Slitherine

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Taking a well-defended hex can be a long-term project. Be sure you bring enough stuff to finish the job. You will want to have engineer regiments to knock down the forts. Assaulting engineers also cause considerable casualties among defenders, as do armored regiments. Bring 2 or 3 of each to a big fight.

Combat causes disablements, disruption, fatigue and loss of morale. In a very real sense, who manages these factors better will win the campaign for the hex. To recover from these, you need support and supplies. You need an assault HQ (an army HQ for IJA, I don't know what the analogous unit is for allied LCAs) for sure, but that by itself will not give you enough support (enough support means "required support" is not in the red for any LCU). As IJ, I have also been bringing an air HQ of some sort, plus an aviation regiment. These have large numbers of support squads, and they will come in quite handy after you take the hex: you will be able to base a/c there the next day after it falls....I brought the Southern Area Army HQ (with prep points) to my assault on Singapore....

Also bring lots of artillery, three or four regiments are good if you are going after an objective defended by up to 50-75,000 enemy. You probably will not be assaulting every day, as your infantry will most likely need to rest in order to recover disruption and fatigue, so you will want to have artillery to keep up the pressure on the days you rest your infantry.

I like to assault when all my main assault units have recovered disruption/fatigue to 20/50 at the worst. Do not assault with LCUs with worse disruption/fatigue levels than these, except in the most urgent of circumstances. I would consider something like the following to be urgent: your last shock attack knocked the enemy's forts from 1 down to 0. Your attack was a 1-to-1; the ground combat animation showed you had 2000 actual AV adjusted to 1000, while the enemy was 800 adjusted to 600. There is a group of enemy LCUs in the adjacent hex. I would make another shock attack regardless of the state of my LCUs (with one exception), because you are very close to taking the hex, but the enemy could easily have reinforcements arriving at any time. The exception would be if supply was green or orange before the last attack but is now in the red. Unsupplied LCUs attack very poorly. If your supply goes red, guess what? You just became the defender.....

A game consideration is that the "top" assaulting LCU (not an HQ) in your "stack" will take the heaviest casualties. If that "top" unit is one of your most important assault elements (eg., an IJA division) your attacks will be delayed by the necessity for this unit to recover from disruption/fatigue. Find smaller infantry units that will stack on top of your main units and take the heat for them. An important consideration for defense as well as attack.

Another game consideration is that if the enemy has enough supply, he may be rebuilding his fort levels even as you are taking them down. To prevent this do airfield or port strikes to keep some level of damage there for him to repair. As long as his engineers have damage to repair they will not be rebuilding forts. Also this burns up his supply. Yesyesyes, gamey, but who does not do this?

One important thing to keep in mind is that naval bombardment, while powerful, can mislead you. The combat report may show them causing large numbers of casualties, but their effect is concentrated among support units. While in the long run this is very effective in wearing down an enemy defense, in the short term a big bombardment will not have much effect at all in the enemy's defensive strength. The effect is in reducing his ability to recover from your assaults in between times while you rest your troops.

Air support can be decisive. If your last attack was a 1-to-1 deliberate assault, shock attacking the very next turn in conjunction with a powerful ground support strike will almost always get you that 2-to-1. Ground support strikes generally cause disablements/disruption among the enemy's most powerful--and therefore most important--LCU. This hits directly at his ability to resist your assault. The effect is fleeting however; the following turn the affected LCU will most likely have recovered from 80% or more of the effect of the air strike. You have to assault the same turn to get the full benefit.

The three most important things (unless you have enough juice to get the 2-to-1 on the first attack): support, supply and preparation points.

Start with a bombardment attack. This will show you exactly what you are up against. If you are supremely confident, or if the enemy does a bombardment attack first (thus showing you what he has), start making deliberate assaults. Repeat as you recover disruption/fatigue. When you finally get the magic 1-to-1 with no forts, do a shock attack the following turn. If the enemy has many forts and you have many engineers and are getting 2-to-1 or better, consider making shock attacks sooner, you may take down multiple fort levels in a single turn.

I almost forgot: You must watch the entire ground combat animation. This is the only way to have any inkling of how the attack is progressing. After you sit through the seemingly interminable exchange of bombardments and assaults, you will be rewarded by an exact display of your base and adjusted AV followed by the enemy's base and adjusted AV. These four numbers are crucial, you need to write them down, and write down the follow-up attacks right next to them. In this way you will develop a very good sense of progress over time. If you don't do this, you will have to guess as to when to apply your final shock attack, the coup de gras.

All the above is based on the assumption that your supply is not in the red. If your supply is in the red, do not attack, unless you know that have overwhelming strength in the hex.

This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.

"Bomb early, bomb often, bomb everything." - Niceguy

Any bugs I report are always straight stock games.

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ORIGINAL: dtravel

...*sounds of poster digging thru masses of computer files*  Ah, here we are.  Something I copied from a post by Irrelevant a long time ago.  *hands file to Marcus*  Go, read, study for a year or two. 

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Taking a well-defended hex can be a long-term project....

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ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

" I almost forgot: You must watch the entire ground combat animation. This is the only way to have any inkling of how the attack is progressing. After you sit through the seemingly interminable exchange of bombardments and assaults, you will be rewarded by an exact display of your base and adjusted AV followed by the enemy's base and adjusted AV. These four numbers are crucial, you need to write them down, and write down the follow-up attacks right next to them. In this way you will develop a very good sense of progress over time. If you don't do this, you will have to guess as to when to apply your final shock attack, the coup de gras.


This is no longer the situation. In version 1.8 they added the necessary information to the combat results screen, so you can now exit out of the interminable combat screen and get the important information.

This game does not have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.

"Bomb early, bomb often, bomb everything." - Niceguy

Any bugs I report are always straight stock games.