Flibby

If there was a better alternative I'd be there, not here. Mius Front for example takes away the micromanagement but doesn't leave a satisfactory tactical simulation behind as it's too abstract. If that's not your example, I'm still fairly sure I've played and discounted it too.

This is not to disparage the information provided by George.. It is fairly damning however that in 2024 a computer simulation has not been developed in such a way as to remove the utter tedium of something as simple as moving a convoy of vehicles down a road. The lack of sensible automation of repetitive tasks is one of the reasons that I find myself playing less and less of the game that I would love to be able to dedicate more time to. I should be able to focus on the tactical development of the battle without having to oversee whether a BMP is going to try to drive through an impassable tile and get stuck unless I rigorously determine its path in advance. Perhaps by the time I reach retirement I will have the time to do so unless It's been resolved by then

You're right that it was a very arbitrary paint illustration, but interesting points. I'd be worried about not tying down eny position 1. In a static exercise they might be out of the fight, but in reality they've retained freedom of manoeuvre. They might make nothing of it, or they could flank your attacking force. The findings I've had with the broad approach let's me orientate my main effort as I go. This approach is more prescriptive and if the enemy setup is not what you expect, it's harder to change on the fly imo.

I don't know whether this might help anyone, or may be an interesting discussion point or not, but anyway... I consistently used to look at a map and decide upon an avenue of attack based upon terrain alone. "That looks like a nice foresty side of the map, let's go that way.." The issues I found were either: 1) The enemy was more concentrated on my avenue of attack, was as it was clear to me was also clear to them; 2) As I had overly committed to the attack on a narrow axis, my flanks were wide open and I was unable to maximise my frontage when my guys were so grouped up. Having read through a number of WW2 era tactical manuals, my new approach is to attack over a fairly wide frontage overall, but to use narrower frontages on certain routes. Obviously this can be changed if the circumstances require it. You might think that this spreads your forces too widely, but remember, not all combat power is the guys on the ground. In-fact, most of your force multipliers are artillery, mortars, HMGs, tanks etc. If you focus these on the 'main effort' platoons then it doesn't matter that roughly the same number of rifle squads are spread over the front: Edit - if this was really fking obvious, I apologise for everyone's time

Thanks everyone. Some good food for thought so far.

I suspect that the answer is "no" but I'll ask anyway... Has anyone got any tips to save the tedium of individual marching orders to Bn size units? I'm trying the Hammer's Flank campaign and the first mission is giving me RSI and some tedium trying to set up all of these movement orders. Is the pathing still pretty shoddy when trying to group select units? Cheers

Speaking as a lawyer in the field, There's nothing in a EULA which could prevent anyone from subscribing/donating to a patreon account for someone who makes mods so long as the mods are publicly available and not dependent upon payments being received. It would simply not be enforceable. It's technically illegal in some places to stream gaming content but for obvious reasons it's tolerated.

You can always rely upon a forum of gamers to create more drama than at an Alabama Sweet 16 party. If you've made a decent Battlepack off your own back, that is admirable and we'd all love to play it. You seem to have taken what looked to me as a 'jokey' remark way out of context. I can't imagine a first responder having such a thin skin. Please take a while to calm down and come back afresh.

I wonder if anyone has any advice for me based around this interesting small scenario. My first thoughts upon a few very unsuccessful attempts is that you have to be very fortunate in order to succeed as you don't necessarily have the tools to pull off what appears to be quite a complex breaching operation - but happy to be corrected and told that I am a complete nub! The objective is to overcome the river obstacle using the single ford in the centre of the map, and clear the opposite bank to form a beachhead of sorts. Our command is a single platoon with an attached Javelin squad with two rounds. Each squad has a PKM and a liberal smattering of various RPGs. My initial overview is that the enemy will set up on the high round in cover on the opposite bank, creating a kill zone around the ford which is the obvious focus for any assault. My terrain analysis shows some concealment on the right where the woods are located which could be used by a manoeuvre group to approach close to the bank, and some hedges in the centre which could be used to overwatch the opposite bank. My initial plan is to strip out the PKMs from the 3 squads, along with the javelin to form a support by fire position in the centre. The remaining troops would travel down the right under suppression from the centre and breach the river. You can see from the following image that the enemy consists of 2 HMGs (one not shown here), a 2 man sniper team and at least another couple of teams and an HQ unit. My overwatch is not in any real cover, and by the time they get into positions where they can see the enemy, they are themselves suppressed and we're stuck without the necessary fire superiority to manoeuvre anywhere. Usually I would either a) use some smoke to parcel up the situation and allow me to focus fires and/or b) approach from a different angle to permit focus on the enemy in a piecemeal fashion. I neither have any arty or long range smoke, or any other options other than to use the central ford to get onto the other side. I can't see where placing the overwatch in another location, as there is no cover as such, would help here. Has anyone any tips, advice, or guidance on how to approach this different? Cheers

I seem to remember the same guy using "Close Combat" to train guys when he was still "in". God I loved that game!

Does anyone have any tips for this interesting scenario? I see two options really. A steady assault up the middle, towards the enemy held reverse slope, or the approach I took which is a right flanking one to try to fight along the enemy MLR on the slope. There are some particularly nasty 20mm Flaks and no tanks to assist. The Vickers MGs struggle to find meaningful angles also.

My first wargame, if you can call it that, was North and South on the Atari ST. Then some others such as Historyline 14-18 before I got a PC and the usual Close Combat route. With a growing family I mainly play vs the computer which is a shame but it's useful to test out tactics.

Yes I think that you may have hit the nail on the head there. In striving for finding the perfect SBF position, the perfect covered approach etc belies that most of the time there's going to be a fairly significant opposition in those key areas and you're just going to have to pick a place to overwhelm the enemy with fire and move in using the best positions you can.

Thanks Combat. I have read that topic with great interest before and will do so again to refresh my memory. In the meantime what I fail to glean from posts from people such as yourself or Bil, which I am entirely sure is my own fault, is the finer details rather than the bigger picture. For example, let's say one has an elevated enemy position. Any spot which one could consider a SBF position is going to be fairly obvious to the enemy. Is the idea that regardless of that fact, if you have to fight onto the key terrain in order to establish fire superiority you just have to get on with it, or do you try to obscure your approach there, if anything making it slightly more obvious? The theory behind tactics sits well with me I just have a hard time applying it to CM. None of the tutorials I have seen actually lead you through a scenario aside from the Jeff Paulding Armchair General Ones. Whilst very useful a lot of the attacks were 'brute force' - absolutely great and well put together, but with nothing like the detail that you have set out in your linked post... Perhaps I just need to lose more often to some decent players

A few questions about these concepts. Firstly, do you typically come up with the best avenue of attack first before determining key Terrain, or vice versa? If you have a dominating key Terrain feature such as a ridge overlooking your objective, how do you asses it's occupation vs the fact that you will be vulnerable to enemy fire from a lot of units as well as being able to bring a lot of fire upon them? Is that fight essentially the big pre requisite for the attack? On avenues of attack, a covered approach seems to be regarded as a good path for an infantry attack, but this limits the opportunity for overwatch. How can this be mitigated against?

Operationally, absolutely. I was specifically talking about this action: https://www.liberationroute.com/pois/447/black-friday

Dom Sorry for my ignorance. I didn't see to get a notification of your reply as I would usually do. I have literally just read Maj Phil Neame's new book 'Penal Company' about D Company of 2 Para in the Falklands. The CO ordered the attack as a "2 up 1 back" movement to contact. D company was initially in reserve and C company was the reconnaissance company. A and B companies were engaged on the slopes of Darwin Hill and engaged in a very much frontal attack which was heavily bogged down. For the benefit of others, the CO joined up with A company and was killed when charging a machine gun nest. There was certainly no intent at that stage to perform a flanking attack and the CO even told Neame not to attempt to flank around the side of Boca House. Once the CO went down, Neame did go to flank with his reserve company but ended up on the beach facing strong Argentine positions. It was only when the hill was finally taken by use of Milan missiles that Neame began firing his 12 company MGs and Milans at the Argies around Boca house. After this show of fire they surrendered despite being in particularly strong positions. It was reading this which starting my thought process around the merits of a flanking attack. Obviously this wasn't the country for it anyway, but even if denser terrain, if you have fire superiority then it seems to me that you can advance frontally, maintaining rushes and performing fire and movement too. Of course it would be best to have an angle between the support fires but that would be more to increase the duration of their fires and maintain fire superiority than it would be to enable a wide flanking manoeuvre for the sake of it. Your last paragraph makes me think however - is what you are saying that the flanking is useful to the point that you can reach your assault position without exposure to fire, but that of course the final 100-200 meters of an assault is always going to be frontal anyway? If so I can readily get on board so long as you were able to guarantee the flank security of that flanking element. Surely that it often if not more often than not, impractical. If you can guarantee fire superiority with arty and MGs on a raised position for example, surely the safest attack is straight up, where you know that the manoeuvre element isn't going to find any nasty surprises. Of course this is often academic in actual conflict because someone being flanked is likely to reposition before you get anywhere near them if they can. What I am not suggesting is frontal attacks ala the Canadian Black Watch on the Scheldt crossing 1200m without adequate support and getting mown down. It just seems that fire superiority is the key rather than a positional advantage from flanking which could present more of a problem than it solves... Perhaps I just need to play against one of your experts to teach me how to do things properly

I'm not sure whether I'm misunderstanding here. I'm referring to flanking in the sense of one unit making a physical manoeuvre via a covered path to the side of the enemy unit before assaulting. I really just don't see massive evidence for this being a common occurrence at platoon or company level.

Yes of course. But aside from even very niche scenarios like an opposed amphibious landing, how often is one presented with an enemy who has left you a covered flanking position into close quarters of your position without there being another unit over watching that position? The frontal attack seems the default in reality yet the outlier in training ...

Absolutely and the vast array of calibers required isn't going to help. I know that our plant in Tyneside making 105 and 155 rounds has been on overtime for months but it's small fry when you look at consumption.

I'm not sure I agree but it's a finely balanced point. Chemical agents are terrible but we're not about to start sending those to Ukraine. We need to keep as much of the moral high ground as possible, and moreover keep the Allied nations together. Rightly or wrongly this has the potential to be to tip of a wedge being driven between those allies. If it's genuinely such a desperate situation that cluster weapons are required, the Rus must be putting up a better fight than the evidence I have suggests.

Everyone knows the old tenants and warnings about frontal attacks. Army manuals warned against it unless almost as a last case scenario since the Great War. I have recently been reading through the unit history of the 1st Gordon Highlanders of the 51st Highland Division in Normandy. My Grandmother is now 101 and one of her 10 brothers was killed just east of Caen sparking my interest. What is of note is that the attacks that they were involved in from Battalion level, to Platoon level, were almost exclusively frontal attacks supported by armour, artillery and sometimes indirect fire from MGs in addition to their organic weapons, from June '44 to the end of the war. Likewise when you consider the Falklands War, Goose Green, Wireless Ridge etc etc were frontal attacks albeit with varying levels of firepower in support. Is it fair to say that the frontal attack is actual more common than the more widely taught flanking attacks? If so, is this due to training levels, a common lack of suitable terrain for flanking attacks, or simply that it's not necessary to do so when you have overwhelming firepower advantage?

Really interesting points and I will have to pick that book up. I also have this on my ever-growing wish-list. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blitzkrieg-Reality-Hitlers-Lightning-France-ebook/dp/B01FTAPZUA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= I read manoeuvre warfare as a way to defeat a large force with brains rather than brawn. Does it apply in practice on either a tactical or operational/strategic level? Tactically much of the army handbooks in the UK and US focus on attacking an abstract isolated enemy. Manoeuvre warfare principles work fantastically here. You can fix a unit with a support section, run around the back while they are suppressed and run into them with your bayonets fixed flinging in grenades with gay abandon. In practice, in a peer to peer conflict, if you come across an isolated squad it's going to be a sentry or OP. Sure you can attack it in the way described above but where does it take you? In a conflict like this you are far more likely, such as at Goose Green for want of a better example, to find a mutually supported position where any attack is going to have to start of life as a frontal attack. You mass firepower at the weakest point you can find, with the best covered approaches, but realise that any obvious approach path is going to be obvious to the opponent. You have to create any sort of flank with overwhelming fire power at a point, but a manoeuvreist view of this isn't going to work unless you're also stopping the enemy from reinforcing this position, therefore a broad front is essential. Ultimately you are going to be smashing into a prepared line and it's not going to be pretty (I am more than open to someone telling me this is wrong!) Likewise on a larger scale, Market Garden sounded fabulous on paper, but the obvious logistical issues (in hindsight) sacrificed a lot of blokes when a more traditional 'steel not flesh' approach would have been just as successful.

Can anyone recommend any reading on the reality of tactics in ww2 versus the textbook visions as set out in the various handbooks one sees? I've got a good stackpole book on the battle of Sedan but it's less nitty gritty than I'm looking for. I do get the impression that the Allied campaigns from 44 to 45 and the Russians from 43 onwards were not really examples of manoeuvre warfare in any way shape or form. Quite rightly we didn't want to risk men when we had such a materiel advantage and could simple attrit away the Germans. I don't want to get into a JasonC type argument, but examples of Fuller esque manoeuvres seem scant after 1941.

Isn't that the same as blokes cutting the wire?