tlassila

I saw my Soviet engineers assault a German schreck-team while in the same building, but with the Germans in the upper floor. They just threw the satchel charge up through the ceiling, and the Germans blew to bits. I guess it was an abstraction of "run up stairs, throw satchel charge, run down stairs like hell with fingers in ears".

"We've got a man on the inside" Maybe he should get out more often.

This works to an extent, but I have to keep switching targets for the MGs by hand between the turns and there's always one or two that nobody seems to be targetting who end up shooting my advancing squads to bits. [spoilers] Take for example, "Hill 312". How on earth are the Germans supposed to take all three objectives in 25 turns? First of all there's a wooden MG bunker, which means you have to go waaay round the left. That takes at least five turns to go around and get into position alone. The four MGs help in keeping the enemies in the trenches down. But there's something like two full-strength platoons up that hill plus some hidden squads in the woods. One reserve platoon arrives later but there's a minefield between them and the enemy, most of the Germans rout under fire and become ineffective for the rest of the battle and so on. I tried to conserve my forces, concentrate fire, keep the MGs covering etc. and still lost it in 20 turns with 50% casualties and 400 points for the Soviets for my losses alone. I never came close to taking any of the flags.

I've now been trying some of the smaller, infantry based battles that come with CMBB. It seems like a few I've tried were simply "advance across an open field against a compound defended with multiple MGs using nothing but infantry and 50mm mortars". Oh and maybe one or two light armoured vehicles. Needless to say what the result is. It seems the light mortars haven't got smoke rounds anymore, not that they would help much since the the enemy would cut my troops down from 10 yards just as well. I've tried setting up a cover screen by placing all my troops in favorable firing positions, but they never open fire on their own accord, just hit the dirt and stay there. If I direct them to fire at specific enemies, my advancing men get mowed down when a hidden MG reveals itself right next to them but my cover screen keeps sniping at some crewmen 200 yards away. Light armor usually gets shocked and routed in a matter of seconds when advancing in front, and I've yet to kill an AT gun from the front. The armor never hits it before dying from the first or second shot, and the infantry don't even fire at the damn things. The final insult comes from the scoring system. It seems no matter how many victory locations I take, the casualties are always so great the enemy get 2-3 times the points that all of the victory locations together are worth. So much for the standard Soviet tactics ("Use up the rifle infantry, the dead cost nothing"). So either the battles I tried are severely unbalanced, or then there is some trick to assaulting with infantry in CMBB I haven't mastered yet. Should I use "Arc" when covering my advance? Should the advancing troops use "Assault", "Advance" or "Run"? Is it a good idea to use area fire instead of direct fire? How can I limit my losses against enemy MGs and still capture the targets in time? I'm not complaining though, the sights and sounds (do all the forces have authentic spoken dialogue, even the Rumanians?) make it a worthwhile time getting my ass kicked back to Berlin.