Units seem retreat happy

[PenCapChew]

Hello. I owned COTA for quite some time and have only recently decided to try to really dig into the series. I played through most of the tutorial and have noticed that attacked units love to retreat quite often. For example, while attacking the Kommas Bridge objective the German units inside the town of Komma will often retreat if fired upon by attacking units. Why do they do this? There is more cover inside a town than the open field around them. I haven't even assaulted the town either, it is just direct fire from the Allies. I am still new to the game, but it seems units like to flee a little to often than they should. I always assumed you had to assault the area by closing in with the enemy to make them flee. Why does this happen?

[PenCapChew]

Any ideas? I did find a post from a designer about artillery that stated "if a unit is under bombardment and wants to retreat ( not rout ) it will have a 70% chance of staying put instead. This is further modified by +20% if its dug-in or better and by -10% if its Moving or Withdrawing. Is this also applied to direct fire? Currently the German AI often runs for the hills while inside a town while being fire on. I am not a military person by trade so I was hoping someone could explain what is realistically happening here.

[GoodGuy]

Well, there might be several reasons for the Germans to retreat at Komma. If the Germans just got there, or if they were in the process of relocating (in an ordery manner, initially), then the particular attacking Allied unit may force them to retreat. Also, say the defending unit just has rifles and MPs at their disposal, but the attacker is equipped with semi-auto rifles and light machine guns, light mortars or even heavy machine guns, then this will put up even more pressure. Check the status of the "happy retreater", did they have enough time to deploy before they retreated? Maybe they received a move order right before they started to retreat. If a unit is ordered to move under suppressive fire, this could result in chaos/retreat.

[Lieste]

In the tutorial they are likely to be grossly outnumbered have only a single formation (of larger than normal size), have no supply and no significant artillery. The attacking Australians have a lot of long range fire-power, including (potentially) tanks and artillery, but even their line companies have vickers MMG organic.

It takes several hours of steady fire by artillery and the pressure of infantry within effective LMG range to consistently discomfort the defenders - perhaps they should recognise the difficultly their tormentors should experience crossing an intact river line and stand their ground even when their effectiveness is greatly reduced? Still the absence of a credible quantity of artillery support in defence makes the German position pretty untenable.

There might be a problem with the two VL at Komma bridge/Komma town - the defence of both is assured as long as the bridge holds, so the early retreat on the town may be unwise - especially as the retrograde movement will be performed under pressure and with the displacing units in plain view and under artillery fire. Equally, attempts to advance on the bridge from the town may result in the breaking of the attacking forces.

The #1 tutorial *is* easy, but IMO it is supposed to be so... The Germans cannot effectively defend one crossing with their forces on hand, yet must cover three... the detail that the allied forces are also smaller than would be responsible for an objective of this importance doesn't really do anything to improve the situation for the Germans. Give the defenders a full regiment with supports (including one Art Bn and IDF capable leIG and sIG company) and it should give an attacking force of much larger size a rough time.