A Canadian Cat

Yes, you can acquire ammo during deployment. Any unit in a setup zone can be mounted and dismounted from vehicles and you can acquire whatever the vehicle has available.

^^^ And if you do that right perhaps someone will come along and feature your map in a comic book or something

Wow lots of discussion here... I have a couple of thoughts to add. Where to put your Fireflys:I think initially not hull down but out of sight in behind your ridge. Once you scouts and infantry find where his armour is then you will know what to do with them. So keep them out of sight in a central location so they can move left or right. You definitely want to have your tanks engage when you already know they will get a decent opportunity and you also ideally want the tank commanders to have an idea of where the enemy tanks are - ? icons for the tanks after spotting info shared. Purchase: I doubt you will want two 25 pdr batteries (which also means one less FO too). Save the points and get another tank or some HT - see suggestion below. I like the idea of extra PIATs. Actually the commonwealth recon units are pretty good for a fast moving occupy force (yeah, I know gamey but meeting engagements tend to be gamey) Thoughts on a Meeting engagement: Usually the winner of a meeting engagement is the one that gets on the objective first and makes the other guy push him off. One strategy I often use is to create a quick reaction force who's job it is to get out there and take the objective. So a platoon in HTs with a tank or two and they just rush for the objective while the slower guys take longer to get there and or setup to over watch. I think the terrain here might make that difficult - after all to defend the objective there needs to be cover for your infantry. On the other hand this could still work (if you think there is some cover for your infantry) - take one objective and bring stuff to mess with the approach to the other objective and only rush to one of them.

OK now that is funny and I can totally imagine that. What I suggested earlier might help but I would hesitate in this case because the view is so bad. But again it would come down to do you think the AT gun has been spotted or not. If it has then do anything that might help if not have them sit tight. Again a bit tough in this game since we are playing it open. My tank has not moved because I feel that is how I would play it myself in a normal game: my men know there is an AT gun around and are taking steps to deal with it, there is no indication that the tank has been spotted (no AT gun fire or MG fire trying to force the tank to button up). In that situation I would not bother retreating but I also would not move forward either until something really bad starts happening that the tank could help with or the AT gun has had a bad time and likely out of the picture. Yeah, this is an are I get into trouble with too. Often I leave them there since they are doing OK and I often also regret doing that. On the other hand when I do pull back I have these lingering feelings that they could have done more. Yeah, helpful I know. Hopefully some other people will chime in - I know I would like to hear a few opinions. Yeah this is another case of hold your fire unless you are spotted. In fact I would just hold fire. If the mortars are coming down adding to the fire from the IG puts it at risk of being spotted by another team some where and what value are you adding if the mortars are already making a mess?

I do this often too. Usually I'll give a 15s or 30s target briefly. The tricky big is firing like that can be a bad thing if you have not been spotted yet. In this case you know but normally you might not. So, I usually base that decision on if they have taken any fire or not. I do find area fire at suspected contacts helps with spotting: note this has not been verified by tests and is not from the peer reviewed literature

Very cool nicely done! I kept thinking that the T34 would save you and take out the guys heading for the barn. I guess that's what happens when you don't have a script and have to let the action unfold. Sometimes the ending comes early.

Absolutely. I could not find it searching for keywords (10 bucks says I miss spelled Firefly). I'll look by person. Either way I'll leave mine for the other vehicles.

Yeah, when I read the thread I saw someone calling it a bug I was actually looking to see what it's status was and discovered I could not find the report. Oops.

I think there is a pretty good variety. I just fired up the game and here are the size counts I have: Tiny: 3 Small: 7 Medium: 8 Large: 7 Be warned I might have a few downloaded scenarios in there so a vanilla install might have lower counts on a few (but I checked the Tiny and Small and they are all stock scenarios).

LOL, I thought I would check and see if it was already there but could not find any sign of it - oops. Glad you are watching too Ken. I should play around and see if it happens to any other vehicles but I that will have to wait until later. Need coffee first

The other benefit is to BFC and these forums. Can you imagine the threads we would have if units with no ammo left were magically still firing because they had access to shared ammo but there was no indication of it

Minute 24: Orders With the tank and the men on the left side of the road firing the guys on the right will advance to get their guns on target too. Figure 80 Orders along the road The second tank will not try to skirt the mines. It looks like there could be enough room but it is hard to know for sure. The only way to find out is to try. Figure 81 Time for a tank to skirt the mines Also get the squad that retreated back into the road. Figure 82 Get the squad back into the road In the woods two fire teams not shaken will run back from the area the HE is coming down. One of them was pilled too and I had to use the ABC command. One team on the left will continue to fire on the foxholes while the other moves up to get a better vantage point to kill them. Figure 83 Pull back on the right and push forward on the left

Minute 25-24: The road went along pretty well. The guys on the left side of the road fired down it. The tank fired down it. The German team managed to hit one more of my guys and that caused the squad to run back and around the corner. The engineers finished marking the mines. Figure 73 Firing down the road The mortar team got to the edge of their clearing, setup and fire the first round just as the minute ended. This is a good view of the clearing they are in. This is looking back towards my starting point. The clearing is in the woods behind the camera is more forest. So the mortar team firing at a target they can see through the trees and they are firing into the open air of the clearing. Figure 74 First round is away Lots of firing going on in the woods. Figure 75 Teams in the left and right side of the woods engage their targets On the right side of the woods about half way through the turn bad things start happening. Figure 76 Something big starts hitting But after one explosion my men go back to what they were doing. Figure 77 The first found was no big deal... But by the fourth… They are not too happy. I took two or three casualties and the team ends the turn still shaken. The first shot looked like direct fire from another un seen gun the others could have been too but they looked a little different. No one knows who is shooting at them or where it is coming from. I have a vague idea the rounds looked like they came from the trench works. Figure 78 By the fourth round there are casualties and a shaken team Over on the left side of the woods all is well. Figure 79 On the left side of the woods all is well

Oh, absolutely it is modelled in the game. Small stuff is harder to hit and the broad side of a barn is easier to hit (well usually anyway ).

Here is a little quad .50 cal AA fun from a recent turn. Sadly the truck the enemy air plane was attacking was destroyed along with everyone on board...

Until you have a look at what the view form the AT guns position is. Oh wait it still defines logic but not for the reason you might think... Here is the view from cameral level 1 just on my side of the bocage where the AT gun is. This is from my turn so you can see all my units. Hummm I see the icon for the tank but nothing of the actual tank. Lets zoom in some... This is 20x zoom directly towards the tank. Wait there is a tank there? I don't see it do you? Now lets turn off the tree branches. Oh look there it is. It is hard to tell from the zoomed in pic but the tank is actually quite a ways into the forest, there are at least three trees on either side of it between the tank and the AT gun. Plus all the ground cover. I call foul - there is no way that ammo bearer team should be able to see that tank. Spotting in this game is way to easy

Ah thanks for the explanation. That is a confusing icon for a sound contact. I'll have to look at the mod to see how it works I guess. Actually those are mine. They are inspired by some work done by billy_sp way back in 1.0 (his newer stuff is here: http://cmmods.greenasjade.net/mods/search?search=bill&commit=Search). You can find mine here: http://cmmods.greenasjade.net/mods/search?search=A+Canadian+Cat&commit=Search The goal was to create a set of icons that used the period tactical symbols of the armies involved. and the modern ones here: http://community.battlefront.com/topic/118057-nato-tactical-symbol-icon-replacements/ I still want to create Russian icons but have not got there yet...

Reported - thanks for the reminder...

That's all I was thinking was needed, just something to remind your self what everyone is supposed to be doing.

That sounds like a really good way to play. One thing that would be required was to have a plan - and record it in some way. The example you gave of the units stumbling into an ambush is a good one. A player playing this way would have to have a list of units and what their assignment is so that you can consider the orders of each group based on what they are supposed to be doing and what they know about the battlefield.

Which I find happens when I try to kill them

WTF (why the face)

Yeah, understood. The thing is suppression is nice and all but the idea is to kill the enemy. Directed fire at a target has the best chance of doing that. Hence my priority list. If you have multiple teams shooting then you can have some area fire to keep their heads down and some (most) trying to kill them. Do not for get the goal is to kill them before they kill you. As it always was and always will be in war. So, you can pussy foot around with fire and manoeuvre and fancy names for stuff but the bottom line for me is if there are enemy soldiers in my sights there is only one goal. After they are dead we can go back to the fancy stuff to find more enemy units

Yeah, oops I should have done that. Everyone do as Ken says not as I do Yep. I doubt the Stuart will fire canister because it does not have a hard spot on the infantry but actually it would be nice if it did. Only 5 minutes in - so not worried yet. I expect (OK I actually know but I'm pretending I don't) that there will be some enemy artillery coming at me at some point. Hiding from that will chew up some time.

This is really informative - nicely done. Information move along quite quickly too. Can you point us to the key for your icon mod, please? I know you said the Marder icon was a sound contact form the scouts but as I kept reading I forgot and thought (from the pcitures) you were passing hard contact information up the chain - which made no sense. I now think that the icon was confusing me. What does a '?' icon look like for the Marder and what does a fully spotted Marder look like?