Rob Gjessing
Posts: 525
Joined: 1/27/2003 From: Sydney Australia Status: offline
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Ok looking at the image above, this is a combat which I just set up in the Gallipoli Scenario which you can download from Run5 (end of shameless plug :)).. If we look at that image above then I will try and explain a few things.. I attempted to do this yesterday and after about 20 mins of typing the forums ate my post! :( If I get anything wrong, then anyone else please feel free to jump in and correct me. That image is divided into 4 parts, the top part of the map where you can see the battlefield and the units conducting the attack. The next part of the image working down is where I can assign my bonus shifts, like leadership, ART etc.. and is it also from where I order the attack to go in - by pressing the Red button! Moving to the bottom part of the image, the main area at the bottom lists what odds I have, and then the CRT for those odds in that terrain type, it also shows the enemy stack that I am attacking, which has 1 unit in it. It also summarises the shift elements in this attack (which I dont know if I will go into here right now.. I have been through it before but it may have been before these forums hit the dust and lost alot of their posts).. and then finally over on the bottom right is some info about the immediate area that is being attack - including some info about what shifts I will get if I attack from a certain direction. Ok, now lets look at them each in more detail. The map on the top of the image, I wont go into.. we should all know what thats showing.. so lets start on the next part of the image down.. where you assign your shift bonus'. Working left to right, we can see that it says Overrun in Green.. this means that I am able to get an overrun for this attack. Remember that when calculating if an overrun will occur ART shifts are not taken into account. Just to the right of where it says Overrun there is an Orange arrow with a bullet in it.. if you right click in this area it will give you some neato info about your attack.. Next along that row are the Reset and Max buttons. They should be self explainatory, Reset takes everything out of the combat - as if no one is attacking. Max, assigns everything to the combat - all units and all shift bonu's. Max is good to press to get an idea of the max odds you can currently get. I generally press this to throw everything into the combat and then start to remove things manually until I get the odds that I want to attack at. Note that if you hit Max and get 10-1+ odds, then you may be able to remove some units or ART from the combat and still achieve 10-1+. Next along is a picture of a generals head, this is the leadership shift bonus, click on the graphic of the leader/general to add and remove the bonus from this combat. Next along, but grayed out in this combat is the Air Combat shift. It is not available in this combat - or this scenario that the image is from because its a WWI battle. But if there was Air combat available this turn then it would be highlighted and you also would be able to toggle it on or off to allocate it to this combat. Moving along, is the Barrage shift. This is to reflect Off board ART barrages. This is NOT the same as the ART which is reflected as units on the battlefield. The next one along is for the normal run of the mill ART units.. so under stand the difference between these two. The next button is the button that looks like an X - this is the button to centre the map on the combat. Moving along is the cycle through units button so that you can manually add or remove the units from combat (you do this by click on the units yellow radio button to select or deselect the unit for combat as you normally do to select them as part of a stack. Then there is the cycle through ART units, so that you can choose to include or exclude specific ART peices for the combat. The next button we should all be familar with and thats the Execute Combat button - its gives the orders to attack! And finally along the row is the Exit button which enables you to exit the combat without attacking. How many times have you pressed the Execuate Combat (Attack) button my mistake when aiming for this one? I have :( Ok looking at the bottom of the image now, the main part on the left, shows the stack/units being attack - there is only one in this instance. Next along is a summary of the attack strengths and shifts.. arhh what the heck Im on a roll.. I will do my best to explain this to you now :) ok it tells us the Terrain type the combat is being conducted on as "Gully" and then it tells us that the hex actually has a name - so it must be an objective "Monash Gully". Under that it says that there is an chance of an overrun in this attack, and that chance is 4/6. We know its 4 out of 6 because is we look over at the odds we can see there there is a 4 in 6 chance of getting a D result. Remember that overruns are negated if you get a * result for the defender. Because there are 2 chances of a * result out of 6 which will negate an overrun, then the chances of the overrun being successful are obviously 4/6. Under this in the Blue bar is the defense strength of 7 compared to the Attack strength (on the orrange/red) as 60. 60/7 is 8.6-1, but I think the engine rounds down, so my RAW combat odds are 8-1. Under that it says that there are +6 shifts. Lets look at this and you will see that I dont actually need all of those shifts and I am wasting resources. Lets start with negative shifts - and how it impacts upon the raw odds.. Looking directly down under where it says Shifts +6 is an image of an ART piece and, I know its hard to see that it has a -2 in the ART picture. This is saying that there is an enemy ART unit which is firing support of defense and that the power of this ART unit is equal to 2 shifts. So therefore thats 2 shifts in the enemies favour - so thats -2 shifts against the attacker. So our raw 8-1 odds are now reduced down to 6-1 because of the defensive ART. Moving slightly to the right, there is a (hard to see) image of the terrain which has a " - " in the image. This is saying that there are NO negative shift allowances due to terrain/defense. I will talk about this a bit more in a moment for now understand that normally a defender will automatically get -4 defensive shifts. This is to reflect that the defender has an advantage. There are some things which the attacker can do to negate this advantage and thats from attacking from multiple directions and attemping to outflank etc. The attacker has done that in this instances and these has resulted in the defender having NO or " - " adjustments due to any terrain/defensive bonus. But more on this towards the end of the post. Ok thats the defensive shifts done! In total they contribute 2 negative shifts to the attack from the Defensive ART. The combat odds are therefore 6-1 now taking account of that. Lets look at all of those Attacking positive shifts. Directly under the orange/red attack strength bar that has 60 on it.. are the Attacking shifts. There is +1 under the Leadership Shift because we have assigned 1 leader to the attack. There is nothing under the Air combat shift, because as I said there are no planes available. We have +1 under the Barrage shift and then we have +2, +2, and +2 for the ART shifts. So in total thats +1, +1 and +6 (for all of the ART) being in a total of +8 positive shifts for the attacker. So how does that impact upon our odds. Well we are at 6-1 taking account of the negative shifts from the defender. If we add +8 shifts to that we end up with odds of 14-1. We know that the max odds are 10-1 so it only shows 10-1+ as the listed odds. So clearly we have 4 shifts which we are wasting. So we could take 2 of our +2 ART out of the attack and still get 10-1 odds. Another way of looking at it is.. the raw odds are 8-1. There are +8 Attacker shifts and -2 defender shifts, so the total adjusted shifts for this combat is +6 shifts. And this is what is listed under the defense and attack strengths. But wait thats not all there is actually more! Remember earlier on I talked about how the defender normally gets -4 shifts due to the fact that its easier to defend. Well this is true and this did happen in this combat.. but the attacker has negated this negative shifts by attacking from multiple directions. If you look at the final part of the image, which is the bottom right, you will see that there is an image of the one hex that is being attacked, and then 2 green arrowheads and 1 orange arrow head (with a mans head above it). This shows whats called Tactical shifts. This says that the attack is coming from 3 directions. The Northern direction (orange arrow head) and then from the North West and South West directions (green arrow heads). The attacks from the NW and SW (green arrow heads) are uncontested attacks - the are not in contact with anyone else and they are able to focus their attacks solely on this assault. Because of this, they get tactical shifts from each of those directions. Each tactical shift is equal to +2 shifts. So they have 2 x +2 tactical shifts giving them +4 tactical shift bonus'. It is these +4 tactical shifts which have offset and reduce the -4 defensive shifts that the defender automatically gets. So above where we have said that the defenders terrain/defensive shifts are listed as " - " its because our +4 tactical shifts have evened them out and reduced them to " - " or 0. The attack is also coming from the North. But the Orange Arrow head tells us that we are not getting a tactical shift bonus from the attack in this direction. We know we are not getting a bonus from this direction because the arrow head would be Green if we were! The reason we are not, is because the units attacking from this direction are engaged themselves from other enemy units (this is reflected by the Mans Head above the orange arrow head). And if you example the battlefield on the image yourself above, you can indeed see that our attacking unit from the north is infact enaged.. he is actually enaged by two other enemy units himself. So he cant get a tactical shift as he cant put 100% into the assault. But - the fact that the arrow head is orange means that we are able to get a tactical shift by attacking from that direction if we try! We way we could do that is to move more of our units into that northern hex until we had more units in that hex then there was enemy units engaging us. We havent done that yet though so the arrow remains orange and we dont get a shift. Just finally on this topic, if the arrow head was Red then that would mean that we are not getting a shift from attacking from that direction and we wouldnt be able to no matter what we did - for example we may be attacking across a river from that direction. Man this is a long post - my apologies if you are fidning it boring.. but if you are I guess you would have stopped reading by now. Just to finish up, someone asked how do u know what the results of your assault was. Well after you press the Execute combat or Attack button, you will see the Die roll and it will show you what you got, this will also be reflected on the Odds/CRT display and you will also see that the enemy unit(s) have lost some steps from the image of them in the bottom left of the display. Good luck.. I hope that atleast makes some sense to someone and if you have any more questions sing out..
< Message edited by Rob Gjessing -- 2/21/2004 9:31:54 AM >
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