Infantry need some advice.

[crsutt]

In comparison to the old CM, it seems much more difficult to protect infantry from tanks and arty. It is hard to believe that I can't move infantry into rubble. Basically, if your opponent has a large tank force, it just pays for him to systematically rubble buildings, even if empty, to deny the coverage to the infantry and force them to move in the open. Also, is just does not seem like reverse slopes offer much protection for infantry or AT guns.

Any tips for protecting my units? What is the best terrain for them and the best way to move in fight when faced with a lot of heavy ordinance?

Aside from bocage. What is the best way to conceal AT guns? I try to hide them in terrain but they seem to get spotted a great deal before firing a shot.

Also, is it just me or do MGs never jam in CM2?

[Pandur]

from the scenarios i make i gather the AT guns are no longer a possible tactical tool for knife fight scenarios, or very limited. in CMx1 you could use the AT guns on smal maps, but on CMx2 mostly through limitation of actionspot placement rules they are almost useless, you can find the smalest keyhole to have them in good position but they hardly have a share of action that way.

smal AT guns need "at least" 400 meters and good cover, big AT guns can go to 700-800+ meters with or without cover and there they work briliantly. more range is better.

similar problem was with ATGM launchers in CMSF, at short range they suck, at longe range(1k meters minimum- 2k or more good) they rule, but ppl complained as most scenarios are smal.

yes, infantry is much more vulnerable to armor in a way, they are easy to spot. have to live with it. new mechanics new game.

[Andrew H.]

In comparison to the old CM, it seems much more difficult to protect infantry from tanks and arty. It is hard to believe that I can't move infantry into rubble. Basically, if your opponent has a large tank force, it just pays for him to systematically rubble buildings, even if empty, to deny the coverage to the infantry and force them to move in the open. Also, is just does not seem like reverse slopes offer much protection for infantry or AT guns.

Any tips for protecting my units? What is the best terrain for them and the best way to move in fight when faced with a lot of heavy ordinance?

Aside from bocage. What is the best way to conceal AT guns? I try to hide them in terrain but they seem to get spotted a great deal before firing a shot.

Also, is it just me or do MGs never jam in CM2?

1. Put your AT guns in trees, but not at the edge of the trees. They should be one (or more if you still have LOS) actions spots back.

2. They should also not be in a location where a lot of units will have LOS to them - reverse slopes or behind other cover is good.

As (2) implies, they also tend to not work well in the main line of defense. But they can work pretty well to protect flanks. So if I'm tasked with defending a village near the middle of the map, I might put a couple of AT guns near edge of the map closest to me, not visible from the enemy start line or even main approach to the village. The goal is not to assist in the main defense of the village, but to prevent the attacker from sending tanks or infantry on a long hook to envelop the village from a side. In this context, facing isolated enemy units, they tend to work pretty well.

[George MC]

Good map design can help AT guns. A common design flaw is just plonking down trees and calling it a wood... If the designer uses the brush tile and even add some bocage (the small bocage with the break is good) you can create perfect cover for AT guns that makes em invisible until they open up at point bank range. Poor map design only exacerbates the issue with cover - good map design pretty much eliminates it.

It's the same with small villages etc. Designers really need to ensure they add other stuff around houses rather than again plonking several houses down onto some grass. All houses have coer around them - gardens, hedges, fences, bushes etc in the garden. I've played several maps where the village consists of several houses just randomly plonked down onto dirt. No wonder infantry struggle to stay alive.

[mjkerner]

Absolutely Plus 1 to this! ^^^^^

[crsutt]

Good map design can help AT guns. A common design flaw is just plonking down trees and calling it a wood... If the designer uses the brush tile and even add some bocage (the small bocage with the break is good) you can create perfect cover for AT guns that makes em invisible until they open up at point bank range. Poor map design only exacerbates the issue with cover - good map design pretty much eliminates it.

It's the same with small villages etc. Designers really need to ensure they add other stuff around houses rather than again plonking several houses down onto some grass. All houses have coer around them - gardens, hedges, fences, bushes etc in the garden. I've played several maps where the village consists of several houses just randomly plonked down onto dirt. No wonder infantry struggle to stay alive.

Thanks, you may have hit this one for me. I am playing a stock scenario and just don't find it very good. Very dull symmetrical meeting engagement with relatively equal forces, terrain and reinforcement groups and times of entry. It only figures that the terrain is lacking as well. Like you say, the buildings are just plopped down in the map with very little supporting terrain around them. This is Italy for petes sake. Where are the stone walls?

But I still can't believe that infantry can't enter rubble. The enemy actually gets rewarded for creating rubble. Who thought this was a good idea? If I were playing Stalingrad, I would have to evacuate the city.

[YankeeDog]

Keys to keeping infantry alive in any situation where there's a lot of firepower around (be it tanks, artillery, or whatever else). In order of preference:

1. Defilade.

2. Defilade.

3. Low ground, otherwise known as defilade.

3. Anything else that creates a hard LOS block, like high walls & bocage, rows of buildings etc.

4. All other types of cover.

Seriously: When analyzing a map, first thing I do is turn off all trees, ignore all terrain features and structures, and find the low ground. Once I've figured out where the defilade lies, then I start considering the value secondary cover like trees, bushes, buildings etc.

But yeah, if the SD doesn't pay much attention to map-making, and gives you a pool-table flat map without those minor undulations of land that IRL are present pretty much everywhere except a soccer pitch, then the infantry is kind of SOL.

Some of your other queries don't jive with my game experience. To wit:

Infantry not being able to enter rubble: I put infantry in rubble all the time. Not sure why you are not able to.

Reverse slopes: IME, reverse slopes kick butt in CMx2. In a game I finished recently, I had a defending 6-man German squad + 2-man Plt. HQ set up in open ground on a reverse slope completely wipe out an entire U.S. Platoon. Granted, this was against the AI, which isn't exactly a tactical genius. But the reverse slope worked beautifully: The G.I.s charged over the rise, and the Germans gunned them down as they came into view.

So I can't help you with those.

As for MGs, no, they don't jam as such, but HMG teams will periodically execute belt/barrel changes, which pauses their fire for 15 seconds or so and is therefore functionally fairly similar to a jam.

[mjkerner]

About infantry in rubble: I seem to recall that you can't put infantry in it during set-up, but you can move them into it after the game starts. Or maybe you couldn't in the original CMBN, and then could after a patch or module came out. My memory sux, but crsutt's comment rings true to me, because I distinctly remember being pleasantly surprised in a pbem a while ago when I needed to crawl a mg team into some rubble for safety, thought it wouldn't work, but tried it anyway...and it worked!

[womble]

It is hard to believe that I can't move infantry into rubble.

That's because it's not true. Vehicles are prohibited from entering rubble, but not infantry. The problem you're porbably seeing is that the rubble you're trying to enter is smeared across the boundary of two Action Spots (AS), so when you drop an infantry waypoint on the rubble patch, it "rubber bands" to the centre of one AS or another and not onto the patch. You might even find that if you're moving in some directions relative to the rubble, your pTruppen don't enter the rubble. However, they often will, and pretty much always will if you put a Face command (or a cover arc with its centreline pointing) across the rubble away from the waypoint that has 'landed' next to it. They'll arrange themselves in the rubble because it's probably the best cover and concealment with respect to potential enemies in the direction of the Face or CA. You just have to encourage the TacAI to use the rubble.

Basically, if your opponent has a large tank force, it just pays for him to systematically rubble buildings, even if empty, to deny the coverage to the infantry and force them to move in the open.

Often this isn't the case. Particularly given that Faust/Shreck/Zook won't shoot from within buildings but will from within rubble. Often it is, since some of the hardest troops to winkle out (if you've not got any indirect HE available) are the ones hiding behind the buildings that you can't get at with your DF HE, or infantry weapons, who'll slaughter your own infantry when they enter the building that the defender is behind.

Also, is just does not seem like reverse slopes offer much protection for infantry or AT guns.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Reverse slopes per se don't offer much in the way of protection to anything once the thing you want them protected against crests the slope. The point of reverse slopes is to stop them seeing anything until that point and to allow you to concentrate your fire on assets that cross the crest piecemeal, killing them before they spot you. Other concealment is necessary to make your spotting chances better than theirs. But in essence, the reverse slope provides pure and complete defilade up to a point, which gives ATG 100% protection (apart from preplanned fire and TRPs) until the enemy reach that point.

Any tips for protecting my units? What is the best terrain for them and the best way to move in fight when faced with a lot of heavy ordinance?

The best terrain to move in is defilade: if there is ground in the way, they can't see you, and can only bring indirect fires to bear.

What is the best way to conceal AT guns? I try to hide them in terrain but they seem to get spotted a great deal before firing a shot.

Brush and low bushes, behind a couple of AS of tall grass or forest tiles, preferably in a hollow at the far end of a reverse slope. Remember that being under tall trees confers little concealment from foes which can see under the trees, unless there's Forest type terrain under the trees too. And there's little substitute for range. At 500m, they start to get harder to spot, and at 1000m they can stay hidden for many shots (if they started the game there). Big "Mooses" of ATGs like US 76mm or the German 88s will struggle to stay hidden, most of the time, but will similarly, if well sited, tend to make sure that non-infantry that do see them don't see them for very long.

Also, is it just me or do MGs never jam in CM2?

Nope. Because WW2 MGs didn't. Or rather, they had expeditious ways of getting over most jams (swap barrels, and have the assistant gunner clear the misfired round from the chamber of the swapped-out barrel while the gunner carries on working the gun, for example) that mean the operation of the system is no more interrupted than it is in normal use, where the barrel has to be changed periodically anyway.

[herr_oberst]

Reverse slopes seem to work just fine. I had a scout platoon pretty well minced by a platoon in foxholes on the reverse slope in a campaign scenario. But that was a well designed scenario -- reverse slope defense, foxholes spread amid some trees -- a real bugger to clear until I could get around behind them and setup a crossfire.