battles from the bulge hunkered down

[mel24]

I had ordered a regiment to attack an objective which it went some way towards doing.
I then got a message saying the headquarters had hunkered down and shortly after that all the regiments units retreated towards the headquarters.
Can anyone explain this?

[jimcarravall]

ORIGINAL: mel24

I had ordered a regiment to attack an objective which it went some way towards doing.
I then got a message saying the headquarters had hunkered down and shortly after that all the regiments units retreated towards the headquarters.
Can anyone explain this?

Look into both the time of day, and the unit effectivenss (F6 Key) levels for the units being ordered to attack.

Units tend to go over to a resting condition as night approaches when assigned "normal" rest periods. In addition, units with low effectiveness ratings (high fatigue, low cohesion and / or low morale) attempt to recover by resting before acting on new orders.

Formation recovery occurs generally when units left on the defensive, waiting, or resting and not taking fire while in supply, within the command radius their superior headquarters, for enough hours to recover effectiveness levels prior to the attack.

There's a good discussion of this under Combat Effectiveness on Page 139 of the Game Manual.

Hope this helps.

[Fred Sanford]

Did you give the attack plenty of time? I always click the "end time" button until the scenario end so the attack doesn't time out.

[Apocal]

ORIGINAL: jimcarravallah

Units tend to go over to a resting condition as night approaches when assigned "normal" rest periods.

How do you assign them different rest periods? Just manually rest during the day?

[dazkaz15]

ORIGINAL: Apocal

ORIGINAL: jimcarravallah

Units tend to go over to a resting condition as night approaches when assigned "normal" rest periods.

How do you assign them different rest periods? Just manually rest during the day?

Yes, but they will still go to sleep when it gets dark so make sure you tick no rest for any units that are not tired, that you want to keep moving at night.
This was put in place because people where not, or forgetting to, rest their men.
There has been discussion on having an option to remove this auto rest for more experienced players, but on by default when first playing the game.

Maybe an option for Command Ops 2?

Units will not recover fatigue as quickly when resting during the day, or resting outside built up areas in cold weather at night or during the day.
Units in contact with the enemy also recover far les fatigue, even when the rest icon is displayed on the unit info panel.
Fatigue is caped at 90% for some reason, so 89% is very fatigued.

They don't bunker down very often any more, when fatigued though. This was changed fairly recently, and I'm not sure if it was done intentionally during patching or by accident?

The most common cause for bunkering down now, is if you miss the "Assault at" time even by one second, when this option is used to control the assault time during an attack.