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Marine campaign - totally flustrated!


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Ticking along in the new campaign, feeling reasonably good then I run into the assault mission - town with dug in bad guys, machine gun bunkers, good ATM's on the enemy side and a few tanks for good measure.

I'm totally stuck.

Possible spoilers...

While I can sneak my scouts and snipers in before dawn without too much trouble, and call in artillery to whack a few BMP's I spot I'm just plain stumped on how to get to my objectives. Hidden ATGM's KO everything I try to move forward including my 4 tanks - and enemy firepower and artillery prevents my infantry from gaining any ground. I've even cheated, meaning saved the game, played a bit, saved again, etc - and still I can make no progress. Not having fun any more.

Is there a way to edit the campaign? Just let me add a few F-18's or more Artillery or something to give me a bit more edge. I like a challenge but at some point it's no fun - and I'm there. :(

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There is an old military maxim, "The easy route is always mined." Stay away from the obvious routes of approach. The enemy always has them covered.

Use your arty assets wisely. A heavy short barrage is usually enough to kill a vehicle and will not all your rounds. Identify possible enemy firing positions and give them a demonstration of the effectiveness of your artillery. It may not seem like it but you do have enough to pull you through. You can't just flatten the entire map but you can severly disrupt the Syrian defensive positions.

Be sure to save some of your arty for smoke. If you fire all the rounds of HE you will lose your smoke as well. Firing all your smoke, however, will not effect your HE. Use your smoke to move your infantry, dismounted, into good firing positions to assault the objectives after you have blasted the enemy positions with 155 HE. You have a lot of 155 and a heavy short barrage is usually enough to damage and confuse the enemy enough to allow you to assault successfully.

Don't forget your troops' smoke grenades, they can be a life saver.

One big thing is not to forget what the briefing says about the building compounds in the middle of the map. As long as they are a threat you will always be exposed to fire from the flank.

If it makes you feel any better, I designed the mission and I often find myself kicking my own ass. A steady advance works better here than a sudden dash. Keep your troops in cover if you can but keep pressure on the enemy and don't be distracted by the enemy doing flashy things until you have to be. You have a lot of firepower at your disposal, unless you lost a lot in the previous missions, and you will need it.

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Be patient. The first time I played this scenario, I immediately recognized it was going to be an infantry fight. Fortunately, the Marines have lots of good infantry and plenty of fire support. I didn't move any vehicles forward until my infantry had already taken the center buildings. Lost one tank to an ATGM on the far left as it was moving up, but all the other ATGMs had been wiped out by then (Except the one on Obj Tigger. I never spotted it as it never shot the whole game.)

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The hardest part for me was the amount of enemy artillery. They hit me for an hour and a half straight, severly pounding me into the ground. This is a tough one.

You got pounded by arty? cool! I missed that, could be that I located and killed the FO (only saw one atleast) or maybe I was moving to much so the AI wouldnt start calling in Arty.

Lucky me anyway, the mines mixed with the arty would have stopped me totally.

/Thomas

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Then you're doing it wrong.:D

Like Clevinger said, you can only mark mines that you already know are there, which, of course, means someone has to find them. Unfortunately you can only do this by running over them. If you mark them though then you know you will have at least one safe route. When mines are marked their sign turns green.

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I also flanked the buggers from the right and suffered from the mines, though only inf casualties. To get to the right side of the defenses is quite easy and from there on steadily moving to Pooh is not difficult, if you are not hurrying for no reason.

I used a lot of arty and choppers and area fire and got along nicely, keeping casualties low. Only recce casualties came when a friendly Cobra fired a missile some 500m short, killing my scout&sniper patrol on a lookout pos. The enemy surrendered, and my ammo was running quite low... Got a nice surprise in the next mission, when most my tubes were empty from the beginning :)

Zip

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Chainsaw,

Don't go that way.

No ****e :D

I have actually never encountered mines in a functional way, it has always been strayed out ewerywhere as disturbance so when my LAV-25 hit a mine I didnt really take that as the whole area was mined. and the rest of the casualtys I got more then halfway thrue the attack and then it was to late to change direction.

What bugs me is that area wasnt ewen the main area of attack as I flanked on the right side and those houses was mere a sidenote to cover the flank :/

I didnt encounter any mines at the objective thoe.

/Thomas

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Mines?! :eek: Oh wonderful, after all the problems I've been running into there are mines too. :(

I know better than to go up the middle - the road it just too obvious a route. I was running flanking attacks up both sides mostly. The enemy Arty keeps me from daring to leave anything I have in position for too long - but alternatively if I move too soon it gets whacked by hidden ATGMs.

I do use my own artillery and have managed to KO several BMP's and the group of tanks that wanders in after dawn, the tanks are the least of my problems!

I didn't know that using smoke didn't lower overall Arty ammo - that's good to know!

I need a way to mark a known enemy site - playing in basic training mode, an ATGM can be spotted briefly sometimes, but then vanishes when the guys hide again. Hard to remember where they're at!

Maybe the artillery is the secret - I am leery about using it all up on suppression fire only to find something I really need it for! I'd love to use it for counter battery fire, if not for the enemy artillery I think I'd have won this one by now!

What is the best type of fire to use for Artillery on infantry inside buildings? On rooftops I use standard anti-infantry ammo, in buildings I don't know if it's best to use general or anti-armor. In fact... when do you use the general purpose, just for suppression when you want an all purpose bombardment?

GRRRR! I will beat this $$#*!&$! scenario yet!!! :mad:

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I generally use anti-armor against buildings. It seems to give a tighter pattern, at least to me it does. If I am targeting an area or linear group of buildings then I will use general if the target is fairly large but anti-armor if the target is fairly compact.

There are safe avenues of approach and areas you can use as assembly areas.

A couple things to remember about AI arty:

They will only fire at targets they can see. If you move out of sight the mission will get cancelled.

The computer can't guess like you can so it has a very hard time adjusting to you if you keep moving.

Remember that your guys can do things from inside a building nearly as well as they can from the roof. Javelins and FO's can be on the upper floors.

Keep at it. No one asset is the absolute key, combined arms is.

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My personal opinion on the use of mines as of 1.10. They should be kept to the bare minimum until BFC gets the engineering vehicles working. Foot soldiers would not be doing the heavy lifting during direct fire combat operations. Breeching vehicles and MICLIC are used when under direct fire.

Just to be clear this thread is discussing the "Crossroads" battle in the Marine Campaign and not the entire campaign? If so, I'll see if I have an AAR lying around on "Crossroads"

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My personal opinion on the use of mines as of 1.10. They should be kept to the bare minimum until BFC gets the engineering vehicles working. Foot soldiers would not be doing the heavy lifting during direct fire combat operations. Breeching vehicles and MICLIC are used when under direct fire.

Just to be clear this thread is discussing the "Crossroads" battle in the Marine Campaign and not the entire campaign? If so, I'll see if I have an AAR lying around on "Crossroads"

Yes, just that particular mission/scenario, whatever you call it.

If there is a good place to park your vehicles where they won't draw artillery, I've yet to find it. Last time I tried to win this one I had to keep moving my crates all over from side to side (well back) as if they stopped apparently somone could see them from the enemy side!

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You just haven't found it yet. The map is based off a Google Earth image so I didn't set it up specifically for the scenario although I did tilt it a bit to the west so the highway wouldn't look crapy.

Scout around, if you can't see anything from a spot then they can't see you either.

Sometimes you can think too hard about a problem. Remember the KISS principle.

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