more frustrating than having a unit that cant fire & can't be moved.

Totally agree with your points on the 50mm/2" mortars, hopefully in ToW2........

[Dietrich]

Good point, Gnasher. =) What you said is what I meant by "visual guesstimation."

Being a fan of the Combat Mission games, I admit I'm a bit spoiled. The maximum map size in ToW seems to limit the size of battles to including hardly more than a reinforced platoon (though sometimes *heavily* reinforced, i.e. with artillery, air support, tanks, etc.) per side. At company level, though, one might have available infantry guns (short-range howitzers) and medium mortars.

I think that there should be one- or two-man foxholes in addition to (or to supplement) the stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb trenches. Also, why no pits for AT guns and HMGs? Why must they have no recourse but to cower (or lurk) behing a minimally protective sandbag wall?

One last thing -- tanks run over infantry too easily. An infantryman need be no closer than ten feet (or so it looks to me) from a tank to get run over by it. I think the 'crush' range of tanks and other heavy vehicles ought to be shrunk.

[JDski]

Good point, Gnasher. =) One last thing -- tanks run over infantry too easily. An infantryman need be no closer than ten feet (or so it looks to me) from a tank to get run over by it. I think the 'crush' range of tanks and other heavy vehicles ought to be shrunk.

I agree, even when you send a tank down the middle of a tree lined road, they knock down all the trees off to thier sides. They do need to reduce their crush zones.

[Dietrich]

I agree, even when you send a tank down the middle of a tree lined road, they knock down all the trees off to thier sides. They do need to reduce their crush zones.

Tanks crushing any and all trees in their path makes one able to spot them even before any of one's units sees them. In WW2, the only time tanks were not easy to spot was when they were dug in deep and thoroughly camouflaged. While on the move they were loud, both because of their engines and because of their running gear.

[SlapHappy]

I agree, even when you send a tank down the middle of a tree lined road, they knock down all the trees off to thier sides. They do need to reduce their crush zones.

This is a side-effect of the size of the collision-detection boxes that surround the model itself....without these, the game system does not know how to determine how to resolve a tank shell or other object striking the vehicle. I don't know if they can be made smaller. I'd suspect you would have to actually redo the model itself if it is even possible to shrink them.

[Sneaksie]

Tanks destroy other objects like people or some statics by their pathfinding square, not collision. This is because two units in the pathfinding system can not share the same cells, while pathfinding squares must be 1x1 (infantry), 3x3 (small vehicles), 5x5 (most tanks) and 7x7 (Tigers, Sdkfz 7 and such). In addition, during move PFS square size increases in direction of move to reduce stops. You can set PFS square for tank to 3x3 instead of 5x5 and it will stop crushing nearby enemy infantry, but this will result in glitches when infantry will be under front or rear of the tank and will not be crushed.