Melchior
-
Posts
359 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by Melchior
-
-
I find harrassing barrages to be very effective in softening up. If you drop all the ordnance at once, you'll kill and wound the same number of targets, the survivors will have been heavily suppressed and Pinned for a short while and will then rally.
If you drop it over half an hour, the targets will be repeatedly Pinned and suppressed, and I get the impression that's worse for their morale by the time the barrage is done. Haven't tested it though. It might be that the intense barrage overwhelms and sends the targets to Broken.
Yeah, long barrages usually cause enemies to just flee their positions. A player will usually just make them reoccupy those positions but once that yellow box is over the morale state the damage has been done. Their is serious value to be had in those 15min long 1-2 gun bombardments.
-
People are really obsessed with finding a "right answer" to CQC and I think the reality is you can't. It's an abstraction because that's just not what the game is focused on. If it's what someone wants to handle down to minutia then Red Orchestra and Forgotten Hope are really what you're interested in playing. Shooters, not strategy. Which their nothing wrong with.
CM is a game about letting you control the circumstances of an engagement, not the engagement. That's the troops' job.
-
Problem is in most scenarios you have recon assets in use against the enemy's main attack force, against which they're unsuited to fight. This isn't unrealistic or even uncommon, but cautious use of your recon units should be kept in mind. On occasion i've even pulled them all the way back to the setup area for infantry support or mopping up defensive positions I want to bypass but need to clear.
The usual for armored and mounted recon would be to spot threats many kms away, and then report back to HQ. But the scenarios are designed to be challenging, not curb stomps. Recon scenarios have been in all of the games, but their aren't many of them. Which I why I think people get a distorted view about recon units in the game.
One doesn't appreciate the value of armored recon until it's used to deny the enemy his own reconnaissance. I'm still in 1944 world but when the Russians like to conduct recon with BA-64s, guys driving around in cars and (not represented in game) horses then the value of something like a Panzer II Luchs becomes pretty apparent.
-
It's basically a small fuel-air bomb that quickly burns out all of the air in a given space creating a sudden vacuum. The effect is most useful when the weapon is fired into a building or enclosed space where it can literally collapse the entire structure in an implosion. The explosive uses the raw force of a detonation rather than fragmentation.
-
It'd actually be pretty cool too if the game had some sort of % chance that reinforcements could show up at all. We already have a mechanic for variable time, but how about variable existence? "501st Recon might show up but air interdiction has been awful high lately."
-
Never attack a position without putting something like fire on it. Drop freaking smoke mortars on it if you must. But never charge men over an open area wider than a grenade throw without suppressing fire. The greenest conscripts can hit something eventually if they're just allowed to use your own men as target practice without a fight.
-
^Bingo. Except in good scenario design I think a good section of that reverse slope should be included.
-
There were still Soviet units with T-26's in 1944!
This T-26 belonging to 176th Rifle Division was destroyed in August during the battle of Ilomantsi with a Panzerfaust. What an overkill, a 149mm HEAT warhead against 15mm of steel!!!
Nothing is overkill against a tank. Make no mistake, a tank of any kind presents a serious threat to infantry. Because 95% of the weapons the infantry have are worthless against even the lightest tanks. That T-26 got unlucky, but what if that Faust had missed? What if his infantry screen was nearby? Their is an awful lot that can go wrong for the guys fighting that tank and an awful lot that can go right for the tank. That's why even "obsolete" vehicles were rarely taken 100% out of service.
Even panzerfausts could be hard to come by at the worst possible time and chances are if you're on a secondary front (along with this unfortunate T-26 crew) a Panzerfaust may even be the best anti-tank weapon you've got.
-
Why do I feel like Lucas is trolling us to death.
Because he saying things that you don't like.
"Trolling" is too often used ad hominem on the internet.
-
I agree with that to an extent. Particularly in CMSF with uncon. Fact is the unexpected is to be expected in war, what I think people want is that it's done in a more subtle way.
-
The odds of a company sized enemy force appearing within grenade range is not at all realistic. If there was a better cue like roads or am obvious avenue of approach then its not that bad but suddenly there's tanks 25 meters from your flank is just wrong.
Indeed. I remember some particularly egregious scenarios in CMSF where the teleporting reinforcements created really baffling situations. I don't think culprit here is the reinforcement system per se though. Bad scenario and map design are more likely. A smartly designed map should feature an area of "dead ground" well behind and out of sight of a map's objectives where reinforcements can teleport in without breaking the game.
Note, this should not be taken as "their should never be any surprise attacks in the scenarios".
-
Remember the game is not a puzzle. Their is no "right answer" and in many cases no distinctly right way to play. All you can do is try to create favorable circumstances for your units and hope for the best. The war was hell for a reason and often the best circumstances still resulted in lots of men dying on both sides.
-
POW raids, night patrols, Airborne Pathfinder, are some off the top of my head. "Venafro Back into Hell" was a very interesting display of the engine's capabilities with small units. You can abstract quite a bit in a briefing.
-
'Just go around it, or mortar it, or put all your ammo into it'. But say you already did that and you want to clear it out and you dont have ammo from supporting forces to suppress the building as you move in. What do you do?
Then don't clear it. Seriously, if you know their are enemies in a location and you don't have the ammo to suppress them anymore, then you should either bypass them in some way or just accept a lot of casualties taking it. Doesn't have to be much, a Bradley can put fire on a house for probably most of a given mission with its coax. That's all you need to advance on the building.
Quick is definitely not for clearing buildings. For CQC "Hunt" and "Assault" are your friends depending on what units you're using. Engineers are preferable to regular infantry too because they can breach and clear. You don't always have to split a squad into teams but you may want to if the nearby structures are not secure.
Before entering a building you suspect has enemies in it, set a waypoint just outside the structure. Then set waypoints for every floor and room so your troops reorganize before each move. Very large structures like complexes should be cleared by multiple squads and teams. Prepare to cosign a whole platoon if necessary. Usually the biggest hang up people have in clearing is they're simply not using enough troops to do it.
-
It has been my long held belief that a major contributor to Germany's losing the war was that its automotive industry simply wasn't even close to fulfilling the needs of the army.
Michael
Germany wasn't even close to fulfilling the needs of its Army. Not for the herculean undertaking the Nazis set it on.
Guderian actually proposed limiting the size of the German Army to only what could be motorized. Disbanding all the regular infantry divisions or reassigning them to garrison duties. Not really practical in 1940 but has pretty much become reality today.
-
Even *having* tanks to fight Tigers with is pretty luxurious if you ask me. Some scenario designers have had the unbelievable gall to pit unsupported infantry against Tigers. You know who you are.
-
I play both real time and WeGo depending on scenario size. For medium or small scenarios I actually think real time is much more practical because I want second-by-second control. TBH real time would work great for all sizes if it only had an instant replay function or short term recorder. Without that you're often left bewildered as to exactly what transpired where the camera wasn't pointed.
I mean it worked for baseball.
-
In the case of the BAR, or MG42 (whether a brace or a singleton per squad), since I split my teams, in order, Assault (A), AT Team or Scout © (if it's a three team splittable squad), leaving B team the rump with the LMG(s), I find the riflemen of the not-B teams carry only their personal weapon allocation, leaving all the rest of the ammo with the B team. Ami B teams carry as much more per trooper in the B team than the Assault teams as the Germans do, but the BAR has less of a fire rate. So the proportion of rifle ammo that departs from the MG-equipped team is very small. Add to that loading MG sections with all the spare rifle ammo from any jeeps and trucks at setup, and trying very hard to pillage any that show up as reinforcements, and the contributions of the separated riflemen become even less significant. Beyond that, if the battle is still raging at the point the SAWs are running out, and I'm desperate for bullets for the long range hoses, I can remerge the squad and divvy up the remaining rifle ammo from the previously-separated teams. I'm not sure why you're only getting a minute of fire out of a BAR-equipped team plucked out of a 12-man rifle squad. I reckon on about 7-10 minutes of "Target" at normal firebase ranges. Even a tripod mounted heavy MG tends only to run through 100 or so rounds in a minute; LMGs use less.
You're right I really had SMG squads more in mind when I was saying less than a minute. I have seen teams with SMGs empty out their ammo in about a minute of fighting though. Teams equipped with machine guns of almost any kind though just aren't able to kick out fire for very long before they need to be merged though. I've seen BAR squads get low on ammunition after a few minutes and the BAR has a low rate of fire. I pretty much feel that the default ammo load infantry carry is good for basically one major encounter with a unit of equivalent size, then they need to resupply. The nature of a given scenario's objectives or time limit may force me to minimize downtime. Sometimes you just need to keep the pressure on.
Another problem is the proportional effect of casualties on the teams. A 3 man team loses a lot more from 1 KIA than a 12 man squad does. I personally do not believe squads and teams suffer casualties at any rate or likelihood different from each other at standoff ranges. Luck is the biggest factor there. In close encounters certainly, but squads are obviously unwieldy in tight quarters.
Anyway, I split squads into teams all the time. I just prefer the teams carry out the maneuver part of "fire and maneuver" because like I said, their ammunition distribution doesn't seem to favor prolonged fighting.
-
Can you explain the firepower difference between having a 2-team squad whole and on overwatch and having two separate teams sitting in the same adjacent ASs?
None. That's not why I keep them together. They're together because as one squad they share spots and lines of fire better. When I order fire on a target I want a lot of fire placed on it all at once, tapering off into suppressing fire. I don't feel I get that same weight of fire in those crucial 2-3 seconds of "opening the can" from split teams as I do from a whole squad.
Again, the two teams combined carry precisely the same number of rounds as they do in total when split up. So the extra ammo use has to be down to the situations they're in, not that they're split up. Indeed, if 4 ARs are getting through their half-load (compared to 8 rifles) of ammo twice as fast, it means they're chucking twice as much lead per pTruppe downrange, which will have the proportional terminal effects. Or maybe it's that split teams get up to closer ranges (cos that SOP is a shade more effective), and so their fire rates go up. Sure, a single team firing in the same opportunity space as a 2-team squad won't suppress as well as the squad, but they should have that other team there to help them if they need it. Another factor might be that if you have a squad in a position where only 4 men can shoot at your preferred target, they might be constrained to throwing the same amount of lead as a single team (though they'll be able to keep it up for longer, as the ones with "muzzles-on" will be able to cadge ammo off their unsighted squadmates). Whereas a pair of split teams can maneuver more freely and find two, possibly fairly widely-separated, perches where they can both bear with all their rifles.They do carry the same ammo overall, but they don't share it anymore. If one man in a 3 man team has a BAR, that's now 1/3 of the population instead of 1/12 that uses inordinately more ammunition than the rest of them. IE: We now have a proportionally bigger mouth to feed and less food for it. They are carrying overall much less ammunition though so the period of time that they can put heavy fire on at target is very short. Possibly a minute or less. Sure that's not too big a deal if the maneuver i'm planning is in a 200-300m space. Anymore than that though and my teams may very well be depleted before they can arrive on an objective. I need them to have staying power because when I seize objectives I usually expect to have to clear the space around the objective from stragglers or enemies I simply haven't broken yet.
Note, I haven't bought CMBS yet, i'm talking mostly from a 1944 perspective. Although I did play CMSF and largely handled my teams the same way. The only time I split every platoon into teams completely is basically for urban fighting.
-
Cold War gone hot, 1980.
Probably would need a whole series to do that though.
-
It makes little difference as far as i've seen. What matters far more is troop quality and morale state. I think something people get wrong about the assault command is they set too few waypoints, and the teams advance very far from eachother before regrouping so they can't cover eachother well. More way points are better than fewer and they should be set so the squad is always in sight of itself.
Keeping squads whole or breaking them up is just situational to me. The greatest use I find for keeping the squads as one though is their concentrated fire. Usually when i'm moving on an objective i'll break two of the squads into fire and assault elements and leave one squad whole, sitting on the start point to serve as overall firebase and reserve. I noticed the other day that a big disadvantage of teams is that they can use up their ammo very fast and can't suppress much.
-
I finally had a successful download of FI last night though I have no idea if I just got lucky.
-
Determine if it's necessary to even clear the forest to begin with. Who cares if a whole company is half a km inside a deep forest if they're not on an objective? They're irrelevant to the rest of the battle.
If clearing is necessary drop artillery on the forest liberally. Split squads into teams, and plot, many, waypoints. Take any number of men you plan on sending into the forest to clear it and add 50%. Sending in a platoon? Borrow a squad from another platoon.
-
Citrix update. Today they say they now fully understand the problem and are implementing a solution. I do not know when this will be complete, but I will update this thread as information comes in.
The problem seems to have started on Thursday, one day before we released. Obviously the timing was not good for any of us.
Steve
It started before then. I've been having the problem since December if is indeed the same problem.
Infantry TAC AI - trying not to rant
in Combat Mission Black Sea
Posted
For every player who wants that kind of behavior their will be another who hates that his men are apt to give away their positions. The tenacity of your men to engage targets real or imagined should be a function of training and experience. Would I expect Green troops to light up the first passing donkey that looks like Fritz? Sure. Veterans and Crack not so much.
If you've got a suspected enemy position you want fire on, "Target /Light".