Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: SunlitZelkova

He gets the main points, but I'll add to stww2's answer-

The different infantry units are as follows-

Inf- this is an "empty" unit, that spawns with the mounts you loaded on to a ship or aircraft when cargo gets unloaded. It can be added in the scenario editor and is viewable in the DB so that it works like a normal unit, but in practice I don't think players are expected to use the unmodified unit itself.

Inf Bde/Inf Bn/Inf Coy- These are APP-6 placeholders intended to represent larger units depending on the design of the scenario. The acronyms stand for Brigade, Battalion, and Company, respectively. Players are presumably expected to add mounts to these, not use them "out of the box". An example of the use of this unit would be adding all of the mounts that an infantry company would have instead of using the individual platoons. So if I wanted to lower the unit count in my scenario, I would add 12x M1126 Stryker mounts to the "Inf Coy" unit to make a Stryker company, instead of using 3x Mech Inf Plt (XM1126 Stryker). Use of this would depend on whether you want your units to operate close together or spread out.

Inf Plt- This is supposed to be an Infantry Platoon, but due to some inconsistencies in nomenclature and the cargo system, it technically isn't exactly. For practical purposes it is fine, however. The way infantry platoons are modelled in the game, they can basically be described as consisting of the automatic riflemen/gunner's weapon (a machine gun). The platoons consist of four squads/sections (which based on the personnel count in the cargo DB, are actually more like fire teams), thus four machine guns. It should be noted that infantry weapons are literally on the very bottom end of the game's weapon systems, only surpassed in lack of hitting power and range by the 9mm pistol mount in the DB3000. Thus even though it says "7.62mm MG Burst (20 rounds)", it might as well be the entire squad firing their rifles in semi-automatic mode; or in the CWDB, even bolt action rifles.

Inf Sec- This is an infantry section. It is used for an even higher degree of dispersal, so you don't have all of the mounts getting destroyed by one guided bomb. There is also an infantry recon section, which is invisible (impossible for the enemy to detect). Otherwise, infantry sections are only used for anti-tank weapons and support units (heavy machine guns and mortars)

As far as attack power goes, whoever has the most mounts will prevail. So even if you have 4x infantry platoons dispersed across a valley, a single infantry battalion with 16x infantry platoons is going to prevail.

I built a very rough Khe Sanh scenario recently, and it was very interesting. The artillery was wildly inaccurate firing point blank, and mortars and recoilless rifles had severe issues too. The USMC actually held out pretty well against the PAVN onslaught, but artillery was continually firing on fixed positions, and the shrapnel was hitting the regular infantry platoons. So the south side of the base was nearly annihilated. On the north side, however, the attack was much smaller, just a few infantry platoons supported by PT-76s and a couple 81mm mortars, and the USMC infantry not only survived (as it was spread out more and there were fewer fixed positions) but also succeeded in destroying most of the attacking platoons, while recoilless rifles succeeded in destroying the PT-76s. I also added some T-34-85s and IS-2s to the PAVN side to see how they did against a smaller number of Marine M48A3s. The M48s missed wildly, not hitting any of the infantry units or tanks they targeted (they actually ran out of AP ammo trying to destroy one IS-2 platoon). The IS-2s likewise probably had their own issues, because despite driving directly into the Marine infantry positions, they did not fire at all.

On the other hand, most of the PAVN forces were detected well before reaching the base, and thus were subject to 175mm artillery fire from nearly maximum range at Camp Carroll. These were inaccurate but the enemy units were spread out enough that some were actually hit, and received a decent amount of damage.