marking mines takes too much micro managing

[Fetchez la Vache]

Blasting bocage should definitely take longer than it does at the moment. I'd be happy to play with 2-3mins delay for engineers to blow a tank-sized hole, I think 5-10mins would take away some enjoyment (albeit more accurate). Wouldn't a person-sized hole be much quicker to blast - couldn't you just throw a satchel charge into the hedgerow and back-off? You'd only need to remove the vegetation since PBI have +2 climbing ability and won't expose their bellies in doing so. :-)

For mines, I'm happy to move the engineers up to the minefield myself and then order them to clear mines. However I do find that engineers seem to need to be repeatedly ordered to clear mines if they are interrupted, which can be annoying in WeGo since things start to become ineffecient.

I would also like to tell engineers to 'clear' a square I only suspect might harbour mines. They could then search the square and proceed to clear mines if they find any. (At least I am unaware of a way of doing this, please enlighten me if I am wrong!)

[The_Capt]

Indeed. From Doubler's description of engineers doing it unaided, it must have taken several minutes at least. First the holes had to be dug by hand, the charges placed and then tamped, and finally set off.

Then somebody came up with the bright idea of attaching two parallel pieces of pipe to the front of a tank. The tank would be driven up to the berm until the pipes had penetrated to the desired depth and then backed up leaving —voila!—two nice holes ready to receive charges. This greatly sped up the process, but still took a few minutes, start to finish.

Now whether players have the patience to go through all of that is somewhat of a doubtful proposition. Figure at least 5-10 minutes for the first technique, 2-3 for the second, and the possibility in each case of delays if they come under fire.

Michael

Problem with bocage and the berm in particular is it nowhere near a uniform structure. Concrete or steel for instance has a very predictable fracture characteristic when exposed to HE. The bocage berms have stones, voids, roots and other organics. So right of the march you are facing a lot of variables, so the engineers of the day did what they would do today...overkill.

For a tank sized breach the engineers, as would have been noted would have boreholed at least a third of the way thru the berm (half would be better) and stuffed them with as much explosives as they could. The reason they had to attack the berm was the very steep slow that either ground out the nose of oncoming tanks or forced the tank up to a very high angle so when it hit the trees it had a high risk of bellying out or tossing a track.

It has been thrown around in some corners that tanks should be able to get over low bocage but the reality is that bocage came in a thousand shapes and flavours. Sighting a possible crossing would have been an acquired skillset in-theatre, not something oyu can train for. I am sure a few Sherman crews got decent at it but this is a rare and still risky proposition. Then the question is what should be the failure rate and by what tank? 50%, 60%, 72.3%...no one really has found any data on this. The only thing we can go on is the very real fact that the Allies went to great lengths to solve the "bocage problem" which spells to me that there was no sustainable tactical solution to the problem.

No for mansized holes the problem is a bit simpler. No need for a berm attack, I would go with three bangalores taped up stuffed thru the vegitation. That type of attack could happen in the timeframes seen in game.

But it is a game and some abstractions have to be accepted.