Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: Alfred

On the evidence presented to date, I'm not impressed with your opponent's use of game mechanics.  In particular his land warfare technique is lacking.  Most egregious is his regular use of shock attacks instead of bombardment or deliberate attack.  Not that you are totally blameless in this area and against a better opponent you would have been forced to pay a much heavier price but in comparison to your opponent, your use of shock attack is much more restrained.

In AE, a shock attack should be the exception rather than the rule.  It should never be the first attack of a siege unless there is overwhelming verified evidence that the enemy is extremely week.  In a siege, Shock attack is equivalent to the me storming of a fortified position after a breach in the walls has been achieved.  Until then progress is measured by digging ever closer the assault trenches, the effects of attrition upon the defenders resulting from cutting supply lines, disease and intermittent long range trebuchet and archery fire.

Shock attack places more emphasis on the firepower values but most players who rush to use it overlook the effect of fortifications.  Rushing a shock attack against any defender who has any sort of fortification level is usually a boon for the defenders for the damage inflicted by superior enemy firepower will be mitigated by their fortification level whereas the attacker who almost certainly will have a lower entrenchment level (and it will always be zero if they shock attack immediately upon arrival in the hex) than the defenders, is fully exposed to the full force of defender firepower, even if that is inferior to the attackers own firepower values.

An unsuccessful Shock Attack is much more damaging to the attacker than a failed Deliberate Attack.  The malus of failure is not fully captured by the Combat Report. Failure results in significant unit debilitation as measured by fatigue, morale and disruption levels.  All intangibles not captured by the Combat Report but key inputs into the combat algorithms.  To follow up a failed Shock Attack with another Shock Attack after a couple of days resting in between, will usually not be sufficient to reduce the fatigue, morale and disruption levels.  Instead what is being set up is a carousel of failure feeding upon itself.

Alfred

quote:

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

quote:

ORIGINAL: DesertWolf101

Singapore Crossing

Most of the report looks very good, but the low number of enemy vehicles destroyed suggests you have few anti-tank guns. Tanks are a big problem for Allied infantry in 1941-42.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Alfred

The bayonet charge is a better analogy than the one I provided.

There is very little of AE which is likely to stump me.  There are reasons why I may not provide a specific answer.

There had been an early bug involving Chinese HQs not returning.  That bug was squashed.  With regard to the "zombie" Chinese units, my hesitation in answering is because notwithstanding the earlier fix there might still be a potential bug.  I don't get Chinese non infantry units destroyed so I haven't witnessed any bug, and no one ever brought it to michaelm75au's attention in the Tech sub forum but that is not conclusive for several reasons.  Rule number one of bug fixing, the coder goes in to fix the identified bug not to ferret out any other related bugs.  So with appropriate caveat ....

Destroyed non infantry/HQ Chinese LCUs should automatically reappear after 30 days as a shell.  However that should be of no comfort to you because destroyed Chinese artillery or flak units would then need to access the Chinese pools for their reconstitution.  There is precious little in the way of monthly build rates for Chinese artillery tubes and flak.

Bottom line, don't get Chinese artillery units destroyed.  You don't have many to begin with and you are always on a knife edge in terms of maintaining their authorised TOE.

Alfred

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lowpe



I use shock attacks very often. However, I almost never use it for the entire stack of units in a hex.

Armor is almost always used to shock attack when the Allies have minimal AT presence early on. During a siege, once forts are knocked down to where I can take the base, often I carefully pick out an infantry unit to shock attack while the other infantry deliberate attacks to speed up the pace of conquests.

I also heavily use Reserve no pursuit in defensive battles,often putting up to 25% or more of the troops in this position. Reserve pursuit gets used too, just not as much.

If you are going to be knocked out of a hex, putting troops into reserve mode can minimize some losses and lets you pick where the majority of losses will come from if you have multiple units in hex.

Combat modes are very powerful and quite the mini game that most players don't appreciate.

quote:

ORIGINAL: BBfanboy

Nice job on Zuikaku. I suspect you will not catch Shokaku fleeing away.
Two cautions on using Oz as a repair base:
- ship lots of fuel there for the ships
- KB often does a "tour around Australia" early in the game when Oz has virtually no fighter defence. Of course the idea of the tour is to pick off convoys and ships in port. Before I have air superiority, I never use Oz for repairs that take more than three or four days.

quote:

ORIGINAL: DesertWolf101


I rarely used reserve (no pursuit) but your point on selecting the unit to take the brunt of the losses in a doomed battle is very intriguing. Out of curiosity, if half of your units are set to deliberate and the other half at shock does the combat result report the battle as a shock or deliberate?

quote:

ORIGINAL: DesertWolf101

Something very strange happened in China this turn that I don’t quite understand. I raised it with my opponent at the end of the campaign and he didn’t seem to understand it either, or to be more precise he didn’t respond to that particular question.

The back-story is that I advanced an army from Kanhsien and threatened to encircle the Japanese army attempting to take Pingsiang from my second Chinese army dug in there. When my opponent realized the threat, he retreated his infantry units but left 10 artillery battalions/regiments at Pingsiang. During the turn, three things happened
- His infantry units and my advancing army arrived simultaneously at hex 82,55 just southeast of Pingsiang (therefore artillery units at Pingsiang were not cut off as far as I can tell)
- His ten artillery units bombarded my dug in Chinese army at Pingsiang
- All ten artillery units (2,785 troops, 256 guns, 103 vehicles) were wiped out at Pingsiang by attrition.

I may be missing something obvious here, but this kinda stumped me. Any ideas?

quote:

ORIGINAL: DesertWolf101

- All ten artillery units (2,785 troops, 256 guns, 103 vehicles) were wiped out at Pingsiang by attrition.

• no retreat path
  
• lack of supply - particularly important in terms of rebalancing the post combat ready/disabled device ratios
  
• general "loss of hope"

quote:

ORIGINAL: Alfred

LCU attrition is both more complicated and simpler than most players understand.

Usually players only see the wiped out by attrition message after the conclusion of battle, during the housekeeping phase.  This obscures the code connection with combat.  Common decisive combat results which a player sees immediately at the end of combat is either a surrender or in the case of Japanese LCUs, a bansai attack.  A delayed combat outcome but still directly related to the combat result, is the wiped out by attrition outcome.  The most common situations which will result in this delayed outcome stems from an inability to retreat or lack of supply or general "loss of hope".  As one needs some Assault Value to launch a banzai attack, when there isn't any AV you will tend to see Japanese LCUs fall victim to the attrition.

Less obvious (because the message is not displayed) attrition is when there is no combat but a LCU is "surrounded" and devices start to be destroyed, generating VPs in the process.  Basically when there isn't the supply and conditions to repair disabled devices, you start to enter the attrition algorithms.

The above however is not set in concrete in as much as when LCUs are close to the threshold of attrition being applied, they will just "jump" the threshold and go directly to the wiped out by attrition stage.

If we go to the screenshot shown in post #137, we see there is no retreat path from Pingsiang for Japanese LCUs.  Supply exits via a hexside controlled by your side but it also has to go through your controlled centre of the hex first before exiting.  Also the Japanese LCUs would have definitely had no Assault Value at all at the conclusion of combat so no bansai attack would ever be forthcoming.  Assuming that the units had expended all their supply in conducting their bombardment attack we are left with the classic situation of:

• no retreat path
  
• lack of supply - particularly important in terms of rebalancing the post combat ready/disabled device ratios
  
• general "loss of hope"

Thus when the "Fat Lady sings", no surprise that the wiped out by attrition situation arose.

Alfred

quote:

ORIGINAL: DesertWolf101


...The Japanese 52nd Division makes a surprise appearance near Canton – smashing a weak Chinese provincial Corps on its way to Wuchow. The 52nd is not a division that starts in China – my opponent brought it as reinforcements from the Home Islands. This is bad news for my Chinese troops, but great news for my overall strategic plan to force him to shift resources and troops to China....