Tactical Withdrawal?

[Krinks]

Being new to battlefield tactics, I still have an awful lot to learn about combat.

Can anyone give me any general guidelines on when to make a tactical withdrawal? I'm kind of having a hard time deciding what is and is not acceptable loss, particularly with my armour and other vehicles.

Is there any particular loss/kill ratio that people tend to stick to?

Advice on this topic would be of great help.

Thanks,

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Krinks

"If news travels at anything less than the speed of light now, it just means we weren't paying attention."

--Bruce Sterling

[Dirtweasle]

Well it's tricky, that's for sure. In some PBEM games your opponent might not appreciate it as it prolongs games that have been decided already.

Having said that I think it realistic, especially in ME scenarios. If you've lost the ability to take or retain the initiative, and you can no longer advance and attack with any reasonable chance of success, then you have a couple decisions to make. Defend from some advantageous terrain and/or ambush the opponent, or withdraw. If your opponent has armor and you no longer have a credible anti-tank ability, I'd have to opt for withdrawal.

[jmac]

i just went thru ScoutPL's post. he seems very knowledgeable(his background of course). head on over to his web site for some possible answers.

[Thunderbird Inf Plt Ldr]

Depends a lot on whether you have covered avenues of withdrawl, whether your units can or cannot continue to inflict significant harm on the enemy (or any harm at all if you've lost all anti-tank assets), do you have smoke to cover your retreat, and perhaps most importantly, do you have anywhere to go that you can reach that will allow you to establish or reinforce a fighting position.

Usually, you should have pre-planned secondary positions (but, many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip) based on the enemy's most likely courses of action.

I'll only give one common situation. Often, infantry units are deployed in support of your vulnerable AT guns. When those AT guns are knocked out, your supporting infantry will then move, or stay put, based on their new role (perhaps to town to aid their bretheren defend the streets, screen the bazooka teams and MG teams, etc.)

Movin' On! (motto of the 1/279 Inf)

[ScoutPL]

Withdrawals are just like advances but in reverse. Same tactics apply. Suppress the enemy, move only when the bad guys heads are down. Attempt to use all available cover and concealment, smoke works great but chances are you used all of that in your failed attack.

Rule of thumb for when to withdraw? Depends on what kinda game you want to play. If you're just interested in winning then fight to the last man. Your enemy might be on his last legs too. More then likely he's about to run out of machinegun ammo so that might play into your hands. On the other side if you want to master realistic tactics then the above advice is good advice. Once you feel you can no longer make any gains without unacceptable losses you should withdraw. This is, of course, very arbitrary. Basically you have to decide for yourself what is acceptable. One of the things I really liked about the Close Combat series was that once the troops figured out you were trying to get them killed by fighting unsurmountable odds, they quit responding to your orders. CM does this too but not on a very realistic scale. A good rule of thumb is to decide in your planning process how many losses you want to take. Look at the scenario for hints at the objective's value in the "big picture." Is it worth 10% of your force? 25%? 50%? For QB's you kinda have to make that decision on your own, but then thats all part of the fun. In a lot of cases, ecspecially meeting engagements, you might actually be able to hurt the enemy more by withdrawing and enticing him to pursue you, abandoning that favorable position he was using to cream you with. Then by games end you may have actually racked up more kills then your opponent, giving you a draw or even a minor victory.

[Tao Xian]

In a sub-topic of this...when is it good to temporarily pull back? I find that once I take territory, I hang on as if the devil were behind me. It occurrs to me, as I play more, that a more fluid approach might be more beneficial; withdraw, regroup, retake. I have yet to experiment with this. Moreover, on the defence, it seems that staking a forward defensive position, followed by a series of fall backs might also be useful; but again, something I have not experimented in.

Any suggestions?

[Soddball]

I would say that it's incredibly difficult to answer that question - only you can decide when it's a good idea to pull back - it is dependent on so many factors.

One example I can cite - I was playing an AI game (I was defending as germans) and in a patch of trees I had a Volksgrenadier platoon in foxholes.

Out of the trees 150m in front of the platoon a company of allied infantry started charging towards their position (bear in mind that a VG squad is 8(9?) [which gives 24+HQ] but a 44 squad is 12 [which gives 36+HQ, total 100+soldiers]. I was keen to withdraw them to a hamlet 100m back, but decided to chance it and keep them in place.

Remarkably, they won the battle for me. I lost about 50% of the soldiers there, but they stayed in place and held off allied troops long enough for mortar fire and reinforcements to win me the game (with 8/1 losses on the allied side I might add).

So you can see that tactical withdrawal, which I would have thought could have saved me those soldiers, would have been a mistake - since I would have lost that part of my defence and it's likely the VG platoon would have been cut to pieces.

Only you can decide when it's best to withdraw (and I believe it's fundamentally wrong to decide never to withdraw) but practice will definitely clear up for you when it's a good idea and when it isn't. As you can see, I still haven't worked it out.

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