Frunze

I got waxed as Germans in this one. My mistake was trying to make my main attacks up the two sides, which ended up separating my infantry from my armor. On my left, I broke through, and was in position to attack the guns, but the guns themselves and a bit of infantry that was rushed into place broke that force up. I'd dropped my little bit of arty on 'em earlier, and I think maybe temporarily panicked some of 'em? Better timing, if my infantry'd arrived shortly after the arty, maybe I coulda done better. Right push, with a couple halftracks along, did okay for a while, but eventually got stopped, one halftrack bogged, another immobilized by a gun, infantry running out of ammo. I later made a push up the middle with my reinforcements, mostly the armor, and for a while contested the middle flag. Conclusion: my whole push shoulda been up the middle, cut the defenders in half, then take the sides one at a time. A little like others have described doing. Disadvantage is guns on both sides knocking down buildings, but they coulda been avoided.

Re Hide-and-sneak: the unit won't hide if it has a movement order. Maybe a short cover arc if you want to make sure it takes cover and doesn't shoot? I've used withdraw successfully a couple times in a current PBEM to get out of an artillery barrage. Sometimes I used other orders if the delay wasn't too long. I had my troops go sideways cause the barrage is longer than it is wide - turns out withdraw works in any direction now, at least in that QB, and I don't think I did anything to the settings to make it that way. Not on purpose, anyway. Assault is best if you want to move a very short distance, otherwise it's just too tiring. [ December 16, 2002, 12:15 AM: Message edited by: Frunze ]

Wow, I thought I got hosed in the finals, but I as far as Nabla scores, I'm barely below the median, and slightly better than I did in the regular season. Sure I lost as Allies in Emilville Exit, but so did everybody else, and they weren't playing against an UberFinn....I got no excuse for getting wiped out north of Epron, though.

For your infantry squads, you don't so much want keyhole LOS. You want locations where they have short LOS. The back side ("reverse slope") of a hill or ridge for example.

The real problem is not "give us a new command", it's what tactics to use to successfully fall back. Including where to set your infantry up in the first place (possibly the biggest question), what range to engage, how long to fight before bugging out, what route to fall back along, where to, what your other units are doing as far as smoke, suppressive fire, and distraction in order to give them a chance to get out alive, and probably a bunch of other things. If anybody's solved these problems yet, they haven't told the rest of us how, or else I missed it. But I betcha it can be done.

I'd put them directly next to each other with no gaps. John D. Salt's right, though, there is some chance that a tank can drive right through a minefield without hitting a mine. If you really, really, want to make sure nothing gets through , you could do a second line - I usually wouldn't, though.

Also, in QBs, the Soviets often get to spend a larger share of their points on armor. Maybe 'cause historically they had more tanks? You can even this up by setting a Soviet infantry division against a German mechanized division, though. Or you can buy more AT guns.

According to the manual, your artillery is more likely to fall off-target if the spotter is inexperienced.

What other people said. Also, ampulomets usually get a top hit, being mortar-like. What kind of tank has 30mm of armor on top? Or are you quoting a front or side armor thickness? Edited to add: I wonder if these were "open top" or "partially open top" vehicles? I've noticed regular molotovs seem a lot more effective against those... [ December 14, 2002, 06:16 AM: Message edited by: Frunze ]

Yeah, I've seen it also a fair bit. It's not just for behind walls anymore. I'm not sure if its intentional or a bug.

(Drift) Yeah. Not that I know an incredible amount about this stuff, but... If every army prepares to fight the last war, for the Red Army that was the highly mobile Russian Civil War, not the relatively positional WWI. So people like Tukhachevsky and the guy I took my username from worked up a doctrine that said in the future, the Soviet army would fight in a highly mobile, maneuver-oriented fashion, as it had by the end of the Russian Civil War. There was some Marshal-Foch-style "cult of the offensive" stuff in there, too, maybe that part served the USSR poorly during Barbarossa?

The key to getting the AI to send its tanks ahead is to avoid giving it anything to shoot at. Keep your troops on hide. With no targets, the AI will send all its units ahead looking for some. Since the tanks are faster... This actually worked on an (extremely inexperienced) human opponent once.

Coe, I think that only happens with area fire. In a recent game, I lost three tank commanders to my own artillery....in another CMBB game, my opponent lost a tank to his own rocket arty. Once in CMBO, one of my opponent's tanks - a M8 HMC I think - knocked itself out. It was half-hidden behind a building and one of its shells hit the building by mistake.

Moon, I see your point. That doesn't seem terribly common though - it's more common to find hull-down postitions behind a ridge. CombinedArms, that's not necessarily the problem. Even if you're only a short distance from where you think there's a hull-down position, the place you intend to target may be a long way ahead. And that's where you have to place the hull-down waypoint. Oh well, the manual does warn us that the hull-down command is best used out of contact with the enemy.

bump

OK, people have been saying that if a tank doesn't achieve hull-down it will keep going. Could this be fixed by making the tank with this order stop as soon as it gets LOS? I mean, if a tank has LOS, but is not hull-down, moving forward won't make it hull-down under any circumstances, will it? If anything, moving forward will only expose more of the tank.

How often do you get sound contacts off a stationary vehicle anyway?

I think FOs can't hold VLs either.

The keyboard shortcut is G. Or hit spacebar, if conditions allow the option will appear.

I tried to cross a street without taking fire. Didn't work out too good - some units popped up back in the original location, one at a time, and by then that building was enemy-held...

Well, you could give 'em a cover arc that includes one target but not the other. Be careful with this stuff though, if you don't give 'em some leeway they might fail to target a new threat that pops up and charges at 'em. Sometimes it's better not even to tell 'em who to target, for this reason. Is the attacking squad in cover? If so, that might explain why they're taking the opportunity to fire at fleeing squads out in the open.

I don't think it's random. But the second explanation might be right.

Soviet rifle squads have more SMGs than the Germans. At least in earlier years. Plus, the Germans don't have SMG squads early. Somebody was complaining about this on another thread - said the Germans didn't have a chance in Stalingrad urban combat. I love the T-34/85 for urban combat too. Fast turret and big gun - a rare combination. And I like Maxims. They don't jam so much. In Combined Arms QBs, it appears the Allies can still spend more points on armor than the Axis can. ("Still" because this was true in CMBO as well. It may have been more necessary in CMBO, when us Allied players had to go up against Panthers with Shermans.) [ December 05, 2002, 10:25 PM: Message edited by: Frunze ]

Area fire may make flamethrowers less effective, even at setting buildings on fire. At least within factories - both my opponent and I were noticing this in a battle within a large factory. One of my flamethrowers on area fire used up all his ammo without even setting the tile alight, but all the flamethrowers - on either side - that targeted a unit directly did set the tile on fire. On the first blast, I think.

Has this FOW bug been reported? One of my opponent's tanks was tentatively identified as a BT Fast Tank? but the color-coded armor readout and the info screen gave info for the T-34 (which has much thicker armor. Eventually it turned out to actually be a T-34 - the bug defeated the FOW and kept me from being surprised by this. This was a PBEM game and I still have the turnfile - I can e-mail the movie where the identification changes if anyone wants it. Edit: I see this has been reported elsewhere, and yeah, this was a transition game so maybe that's where the bug came from. [ December 04, 2002, 12:19 AM: Message edited by: Frunze ]