Smoke, used in an attack

[Lt Belenko]

Lately, I've been burning a Perdomo 10th Anniversary Churchill cigar when I attack/smoke.

[Pak40]

They take some using... You have to either be very specific (and patient, in WeGo) or lucky to get the smoke bombs to go anywhere useful...

Yes, but not too bad once you're used to the mechanics and know the wind for the particular battle you're playing. Using the face command the turn before you pop the smoke will ensure that it goes the correct direction. You might even be able to do it in the same turn but I seem to have had bad luck with this method.

[Quintus Sertorius]

I never have enough smoke. I use it constantly. If I'm not using it to prevent enemy LOS to my defenders, or blinding and choking enemy defenders, I'm using it as a feint. Smoke rounds in one place, attack in another.

[Zane]

Tank in trouble from enemy fire Pop a smoke in back out of Line of fire.

Played the german Last night my tank was taking a beating from enemy fire.

Pop a smoke and move behine Building.

Zane

[JasonC]

Other than Baneman, I consider most of the comments to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of smoke on the attack. It isn't cover, its role is not to protect otherwise unsafe movements in the open. It is temporary terrain, its role is to reshape the visual landscape in order to isolate the portion of the battlefield you want to dominate. By that I mean you use it the same way you use permanent terrain LOS blockages like ridges or buildings, to break up the defenders and keyhole the match ups you want, while avoiding the firepower of other elements of the enemy force. E.g. You don't permanently hide your tank behind that building, you peak around one side of it to isolate on a lone defender it can kill.

Fire is what takes ground, not movement. Superior overwatch fires shoot the attack in, by destroying the defenders in a selected area. That much the original poster had right, and his understanding that aspect explains why he rarely uses smoke.'

But there is no need to take on the whole defense at once. Attack is all about using the initiative to create many on few match ups that are lopsidedly in your favor, and then to conduct several of those fights in sequence, to blast through the weaker defenders. You want 10 to 1 firefights 5 times in a row to kill an enemy half your strength, not one firefight at 2 to 1.

The defender has a cover differential, you need to overmatch it with an even greater firepower differential. You can get that by maneuver and being concentrated and hitting only a portion of the defense, leaving others dislocated or out of position at the moments that matter. Well, smoke is portable dislocation.

You mask the right side of the defender's fire scheme while leaving all your long lines of sight and fire to the left side of his position open and unobscured. Then the attack goes in on his left.

Fire the smoke right where the defenders you want to mask are, or right in front of them - not where your forces are or right in front of those. A smoke barrage right in front of an enemy fire nest blocks its view to most of the map, including all the areas you know will be relevant because you have forces there.

You can use it more tactically, to just take that key shooter out of the firefight until the right answering asset comes up. The ATG that just unmasked will die to your 81mm mortars, but you don't want it killing tanks in the meantime. So you mask it and reverse the tanks and set up the mortars and creep the mortar observer to the right spot for when the smoke clears.

Some of those tactical uses are indeed defensive, meant to protect portions of your force. But you are not trying to stop combat from occurring, you are trying to get that combat to take place with the odds and weapons mix you picked out, not the odds and weapons mix the defender's whole defensive scheme was counting on.

Sometimes you can accomplish the same thing by just massing fires on a key defender and kill him outright - but there are lots of cases where is takes a lot more firepower to kill a defender than to mask him - so you can kill his friends in the meantime.

Disarticulate the enemy force. Get the match ups you want. Not no firefights, but your cherry picked firefights only - that is what the stuff is for.

I hope this is useful.

[agusto]

Why dont you make a long tactic tutorial, JasonC? All posts i ve read from you that were about tactics were excellent and helped me to better understand how tactics work. I even have 5 of your posts added to my favorites in firefox .

Edit: Here is my collection:

Recon:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1457069&postcount=52

Fire & Movement:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1413819&postcount=21

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1414257&postcount=42

Terrain:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1414775&postcount=55

And now there is also Smoke:

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showpost.php?p=1459053&postcount=30

These posts read like they are written by someone who served as officer in the US Army.

[BLSTK]

I agree, Agusto, So when's the book coming out, JC?

[Blazing 88's]

+2 what Paper Tiger says.

Yep..............

[Bil Hardenberger]

Not that anybody noticed Jason, but I believe I said the same thing you did back on page 1, but in fewer words:

... Use it as an additional way to mask movement and block the enemy's ability to fire and break up your movement.

Note I said "mask movement".. don't drive through the smoke, but around it as you would use a terrain feature.

Other than Baneman, I consider most of the comments to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of smoke on the attack. It isn't cover, its role is not to protect otherwise unsafe movements in the open. It is temporary terrain, its role is to reshape the visual landscape in order to isolate the portion of the battlefield you want to dominate...

[Michael Emrys]

Yeah, and I wrote, "A favorite trick of mine...is to smoke one part of the enemy position while shooting up another part."

I don't think Jason may have read the entire thread before posting.

Michael

[A Canadian Cat]

I was just going to let it go but...

From my first post " Call in smoke to blind half the enemy and suppress and kill the other half. Once the smoke clears you deal with the other half. Divide an conquer."

And that was before either of you guys

[Michael Emrys]

And that was before either of you guys

Great minds...

Michael

[BLSTK]

We'll call it a tie.

[JasonC]

Michael and Ian each get a gold star, along with Baneman. Their amendments are friendly.

Bil on the other hand (though he undoubtedly knows and uses the methods I stressed, in addition) spoke of stopping enemy fire precisely to allow friendly movement, which is firmly in the domain I was not agreeing with. Protecting friendlies while they are moving without cover is what too many players think of as the only use for smoke. Cutting reply fire in half during an active firefight, on the other hand, when friendlies are shooting not moving, is the use I wanted to stress.

[Broken]

It isn't cover, its role is not to protect otherwise unsafe movements in the open. It is temporary terrain, its role is to reshape the visual landscape in order to isolate the portion of the battlefield you want to dominate.

I have to disagree with you there, Jason. Smoke in CMBN works quite well in masking movement, as Bil has already noted. In the infamous 'School of Hard Knocks' scenario in the C&F campaign, use of smoke to mask movement will save you a lot of casualties, as womble said.

I do agree with you that smoke is used to "shape the visual landscape", but it can be used for more than LOS isolation prior to a fire-fight.

[agusto]

Using smoke in order to mask otherwise unsafe movements is included in Jasons definition IMO. If you smoke an area to mask your troops movement, what you are doing is exactely what he said: isolate the portion of the battlefield you want to dominate. As far as i understood it, it is just that smoke isnt limited to the sole purpose of masking movement.

[Paper Tiger]

In real life, smoke would prevent a player from seeing what the other person is doing but it certainly wouldn't stop a bullet. If I set up a MG with LoS down a long narrow road and the enemy drop some smke and advance up it, I'll still cut them down. However, this is not what happens in the game.

Smoke, once placed, does prevent a player from firing through it because the game only allows us to fire at locations within the firer's LOS. In the example above, the MG will not be able to fire down that road beyond the point where it can see into the smoke. Even if I place a TRP at the end of the road, I can't get my MG to fire down it. So, yes, it would appear that smoke blocks fire in the game and in a sense, provides cover.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Smoke, once placed, does prevent a player from firing through it because the game only allows us to fire at locations within the firer's LOS. In the example above, the MG will not be able to fire down that road beyond the point where it can see into the smoke.

Yes, but there is an exception for existing area fire plotted before LOS is lost to smoke, which will continue after LOS is lost. So if your opponent drops smoke but the turn ends before it thickens up too much you may want to get some area fire going onto suspected movement routes to see if you can make him waste the smoke mission.

[Vinnart]

I think whether it is used to mask your movement over open ground, or to shoot it at the enemy to blind him where he is depends on the situation, conditions, problem that needs to be solved, and what one has at their disposal. I have used it both ways to effect. As others have said wind direction, and strength is the biggest factor in effectiveness so checking the conditions is always best before using it, and adjusting for wind will get the most out of it.

The more tactics in your bag of tricks will give you more to draw from to problem solve. In the tactics I shared I would say they are not the norm, but some of the more creative ways I have found to use it with success when it was the best answer to the situation against AI, and human alike. In the case of using the “Moving Wall” tactic it works best when the wind is light, and moving in the direction of the desired movement with enemy on the flank, but not to the front. In this case one uses the direction of the wind to their advantage, while maximizing the cover since the unit is moving parallel with the smoke. Infantry grenades will work fine for this tactic.

The “Rolling Smoke Screen” tactic works best if the smoke is blowing toward the enemy, and with tanks popping smoke as it is robust, covers a wide area, and can be deployed in a leapfrog fashion quickly. Again, it is a case of using the direction of the wind to best advantage to coincide with desired direction of movement. The tank formation I use most for this is an echelon depending on the enemy position. This method will mask much more troops with much less smoke than if firing a line of smoke in front of the enemy spread on a wide front. The main objective is to move the infantry across open ground creating concealment “terrain” where there is none. There will be no C if one cannot get from A to B first.

Again, it all depends on many factors as to what tactic is the best answer to solve the problem. The only wrong tactic is the one that has never produced success.

[Broken]

Using smoke in order to mask otherwise unsafe movements is included in Jasons definition IMO. If you smoke an area to mask your troops movement, what you are doing is exactely what he said: isolate the portion of the battlefield you want to dominate. As far as i understood it, it is just that smoke isnt limited to the sole purpose of masking movement.

No. Jason specifically expresses the belief that smoke should be used to isolate sections of the battlefield to achieve overwhelming fire advantage. He said:

Other than Baneman, I consider most of the comments to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of smoke on the attack. It isn't cover, its role is not to protect otherwise unsafe movements in the open.

If everyone but Baneman is wrong, who said "I generally use smoke to isolate a section of the enemy line that I'm about to attack", then Jason is including womble, Vinnart, slysniper, Quintus Sertorius and Bil Hardenberger who said:

It is possible to successfully use smoke to gain fire advantage as Jason describes. I use smoke far more often to mask movement, and have done so as far back as CMBO.

[JasonC]

Broken has understood me correctly.

I think that most players start from the use of smoke to mask movement.

I think that is a poor use of smoke. Yes there can be times when it is tactically the right thing, but I believe it is normally - when the average player does it for the average reason - a mistake.

I think too many players think of the whole combat problem as being one of safe movement, they are trying to do to much by movement, they are trying to score a touchdown. They fear the open as dangerous but think they have to be moving, and putting the two together, they think smoke is an answer, that will let them move in the open.

At bottom this frequently leads to them masking their own fires in an attempt to mask the enemy's. And just as often it leads to them reaching close range with intact enemies who have not been adequately prepared by fire. (Like, by all being killed to the last man, say - I exaggerate slightly for clarity). They are trying to take ground instead of kill the enemy and trying to accomplish that by moving.

I want to tell them that the original poster was right when he explained why he personally rarely uses smoke, because he wants all his guns bearing on the enemy and thinks smoke gets in the way. The original poster was right to want firefights. The common use is wrong seeking to avoid firefights to move a lot instead.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not think a CM player as expert and experienced as Bil get any of this wrong. He might have a different emphasis - fine. But I think the errors I have described above are very common because they are very natural - but that they are errors.

Do use smoke, unlike the original poster confessed about his own practice. But use it with his basic lenses on, viewing the battlefield as he was - wanting the firefight because you think you can win it, not shrinking from it as dangerous to your vulnerable moving troops. (Why are your troops moving, again?)

If you have men in good order with working weapons in line of sight of enemy positions, you should be pulling triggers, not dancing around in the open. Some of the triggers can be for smoke rounds to take his tank or bunker or gun out of the firefight, but not to stop that fight, and not to move instead of shooting. Shoot more, move less. Shooting wins fights, moving in the open to close range gives the enemy great opportunities hurt you instead - and frequently does precious little for you.

I know I am presenting a lopsided view. It is deliberate. There is a common error abroad, an error that a natural use of smoke furthers and reflects, and I want to stomp that common error into oblivion, especially in newer player's minds and play. Smoke is incidental to that lesson. The real lesson is that firepower takes ground, not movement.

But you don't need to fight fair...

[JonS]

In real life, smoke would prevent a player from seeing what the other person is doing but it certainly wouldn't stop a bullet. If I set up a MG with LoS down a long narrow road and the enemy drop some smoke and advance up it, I'll still cut them down. However, this is not what happens in the game.

Not really. Bullets can fly through the smoke, it is true, but it's effectiveness of fire into smoke is drastically reduced. MGs cannot just fire continuously, they doesn't have enough ammunition for that. So the gunner must fire at selected intervals, or when there are definite targets crossing the road. But, of course, the smoke conceals the movement so the gunner doesn't really know when to fire, nor even where to fire - left, right, near, close, high, low? Dunno. The gunner can't see, remember? Fire into smoke is purely speculative, and is "aimed" fire in only the loosest sense of the term.

Smoke, once placed, does prevent a player from firing through it because the game only allows us to fire at locations within the firer's LOS. ... So, yes, it would appear that smoke blocks fire in the game and in a sense, provides cover.

This is all well and good, except that that smoke doesn't do that. Smoke in CM is not an impenetrable armoured barrier. You cannot target a location out of LOS inside the smoke, but you can target a spot on the near edge of the smoke, and use the beaten zone of the MG (or any other fire) to carry some of the rounds into the smoke, making masked movement somewhat risky. Is that vastly less effective than being able to target any point in or beyond the smoke? Yes, of course it is. Which is exactly the way it should be.

[kensal]

My tuppence worth: whether it is the "correct" use of smoke or not (who decided anyway what is "correct" and what is "incorrect"?), I use smoke a lot where I have to move forces across open ground towards an objective and I would drop that smoke just in front of, and on top of the suspected or actual enemy positions. As I see it the purpose of this smoke is to prevent the enemy from engaging my forces while they are vulnerable i.e. moving across open ground. That smoke enables me to move my forces towards the objective and into positions from which they can engage and destroy defenders piecemeal.

That works for me, whether right or not.

[JonS]

Shoot more, move less.

Although this article isn't directly about smoke, it does talk about the ratio of movement to fire, and how the ratio is commonly weighted in the wrong direction.

http://www.2ndbn5thmar.com/CoTTP/Suppression%20McBreen%202001.pdf

[agusto]

Good article, thanks for posting.