Vehicle Patrol

[Pingouin32]

Hello everyone,

I'm having a hard time with vehicle patrols, particularily in the 2nd mission of From the Dawn to the Setting Sun.

I'm supposed to patrol along a road with unarmored vehicles. Of course there's an ambush waiting for me. Whatever I do, I always take casualties. Some RPG guy pops up and destroys a car.

Do you have some good tactics on patrols, and how to avoid casualties during them ? I always lose some men at the start of the ambush.

[Chainsaw]

thats the downside with an ambush. you are never prepared for it while the enemy IS. that makes it a bit hard to not sustain casualtys in the first moment they open up.

However, when doing patrols you can dismount and do foot patrols at suspected locations, or start doing overwatch with the vehicles at suspected locations so that the vehicle moving in is covered by others.

[Phantom Captain]

Definitely use foot patrols first. That's how I did that one. Immediately get some men out of the vehicles and flank up the left and right side of the road before pushing your trucks forward. You know they are out there so don't give them the advantage. Get your men out and uncover the ambushes before they get a chance to hit you.

[Erwin]

The challenge of CM scenarios is that you know that the enemy is there, so it forces you to dismount and advance cautiously with inf until something happens.

It's annoying when a scenario designer for some reason expects one to drive down the road until ambushed. The problem there is that a careful player can spend a lot of time carefully reconning forward when the enemy ambush is in fact a long way off.

But, CM1 taught us that some designers give misleading info in the briefings so even when they say "There are no enemy tanks..." etc. one is forced to disbelieve them.

[Dietrich]

In my view, the second mission of "From the Dawn to the Setting Sun" is not an example of a vehicle patrol. A patrol is (typically) a reconnoitering passage through an area or along a route from a certain point and (generally) back to that same point. In the scenario in question, you the player have a platoon of US Marines mounted in pickups, and your objective is to get your troops through the ambush with a minimum of casualties.

There are basically two ways to do this: the easy way and the hard way.

The hard way is to dismount from the vehicles and probe forward on foot, engage the irregulars, destroy them or drive them away, then move your vehicles forward, remount them, and proceed along the road.

The easy way (which might seem gamey but isn't if you think about it) is to put the pedal to the metal and drive straight through the ambush to the "exit zone". It's still a gamble, but the pickups are pretty much too fast for the irregulars to engage them effectively. If you don't mind the scenario lasting just a minute or so, hit Cease Fire as soon as the first vehicle reaches the "exit zone" (so long as they other vehicles are intact). If you want to be more particular about it, wait till all the vehicles have reached the "exit zone", then hit Cease Fire; the dust kicked up by the vehicles ought to obscure them from enemy units in the meanwhile.

[Ryujin]

Personally I found the dismounted movement to contact easier. I had a lot of ammo and the ambush was pretty predictable. Some careful recon combined with some basic fire and maneuver got my platoon through that with only one unlucky WIA. I figure blitzing through with the vehicles would have cost more than that (or does it?).

[Phantom Captain]

Personally I found the dismounted movement to contact easier. I had a lot of ammo and the ambush was pretty predictable. Some careful recon combined with some basic fire and maneuver got my platoon through that with only one unlucky WIA. I figure blitzing through with the vehicles would have cost more than that (or does it?).

I agree, the dismounted movement is much easier and effective. After reading Dietrich's post I went back to give it a try by just running the gauntlet. Promptly lost the entire platoon which was RPG'd to death as they passed the ambush point. Maybe I put too much space between the trucks instead of bunching them up close but within two minutes all trucks were hit and pretty much all my marines were KIA.

[Dietrich]

When I brought up putting the pedal to the medal and running the gauntlet, I wasn't meaning to say do it this way, I was merely making mention of a tactic that had worked for me. (When I ran the gauntlet, I lost only 1 Marine WIA.)

Phantom Captain: Did you try issuing Fast (rather than Quick) move orders to your pickups?

But by all means, if you have success via dismounted assault, use that tactic. My experience, conversely, was that I suffered inordinate losses due to [*** SPOILER ALERT***] the multiple technicals, the uncons hunkered down in trenches, and the roof-positioned machine-guns. [/*** SPOILER ALERT***] It sounds, though, like Ryujin is simply a better tactician than me. =/

[Phantom Captain]

When I brought up putting the pedal to the medal and running the gauntlet, I wasn't meaning to say do it this way, I was merely making mention of a tactic that had worked for me. (When I ran the gauntlet, I lost only 1 Marine WIA.)

Phantom Captain: Did you try issuing Fast (rather than Quick) move orders to your pickups?

But by all means, if you have success via dismounted assault, use that tactic. My experience, conversely, was that I suffered inordinate losses due to [*** SPOILER ALERT***] the multiple technicals, the uncons hunkered down in trenches, and the roof-positioned machine-guns. [/*** SPOILER ALERT***] It sounds, though, like Ryujin is simply a better tactician than me. =/

Oh no! I didn't take it as a "do it this way" command either. I just wanted to try your method for myself! And yes, I did issue a Fast order and spaced the trucks out by 15 second pauses.

Definitely did not get the results you had!!

[*** SPOILER ALERT***]

Dismounting and patrolling up on the left and right I got through with 2 WIA. I was way out to the edges too. Coming through the orchard on the right my squad emerged behind the technicals and RPG team and took them out right quick like. My other squad hit the trench way over on the edge on the left and cleaned it out pretty easily. They then suppressed and killed the MGs and sniper etc. in the buildings. Worked well.

Haven't finished the whole campaign yet and am currently on the one with the fortress. I'm pondering how I want to go about this. It says to pick an entry point and blast through but it seems to me the best approach is through the woods and right through the front gate. It's definitely more covered than any other route. My MGs can suppress the towers on the approach and once I have troops in both of those I should be good to cover myself inside. We'll see.

[Ryujin]

[RECORDED IN SPOILER-VISION!]

Personally I found the dismounted option easier because of how the map is layed out. The sparseness of tactically significant positions made it easy to assume there would be MGs/Snipers at each of them and proceed with that in mind.

There was only the "orchard" and hidden ground behind it, house, treeline at end of the field (the rest of the field wasn't too bad), and that suspicious little hill in the corner (gamey, but it still got my spidey sense tingling).

Taking these as the probable enemy positions, the rest of the battle was much easier. I didn't get every enemy fighter, just made sure to hammer down the positions enough that I could move around.

I started by moving up on both flanks, through the fields and the scrub/open ground.

Step one was to sneak up on the house and scope out the contacts. I tried to stay as keyholed as possible, to deal with one threat at a time. Then nearly got a guy shot by that sniper on the hill. Since I had tried to keyhole as much as possible, I had a manageable list of suspected positions and put area fire on all of em (house, hill). House got the SMAW treatment too. This addressed the incoming fire issue.

Next step was to work the other flank. I had 2 squads moving up bounding through the walled fields, going for the orchard. With the hill and house suppressed, they had a manageable task now.

They made it to the orchard with out incident, just a tad bit of fire from the bottom of the house, which hadn't gotten as much fire or any smaws. They moved through the orchard and bumped into the technicals and fighters on the other side. Luckily, they seemed to have the element of surprise and I had 2 squads coming through the woods, they lit everything up and suffered only a couple minor injuries. The one firetime on the roadside edge ran into trouble though, I had issues suppressing and getting fire into the center treeline and when i poked up a team to eyeball the trench from the orchard they got hit bad with one WIA. The wall however save the rest of em and I had them hide.

Eventually I was able to get rounds down into the trench from the orchard, bringing a full squad up to rain 5.56 and 40mm in there. At this point I was able to disengage the team up on the side with the house/hill, bring em down, and move towards the exit from the orcard. That damn sniper on the hill was still alive though, and I had to resume suppressive fire to work my way to the exit, keeping a little fire on the house and hill.

So i made iot out with only one WIA, but very little ammo...