Latest sd44 blog - makes me think infantry only cap buildings.

[Bersercker]

What I want to see is squads/sections (10men) and platoons (30 or so men) taking cover correctly and deploying weapons in cover correctly to give them the best profile for the enemy they are facing. Patrolling and moving forward in formations that don't get them all killed in one enfilade shot. Of course this is not always possible and it's part of the reason why house to house combat was more deadly in ww2 for infantry than more open combat in forests and rural areas.... however in Eugen games infantry tend to be very vulnerable in anything but buildings. That is just my experience, considering I saw tanks assault through heavy wooded areas.

I also hope they have both dense impassible for vehicles forest and other densities of forest to give infantry more cover.

Also the fact that when Eugen has open terrain, generally it is exactly that. A flat football field freshly mowed and perfectly level. Infantry cannot play against vehicles or even other infantry in this terrain. I don't want eugen to magically make line infantry invisible all the time either.

I would like it if as infantry advanced in open ground they were in line abreast, if they are assaulting they should be bounding and shooting as they do it and if they get fired upon enough they could go to ground individually behind cover. That cover in open ground can be shell holes, hay stacks, boulders, slight crests etc. There is so much more cover than just buildings for infantry. Consider though that in the bocage farmland their would have been open fields well tilled and flat, but that hedges in that country would block LOS and that bocage was far more rare in the British area. The British typically had no such cover and were thus using more massed brute force advance tactics.

So pretty much like in CoH2 only even more detailed?

Not sure how that would work if you don't controll the placement of each soldier. Like, zoom in and count the number of boulders and haystacks to asses how much cover is available in the area and then get pissed when unit AI doesn't use them efficiently enough? Meh.

Unless you'd want to represent that cover with some additional damage received modifiers in each area depending on the terrain, with some sort of additional overlay that would to tell how much cover is available in the particular area. But then there are already all these bushes, forests, hedgerows and the like, which function like cover, block line of sight, don't require any overlays and are visible without zooming in, so in my opinion they would do just as well.

 

[Thonar]

1. The main-weapon of tanks against infantry is not their main gun but their MGs.
For a Tiger I for example up to 3 MGs (2 under armor).
With the fact that tanks usually doesn't operate alone that is massive firepower... if you know where the enemy is.

2. The size of the HE shell is usually not really that important, since blast and fireball are directly propotional to the amount of filling but shrapnels aren't.
That may also be the reason why several armies use HEAT-rounds as Multi-Purpose-Rounds.


So overall: The advantage of the infantry is concealment. That is also why they fight usually in Forest, Cities and out of fortified positions. Open ground is, nearly always, a deathtrap.
Even when a tank wouldn't be able to kill every man in a squad, the squad wouldn't do much anymore without own Anti-Tank-Assets.

 

[Destraex]

The problem is that open ground is not always as open as it seems. Its just that eugen show open ground as if they were bowling greens in previous games. Next time you visit the country or even a farm. Try to determine how easy it would be for tanks to see men who have taken cover. Will eugen have men take cover when facing tanks... Tanks of course have very limited vision. I just want to be able to visually judge without looking at icons when my men have a chance. I want infantry to be useful like they were in ww2. I don't simply want a tank fest.

The typical problem that games like this have is that as soon as you introduce tanks as a standard piece of kit, where in reality tanks were the exception not the rule, you negate anybody wanting to use infantry properly. Because they cannot survive vs tanks. So you need a way to make sure infantry are able to take on other infantry in fields not just houses. A good way to do that is the introduction of impassible to vehicles terrain. Hedgerows were impassible to most tanks without the help of engineers for instance.

 

[Destraex]

be nice to see tracersand muzzle flashes from individuals in the squad rather than a single burst of tracers coming from the centre of the blob so to speak. Close Combat probably did this on a similar scale very well. Close Combat 3d is coming btw. As is another game by sulla I cannot currently remebrr the name of... Anzio art of war or something.

 

[Gorganslayer]

To be honest I would almost suggest infantry get a concealment bonus if they stay in open ground long enough to represent them conforming to the terrain. That way you can have tanks struggle to stop infantry prepared in fields but not moving infantry, and still, have the ground hugging troops spottable by reece.

 

[Destraex]

Combat Mission does it well in that their is NO BORG SPOTTING - meaning that individual squads need to spot their own targets but can be informed through a simulated coms system and notice things that way that other units notice. In other words spotting is delayed unless it is obvious and in direct los.
I remember that the Americans had phones in the back of their tanks for the express purpose of infantry informing them of targets... because they were not great at spotting but infantry in support were. German tankers had a DOCTRINE of their commanders staying unbuttoned in order to spot effectively.

I guess what I am saying is that it should be possible to assault with infantry in numbers because tanks should not be covering the whole field. Maybe I am thinking of the eastern front where infantry divisions held large tracts of land without armoured divisions. Armoured divisions being used for breakthroughs or kept as "fire fighting" teams moved around to support defenders that were under pressure. Infantry played such a huge role in ww2. I want to see tanks do well but it sounds like in this game their will always be that problem that the enemy will ALWAYS field tanks.

Their is hope though that we will see infantry fights in the first few phases. But I hope the infantry are better animated than they were in red dragon where they would simply run around in a blob and in the open would simply blob waiting for that one killer shot from a tank.

 

[D Inqu]

I've had the opposite experience in RD and EE: if the infantry properly gets the drop on tanks, they can absolutely slaughter them. Sure, infantry is a bit of a niche weapon, but they're really good at what they do, and the fact that they're hard to spot makes them really versatile in my eyes.

See, this is the bit I don't like. In WW2 infantry were not a niche weapon. They were the main combattant. RD made some steps in the right direction, but it's not enough for WW2.

One of the things the game needs is some sort of fortification system. Soldiers did not always sit inside houses (since those are actual not that good as cover or protection). They would dig in whenever they had a chance. Starting with foxholes within minutes, and stretching to full trenches, fortified MG and gun nests etc.

 

[Baane]

See, this is the bit I don't like. In WW2 infantry were not a niche weapon. They were the main combattant. RD made some steps in the right direction, but it's not enough for WW2.

One of the things the game needs is some sort of fortification system. Soldiers did not always sit inside houses (since those are actual not that good as cover or protection). They would dig in whenever they had a chance. Starting with foxholes within minutes, and stretching to full trenches, fortified MG and gun nests etc.

It could take up to a full phase of this game's time to dig a foxhole suitable for a man. While I think abstractions should be avoided where they can be, just making infantry more robust against incoming fire I think should be enough to simulate irregularity in their formation.

The M48 high explosive shell of the 75-mm M3, for example, had a 'casualty radius' of thirty feet (just over nine meters.) This is a paper statistic, though, and doesn't really take into account undulations in the landscape or the presence of any form of cover. Exactly how to simulate this, I don't know. But I really, really hope we don't get just a handful of tank rounds wiping out platoons like we did in Wargame

 

[Destraex]

I dare say that even in todays world if a full on conventional war happened that infantry would still be more important than you think. Once all the expensive kit took attrition.

Back on topic though, fully mechanised units in ww2 were rare and the infantry did the hard yards especially in defence. It was generally only in the concentrated breakthrough stages that fully armoured and mechanised units were concentrated and used in force. At that stage they were usually facing AT defences and infantry lines in depth. Generally things were a question of falling back through a series of defensive lines. But Normandy is one of those battles that kinda was very mechanised. But just remember that penny packeting tanks had been tried many times and failed... the French are a good example of this. Failure to concentrate their superior tanks left them broken against the Germans during Blitzkrieg. This game will basically make you penny packet all your troops by only giving them to you very slowly. The original wargame european escalation was good because you could bring on a whole column of tanks at once. Red Dragon rarely allows enough points to do this as you are usually hanging on by a thread because of points and attrition rather than battle strategy and tactical skill. This is why I would love a defensive or offensive mode with objective points based gameplay (ten victory points for attacking holding the hill for 15 mins with inferior forces) rather than simply doing a straight meeting engagement with gradual build up of forces.

 

[Baane]

I dare say that even in todays world if a full on conventional war happened that infantry would still be more important than you think. Once all the expensive kit took attrition.

A lot of the reason that Infantry doesn't seem that critical in games like Wargame, is because cities are ghost towns and there is no inclination to preserve anything like there is in the real world.

 

[Destraex]

True. IRL everything would be defended if possible and that means infantry. Massive infantry reserves would be mobilised. It's just that today's asynchronous warfare makes people think today's battles are all fully Tank and APC from a western perspective. Simply because the best units with the best equipment are deployed. WEE and ALB simulated the large tank battles expected during the cold war... that was fine. But who knows after that.

 

[fabius]

A simple addition for infantry that strikes me as possible for release would be to make ruins still give them some cover

 

[Baane]

A simple addition for infantry that strikes me as possible for release would be to make ruins still give them some cover

Ruins absolutely should give cover. I have no idea why they don't. Regardless of if the former structure was destroyed, the ruins themselves still provide hard cover.

 

[fabius]

Ruins absolutely should give cover. I have no idea why they don't. Regardless of if the former structure was destroyed, the ruins themselves still provide hard cover.

The Betas must have mentioned this...

 

[safe-keeper]

See, this is the bit I don't like. In WW2 infantry were not a niche weapon. They were the main combattant. RD made some steps in the right direction, but it's not enough for WW2.

One of the things the game needs is some sort of fortification system. Soldiers did not always sit inside houses (since those are actual not that good as cover or protection). They would dig in whenever they had a chance. Starting with foxholes within minutes, and stretching to full trenches, fortified MG and gun nests etc.

Niche in that you use them in specific situations. They obviously can't charge across an open field or effectively march 10 kilometres to their target, but when you use them correctly, they are deadly.

 

[D Inqu]

It could take up to a full phase of this game's time to dig a foxhole suitable for a man. While I think abstractions should be avoided where they can be, just making infantry more robust against incoming fire I think should be enough to simulate irregularity in their formation.

Perhaps deployable trenches/fortifications before combat start? TBH, I consider the game to essentially have "compressed time", as RL engagements were not often in short 10 min phases.

Niche in that you use them in specific situations. They obviously can't charge across an open field or effectively march 10 kilometres to their target, but when you use them correctly, they are deadly.

Yes, and that's exactly what's wrong. The massed charges of pre-WW1 were of course gone, but infantry was the main combatant for most situations, not just specific ones, both attack and defence. They should not charge across an open field, but it's the same for vehicles.

 

[Bersercker]

Okay, so i guess you guys want riflemen with at grenades chasing panzer 4's all over the map and panzergrenadiers armed panzershrecks, which have 99% accuracy and the same range as tank main guns, popping shermans left and right? While thats a valid preference, i'm afraid Eugen aren't making company of heroes: Normandy 44.

 

[Baane]

Okay, so i guess you guys want riflemen with at grenades chasing panzer 4's all over the map and panzergrenadiers armed panzershrecks, which have 99% accuracy and the same range as tank main guns, popping shermans left and right? While thats a valid preference, i'm afraid Eugene aren't making company of heroes: Normandy 44.

No one said that and you should feel silly for posting such hyperbole.

 

[Destraex]

Okay, so i guess you guys want riflemen with at grenades chasing panzer 4's all over the map and panzergrenadiers armed panzershrecks, which have 99% accuracy and the same range as tank main guns, popping shermans left and right? While thats a valid preference, i'm afraid Eugen aren't making company of heroes: Normandy 44.

Not at all. I don't want company of heroes. I love realism.
Realism in infantries case means they should have the flexibility to fight outside of towns.
Infantry generally support tanks and move with them. They are not saved purely for buildings and forests. They generally take cover when fired upon.... that is primarily what I hope Eugen show. A convincing cover animation. Then a convincing return fire animation.
In red dragon the infantry if in the open and fired upon sort of stood their like dopes and then when suppressed got on the ground ready to die in a blob.