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Curtis Lemay -> RE: Guide Newbies (12/9/2014 1:33:46 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: CC1
Hi,
I started looking at your first move in your "France 1944 D-Day" scenario (to get some insights into helping me with the game learning curve) and had a question regarding the tactic of choosing a limited number of units to attack the beach hexes when you could otherwise attack with more units.
You do allude to the fact that it would be wasteful to attack with more units because the Germans have a lot of supporting artillery but I was wondering if you could elaborate on this a little more. Especially in the context of your doing this in the Omaha beach sector when facing a much tougher force.
I can sort of understand that you want to avoid defensive fire from the supporting artillery but wouldn't you also want to maximize the amount of damage you could deal to the defending unit as well?
Is it that the optimal way to do this is to essentially attack in waves (a few units at a time over successive combat rounds) which also helps to minimize losses?
My sense is that this is the case but it is not intuitively obvious for a beginner.
The neat thing about TOAW is that there are no guarantees of anything when it comes to combat. I can't profess to having had the perfect solution to the problem - just that it was good enough to get a satisfactory lodgement. So, you might want to try it with more assaulters and see what happens. But I suspect that you will find that it not only wastes your squads but may also waste rounds (from the increase in attack complexity). As I planned it, most of the combat power comes from the invulnerable ranged equipment, not the vulnerable ground forces. Throwing more troops into the assault reverses that ratio. And, it's hard to get a large number of ground units to all drop out of the combat at the same time, resulting in expending extra rounds. Maximizing combat phases is critical in this first turn.
Note that since I wrote that AAR, version 3.4 has posted, and that adds the Assault Ratio test, so you will always want to have ground assaulters of at least equal strength to the defenders or risk weakening the support strength. But note that I voluntarily complied with this rule anyway in that AAR. Going beyond that requirement gives no further benefit in that regard (though that will change in the next version).
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