Seeking Bombardment Advice

[Rokossovski]

I recently began playing CMBB, and am hoping for some advice about the use of off-map artillery assets. In a recent TCP/IP game, it was necessary for me to seize two large clumps of woods on an otherwise rather bare QB map. I held my troops back and hit the woods with 250 or so rounds of 82mm mortar fire. My infantry charged into the woods, but I noticed that my dug-in enemy was rather less distruped than I had hoped, and my infantry crossed the open ground leading to their objective only with difficulty. (Perhaps less difficulty than if there had been no bombardment, but it is hard to say. I had armor support flinging shells in as the infantry advanced, so that was helpful.) Ultimately, the first group of woods were taken.

Next, there was a stretch of open terrain to be crossed before reaching the second wooded objective area. I brought down my remaining 82mm mortar fire, about 350 shells worth. I though about mixing in smoke, but ultimately did not, in part because of an impression that it would take some time for the smoke to spread, and I was running out of time. Unlike the earlier assault, this time I did not hold back my troops while the shells were falling, but started them moving right away. (My thinking was that if my infantry arrived very promptly after the bombardment the enemy would not be given a chance to recover from any suppression.) My Soviet infantry began reaching the objective very soon (less than a turn) after the bombardment ceased but were nevertheless dogged by fire coming from the woods I had just peppered with mortar rounds. I had hoped for a greater suppressive effect. My brave sons of the motherland managed to seize the objective area, but I remain troubled by a suspicion that I am using artillery/mortar assets inefficently.

How should one use artillery in a set piece assault such as described above? After the battle my opponent suggested upgrading to 120mm mortars, although I would of course have to buy fewer units, or invest more points. (I spent about 20% of my points on the mortars.) Should I be buying 82mm mortars at all, or was my problem the result of the enemy being dug in? Should I use more smoke? Should smoke be brought down right on the units targeted, out ahead of them, or elsewhere? What sort of gun should be purchased for throwing smoke? 82mm, 122mm etc? Should I be using the smoke rounds from my tanks? How much is enough? How long does it take to form a barrier and how long does the effect last? Is there something else I should be doing/not doing? Any comments or advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

- Rokossovski

[Beta1]

If you looking to break a dug in defender using off map spotters your going to need something a little bigger than 81mm tubes. If the points allow it take 105-150mm FOs instead, You wont get as many shells but you shouldnt need as many...

On the other hand if your looking to supress a specific shooter that you can see using an on map 81mm will drop more rounds more quickly on that target than blasting the entire area as after the first few shots almost all the rounds should come down very close to the target. With 2-3 81mm tubes backed up with some MGs to add to the suppression you should be able to force most of a defending platoon out of their positions without moving you infantry in at all.

[Code13]

In my experience, unless firing at open ground, or going for area denial, then the best use of off map 82mm mortars and its ilk is for smoke, lays a good thick blanket that is far more useful than the suppresive fire effect of the motar bombs.

You want to suppress and area with artillery, use at least 105mm artillery.

Killing point targets however is ideally suited to the use of on map motars of any size combined with HMG's

[IntelWeenie]

Time is not as important for smoke as is wind speed. If you would have fired smoke, most of the shells fired during the first turn would have "spread" enough to be effective at covering movement the next turn. The problem is that with strong winds, it dissapates as fast as it is fired, so you don't get a very good smokescreen.

I love using 81-82mm mortars this way since they have very high ammo loadouts which make for dense screens. They also have much faster response time than higher level arty, so it's easier to time your fire mission.

[xerxes]

You had multiple FOs (3 of them I'd guess). Were you targetting all of your FOs at the same time? 3 82mm FOs firing for a full minute will disrupt foxholed troops quite well. If the enemy are in trenches you'd need heavier arty.

[JasonC]

82s are simply too light for what you were trying to do. You did fine on the rest. You just had the wrong artillery tool. For defenders in good cover, you want big shells not light mortars.

82s are the most responsive off map module the Russians have, by far. The 9 tube variety hits decently hard, but still needs infantry enemies with poor cover - no foxholes, moving through trees to allow airbursts, or in open or wheat. Defenders can use them for HE that way, because attackers generally have poor cover. You also need the fast response time. They can cover gaps between TRPs.

But the problem for attackers is different. Response time should not be so big a deal, since you know where you are going. 82s can provide smoke, though that can be expensive unless the smoke barrage makes a big difference.

It is not enough to cover the open ground and then walk onto unsuppressed defenders. They will kill you. You were in fact better off with at least some of the defenders heads down because of your HE. An ideal smoke barrage is in addition to breaking HE, or seperates some defenders from others by cutting long lines of sight.

To break defending infantry in good cover you need either 76mm and higher HE fired with pinpoint accuracy - meaning by on map weapons at fully IDed targets - or you need serious HE. For the Russians that means 120mm mortars most of the time.

122s and 152s also work but have longer response times. Those can be afforded in planned "map fire" (bombardments ordered on turn 1, using conscript or at most green FOs). When you can see the terrain you must take at set up, this works. (203 size stuff or 132mm rockets can also work if you roll a low rarity for them, though they are harder to use correctly).

To get rounds called during a fight to land in a reasonable time but still pack a sufficient punch to break dug in defenders, the 120mm mortar FO is the weapon of choice. Germans are best off with 150mm div arty, with 105mm a more affordable but distant second.

The thing to understand is that fire effect is well more than linear in blast. 10 rounds of 160 blast will inflict far more actual casualties than 40 rounds of 40 blast. The variance is higher, too. The better the defender's cover, the more important it is to "overload" that cover with high "peaks" of fire effect, which are produced by near misses from the largest shells.

Even with big shells, the maximum effect is felt in the first 2 minutes after the barrage, and during it. By 5 minutes later, most of the suppression is all long gone. A few units will be broken if the caliber was very high, and outright losses will remain. But nothing else. The lower the caliber and the better the cover, the faster the recovery time. Because deeper morale "dips" take much longer to recover from than shallow, widespread ones.

Big shells can give spotty coverage because often there aren't enough of them. So you break half the defenders, perhaps, and pin a few more, while 1-2 are fine simply because nothing happened to land nearby. That isn't a reason to use smaller FOs. Instead, suppliment the FOs with a few direct fire overwatch assets - tanks or infantry guns or mortars e.g. - to suppress the holdouts. The big shells will do the heavy lifting.

Big shells are not appreciably more expensive than lots of little ones. You just get fewer of them and they aren't as responsive. A 40 round 120mm module with 5 minute response time costs about what a 200 rounds 82mm module with 2-3 minute response time costs. It isn't as flexible dealing with a rapidly moving attacker. But it will dig defenders out of their holes much more effectively, for the same price.

A typical Russian attack should have a mix of heavy weapons and off board support. A good mix is some direct 76mm (T-34s most common, infantry guns or ZIS-3s as poor man's alternatives) especially to deal with bunkers, buildings, and trenches - plus some (1-2) 120mm FO to deal with reactive targets in woods.

If you can afford more, add 122, 152, or larger stuff, picking the lowest rarity and low crew quality, and then use that stuff for pre-planned fire on the most obvious covered areas. Set that fire to start between turn 5 and 10, finishing by around turn 15 (so you have time to follow it up).

If there are obvious narrow covered areas use standard sheafs for this pre-planned fire. If there aren't or such areas are wide or numerous, use wide sheafs with 2-3 FOs (or one 132mm rocket FO if you prefer), to target a whole sector of the map over a 5 minute period.

Even one module of big stuff slowly drizzling in monster shells at random over the whole enemy rear (via "target wide") can paralyze reserve movements, and 1-2 best shell outliers can pay for the whole FO. (A single 203mm treeburst can put a whole platoon out of action for 5 minutes, with only half left afterward).

[Redwolf]

Jason's point about continued fire is very important.

CMBB heavily rewards dropping shells for some time near a unit. A single shell does very few, continued bombardement a lot more, both for casulties and for supression. That applies to everything, offboard, on-board and even smallarms fire.

That's a contrast to CMBO, where the bigger artillery modules were by far more effective even when there were very few round per target.

Still, if the artillery is too small for the cover, then extended fire won't do much good either. Also, if you want to knock down houses the bigger the better, although on-board works much better than off-board here.

[demoss]

To get rounds called during a fight to land in a reasonable time but still pack a sufficient punch to break dug in defenders, the 120mm mortar FO is the weapon of choice. Germans are best off with 150mm div arty, with 105mm a more affordable but distant second.

The German 120mm mortar FO is nothing to sneeze at either. You combine the quick response of battalion mortars with decent power, especially when the targets are in woods. In a recent game, I had one take out 3 guns and 57 infantry, all in the woods. Yum.

[JasonC]

There are many tricks and pitfalls to using planned fire. You can easily do it wrong and waste a load of points without getting your money's worth. Try things out beforehand in testbeds or fights vs. the AI, so you know how it works before your human game.

Conscript FOs are cheaper and allow you to buy a lot of bang for the buck, particularly with rarity off. They also fire somewhat slower than greens, which means their missions last longer. Using planned fire, they will still come down on time (sometimes plus a minute it is true) and accurate. If your fire plan depends on high ROF, the extra cost of greens may be worth it. But for long slow harassment, conscripts are great.

Even when using target wide orders, you must selected areas of cover you expect to be inhabited by the enemy. Don't put the aim point between two bodies of covr and expect the spread to reach to both. Use a seperate aim point for each FO if you want spread fire. (Only rockets really give a spread pattern with a single FO. You don't want or need target wide with them).

Around 3/4 of even a target wide fire order (by tube arty) will land in a pretty tight pattern - typically 25m right or left and 50m short or long, giving a 50 by 100 "most" beaten zone. The remainder can scatter 100m to 200m away, but if there aren't people under your planned aim point you will waste most of the fire of that battery. Only a quarter of the shells spread over the large disk represented by the distant part of the pattern means very limited coverage.

So the right way is to pick objective areas or large bodies of woods, and put a seperate tube battery on each, target wide. Let the distant portion of each aim point spread and overlap, spreading risk of a nearby shell over a wide area on the defender's side of the map. While the majority of each module plasters a given covered area.

With high calibers, you can expect to break (at least for a few minutes) most of the men in the actual targeted cover. Even the best off will be pinned while the shells are still falling, and often for a minute afterward. If you break the local HQ the suppression can last significantly longer. Depending on the caliber, you may also hit a quarter (105, 120, 122) to half (150) or more (170, 203, 210) of the personnel under the barrage footprint (cover assumed).

If an area is empty, at least you can enter it with confidence knowing that anyone there would have been vunerable. So your fire plan can take ground for you, as well kill enemies. Do not order is so soon that your infantry has no chance to approach before hand, or the defenders will fully recover befre you can follow up. But don't delay beyond about minute 15 either, for the last shell landing, or the decisive portion of the fight may be over without your arty having helped. As already mentioned, minutes 5 through 10 are typically good begining points for planned fire.

[Rokossovski]

Thank you, gentlemen, for your advice. I did some experimenting with various sorts of ordinance tonight against the AI. I must say I am not convinced of the usefulness of the REALLY heavy stuff, like the 152mm and 203mm guns on indirect fire. When they hit I'm sure they're terribly effective, but with so few shells I would seem to be depending heavily on lucky hits. During my test games the heavy shells seemed to go astray and obliterate various innocent woodland creatures while leaving my cyber opponents untouched. If I had counted on them (the artillery, not the aforementioned woodland creatures) to soften up the enemy before an advance, my units would have paid heavily. The 120mm mortars may be my answer. Of course the responses given went into much greater depth than merely advising me about bore sizes, and I intend to add these tips into my play style (especially the use of "conscript" spotters bringing down pre-plotted fire delayed until shortly before my troops arrive). Thank you.

- Rokossovski