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Fortification Durability Tests


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LOLOL, I meant using the disabled HTs, as well as bunkers, for the French in their trench lines You can bury them and cover them with bushes so that they can barely be recognised.

I was just spit-balling some ideas. CM has a lot of work-arounds if you want to dig for them, and can accept the historical accuracy compromises.

So far, it seems the best you will be able to do is have a special mod package that comes with the battle, for Modular Buildings made up to look like bunkers.

Send Tanks a Lot a check, and see what he says. ;)

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While writing this, it occurs that I have never experimented with sunken, immobilized Half-Tracks.

Throw a few rounds at some HTs sited along your trench lines LLF. Maybe they will help some.

The answer to hardening bunkers against 81mm turns out to be quite simple, with no trees needed (might need them to shrug off the 120mm heavies though!)

Per my earlier tests, 81mms cannot (AFAIK) destroy bunkers outright, but near misses can cause substantial casualties (4-5 out of 9 max capacity) through the firing aperture to the occupants, who won't HIDE or Cower. Sandbags, walls and other barriers won't sit close enough to the bunker (or vice versa) to mask it.

The solution: stick a destroyed halftrack (or any other AFV) up athwart the vulnerable aperture. Zero casualties in 5 playtests in spite of numerous direct hits (the wreck was set ablaze twice, but there's no cookoff effects -- it just looks neat!). The track takes all the punishment, although the (Veteran/High) bunker occupants max out the Pin meter and suffer morale effects.

FortTest_Track.jpg

So it doesn't look quite so odd, I swapped the M5 Brit halftrack wireframe for a wood bunker. It's still a HT for all game purposes, just looks like a bunker.

FortTest_Track2.jpg

With that problem solved, I now move on to the 120mm indirect mortar barrage (1 tube firing a Maximum 51 shells including spots), which has more devastating effects on both the (Point) target bunker and its surroundings, as you can see from this screenie.

FortTest_120mm_1.jpg

The bunker was KOed and the squad evacuated, only to be massacred in the nearby trenches. 9 of 9 casualties. And the next bunker over was also killed and it wasn't even a target.

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.... Come on, how hard is it REALLY for Charles to work up an illum round that is fired as a mortar round, briefly illuminates an area around the impact and then fades out. Flickering, wind drift, all that stuff can wait for CM3. This is a very basic piece of kit.

My hack is to reskin a Kublewagen as a pole, set the vehicle to "Burning" and it arrives as a Reinforcement. Only drawback: it illuminates for the rest of the game.

FortTest_illum.jpg

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Like sublime, I'm loving the creativity and ingenuity in this thread :)

By placing walls inside rubble, you get a little extra splash damage protection, at the cost of movement silliness that must be rigorously tested out.

rubblewall3.jpg

Schultz, with this one in particular, doesn't the X wall prevent infantry movement into that tile altogether? AIUI, for any wall with a junction (the T, Y, X and + pieces) infantry cannot move into the 'small' corners.

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Still LLF, all the other stuff is impressive, but thats a really great workaround for illum rounds. I'm very impressed with your creative thinking with this and the dead HT. brilliant.

In another attempt to replicate an illumination round, I tried combining the burning pole visual with a TRP. Unfortunately, you can't bring in a TRP as a reinforcement (yes, I understand why), so it's there from the start.

I just had a terribly frustrating playtest, gaming out a small night action involving a VietMinh sapper unit (a Panzershreck* team, a Breach team and a Scout team -- 8 men, Crack/Extreme) probing the wire entanglements (~level 8) in front of a French (Airborne) platoon dug in on a hilltop position (level 20), under covering fire from mortars on another (level 12) hilltop.

1. The AI opened with a punishing 120mm barrage on the position (100 shells), which knocked out one of the 4 bunkers, killing 8 of 9 occupants. The other bunkers withstood the barrage (all were masked by wrecked halftracks). In a prior playtest, all 4 bunkers came through unscathed.

2. Even though the night was pitch black (overcast), everyone seemed able to see everyone else quite nicely at ranges of up to 270m. The death star 81mm mortar ranged in promptly on any French position with the temerity to open fire and quickly KOed the French 60mm mortar and the entire platoon HQ team -- about a dozen casualties in all, before ammo ran dry.

3. The VM ignored its AI Order to Assault through the wire to the foot of the hill (and then knock out the French OPs using the shreck). I need to figure out how to persuade it to breach the wire and advance -- this may be just an AI programming issue.

Instead, the 3 teams sat in open ground at about 90m range, and, aided by rifle fire from the overwatching mortar+FOO (5 men), proceeded to systematically shoot the remaining 15 or so French defenders out of their holes and scrapes uphill, using nothing more than small arms. The French were Vets/High, yet were easily pinned and killed as they engaged in spite of the darkness. Neither their trenches, nor sandbag walls, nor the plentiful shellholes -- on higher ground -- conferred the kind of protection I would expect.

I am going to tweak a few things (e.g. add Fog to reduce visibility further, although I did want some VM overwatch capability), then rerun the test tomorrow. But something really seems out of whack with cover (and with infantry cover-seeking) in the game. I've been quietly reading the MG thread over at CMFI, and Jason says much the same thing. Men not in cover should not be able to rapidly spot and kill equal numbers of men in cover at range even in daylight much less in pitch dark.

Were it really this easy, Dien Bien Phu would have been over in days. World War I as well.

* The PSK best represents the US 90mm "super bazooka" used in numbers by the VM (although not by the French).

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I will assume you're being cute here, Jon. As you know perfectly well, the guns opened fire on March 13 and the main camp fell on May 7, nearly 2 months later.

The Peoples Army had to take the various outposts, one after another, the old fashioned way, by breaching the wire barriers and blasting the dugouts with grenades up close and personal. While I am skeptical of the 20-25,000 VM casualties estimated by the French (again, we Westerners cling to a deep-rooted meme/terror of being overwhelmed by screaming Asiatic hordes that goes back to Thermopylae at least), most of these assaults were extremely costly and many were failures. In precisely no case were the defenders eliminated or driven out by fire in spite of the dominant tactical positions of the Viet Minh.

In fact, I defy you to find me an example pre 1990 where a prepared position held by a disciplined force has been annihilated solely by fire, allowing an attacker to simply walk in. Yet this result is routinely the case in CMBN.

Kettler -- you are welcome too. Just keep it brief please.

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I meant using the disabled HTs, as well as bunkers, for the French in their trench lines You can bury them and cover them with bushes so that they can barely be recognised.

You know what, I may actually give this a try -- reskin an immobilized halftrack or carrier as a trench and bury it hull down. At least the MG gunner will "prairie dog" (Un/Button) quickly up and down between shots, the way ordinary infantry under fire ought to do instead of just sitting there upright (Spotting) waiting to be picked off. Unfortunately though, halftracks are swiss-cheesed by small arms just as easily as Fortifications.

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Actually, I wasn't. WWI (and DBP, &c.) took years (months) because of logistics. If logistics wasn't a thing, WWI (and DBP, &c.) probably would have been over in days.

Armchair General

Per official history of PAVN's Artillery, the exact [VM artillery, as of Mar 21] number is

24 x 105mm

20 x 75mm mountain guns (son pháo). At least half of them were Japanese Type 41

15 x 120mm mortars

There are also a large amount of 81/82mm mortars and 57/75mm RR in infantry units.

In addition, VM was reinforced by a battalion of 12 Chinese made 6-barrel MLRSs in the last days.

Ammo expenditures, per PAVN (planned / allocated / expended)

DKZ 57 4300 / 4150 / 4000

DKZ 75 4000 / 4000 / 530

Bazooka 90 1720 / 1820 / 1800

Mortar 60mm 22700 / 21800 / 23230

Mortar 81/82mm 34934 / 35993 / 37300

Mortar 120mm 4250 / 4360/ 3000

75mm artillery 3750 / 3574 / 4700

105mm howitzer 15094 / 15118 / 16600

Rocket H6 4000 / 4000 / 836

Grenades 96180 / 96480 / 86080

(Where actuals exceed allocations, the difference appears to have been French airdrops that went astray! Most notably, the VM used the advanced fuses on the misdropped 105 shells to devastating effect)

So if we were to add a zero (10x) to all the above numbers -- tubes and shell counts -- it is your contention that the battle would have been over in days instead of weeks? That annihilation fire is indeed possible if you put enough explosive on it?

Curtis LeMay and Earl Haig smile upon you! (Leslie McNair and the Abbott of Monte Cassino, not so much). :D

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At the risk of becoming my own John Kettler here, the closest the Viet Minh came to achieving "annihilation by fire" on any French position was the very first night -- the assault on 13DBLE on Beatrice.

Martin Windrow:

"Shortly before 5 pm, legionnaires on Beatrice 3 reported enemy infantry coming over the crests to the south....a force of several battalions... 'CPO Beatrice 321, 8 [120mm] rounds per minute.' As the Legion mortarmen adjusted their sights, the world went mad... a sort of drum roll from the east."

From the Armchair General thread as above.

Viet Minh artillery basically turned the whole strong point upside down, killed the entire command post, and was depicted by surviving Legionaires themselves as absolutely apocalyptic. Plus, Viet Minh infantry was so successful in preparatory infiltrating the barbed wire of Beatrice to the point that their starting position was only some 180m from the peak. The battle practically lasted only more than two hours (barring the 9th Company). March 13 was chosen as a new moon day, so complete darkness would seriously impede the ability of the defenders to grasp the "big picture".

Fall wrote that at the moment of the attack, the garrison was reduced to about 500 men from the normal strength of 700. The pile of bodies left to the French to collect the day after was estimated to have contained 300 bodies. 194 men were reported to have got out of the battle alive. The Viet Minh claimed they got 289 prisoners. Feel free to challenge any of the numbers as they obviously don't add up.... The French Legionnaires estimated at least 500 [VM] dead.

Staff officer of regiment 141 at Him Lam (Beatrice): "From our side, the battles for Beatrice, Gabrielle and Anne-Marie were prepared very carefully by 2 divisions 308 and 312. So, only 2 regiments were committed for each position. For Beatrice, it was the 209 and 141 of 312nd Division. In fact, this battle happened rather smoothly for us, most of french defensive positions were well known and well scored by 105mm gunners by direct fires after months of preparation(the French trenches here are the strongest, but they are not made to take direct hit from 105mm as the 2 strongpoint commanders would experience it and paid it for their life at 2 different commanding posts). The main assault was made by the 141 regiment and most of the Viet Minh casualties came from the 141, especially from its batallion 11....The 13 DBLE is an elite unit, but it was caught here by a complete and worst case surprise. Our nearly 200 KIAs for such a well prepared and favorable operation show their valor. But they are just men, not Rambo. The low ratio of KIA and WIA is mostly from the very bad performance from the rear medical services."

The PAVN official casualties for Beatrice were 193 KIAs and 137 WIAs.

But in spite of all that, the battle was decided by infantry assault....

Jules Roy:

At last some information came in from Beatrice: each strong point was fighting separately. Six Viet battalions, pouring in along three axes from the northwest, the north and the northeast, had already gained a footing on the inner defenses. Langlais asked Piroth to lay down barrages on the barbed wire defenses destroyed by the Viet guns, but Piroth's batteries, under enemy fire, were suffering terrible losses.

[VM officer] "Our jumping off point was moved up to only two hundred yards from the peaks of Beatrice [Him Lam]...." Each bangalore cleared an area of four square yards. The losses were so heavy that the division was asked for reinforcements. The attack from the northwest was hanging fire.... Within ten minutes of each other, two of Beatrice's peaks fell.... At about 2100 the firing slackened.... Suddenly at 2300 hours, the attack was renewed and the central peak fell at fifteen minutes after midnight

Windrow:

Waves of infantry grenaded and shot their way forwards and sideways through the trenches, blasting the remaining shelters and barricades with bazookas.

After taking great losses among their junior leaders and weapons crews, the attackers too were suffering from poor coordination; it became an NCOs' battle on both sides, with the outcome of a score of little local fights depending on the courage and initiative of individuals.... His company rushed forward with neither heavy weapons support nor radio contact from regiment or battalion; the company's two machine guns were destroyed and the bo doi used every fold in the ground for cover before they rushed a succession if trench corners with grenades and submachine guns.... assault units were pulled back soon after their victory.... artillery observers had been installed.

And after all that, 194 (per Fall, Roy says "about 100") of the original 450 Legion defenders (Windrow's estimate, not Fall's) survived to reach French lines. Most of whom would likely still have been sitting in their holes in the morning had counterfire been more effective and stalled the Vietnamese attacks on the wire.

Don't get me wrong -- the effects of heavy bombardment are intense and destructive. But they do not in themselves suffice to either destroy or compel withdrawal of a defending force that is strongly dug in, even in crude field works dug with their own hands as was the case at DBP.

Yet that is demonstrably NOT the case in CMBN -- in fact it appears near impossible to represent such a defense. Ranged fire -- shells and ordinary bullets -- consistently trumps "fortification" and does so rapidly, day or night. That is simply wrong.

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I hesitate to get involved in this as frankly I don't know s**t, or more precisely I do know s**t and that is about it.

From my view though CM fortifications are not on the scale of what you'd see in DBP. Trenches that you see are not deep enough nor are the bunkers really representative of hardened positions regardless of what they visually may look like. I view them more as something a unit would scratch together over maybe 24 hours and not a built up defensive network. As much as I appreciate all the work you are putting into this LLF, I do not think the current tools in game are going to get you to where you want to be on this unfortunately.

As to logistics, yes that was an issue for the Viet Minh, but they had largely tackled that prior to launching the assault. I think LLF is on target here in that logisitics were an issue for beginning the assault, but once they had accumulated their material, that was no longer a factor. In other words, it would not impact the period he is attempting to recreate.

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There is a bit more to logistics than just moving a few shells. Really, why is this even controversial? I thought the importance - the centrality - of log to mil operations was well understood?

Are we talking past each other here? I am making a broad case that "fortifications" in CMBN are profoundly ineffective in protecting infantry against ranged fire of any kind, and that this completely flies in the face of the historical record, even in a battle like DBP where the attacker enjoyed near perfect conditions in terms of fire superiority, ability to fire with impunity, clear fields of observation and weeks of preparation time.

And you're repeating some truism about logistics? Yes, fine, it's important, so what? I respect you a lot JonS, so I can only assume I'm missing some more profound point.

EDIT: SBurke, yes, Steve has explicitly stated that the fortifications provided represent primitive field works that infantry could build with their own hands using materials ready to hand on the battlefield (dirt, sandbags, saplings). I shall set aside the fact that the wireframes LOOK a lot more sturdy and well-engineered than that (which is misleading), and that there were plenty of Normandy battles that involved attacks on German positions that they'd had plenty of time to build up and camouflage.

But I could go out my backyard with a spade and my SMLE, and in a few hours dig a one-man spider hole with a narrow embrasure between two sandbags, camouflaged with a bush, that you could drop a dozen mortar rounds on and hose down with a machine gun and still not have more than a 1 in 5 chance of wounding or killing me.

Even by the standards of hasty entrenchments these things are nearly useless. Forget Dien Bien Phu, a hole or two got dug in Normandy I think. And if a unit manning it can be systematically shot to death from hundreds of yards away within minutes even when Hiding, there's something freeking wrong.

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But I could go out my backyard with a spade and my SMLE, and in a few hours dig a one-man spider hole with a narrow embrasure between two sandbags, camouflaged with a bush, that you could drop a dozen mortar rounds on and hose down with a machine gun and still not have more than a 1 in 5 chance of wounding or killing me.

I won't hold you testing this. :D

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Are we talking past each other here? ... I can only assume I'm missing some more profound point.

Me? Profound? God forbid. I think we're just talking past each other.

I see "I just beat the computer on Sooper Hardz level, I must be better than teh Rommelz" type comments from time to time, generally coupled a "why didn't the Germans/Allies/Soviets/Aliens just do it my way?" question.*

Well, the reason the Germans/Allies/Soviets/Aliens didn't just do it that way invariably comes down to logistics. They simply couldn't get enough stuff to the places they needed it. That's why the Somme offensive failed, it's why 3rd Ypres ultimately bogged down, it's why the German 1918 offensives all failed, it's why the Guderian didn't get to Moscow, and Rommel didn't get to Cairo. And it's why Giap didn't overrun DBP in an afternoon.

There were other factors too, of course. Intelligence - or lack of it (military intelligence that is, not IQ intelligence :D ) - is often up there. But the key limiter is usually logistics.

I wasn't commenting on the robustness or otherwise of CM fortifications at all. If I were to comment on that, it'd probably be along the lines that the fortifications are probably ok, but direct and indirect fire might be too precise and too accurate Edit: and that the ability of HE to cause yellow/red/brown cas against men could maybe be modelled as some kind of logarithmic decay curve - initial rounds are very effective, but as men wriggle themselves into cover (c.f. CM's so-called 'micro terrain') then the effectiveness of each additional shell as a cas causing agent decreases. Suppression effects, on the other hand, could maybe go the other way. Few HE rounds = slight suppression, loads of HE rounds = lots of suppression. That way the player commander would have to deside what kinds of effects they want, and balance that against the quantity of rounds they have. It's a complex problem, with lots of inter-related elements.

Jon

* Do I need to point out I'm not particularly talking about you, LLF, or your posts here? Hopefully not.

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I don't think the issues with fortification/entrenchment modeling are really going to go away until we get entrenchments/fortifications that are actually an integral part of the 3D terrain mesh, properly existing mostly below grade level. I think there are currently more compromises & abstractions in this particular area of the game model than most others and as a result, no matter how much "tweaking" is done, fortifications and entrenchments are going to be like a too-small blanket on a cold night -- no matter how you arrange it, something is left out in the cold.

Steve has stated in the past that it's going to be a lot of work to actually fully integrate fortifications with the terrain mesh while also maintaining FoW, but I hope it can be done before too long... if not for the Battle of the Bulge game, then I hold out hope for the first East Front title.

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LOL! OK, I get you now.

I wasn't commenting on the robustness or otherwise of CM fortifications at all. If I were to comment on that, it'd probably be along the lines that the fortifications are probably ok, but direct and indirect fire might be too precise and too accurate.

I won't set you up as a straw man, since you aren't so inclined, but my personal sense is that the main "breakdowns" that need to be addressed in the essential Men Against Fire equation lie at the target end, not the shooter end.

BFC has clearly worked very hard on the ballistics modeling for both direct and indirect weapons for years, and done a lot of diligent testing and tweaking since CMSF. So it seems to me that it's actually pretty good. However, units of all kinds are a little too eagle-eyed in terms of Spotting, even under adverse conditions of incoming fire, visibility and terrain, and indirect weapons also range in a little too quick).

EDIT: Y-Dog, the terrain mesh thing is a big part of it, yes. But I thought I'd neutralized that by sinking the fortifications a meter or two into the earth or sticking sandbag walls in front of them, essentially giving them hull down protection. This does seem to help a little with Hiding or Cowering guys getting killed by bullets that penetrate seemingly solid cover.

But at the end of the day, the defending pixeltroops also have to put their heads up to spot and fight, and it seems like that's another big part of the problem. Instead of taking quick peeks or snap shots, preferably between narrow embrasures (gaps) that limit their lateral exposure, they expose their heads and upper bodies too far, for too long, and the law of incoming averages rapidly catches up with them.

There are only 3 default postures for CMtruppen: fully prone, taking a knee and standing and the latter two bring too much of the body into the open. Moreover, all parapets (the tops of cover) are dead flat -- like tops of walls. Not saying the fixes for these crude behaviors are easy to implement. But the consequences for CM infantry combat are very basic and profound.

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LongLeftFlank,

Good to be back! I like your buried, reskinned halftrack as trench idea. Goodness knows,it's got to be better than what we have now. You've already got a handle on the fortification side and on what WO and other predictions are for mortar lethality--vs your enormously larger lethality numbers. I think, though I've spotted a disconnect.

In one of the quotes you provided there's an explicit reference to 105 guns in direct fire. This flatly contradicts multiple accounts I've read which state the precious 105s were specifically sited on the second range of hills and were fired indirectly, exclusively, under control of poorly trained VM FOs. This also contradicts a brief clip from the North Vietnamese DBP doc in which one indirect fire, heavily protected firing position is shown, from both within and without. I've never seen the like for field artillery.

The other thing I noticed was a reference to captured 105mm ammo with "special fuzes." Based on their description as "devastating," I think the writer's referring to VT. If so, we have a further factor contributing to the effectiveness of the VM bombardment. Of course, their leverage has a lot to do with where they were aimed, a matter in which I defer to you.

Regards,

John Kettler

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I don't want to get into it too much here, since this isn't a DBP thread per se, but Beatrice was the opening night of the siege and was a "special case" in numerous respects. Including 105s shooting a bastion (they mainly zeroed the entrenched camp and airfield).

Re halftracks, I'll test it once my little one is in bed but I'm not optimistic about the likely outcomes. I used them as Alligators in Makin and found they richly deserved their moniker "Purple Heart boxes" (i.e. it seems the game gets it right). Unlike Trenches, troops inside cannot Hide or Cower, and they also tend to bail out once the fire gets too intense. And if the HT is destroyed by ordnance they can all get killed at once. We shall see.

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Like sublime, I'm loving the creativity and ingenuity in this thread :)

Schultz, with this one in particular, doesn't the X wall prevent infantry movement into that tile altogether? AIUI, for any wall with a junction (the T, Y, X and + pieces) infantry cannot move into the 'small' corners.

Yes, Jon, that particular test structure is impassable. I didn't find out until long after I took those pics. I made a bunch of testbed structures, and that one was in photobucket. ;)

There are various ways that DO work though. Especially with multi-tile rubble.

LLF, the wireframe trades are frickin' awesome!

Now, why do you not switch the wooden shelter look into the concrete shelter specs?

Or, are they same as far as the game is concerned?

-

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