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ferrata -> Last Hoorah of the "Staff Battery" (8/29/2008 7:23:40 PM)
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It's unfortunate -- the last battle I ever fought that included the "Staff Battery" (two, no less) and the Staff Batteries (with a few well-said prayers and a heckuva lot of displacing) performed wonderfully.
Truthfully, my two little staff batteries were like 20th Maine -- I left them all alone on a little hill on my right flank, while my rifle battalion covered the juicy objectives. The Russian onslaught came right at them. In the end, my riflemen had to deal with a few T-26s and scattered infantry platoons, while the staff batteries, confused and out of supply (of course) wound up taking a russian rifle battalion, a company of T26s, and a company of T-34s right in the face.
In the end, I wound up having to flex my reserve company and an engineer platoon over to the right to help them out, and even after having made a mid-battle decision to bug-out, I turned them around and got them back into the fight. Most of the sections made it through OK.
Unfortunately, it was after that battle that I decided to dig a little deeper into why I was constantly receiving these seemingly useless support units over and over and over again. I found that when the campaign was selecting my attachment forces, it was using a huge chunk of my available resources on them.
I don't know who decided to include them in the oob, but I made a call and went ahead and commented them all out of my battalion oob file, then restarted my campaign and I have seen hide nor hair of a "Staff Battery" since. Don't get me wrong -- it's cute being reinforced by a unit that's as useful as a guy in a giraffe suit on a bicycle and monkey playing a kazoo. My little riflemen really got a kick out of those guys around the campfire at night, but it was even better starting my next battle and seeing a little tear in my men's eyes when StuG IIIs and 150mm Howitzers came rolling in to support (these units were nonexistent before I made the aforementioned omission).
Basically, those staff batteries broke the game... on the german rifle battalion level, at least. Do yourself a favor, go into your battalion.oob, find every line that has "Staff Battery" in it, and put that line in brackets. Then restart your campaign (or just cut your old campaign info into a new one), and enjoy the war.
P.S. Does anyone know what needs to change in the platoon oobs so my 105mm howitzers will once again be capable of laying smoke?
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