Jump to content

Tigrii

Members
  • Posts

    326
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Tigrii

  1. Nice. It's rare that a plan that involves limbering/unlimbering ATGs within a mile of the enemy actually works, in my experience. Sounds like you were playing a certain scenario from the Scottish Corridor, no?
  2. I've noticed as well that on occasion you can dump a lot of HE on an AT gun without much effect. It's worth bearing in mind that in certain situations it is not necessary to KO the gun, just block it with smoke (or even the dust kicked up by the otherwise failed barrage will sometimes do) and rush past its kill zone. Since effective ATG use often means carefully selected LOF/keyhole positions, once you're past you should be ok. Obviously this is not always the case though.
  3. They're like the Vice President: no one even knows they're there until #1 gets it, then they're very important.
  4. @tdogg: yeah same, I just lined up my inf along the bocage at the back of the hill crest and covered the flanks with my tanks behind the crest. Got a tactical victory in the mission and campaign (campaign was draw when I surrendered). But yeah, I was similarly outraged when I exited most of my force and lost the battle. But I guess it makes sense.
  5. A good way to deal with the problem of whether to move cautiously and risk wasting time (Plan A) or move aggressively and risk having a significant force ambushed (Plan is to just quick move a suicide scout team forward while everyone else watches. If they die, you know you have opposition and you then proceed with Plan A. If not, you know that ground is safe and you go with Plan B. The AI is not clever enough to let the suicide scout survive and then whack the main force (although humans of course are so don't try this in a real game).
  6. Downloaded CW Forces the other day, and I just wanna say well done to whoever designed the German campaign, I am 2 missions in and enjoying it very much. Only Road to Montebourg is better in my book.
  7. I still think this doesn't make any sense. The theory that "HE can sometimes be effective against tanks, and besides, the crew wanted to save AP", overlooks two things. One, no matter how effective HE might be against tanks, surely AP by its very nature is MORE effective against tanks, so its a moot point. Second, as I mentioned in the original post there were about 40 rounds of AP left, so conserving ammo could not have been a huge priority given an enemy tank ~25 meters away. Gunning for the exposed TC doesn't explain it either. Sure an HE shell could kill the TC, but an AP shell could kill anyone and everyone on board and KO the tank while its at it. It seems beyond dispute that a brain as opposed to an AI routine would conclude that AP was the correct choice, and the question then becomes, what went wrong with the AI routine?
  8. A few days ago in a PBEM game I witnessed the following incident. My PzIV fired a shell at nearly point-blank range at a Sherman, only to have it explode against the side turret with no effect. Upon reviewing the turn, by looking at the PzIV's ammo state as it fired I was able to confirm my suspicion that it fired an HE shell (with no less than 41 AP shells available). Why on earth would this happen? I know CM doesn't model what type of round is loaded at the moment, you can just magically fire whatever round is appropriate. Also, it's not like it was a King Tiger or something where AP would have no chance and you might as well go for external damage, it was a lowly Sherman 75(early) at close range with the side turret exposed. So what gives?
  9. Ok fair point, its very true that RSPs largely solve the problem I'm talking about and are the very devil to attack successfully (without just attacking somewhere else and rendering them untenable, if possible). And yes I'm aware that an RSP doesn't have to include an actual slope. The problem is that this sort of thing doesn't really fly in your classic bocage "chessboard". The essence of the RSP is that your kill zone and only your kill zone is in LOS/LOF, and any overwatch positions aren't. If you have have two parallel hedgerows facing each other say 100m apart on level ground, it is simply not possible to establish a position behind one hedgerow that has LOS to the kill zone (the intervening space) but not the overwatch position (the other hedge). And in the rare case where some terrain quirk does make this possible, the compartmentalized nature of the bocage means that you have to defend what are essentially several independent battlefields in parallel, and the attacker simply chooses the most favorable one, forces the position, and everyone has to leave all the parallel positions since their flanks are compromised.
  10. Interesting points, thanks in particular to Broadsword for posting that diagram. @ sburke, I agree entirely that one can simply shoot and scoot and largely avoid a mortar response. But this is an out of the frying pan into the fire type thing. Against a properly cautious enemy, your initial ambush isn't going to do all that much damage, and then you have to bug out immediately if you expect to survive. So the attacker has essentially traded a scouting element and possibly a few dodged mortar shells for a free hedgerow. On most QB maps, the defender will run out of hedgerows way before the attacker runs out of scouts/ammo. In other words, you can bug out, but generally you have to bug out rearwards and not laterally, and wars are not won by retreating from the enemy (although that certainly has a role to play at times). @Broadsword, while there is certainly a nice killzone in the open ground in the middle of your map, it seems likely that it would only contain scouting elements, while the attacker sets up a superior overwatch force on the hills/woods on the far side near the stream or whatever that is. Then what's to stop him from killing anything firing from the MLR? Reverse slopes will do that, but then you can't cover the kill zone unless you are keyholed such that you have LOS to the open ground but not the overwatch positions. Most maps are not set up so conveniently, and have only maybe one or two positions from which this is possible, which the attacker can read as well as you and deal with accordingly (avoid, TRP, etc). "They're almost guaranteed to surprise the enemy with an ambush and get the first few shots in before they're located and taken out. " Agree completely. It's that the first few shots don't do enough damage to balance getting taken out.
  11. I’m glad I saw this thread, I was actually coming to exactly the same conclusion as the OP myself. I agree 110% that in the case where you have two people of roughly equal skill who are highly experienced CM players duking it out in a QB, the overwhelming advantage lies with the attacker. This is mostly an empirical observation, I have some theories but mostly I’ve just noticed it’s true. What are the theories, you ask? Once you’ve gotten to the level where you know what you’re doing and aren’t gonna make rookie mistakes, the defender’s big advantage of being able to sit in cover while the attacker has to come to him is basically gone. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we have a classic “bocage maze” QB map. There is a very simple winning strategy for the attacker: 1. Send in a suicide scout team 2. Blow up anything that shoots at the scout team with mortar fire 3. Rinse and repeat until the defender runs out of hedgerows I honestly have been totally unable to come up with an effective counter to this. My thinking is along much the same lines as ASL veteran’s discussion of flexible defense. The problem is that that sort of thing has way too many moving parts to work reliably. Inevitably you are going to screw up the timing and either stay in position too long and get pinned and killed in place, or you give up your positions too easily and surrender too much ground without inflicting much damage. The perfect balance is nearly impossible to strike under the fog of war conditions CM does so well. But it’s certainly worth a try and beats the heck out of sitting in a static position, popping the hapless suicide scouts, and waiting for the shells to fall. The problem is that a very small force can be sacrificed to force you to reveal your much larger defensive force, at which point the defender’s advantage of surprise is gone and it’s a straightforward firepower duel, with the attacker at a 50% advantage. All the attacker has to do is be good enough to realize that his job is not to advance, it’s to kill the defenders with his heavy weapons (this mostly means mortars). Arty in my opinion takes way too long to call in except on TRPs to be of any value, and the spotting rounds allow a human to dodge most of the time. Besides, mortars are plenty deadly anyway and much more flexible. Armor is a waste of points in bocage for the most part, you have to use it super-conservatively since you’re always in effective bazooka range of unsecured positions. If you’re not, it’s because your tanks are being held back where they’re safe but useless. So armor doesn’t do much, arty is too slow/expensive, and we’re left with infantry and mortars. If attacker scouts properly, he can reduce the game to a mortar duel, and he has more of them. How to beat this?
  12. Is it possible to get a sniper team to engage only with the sniper rifle (i.e. tell the spotter not to open up with his secondary weapon) in order to stay hidden better? Would Target Light do this? Thanks.
  13. I have noted an extreme reluctance of strafe only planes to attack tanks, which makes perfect sense. However, does anyone know if this reluctance applies to open-topped vehicles as well? How good are strafers at finding and killing such vehicles. Thanks. PS: Shane I swear this has nothing to do with our game where you have like 12 Marders and I have air support.
  14. I second the advice that scouting is everything. For those who have played Stratego, think of your tanks as your 1 and 2. You don't go rushing forward with them into the unknown, but keep them safely anonymous (or hidden/defilade in CM's case) while your 9s (aka infantry teams) see what's what.
  15. I usually use ten second pauses with a couple vehicle lengths spacing. Obviously if you are willing to accept arbitrarily large spacing/pauses you can get any number of vehicles to behave, but I think its not unreasonable to expect a little better. Consider what we see on highways every day, cars a few feet from each other doing 70 without slamming on the brakes and pausing for 10 seconds every other minute. Objections: with user-friendly vehicles, on a (generally) beautifully built road, in peacetime. Responses: 18-wheelers do it too, I don't expect my halftracks to do 70 on dirt roads, nor do I expect the column to hold together if people start shooting at them. I 'm just talking about rear-area "strategic" movement. P.S. Lol at that million dollar crash thing. Wonder how much a halftrack (or tank for that matter) costs.
  16. I played this one a while ago, but as I recall I got a minor victory by simply giving up on clearing all the Americans out and rushing a mechanized group along the road to the objective at the end. Attacking equal/superior forces at night in the woods is pretty hopeless, I'd say just try to blitz through with a limited number of troops and keep everyone else in a defensive deployment to sit it out and bombard the woods.
  17. So I just finished playing Huzzar, which was a lot of fun, except that it really highlighted something that's been bugging me for a while, namely that it is a huge pain to move vehicle columns. I'm tired of plotting a whole string of waypoints for each vehicle in a big column only to have either the column stack up because someone is a bit too slow or fast which starts a chain reaction of ridiculous stopping and starting and trying to drive around each other (this despite generous pauses), or to have some idiot fail at turning a corner and having everyone stack up behind him. Is there a way to code the tacAI to have like a "column mode" where they drive like rational beings? I realize this is a tricky problem and am not pointing any fingers, just putting this out there. On the bright side :
  18. Anyone else had this? I am trying to load the next mission after A Holding Action (near the end) for the first time and the load screen with photo comes up but the progress bar is stuck at 0%. It says "read file" underneath and just sits like that forever. Is there a file missing or something, or am I just going nuts? Any ideas appreciated.
  19. Tigrii

    Cmbn Pbem

    Opponent found
  20. Tigrii

    Cmbn Pbem

    Anyone up for an email game? Experience level: I've played a lot of CMx1 back in the day and a fair bit of BN vs. AI and a few PBEM so far, but more or less experienced are welcome. Small or medium map, no town. Would prefer not a meeting engagement. PM if interested.
  21. My concern is more with the gameplay consequences rather than the historical (in)accuracy involved. I would much rather have a game that was balanced and required strategy to win (not that I'm saying CMBN isn't of course) than one that was historically accurate but one side had overpowered units (e.g. Combat Mission: Hitler's Bunker vs. the Red Army). Of course both would be nice as well.
  22. First off, my congratulations to BF for such a great initial release of the game. Secondly, your pardon if I missed a previous thread on this topic with my search. That being said, what's the deal with the US Xylophone rockets? They cost like 80 pts, and its like being able to call in an asteroid strike, its just complete devastation. Granted they're not the most accurate, but when you can turn like 15% of the map into a crater at one go that doesn't really matter. So why so cheap, and why are Nebelwerfers so much more expensive?
  23. Very rarely, the last crew member of an immobilized gun will abandon it. You cannot deliberately abandon guns.
  24. There is a tactical issue that has been bugging me for a while and I'd like your thoughts on it. Since you need local superiority in addition to generic 1.5-1 superiority as a QB attacker, but bunching up effectively multiplies your enemy's firepower, how can you have it both ways? If its a fairly open map and your approach pathway is only a few tiles of cover, how do you mass the kind of force needed to force a breakthrough without putting a platoon in each tile and losing way too many guys if even a light mortar opens up? A related question: What is the minimum spacing between squads needed to avoid a MG shooting at one affecting the other as well?
×
×
  • Create New...