Advantage: Attacker?

[sburke]

Personally I am still of the opinion that defending is easier and I play exclusively WeGo. Putting together a decent combined arms attack is difficult and I have been deeply impressed when my opponents have been able to do so. I have found CM to duplicate very well WW 2 tactical doctrine of trying to break up infantry/armor cooperation to defeat an attack. Keep the tanks at arm's length with a well placed AT round and suddenly your opponent may be finding the infantry is out there on their own just a little too much. Toss in a minefield or two and things start getting dicey for an attacker. Scatter the infantry and those tanks become awfully vulnerable.

With a decent use of terrain I think it is not necessarily "easy" but practical to ambush the enemy. As noted by someone previously, passive defense is not necessarily a good answer which I think would fall under the desired armored covered arc (though I do miss that one). Obvious ambush locations will more than likely be given a dose of suppressive fire. The goal then becomes how to spring an ambush at a location or time not so obvious. I can't say I have mastered it but I have learned to look for opportunities as they arise. In a recent battle I had a team positioned at a hedgerow providing overwatch of a wire obstacle and noticed some US infantry getting strung out in front of a hedgerow across the road. I rushed the team across the road and up against the adjacent hedgerow, took out an infantry and an engineer team at close range and then retreated before the supporting armor could hit back at the cost of a single soldier. In the same battle I had an AT team nail a light tank, crawl for a turn + to another position, pop up only to spot another tank and kill it.

Other possibilities- if you have a trp, put it on your own position. When about to be driven from that position call in a mortar strike. Odds are your opponent is gonna get caught exposed and reorganizing.

[Killkess]

You would think that this would pretty much be taken care of by the game's morale system, but it's amazing how well you can continue to fight even after taking heavy casualties. Is there any way to setup a Quick Battle with conditions that would prevent taking more than X% casualties?

My experience is that people tend to "buy" units with much to high moral and experience levels state during QBs. That regulary ends with an unrealistic fight to the last men. Imho a defensive which is capable of inflicting more than ~30% cassualties should break further offensive actions.

If you know your opponent, try to make some houserules about force selection. The outcome will change quit a bit.

[Steiner14]

One of the first things soldiers do, is digging holes and preparing defenses.

If scenario designers would give the defenders more defensive tools, it would make things harder and more realistical for the attackers.

But if holes and sandbags are more precious than tanks, then something simply is not well balanced and therefore realistical results cannot be expected.

If the engine would offer a bigger variety of defensive tools, that would help, too. I.e. purchasing bonuses for walls, simulating sandbag or other kind of protection.

[ClarkWGriswold]

My experience is that people tend to "buy" units with much to high moral and experience levels state during QBs. That regulary ends with an unrealistic fight to the last men.

If you know your opponent, try to make some houserules about force selection.

That's a good point, and something I should have mentioned earlier. My opponent in my most recent game normally buys all veteran or crack units. After experiencing that he was able to continually attack despite suffering heavy casualties we made a gentleman's agreement to limit the number of veteran and crack troops that could be purchased. In our most recent game he was on the defense, so I haven't really been able to see how much effect this new change makes.

I wish that the rarity values would take care of this issue. When rarity is set to "strict" it shouldn't be possible to purchase 100% veteran troops, but it is.

[Childress]

I wish that the rarity values would take care of this issue. When rarity is set to "strict" it shouldn't be possible to purchase 100% veteran troops, but it is.

Maybe, but that would be requesting Battlefront to go back to a source of controversy that they don't want to revisit: fine tuning the values of units as to make them 'fair' in the shark infested pool of QB cherry picking.

It represents a drain on resources which ends up making nobody happy.

[Michael Emrys]

Far better that players would try to be more realistic and reasonable in their force selections. If they are expecting historical outcomes, they should use historical forces.

Michael

[Pak40]

That's a good point, and something I should have mentioned earlier. My opponent in my most recent game normally buys all veteran or crack units. After experiencing that he was able to continually attack despite suffering heavy casualties we made a gentleman's agreement to limit the number of veteran and crack troops that could be purchased. In our most recent game he was on the defense, so I haven't really been able to see how much effect this new change makes.

I wish that the rarity values would take care of this issue. When rarity is set to "strict" it shouldn't be possible to purchase 100% veteran troops, but it is.

I have to disagree.

Honestly and historically, Veteran troops generally were in the same battle with each other. In other words, not too often will you see a platoon of regular soldiers with a platoon of veteran soldiers. Obviously, cases such as armor backing up airborne troops is a different situation. Therefore I don't think it should be limited when purchasing.

[Michael Emrys]

I have to disagree.

Honestly and historically, Veteran troops generally were in the same battle with each other. In other words, not too often will you see a platoon of regular soldiers with a platoon of veteran soldiers. Obviously, cases such as armor backing up airborne troops is a different situation. Therefore I don't think it should be limited when purchasing.

On the other hand, veteran formations became diluted by absorbing green replacements. This is hard to model in the game as it occurred most usually within squads whereas in the game, squads are homogenous in experience. The best we can do is to vary experience from squad to squad in about the same proportions.

Michael

[StellarRat]

I tend to agree with Emrys. Really the best distinction that can be made is completely green i.e. the unit has never seen combat or it's experienced. The other thing you can account for is training and selection. Like special forces or miltia.

[Tigrii]

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?

[sburke]

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

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?

I think maybe you fight too staticly on defense. It's a pretty simple answer to fight the "mortar sniping". You don't stay put for it.

So here's your alternative. The enemy suicide scout team is allowed to approach. You either have the fire triggered by a covered arc, in which case you move immediately at the start of the next turn or you allow yourself 30 seconds of firing and displace. By the time the mortar gets into the fight you are no longer there and an additional suicide team to scout you out is more then welcome to try. Those scout team losses are gonna hurt your opponents morale. You can't just keep tossing out troopers as bait and not expect to pay a cost.

And if I have a mortar on defense, you can bet the hedgerow that scout came from is gonna get a slight dousing.

My toughest one to fight is someone who does some serious suppressive fire and smoke. Those Shermans can lay down some hellacious fire. If my troops are cowering the active defense starts to collapse and the smoke can change everything. Unfortunately I fight two opponents who do both on a regular basis.

[Sublime]

I sort of agree. The game seems to use a 3:1 attacker ratio formula. This is usually used as the example of what an attacking force needs to sucessfully attack. In the game this translates sometimes to one company versus two or three with armor attack. it can get rough.

mortars are very deadly, one of the best weapons I use. you can counter them pretty well though. they usually take the better part of a turn to get the range on a target and laying down real fire. you have to pay attention and have a bug out route planned.

on top of that mortars will burn through their ammo in one or two turns. So yeah, they can kill most things, but they get used up quick enough.

[ClarkWGriswold]

I think maybe you fight too staticly on defense. It's a pretty simple answer to fight the "mortar sniping". You don't stay put for it.

Unfortunately, it's basically impossible to move AT/AP guns (you can, but it takes half the game to do it). Since these are, historically, the backbone of any defense, it makes for quite a quandry. As the defender you get relatively few points to spend. If you buy relatively inexpensive AT guns you've got one shot to inflict casualties against enemy armor before the enemy silences them (mortars or AFV HE rounds). If you buy tanks you'll wind up using a large portion of your point allotment on a relatively small number of units. SP guns can be a decent compromise on some maps, as long as they aren't easily outflanked and lines of sight are long.

Not being able to temporarily abandon guns and then recrew them makes historically accurate defense extremely difficult. Not being able to dig in guns or hide them inside buildings makes it even more difficult.

[StellarRat]

Do you use AT guns with a long narrow FOV? They've pretty deadly with infantry support placed in spot where they fire down narrow LOS corridor. That denies a lot overwatching units a chance to avenge their flamed up buddies. Plus it forces the enemy to attack from certain direction.

[Broadsword56]

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.

If your defense is set up correctly (in depth, with advanced observation/listening posts, a first line, and then a main line of resistance behind that, and with your MGs and guns back and hidden by reverse slopes so they catch attackers from the rear or flank), then a scout that finds one of your positions doesn't really find all that much.

Your opponent would still have to do a lot more scouting and probing to discover whether that contact was your main line or an outpost, etc. And if he deploys forces and mortars it, you've succeeded in making him waste his time and ammo prematurely.

Here's how the Germans were taught to do it "by the book" (from the translation of the WWII German Company Officer's Handbook):

One thing that always strikes me from this disgram is how much space they left between the most forward outposts and their main line of resistance (MLR). But that would be a "killzone" for the 1st and 2nd platoons, which are in mutually supporting positions on the main line.

Also, notice how many MGs, guns and mortars are deployed way back, invisible from an advancing enemy, in reverse slope and "keyhole" positions. 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.

Look at all the distance and enemies an attacker would have to fight through to penetrate the MLR and secure an objective -- I can't imagine how an enemy wouldn't be exhausted/decimated/demoralized by that point, ripe for counterattack by the reserve company (offmap). And this isn't even a bocage defense, which would have offered enormous additional benefits of covered/concealed defensive positions.

Advantage attacker???

Final thought: You might say it's impossible to set up a defense like this on a typical CMBN map, especially some smaller QB ones. Fair enough, but then that's just the map's fault, not the CMBN engine itself. Bad maps make for bad tactics and gamey outcomes. All that's needed is to make maps that are big and realistic enough for the battled you want. The tools are there.

[JonS]

Advantage attacker???

Good post. What it does highlight (apart from the map design thing) is that defence is complicated. And hard. And punishing of mistakes. And it requires a lot more thought and planning than most people recognise. And most of that planning has to occur before the battle begins, because once you're out of the Set Up phase it's too late to shift your guns, or reposition your foxholes, and even a seemingly simple task like side-stepping a platoon can become a real challenge under enemy pressure.

I think most people have some intuitive grasp of how to mount an attack - as Forrest said "get there fastest with the mostest." But many people (including me) try to apply that doctrine to the defence, and basically it just doesn't work. For the defender, a major part of their game should occur during the Set Up phase, and the turns are a case of seeing how good your planning effort was. This is, of course, the inverse of the attackers game. The attacker can pretty much throw down his forces wherever, pick a couple of axes of advance, and make up the rest of it on the fly. A defender who tries that will lose.

As a rule of thumb:

* The defender should spend hours on his setup, and minutes on his turns.

* The attacker should spend minutes on his setup, and hours on his turns.

[Tigrii]

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.

[JonS]

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.

There may be a misunderstanding about what a "reverse slope position" is.

Certainly, a reverse slope posn (RSP) may be on the back side of a hill, and that's where the term came from, but you can get the effect of a RSP without the presence of hills.

The basic effect that you are after with an RSP is that when the enemy comes into view, you can engage him with all your own weapons within their engagemet envelopes. The idea is to negate the enemy's advantage in terms of observation and/or ranged firepower. So if the enemy has armour, an RSP is any positon from which you can engage him within your own envelope as soon as he becomes visbile. That might be as close as ~50 metres if you only have a few panzerfausts, or as long as 1km if you have a PaK43. And remember that 'ranged firepower' includes anything indirect, so you want to be able to observe and neutralise any enemy spotters from your RSP. Otherwise you don't really have an RSP, and he'll just obliterate you with mortars and artillery.

Finding locations where RSP will work is tough, and means anticipating which direction(s) the enemy will come from. Which is one of the reasons defenders need to spend a lot of time on Set Up.

edit: to put this another way, if you're on the back slope of a hill, but your only a-tk weapon is a panzerfaust with an effective range of 50m and your sections are 100m down from the crest, then your do NOT have a RSP, since enemy armour can crest the rise, sit happily at a range of 50-100m and blow your guys to pieces with no risk to themselves.

[Tigrii]

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.

[JonS]

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).

That's what your own indirect weapons are for.

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.

Yes, and I believe the Germans whined about the Allies being gamey bastiges when they figured that out in 1944, too

[Praetori]

Most defenders forget to use smoke as well.

A couple of mortars with smoke can screen the ambush and isolate the units you want to hit. Explosive rounds should be called in as soon as you trigger the first ambush, no more than 30seconds (pause in WeGo) or preferably even less before you bug out and let the arty prevent an advance. Rinse and repeat.

[Broadsword56]

Great tactics thread! Love it when we're all contributing ideas and insights about playing, instead of whining about the limitations/perceived flaws of the game itself.

[Steiner14]

Broadsword56,

good post. It shows what i already tried to explain:

the usual defensive setups in CMBN battles are not adequate and are more like rearguarding units on the move, but not dug in units. IMO there should be made much more use of the defensive tools (and new, additional tools would be very nice, too ).

Ofcourse that would make attacking more difficult and sometimes the designers would invent real hard nuts, that need a lot of planning, but for those who like realism, i think it would be more challenging and more fun.

Why do we have no scenarios, only the best attack players can achieve a minor victory (not because of unit balance, but because of the overall strenght of the defensive position)?

Another aspect i would like to see a solution for, is the visibility of hidden ATGs. I mean we do not have the possibility for ATGs to dig them into the ground down to the barrel and put camouflage on them. Very often they could not be spotted by FOs with binocs, but only after they had opened fire and the muzzle flash was spotted. Maybe a stealth and a size-bonus to simulate that kind of entrenched ATGs would be a solution?

[Broadsword56]

+1 to the idea of harder-to-spot ATGs. That would at least help compensate for their not having the full panoply of dug-in positions and overhead cammo netting, etc. That would just be a tweak to some numerical factors, wouldn't it? Although I understand that BFC are very (justifiably) conservative about things like that and don't want to risk unhinging the overall game balance.

[sburke]

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).

I didn't say to vacate the hedgerow - moving laterally can have the same effect. I started trying this tactic earlier this summer in a battle with broadsword where I just knew I was gonna face a lot of artillery. For the most part it worked really well. It wasn't until the really big barrage was called in to start the main attack that I got shut down, but at that point the main attack was having to be launched against my outpost line.

There is no set rule for anything though, the point is to try and make the terrain work for you. Sometimes that just isn't possible, but a bit of creativity can go a long way. The map you play on is going to dictate your tactics so make no assumptions that what worked in one battle will work in the next. Look for things like dead ground that may give you an opportunity to flank an enemy advance. I have ended up on defence a lot, won some, lost others. What I haven't found is there is some automatic assumption that the offense should win. For me it is more an issue of does the battlefield itself have what I need to defeat the opposing force. I don't generally rely on AT guns as the lynchpin of my defense. I've had much more success with Pzshk and PF, though the maps I have generally fought on are closer terrain.

Obviously there is a lot more to the whole issue of fighting a defensive battle. If your opponent has enough firepower they are going to be able to hit you. A linear barrage on a hedgerow is gonna eliminate any plan to displace. A few trps of your own however can even that score.