Question for Battlefront Soviet Assault Battalion - Possible under current C3 rules?

[Der Alte Fritz]

Question for Battlefront.

It was Soviet practice for major assaults given the relatively low and under strength nature of their forces, especially their Rifle Battalions, for the Battalion to break up its normal Company structure and to be re-organised into 2 Companies, a small Reserve and an Assault unit. This meant spreading the SMG sections, ATR Rifle sections and other sub-units out across the whole Battalion.

It used to be possible to set this up in CMBB because the C3 command structure gave a lot of influence to the Company Commander. You could purchase a Battalion, break it up into 2 Companies and an Assault unit using the existing Company commanders (in fact you had enough including the Battalion Commander to give each big Company a reserve commander) and then split off SMG Sections, Pioneers, ATR, etc from their Platoon Commanders and put them into one of these super units using the Company Commander as the HQ.

Since you were going to keep them as tight units this worked quite well, with the reserve company commander at the rear to pick up any stragglers or cowering troops.

But will this be possible with CMRT with its more structured and identifiable Command Structure? Or can you 'buy' an Assault Battalion already set up.

These all arms teams are very good at their job but are ad-hoc and not represented by the 'official' TOE.

See here for full explanation of Assault Division:

http://forum.axishistory.com/download/file.php?id=321400&t=1

http://forum.axishistory.com/download/file.php?id=321401&t=1

http://forum.axishistory.com/download/file.php?id=321402&t=1

http://forum.axishistory.com/download/file.php?id=321403&t=1

taken from TM-30-130 Handbook on Military Forces of USSR 1945 edition

[lurrp]

I don't remember seeing an assault battalion listed as one of the formations in RT, but it would probably be possible for QBs. Couldn't you just purchase additional teams, and attach them under the company commands? I'm aware that that's a different thing than actually reallocating the support weapons, but maybe if you deleted the organic support elements and then purchased new ones for the companies, you'd have a good representation. It seems like these units were usually pretty ad hoc, so any company (+) with added support should be good.

[Der Alte Fritz]

That sounds like a plan. Buy your Company, strip off individual items and then purchase the extra additional units. This means that all the units come under the same Company Command structure?

[Fizou]

That sounds like a plan. Buy your Company, strip off individual items and then purchase the extra additional units. This means that all the units come under the same Company Command structure?

Yes, you can have the new teams under the CO you want. Be it Bn, Coy or Plt. Or a mix of these.

[womble]

Buying "Teams" has two failings in terms of simulating this sort of wholesale TO reorganisation:

• There are no "Rifle squads" (or SMG squad or whatever) to buy, nor HQs for them.
  
• It's piggin' expensive. For a QB, you'll be gimping yourself if you go along this route.
  

The first still applies to scenario design, if you're wanting to have the "strong" company be stronger than a vanilla "official TO" company, in "rifle count", but if the objective was to bring 3 extremely understrength companies up to something closer to their establishment, and assign the heavy gear closer to the point of use, it's doable.

[Der Alte Fritz]

but if the objective was to bring 3 extremely understrength companies up to something closer to their establishment, and assign the heavy gear closer to the point of use, it's doable.

In a nutshell that is what they did. They broken up one company and strenghtened the other two (and the assault group) and broke up the other battalion units and gave them to the two companies. As you can see from the diagram the Assault Group is a SMG Section, Sapper Section, ATR Section and 2 Flamethrowers

It depends how the game handles the Soviets really. Does it work off fully manned TO&E - in which case most units will be over strength and would need reducing is size or does it assume that most Soviet units are only 70-50% of TO&E as a typical level.

Soviet Forces were usually very under strength and later in the war some Fronts issued special 'shtat' (establishment lists) so that they had their own TO&E reflecting their 50% or less status and to allow the Front to even out its units somewhat.

[akd]

In a nutshell that is what they did. They broken up one company and strenghtened the other two (and the assault group) and broke up the other battalion units and gave them to the two companies. As you can see from the diagram the Assault Group is a SMG Section, Sapper Section, ATR Section and 2 Flamethrowers

It depends how the game handles the Soviets really. Does it work off fully manned TO&E - in which case most units will be over strength and would need reducing is size or does it assume that most Soviet units are only 70-50% of TO&E as a typical level.

Soviet Forces were usually very under strength and later in the war some Fronts issued special 'shtat' (establishment lists) so that they had their own TO&E reflecting their 50% or less status and to allow the Front to even out its units somewhat.

The game includes fully-manned TO&E, but you have all the tools needed in the editor to reduce the strength of a unit. There is also one "official" reduced TO&E (type 44 infantry battalion) included. Between that and the standard infantry battalion, you should be able to make any of the various Front reduced TO&Es through deletion.

[womble]

In a nutshell that is what they did. They broken up one company and strenghtened the other two (and the assault group) and broke up the other battalion units and gave them to the two companies. As you can see from the diagram the Assault Group is a SMG Section, Sapper Section, ATR Section and 2 Flamethrowers

What you won't be able to do is have more platoons (at low strength representing platoons taken out of other companies) than the official TO has in it, nor more squads per platoon. You could make "ersatz" SMG squads, probably out of 2 or 3 Scout Teams; I imagine the Soviet Scout Team will be as SMG-strong as the German. And they could be part of a platoon, or directly under the Coy CO. If there's a "Weapons Platoon", you could jam that with more SMG teams and have an SMG platoon, deleting the support weapons and re-adding them as individual teams under the Coy HQ, or divvied out amongst the other platoons. All this has a cost in points in the QB picker, and you soon hit the limit of the number of HQs in a given Company.

It depends how the game handles the Soviets really. Does it work off fully manned TO&E...

Almost certainly.

...in which case most units will be over strength...

True, to a greater or lesser extent, for most formations, in any army ever, even when they're not sustaining casualties in prolonged combat. Something for the scenario designer to bear in mind, though there has been some mild discontent with the way the "head count reducer" can disproportionately deprive a unit of its support weapons, when they'd be a priority for preservation/recovery.

[Rokko]

Is there any chance we will one day get a full TOE editor in game? That would be really awesome, but I could imagine BF wouldn't really want that, just as they don't want their games too modable.

[Apocal]

Didn't CMSF have a modified TOE available for infantry battalions? Like regular and MOUT configurations? Would that be applicable in this case?

[LukeFF]

Is there any chance we will one day get a full TOE editor in game? That would be really awesome, but I could imagine BF wouldn't really want that, just as they don't want their games too modable.

Not a chance.

[c3k]

^^^

This.

However, the editor TOE tools are VERY powerful. You can add any individual unit to anything in the TOE. For example, I can add sniper teams, scout teams, and LMG teams to each platoon. I can delete one company from a battalion. I can buff up the other two companies. I -cannot- add a platoon: if it starts with 3, I can only have 3 or less. I -cannot- add a squad to a platoon: if it has 4 squads at start, I can only have 4 of that type or less.

Within the above restrictions, there are a lot of possibilities.

[Michael Emrys]

However, the editor TOE tools are VERY powerful.

I believe that everything c3k describes in the scenario editor can also be done in the QB purchase screen.

Michael

[Rokko]

But you cannot recreate historical OOBs that fit into the timeframe and location of the game (whichever that may be), but BF chose to omit, because they were too obscure or too rare (like a 4 company SS-Panzer-Pionier Bn '44 in CMBN or a 6-tube mortar platoon in a German PG Bn's weapons company).

Since BF doesn't really care or deems necessary (or at least not a priority) too include such structures I think it would be adequate to give us users the tools to do it on our own.

I don't really believe sales would go down because of this. No one would say "Oh I am not going to buy CM: Crete 41 because I can just make it myself with correct OOBs and play it with Germans and Americans in Normandy with the CMBN basegame."

[womble]

"All" it needs is for HQ elements to be purchasable in the "Specialist Teams" or "Individual Vehicles" menu. HQ elements and "vanilla" (or strawberry, or chocolate... but not Phish Phood, or Rocky Road, or Strawberry Core Ripple) rifle squads of the various standard flavours.

There'd have to be some logic along the lines of what you're allowed to delete right now, so that if you bought a HQ element, you couldn't "OK" until it had at least one subordinate element. And maybe a "no more than 2 extra HQs at each level" rule. There are already Scenarios where a company has a putative 4 rifle platoons, but the 4th platoon isn't in the TO, because it has been "tacked on" from a separate company.

A full blown free-form TO editor isn't needed (or desirable, I think, for a few reasons) but a bit more flexibility in the current scheme would be useful for historical anomalies (as opposed to a-historical aberrations) to be played with.

[Rokko]

To me that would be a full TOE editor, I don't see what else anyone would need to edit existing TOEs.

[womble]

For me, a full TO&E editor would allow the transfer of entire formation sections to the control of another HQ. So you could add a "PZDiv Escort Company" or a "Sapper Platoon" to any "larger" HQ. Or transfer a tank platoon to an infantry Company HQ so their C2 is on-map. Just that slightly longer step past what I described in my previous post, and much harder to restrict to "plausibly historical".

[Michael Emrys]

For me, a full TO&E editor would allow the transfer of entire formation sections to the control of another HQ. So you could add a "PZDiv Escort Company" or a "Sapper Platoon" to any "larger" HQ. Or transfer a tank platoon to an infantry Company HQ so their C2 is on-map. Just that slightly longer step past what I described in my previous post, and much harder to restrict to "plausibly historical".

In its favor it would allow freer formation of Kampfgruppen/Task Forces having one overall HQ. Now it requires two or more superior HQs, neither of which is subordinate to the other, which is ahistorical.

And yeah, I know it wasn't all that common at the level CM was meant to be played, but with players using battalion and multi-battalion sized forces, we are definitely in the realm of cross-attached TFs.

Michael