LTShotgun

Ooops...My diagram in the previous post didn't turn out like I had hoped. I agree with chasd in the prior post about gamesofwar website. It has excellent CM representations of formations and plenty of info on how to effectively deploy and employ as I described. It's just standard US Army Infantry Doctrine, of long ago, and today.

For what it may be worth, I'll put my 2 cents in on this one. From the missions I've played, I have to say that this is an excellent game. My judgement criteria is how well a game performs while using real world tactics. This one does it quite well. With reference to platoon deployement, I use the same line of thinking as real world. Where do you place your forces? The standard answer is; "it depends upon the situation." That's cliche, but nonetheless true. There is an acronymn out there today called METT-T which can help you decide where to deploy. With the 3D nature of this game, it allows you to analyze the terrain as a modern day commander would, or would like to, anyway. It stands for Mission, Enemy, Terrain, Troops, and Time available. What is your mission? Read the briefing, and identify your objectives on the subsequent set-up phase. What enemy forces are you expected to encounter? What is their composition, or what are they made of? What is there disposition, or where are they located, or are they moving toward your assigned objective? Defining whether or not this is a meeting engagement, or an assault on a defended position, or you're being attacked plays a large part in how you will deploy your forces. Terrain. Very key. Taking into account the mission, and the enemy, how can you best utilize your terrain. I get down on troop view level and move forward during the setup phase to analyze possible courses of action, looking at routes for cover and concealment, avenues of enemy approach, possible enemy locations, my view of friendly, and enemy fields of fire. How many hull down postitions are there on your proposed routes of travel? Where are they located? Where can I put my HMG's in support? Will they be able to support my assaulting troops? Primary and alternate firing positions. Analysis of the terrain in the setup phase can be priceless when the heat starts flying. Troops. What do I have? How do they stack up to the enemy? Do I split out MMG's, Anti-tank teams, and mortars to individual platoon commands, or do I consolidate them to form a massive support weapons platoon? Some scenarios account for the latter. I had one platoon leader extra, in addition to the company commander, which allowed me to pull in my MMG's, HMG, and mortars to form one dominating support by fire element that ranged nearly every enemy infantry squad I encountered. That's an option too. But at times, you may want them to tag along with a given platoon also, or several platoons. Time is critical also. This game has a limited amount of turns to achieve your victory conditions. Same holds very true in real life. Resources are limited, and time is no exception. This is a major factor in initial deployment as well. Keeping forces in command is critical. The way this is done is through formations, and movement techniques. Formations are essentially the same for whatever you deploy, vehicles, or troops, and units. For this game, since squads aren't accurately rendered graphically, formations are limited to the platoon, company, and battalion levels, which is good enough for what you're doing in this game. There are many formations, line, vee, wedge, modified wedge, and column are pretty standard. The squads within the platoon are in one of these formation categories, while the platoons within a company can be in the same category, or different. For example, you can deploy your squads within a platoon in a wedge, while the company is in a column. This example provides good fields of fire and security to either flank, while maintaining the flexibility to move a trailing platoon in the column to either flank for an assault should contact be made. Spacing can be dictated by the terrain in which they are travelling, or deployed in. If they are in the open, space them out. Way out. 100 to 200m between squads, and 200 to 300m between platoons of the company. If they are in the woods, close them up, and keep it tight. The platoon in wedge, company in column would look like this from above (hopefully it posts properly, as I envisioned): SQ1 PL MMG SQ2 SQ3 CO HMG MORT MORT SQ1 PL MMG SQ2 SQ3 SQ1 PL MMG SQ2 SQ3 The movement techniques are dependent upon the terrain traversed, the enemy contact probability, and the speed at which you need to move. There is travelling, where speed is essential, and enemy probability is low. This is basically as I shown with the diagram above, where units are equally spaced, and constantly moving without overwatching elements. There is travelling overwatch, where the lead element is at a much greater distance from the rest of the elements, i.e. the lead squad of the lead platoon is way out front, with the others lagging behind to ensure some survivability during initial enemy contact. The lead platoon is also way out front of the rest of the company element. Then there is bounding overwatch. This is where enemy contact is highly likely. One squad remains in position, ready to fire, while another moves forward to their postition. The key here is that the moving squad does not move farther than the maximum effective range of the weapons in the overwatching element. If you have a infantry and armor task force, where the armor is the overwatching element for the infantry in motion, then, you can go further forward than if you had only an infantry squad acting as the overwatching element. The second key is that the overwatching element does not move forward until the moving element has finished their movement, and assumes the role of the overwatching element. The movement is called bounds. There are successive, and alternating bounds. Successive bounds are where the moving element has taken a position and become the overwatching element. The overwatching element then moves forward as the bounding element up to the same distance across from the unit that just moved forward, but not past it. Alternative bounds are where the unit moving forward takes up a position forward of the forward overwatching element, thus passing it. It all depends upon how likely you are to get shot at, really, and how fast you want to traverse that terrain. Successive bounds are slow, especially in this game. Alternative bounds can be risky. The third squad in all this usually goes diagonally between the old positions of the first two, moving up as the respective squad leaves their position to become the bounding element. It all sounds pretty robotic, but it works. The aim is to make contact with as little of your force as possible, being able to maneuver effectively with your trailing forces. Then it comes to tactics, or what you do with it all. Your squad (or platoon) that makes contact with the enemy becomes your base of fire element. Essentially the ducks that take the enemie's fire, allowing your trailing forces to flank the position. It's all fix and flank. You fix the enemy with the lead element (in most situations) and flank them with the rest. There is a certain amount of survivability you want to maintain, however. If you don't think that one squad will survive, move a second up to one side of it. Then you have two fixing. You may need an entire platoon to fix. You may even need the reinforcement of MG team's. In that case, you'd better have another whole platoon to do the flanking close behind you. Formations, and movement techniques as I described previously, allow you to do that, without spreading your forces too thin, and running willy nilly around the game map when the bullets start flying. Give it a try. Do some reading up on today's tactics. Buy some infantry field manuals from a surplus store, or do some reading online. There's plenty of it. I'm sure after you try it this way, you'll find out that it works quite well. When it comes to deploying for a defend mission, where you won't be moving, but the enemy is moving to you, then terrain analysis is prime. Look at the map in the setup phase extensively. Use your view angles to the fullest. See from ground level in a direction toward the enemy, as well as from the enemy's expected direction of travel to you. When placing units along a line of defense, a lazy W is used. Think of it where you have a long, drawn out "W" where units are positioned at each point between the lines of the "W." This ensures that there are mutually supporting, or interlocking fields of fire. As the enemy closes, several units can fire upon it from several directions. Dot the "W" with MG's and dug in tanks, and you've got a good line. Cover areas of no LOS with mortars. Place TRP's where you think the enemy has to go in order to get to you. Don't ever place units on top of a hill! Place them on the side of the hill so that they are not silhouetted against the skyline as easy targets. Enemy arty targets the hilltops as well, or expects you to be there. Having at least one MG team near the edge of your flanks also is key. This allows them to fire diagonally across your entire front, with each of their fields of fire interlocking as well. This can tear up the enemy. You can conceal Bazooka teams far forward to act as scouts, and hide until enemy armor comes into range, then run like hell back to your line if it gets too thick. Well, my 2 cents turned into more like 2 dollars...

I think it's unfair to the BAR to draw straight lines of correlation between it and the MG42, because their reason for existence is not the same. The German squad tactics were based upon the machine gun as the primary focus, with troops supporting the machine gun, whereas the American's use of the BAR was to support the squad's primary focus of maneuver. Or at least, that was the History Channel's take on it, from Tales of The Gun. We took a lot of lessons from the German's in WWII. The very core concept of AirLand Battle Doctrine is simply a highly refined version of Blitzkrieg. The MG42 is no exception. It is today's M60 medium machine gun, right down to the spare barrel swap concept, tripod, bipod, or shoot from the hip mode. Heck, the Navy Seals use it as an individual soldier weapon with a second pistol grip mounted under the front handguard. Both of my Grandfathers, and their friends say that the BAR was a dream. It was an inspiration to have one along, especially in the presence of the pants filling sound of an MG42 spouting off 1000 rounds per minute. The BAR is just a step in the evolution of the assault rifle we know today, with many "children." Vietnam showed that the M-16 just didn't cut it in full auto. The M-60 was just too cumbersome to effectively maneuver with in an assault element, and was more likely to reside as a member of the base of fire element, as it does today in conventional infantry platoons. Enter the M249 SAW, which is the current step in the BAR lineage. It fires at a greater rate than the BAR, variable from 750 to 1000 rpm with a twist of the gas cylinder, and carries a 200 round belt in a box linked 5.56mm round compatible with the M16. With two M249's in a squad, it allows enough firepower to the squad leader to take care of smaller size forces on his own without calling the platoon leader to send up an M60, and can be carried effectively in a combat rushing situation across an objective without exhausting the soldier too much. While the BAR had good punch but little pack, it still served it's purpose of supporting maneuver. They just didn't find out that the 20 rounder wasn't enough until it was in combat for awhile. It was designed in WWI mentality, after all, when automatic weapons made there debut. I believe it was Clyde's favorite weapon of crime, in the Bonnie and Clyde days. The FBI used it to kill them, paradoxically... If you ask anyone veteran from the WWII era, that had front line combat experience, and lived to tell about it, it's probably because there was a BAR keepin' Kraut heads down.

Not to rain on anybody's parade, or go against the grain, but I believe that CM's ommission of the Rangers is justified. I just recently purchased CM, and have not had any time to actually play it yet, but I have read the manual, and studied this site extensively. CM sounds like a very accurate representation of tactical combat up to battallion sized units for conventional operations. Rangers have been developed from their origin, to serve the role of filling the gap between conventional, and special operations forces. Missions where tasks were too specialized for conventional forces, yet required a more sizeable force than special operations units. In fact, most people think that blowing bridges and raiding rear positions is SF stuff, and it's not. It's Rangers. Don't be fooled. They are by no means regular ground troops, nor were they back then...I believe that CM was designed to represent virtually any piece of ground on any slice of the timeline, and do the basic missions of search, attack, and defend. Things that weren't worth wasting Rangers on. CPT William Darby was a member of the 34th ID, and took some volunteers to form the Rangers to meet the needs of more specialized tasks. The remainder used to flesh out these units were convicts that had their sentences commuted to literally fight for their freedom. The 34th ID had more front line combat experience than any other unit in the US, and therefore they were highly elite. The CM manual explains that the occurance of "elite" status troops was very rare, and in reality, it was. Rangers were utilized to scale steep cliffs at Normandy to take out gun emplacements, and suffered 80%-90% casualty rates or greater in the process. The very "generic" nature of CM tactical scenarios may accomodate the meeting engagement, attack, and defend missions very well, but has no accomodation for the "raid," which is the mainstay of the US Ranger. A raid being a planned insertion, a multitude of means, a planned objective, usually behind enemy lines, and a planned extraction, again a multitude of means, and the defining characteristic of a raid. I would like to see BTS go for the modern day version of CM, and model it specifically for the Ranger missions. I like your enthusiasm about them. I believe that they are interesting as well. That could be a simulation across all time periods from WWII through present and beyond. They pack a lot of punch to soldier ratio, and could be a great tactical game with the planning of insertion and extractions, and the associated unplanned complications that can arise from them. How many ways can you attack and secure an airfield? What do you do when your extraction helicopters get shot down? How do you change your plan when you've taken 25% casualties on your insertion? 50%? ...Though I be the lone survivor... You've got something with the Ranger thing. Let's get them to make it a stand alone game!