Codreanu

Having a lot of fun with the second mission, map is beautiful and enemy placement is well thought out. Stare Kozary Station and Stare Kozary West are firmly in German hands but we've taken 14 KIA and 7 WIA in the process. One of the Soviet snipers even managed to hit one of my men 550 meters away, but Ivan has also suffered around 100 casualties and there's still an hour left on the clock so I think I'm doing alright. Excited to play more and see what else the reds have to throw at me in this and later missions.

Mark Felton is good at being entertaining but I hope you're not trying to imply that he's some sort of authoritative source, the dude cites David Irving in one of his videos for crying out loud.

Can't say anything about how it works in Quick Battles but I've done two PBEMs, one on Rumpenheim Rumpus where my Soviet opponent used mass artillery and focused all his troops at one weak point in my line and totally rolled me over, and another on on Brauersdorf where I played the Soviets and did the same to my opponent, minus the artillery as there was only a section of off-map mortars. In both scenarios I think the Soviets would have lost if they didn't use a rapid, concentrated assault to force a breakthrough. I would not be relying on artillery to take out tanks in any CM game either unless you're playing SF2 or Black Sea, It does a good enough job at killing and suppressing infantry and lightly skinned vehicles and creating obscuration through dust clouds. Once you've taken care of the American's dismounts and jeep/M113 TOW vehicles, what exactly are M60s going to be able to do to you if you're concentrating your forces against them?

First I would try and identify where they're most likely to be and hammer it with indirect fire if you can, barring that use covered routes, and barring that try to bait them into firing at you and then reversing. Having infantry close by to improve your chances of getting a spot on them when they fire would help too. I know in real life if you get launched on you're supposed to fire a snap shot towards where you think the launch came from, go evasive, and pop smoke but there's only so much of that you can do when you have to wait a whole minute for a turn to play out.

Shooting until the building falls or at least until the wall is blown away is how I typically do it if I'm able but being unable to target the building was my problem. The only way to actually hit it was to shoot at the hedge in front of it and hope that some of the rounds overshoot the hedge and hit the house behind it which seems to be the best way to solve the problem if you're having LOS issues. In this particular situation the enemies definitely needed to be taken care of and they were more of an annoying speed bump plinking at my men rather than a strongly fortified position. TacAI can't do sustained suppressing fire to my knowledge, when they see a solid contact they shoot at it until they can't see it anymore and then they stop shooting, targeting the terrain that the enemy is on or near is the only way to keep them shooting. I would rather take them out at a distance with a tank, or at least keep them suppressed with constant MG fire than play whack-a-mole with them only shooting when they see the guy peeking out the window and shooting at them. Thank you, this is helpful and is the tactic I ended up going with, was fighting the Soviets so didn't have to worry about man-portable AT so I could just hammer the buildings with HE and then move up infantry while the guys inside were pinned, if I was fighting the Germans instead I think I would have done just a brief 15 second target order and then reversed the tank while the infantry moved up to lessen the risk of getting hit with a panzerfaust. Enemy had a lot of AT guns so I was worried about rushing my tank forward but it ended up not being an issue this time.

Because the target command doesn't work on ground floors if there's a little bit of the ground floor concealed by the hedge, if I could actually target the ground floor I'd happily pelt the house with HE until it collapsed. Only options that I can see is hoping the tank sees the soldiers inside of the house, targets them, and shoots, I drive the tank up close enough until it can get line of sight and shoot it that way which works fine against the Russians but against any nation with handheld anti-tank weapons seems risky, or shoot at the hedge itself and hope any overshoots hit the building behind it. Maybe it's just user error but I always have a hell of a time trying to target ground floors if there's a low hedge or wall in front of it or if the building is slightly sunken into the ground. After messing around with it for a bit just trying to target as close as you can to the ground floor and letting the overshoots hit the building is the safest way to do things even if it takes longer and expends more ammo.

Units can get LOS on each other if they see them but I can't get LOS on the very bottom of the ground floor of the houses so I can't use the target command on it is what I meant. If I move a tank or infantry up to the hedge they can finally manage to see the ground floor and target it. If any little sliver of the bottom of the bottom floor is out of sight it seems to make targeting it impossible even if you can see 95% of the rest of the floor.

Mitigating risk and losses when attacking them is most of the issue I have when attacking them, they rarely have more than one split down squad inside of them so they become more of an annoying speed bump that attrite my forces. The way I've been trying to clear them out so far is somewhat similar to that method, except instead of hunt I use quick or fast moving my men from cover to cover as they close the gap, this turns it into a little game of whack-a-mole where the enemy inside will spot them and fire a bit and reveal themselves, sometimes other men I have on overwatch will be able to get one but sometimes one of my own men will get hit instead. I either do that or try to rush a tank up to the hedge, shoot inside for 15-30 seconds, and then reverse, maybe repeat it once again and then send in the infantry to clear out the buildings, that keeps infantry casualties down to about nothing but then you run into the risk of a hidden AT gun, I guess using that comes down to reading the battlefield and estimating the likelihood of that position being covered by an AT gun based off of what you've seen up to that point. Front building has windows all around, rear one only has them on the front and sides, one could attack from left to right and only have to deal with being shot from the front building but you'd have to cross about 80m of flat, open field. Bottom is half open field half swamp, right is all swamp, and top is a large field with the enemy's main line of resistance behind it. I ended up just rushing in a tank and blasting it which worked but I'm always paranoid about some sort of anti-tank weaponry knocking one out when making a mad dash over open ground and up to those little hamlets or compounds without infantry support. I guess it's all about taking those calculated risks but I'd hate to lose a tank just to clear out one annoying squad I can't get proper LoS on. I'll try targeting the hedge next time, I never trust suppressing fire unless it's actually on target but even reduced suppression is a whole lot better than nothing, maybe tank shells could destroy the hedge too and create a gap where it could get proper LoS to the building.

Bypassing them can work but sometimes maps are filled with these things or they might be in a key position that you really just have to attack and they stop you from being able to use the target command on them until you get right up on them. The only real ways I can think of when it comes to attacking them is trying to rush a tank up real close and blast it, attacking the hedge and hoping it destroys the hedge or overshoots hit the building, or trying to maneuver towards any hole or open side. Infantry assaults seem like death because there's no way to pour suppressing fire on the guys inside until you are at the hedge anyway.

Do you guys have any strategies you use when attacking compounds surrounded by low walls or hedges that stop you from getting line of sight onto the bottom floors of the buildings inside of it but still allow you/the enemies to shoot if they're spotted? Is it best to shoot at the hedge/wall itself even if the building is pretty deep inside of it? Picture attached is what I'm talking about, can't target any deeper than the first line of hedges and there's no raised terrain or tall buildings to shoot down into it.

It's a good time saver but it's not as reliable as it could be so sometimes you end up wasting a turn where if you just took the time to get your tank into hull down manually it would have worked fine. If you're just trying to get a large group of vehicles into a good enough position then it's useful, but for vital vehicles in vital areas I would just stick my face in the dirt and drag those move orders around myself.

Soviet squads seem to really chew through ammo like nobody's business, I once had a platoon of tankodesantniki go through their entire load of ammo in one, maybe two turns trying to shoot at a guy cowering in a trench. It was like watching a fireworks show seeing 30 submachine guns mag dumping and spraying ricochets everywhere.

Pretty much the same as womble. For WW2 titles I usually drop it on key terrain that looks like it would contain enemies, usually a suspicious looking hill or treeline or something. On map artillery is for sniping machine gun nests or AT guns. For modern titles the call in times are usually so short I'll wait until I positively identify the enemy and just drop really short intense bursts right on top of them or walk the artillery around the map using the readjust fire option.

A harassing fire option would be great, seems like it would be pretty easy to code and they could add "harrassing fire briefly" and "target light briefly" along with it. I think the BMP-2 has a slow and fast rate of fire toggle in real life too which could be used for just throwing out slow, short 2-3 round bursts, just enough to keep the enemy's heads down.

Good thing seeing them at all in CMCW is awfully rare, massed 125mm fire even from the front will severely degrade it's spotting ability and will easily punch through the mantlet if it can hit it and take out the gun too. Are those the actual in game stats of them though? Haven't tested it exhaustively but in the one scenario that pits the T-80 versus the Abrams, 3BM22 didn't seem to want to penetrate the Abrams frontally, but angle could have been a factor to that, generally not a big deal though because like I said to db, massed fire and a hit to the mantlet deals with them just fine.

That Tiger II camo looks great, and wow, those campaign casualties for the Soviets are insane, I really gotta play this one.

Bumping this great scenario for anybody who hasn't played it yet, nice pacing and a good challenge. Reloaded my save once because I had a really unfortunate turn but after that I managed to get a total victory, 50 KIA 31 WIA. Ambience and force compositions were excellent although my Stuka never arrived, I wonder if updates have broken it?

You can definitely hit individual trees and eventually destroy them with enough hits. In fact, they're the strongest armor in the game, even modern APFSDS is no match for even the smallest of trees. Shell speed seems fine to me too, the difference in speed in the modern titles between APFSDS and HEAT/HE is pretty big so I don't think it's switching effect on impact, there is a bug where APHE shells have way too much shrapnel if they miss a vehicle and hit the ground though.

I would say no for all of them, but what about shooting at gunfire noises that give you no contact markers at all? Is that gamey? Personally I would say no against a human player because it encourages them to shoot and scoot as you would do in real life. Doing it against the AI does make the game a little easier but not having gunshots generate sound contacts is an oversight in my opinion so I'm not too bothered by doing it. One thing that IS without a doubt gamey is using knowledge of enemy positions that you should have no idea of, like if you had played a scenario before and remember the locations of certain units. If they're in an obvious spot you believe you would have shot up anyway then that might be okay but if it's a tiny little FO team hiding at the back of the map at the edge of a forest then you should pretend that they don't exist unless you start hearing gunfire or get a contact icon.

Discovered a weird trick, if you dismount a halftrack crew, and then mount an infantry team, and then remount the halftrack crew, the guys in the back will stand up and shoot at whatever you're targeting no matter the range, whereas normally they only will when the enemy is danger close I believe? Not sure if this would be useful at all, maybe if the guy standing up had a machine gun.

@Artkin Could your spotter have lost line of sight of the target after ordering the call for fire but before the mortar rounds were fired? Did some more testing and this was the sequence I used: 1. Spotter calls for fire on position 2. Spotting rounds are fired, and the mortars fire as they're supposed to 3. Readjust fire using the spotter but smokescreen blocks the spotter's LOS to impact point right after I do 4. Mortars don't fire even after the smoke has cleared and Spotter has a clear LOS to the impact point.

Had the same issue with them as of the latest Steam version, I thought it had something to do with them not automatically turning to face their side/rear towards the target which is where their firing arc is at but I just tested it and they automatically turned for me, although they didn't at the time I had the issue with them.

You're right, it was an SU-152, either way I feel like the 152s are pretty situational. Good for when you really need to drop a building but against trenchworks they're not as consistent as I like, they might kill a few guys or might wipe out the better part of a platoon. Reminds me of another scenario I had where I was assaulting a trench section and despite missing the trench the explosion must have killed 15 guys and caused the whole enemy platoon to instantly shatter. I like the consistency of the smaller calibers and even if they miss, a follow up shot comes soon after, plus loads of coax and hull MG ammo.

I'd almost always take the Churchill too, maybe if you were trying to clear/knock down some sort of big stone structure that was really infested with enemies the 122mm would be worth it but that's about it. I remember playing the Berlin mini-campaign in F&R and getting a couple ISU-152s, they were fun and really put a lot of hurt on the enemy but ran out of ammo very fast and had no machine guns so they were just big hulking wastes of space. Also not fun when one hits a tree or little hill in front of it and frags an entire squad of your own men