Getting into buildings with a Stryker platoon

[Aacooper]

In my limited CMSF playing time, all 1-player so far, I've had the most trouble trying to get a platoon of infantry into a building. The first problem is that most buildings worth getting into are inside of compounds. It's easy enough to knock the wall down. Then, if you bring your Stryker up close, add some suppressing area fire, and dismount your infantry... they seem to take cover in the open space. Or, some unseen RPG blows vehicle and occupants to bits.

Anyone have ideas -- use Stryker smoke, demolish the building first... etc?

[Chad Harrison]

I cant answer your question for sure, but I keep playing the final mission of the training campaign over and over, trying different things each time. Your facing RPG's, all defenders are in buildings and quite nasty.

The most success I have had is the old CMx1 mentality for rushing an enemy position across open ground: suppress, suppress, and suppres some more.

I first pop smoke from all my Strykers, and I leave them all close together also, and have the ocupants area fire into the known enemy positions. It *usually* works pretty well. All it takes is one unknown enemy unit to open up on them as they come out and . . . well, you know the rest.

By the way, I also dont use the dismount button. I give the squad and assault or 'quick' move order to the nearest building. Make sure you spot the doors before hand though. I have not looked to see where the doors are to the building and had my squad run to the other side of the building outside of my smoke, and well, you know the rest.

Hope this helps.

[molotov_billy]

I've noticed this as well. I've also noticed that any RPG to knock out a stryker tends to kill 100% of it's occupants - and anyone within 15 feet. It doesn't seem to jive with the information from strykers in Iraq - often times taken direct IED hits that only cause light casualties to the occupants.

But anyway, so far I've avoided direct confrontations with my infantry - only going in once I've completely annihilated an area with stryker 105's, M1's, and artillery.

[metalbrew]

How big of a building are you attempting to fit 36 guys (a platoon) into? I'm going to assume you mean a squad, but the same tactics work for bigger groups too.

I usually dismount outside of RPG range, in the game this seems like roughly 150m. I attempt to align my assault on the building to lessen crossfires from the enemy. Then using 'assault' or 'quick' move towards the building with infantry while the Stryker provides overwatch. The Mk19 equipped Strykers (40mm automatic grenade launcher) are just awesome for infantry overwatch, they easily suppress enemy infantry as long as you've picked a reasonable approach (stay out of crossfires).

If you find a particular building makes your life tough, drop it using a Javelin team. Obviously, if the enemy is inside they die quickly. For instance, I found the final tutorial mission really easy once I dropped the tall center building. With this building gone I flanked left with infantry while the Strykers tore the remaining defenders to ribbons now that the center building was gone and they had long lines of sight.

[ July 28, 2007, 08:00 PM: Message edited by: metalbrew ]

[Bluefish]

Damn, number 9. Cheers dude!

[ChrisND]

There's no easy way to take building without risking casualties.. unless you can just drop the building.

If you can estabilish a base of fire with strykers and other elements. Once enemy return fire has decreased from the target building (and others for that matter), move them into a corner of the building preferably far away from your suppressive fires and masked from fire lanes. If you can't move in a hidden area pop smoke from the vehicles. Once you have a foothold in the building, move forward SLOWLY, and "lift and shift" your supressive fires as they move along the building. Ideally, the occupants will have no recovery time from when the suppressive fires shift to when the assault element engages.

Better to just level any pesky buildings (if you are allowed to) that out of the way and have good lanes of on your target building.

Key things: LOTS of suppressive fire, take plenty of time, use smoke and hidden routes.

[Cameroon]

There are two things complicating taking builds, beyond the regular MOUT problems.

The first is that squads are not (at least for a bunch of us - there's a thread in the general forum) going through openings blown in walls. Too many doors are in exposed (duh ), so using an MGS or the "Blast" movement order should remedy that. Except that it doesn't right now. Rune (and through him Charles) should have a test scenario and save game showing that, so fingers crossed that its fixed soon.

The second has to do with squad pathing. Picture the "row of buildings" below with doors on top and bottom. Dismount your squad below R and give them a movement command to M. In my experience so far, they decide to go in through the bottom of R, out the top of R, in the top of M. WHY?!

|L||M||R|

So, be extra careful with your move orders. I am now very specific, which sucks.

Also, since dismounting (no matter the move order used) seems ponderously slow, use LOTS of suppressive fire. Thankfully Strykers have tons of MG ammo, so use it.

[astreetcarnamedkill]

The best way I've found so far is to blow a hole in the bottom floor, back the stryker in and pop smoke, that way as soon as they step out of the vehicle they are already in the building.

[GriffinCheng+]

Well, first off, RPG (not the game genre nor that programming language) is essentially a high-explosive round, and comes in XL size. And worse, it tends to burn things upon explosion. Since our ancestors are carbon-based, which makes your troops more or less included in this category. Trapped inside a confined space like Stryker, a penetrating round of RPG would give you a visual definition of "burning hell"...

So much for the "basic principle" why it is not a very good idea for a loaded Stryker, or any APC in this regard, being hit by a HEAT round.

It is a "basic" that CMxx that assaulting a building or house usually ends up in diaster, without support and suppression. The defender can easily hold up multiples of attacking enemies of it own size. CM:SF adds a little more complexities to this issue. First off, the buildings have more than two stories high, which means more enemies can be stuffed in one target building and more time is required for the attacking party to root them out. To make the matter worse, these buildings are made of concrete, which is quite durable against even .5 cal fire. I have seen more than once that rounds "bounced off" from walls.

So very careful planning is required when you are going to take a building. Of course the first thing to do is to pick your target building AND know if it is "infested" with enemies or not. If you have got your target, surround it with your troops with the heaviest tools available in the arsenal (translation: weapons which make the most bangs). Lay down suppressing fire, and move your troops in.

Since helicopter drops are not in CMSF, the second best means is dropping your troops via APC as close as possible. AT teams still threaten your AP, this is better than moving them in open, nonetheless. The path-finding AI in CMSF adds another problem onto your list, for the troops tends to move on roof level when they move from one building to another, giving them unnecessary exposure and loss of stealth, worse, if there are enemy over-watches nearby, the troops could be worse than moving in open. Addition to the above posts, make sure you plot your movements very carefully for your troops (and vehicles too!) can move in some (not so pleasant) surprising way to reach their "destination" (sorry, pun intended).

Good luck and enjoy.

[athkatla]

I haven't had a lot of problems assaulting buildings. I tend to get the squads in close with the vehicles, pop smoke then use the 'Quick' move command to get the grunts into the building. If you just use the 'Dismount' order they will take up defensive positions close to the vehicle, so use 'Quick' or 'Assault'. I usually bring up a couple more vehicles for more smoke and suppressing fire, anything to make life easy for the grunts.

[JasonC]

In reality, APCs hit by RPGs average 2-3 wounded and occasionally 1 KIA each. An occasional outlier may kill a couple and wound 70% or more. Instant death of all aboard is utter nonsense.

Also, 50 cals routinely penetrate the typical buildings. 5.56mm doesn't and 7.62mmm doesn't get through most, but 50 cal emphatically does. Again, I am talking about reality, not the game.

Also, the real world range of RPGs is much longer than 150m. More like 700 meters maximum, with accuracy good out to 250m and OK at 400-500 (volume makes up for relatively low - 10-15% or so - per round hit chance at those ranges). Enough for nearly every urban line of sight, other than down the main drags.

[Cpl Steiner]

I played the MOUT mission of the training campaign loads of times and eventually managed to take all the objectives with only 2 KIA and 12 WIA.

The way I did it in the end was to use small teams to draw fire. I started with a squad split into two teams, each mounted in a separate Stryker. The Strykers then pulled up at the PL and disembarked one team of 4 men. They were ordered to sprint for the first building using a "Fast" movement order. Sure enough, the enemy opened up on them and they all went down (sorry guys). Having revealed a few enemy positions I hosed them down with the Mk19 and the MGs. The Stryker with the other team then popped smoke and this team did the same, legging it for the first building through the smoke. A good point to mention here is that smoke drifts on the wind in CM:SF, so if you attack up-wind, it helps a lot! The second team were more fortunate than the first, and only lost a single man. Any newly revealed enemy positions were then hit hard again, before I repeated the process for the remaining squads (this time unsplit). I think I also had the platoon HQ grab a Javelin and blow the top floor off of a building where enemy had fired from. By this time I had the whole platoon occupying the first and second floors of the first building. They had noticed enemy fire coming from a building to their right, so they hosed that down for a minute and then popped smoke through the windows before "Quick" moving into the next building towards the objectives. This went very well and I don't think a single man went down. Once in the second building they had a clear view of the objectives and just hammered them until the "Total Victory" screen appeared.

[Stryker]

As has been mentioned the Dismount command is not always optimal. I've give the squad a Quick move command while the Stryker is still moving toward its objective. Just like CMx1 the infantry waits until the vehicle is stopped and then jump out and head toward the objective. A big help when playing RealTime so you don't have a vehicle waiting for you to issue orders to the passengers.

[Guest]

(Spoilers, I guess?)

I finished the MOUT training on Elite with 7 WIA (should have been 3, but a pathing "incident" and a misfiring Javelin claimed an additional 4).

Basically I suppressed suspected enemy positions from a dismounted deployment about 300m outside the village for appx. 15 minutes, then leapfrogged my squads forward with the 40mm GL Stryker moving up with them.

I destroyed the leading building on the left (theorizing that the enemy would put a shoot-n-scoot buffer in there that might create a crossfire), then pounded hell out of the center building and seized it with an assault team. I did the same for the MG-hiding building on the right, then rolled through the streets with the Strykers covering.

The enemy surrendered about 15 minutes after the center building fell. I made sure to treat all seriously wounded, which may have effected my final score.

The tricks:

1) (As Chad said:) Suppress, suppress, suppress. Time and ammo are on your side. Use them. I found that the positions I spent the most time suppressing were the positions with the most dead / wounded enemy inside when I cleared them (go figure).

2) Split your teams. The Assault command works well in particular situations, but when things get complicated it helps to micro your guns-n-assaulters a bit. Explicitly position your support teams and sit on the Hide / Smoke buttons for your assault teams. Multiple support teams seem to multiply the effectiveness of a particular assault.

3) Strykers are scary. Use four of them at once to pound the most likely enemy positions around an assault.

And that's how I got into / cleared buildings.

A caveat: I'm usually very bad at tactical wargames in general (CMBO, Steel Panthers, etc). Either my casualty counts are very high or I concentrate too much on force protection and never reach the objectives. However, this worked for me.

Cheers,

p

[SGT_56M]

Normal dude had good points.

I also find that my infantry do a lot better if I dosmount about 300m out and have them "assault" to the objective building with the stryker acting as a fire support system. Once the enemy infantry is clear, bring the stryker forward.

Rushing the stryker into a danger area and then dismounting is very dangerous. Get those 9 sets of eyes outside the vehicle before going in. Then use the stryker for copious amounts of suppression.

[CRourke]

I've also been annoyed by the total casualties my stryker inf takes when one brews up, but I've been explaining it to myself this way: Much of the squad probably survives a brew up, but between shock, serious wounds, and destroyed equipment, everyone is pretty much combat ineffective for the rest of the scenario.

[molotov_billy]

Originally posted by CRourke:

I've also been annoyed by the total casualties my stryker inf takes when one brews up, but I've been explaining it to myself this way: Much of the squad probably survives a brew up, but between shock, serious wounds, and destroyed equipment, everyone is pretty much combat ineffective for the rest of the scenario.

It's a pity considering that the game has a complex morale system which could simulate these types of effects.

[Aacooper]

Good points, I've found popping smoke and suppressive fire are very helpful.

[SlapHappy]

I guess I need to practice my tactics a bit more. I've found the only way to get inside a building without massive casualties is to not try to go in there at all. Rather, level the entire building with 155mm.

Lacking 155mm, some vehicles pack a pretty mean punch against buildings......