Getting arty units safe...

[Tzar007]

Haven't been on the forums for a while but in anticipation of the upcoming COTA, I decided to fire up my HTTR that was sitting still since a couple of months...man, everytime I am blasted by this great game.

I have 2 questions though and I don't remember if their is a satisfying answer to them or not (and I was not any more succesful with a search in the forums):

1) When a give an order let's say to a battalion to move, sometimes the mortar unit attached to the Bn is right there in the middle of the pack, moving along with the rest of the battalion. I hate it when it does that, because sometimes the Bn gets embroiled in some fight sooner than you expected and then the mortar unit is right in the line of fire and suffers heavy losses. Why is it my damn Bn commander isn't more careful and keep the arty unit in the rear to follow the bulk of the troops instead of being right up front or close to the forward elements of the Bn? Just being a couple of hundreds of meters behind makes all the difference in the world: the arty unit does not fall into firefights or enemy ambush, and can provide support to its brothers up front. Does such a behavior depend on the Bn commander quality ?

2) Let's say you detach some arty units and put them under your own command to move them in a safe and strategic spot. After they're finished moving and are setup, you are satisfied with their position, want to reduce your unit load on your HQ and so you reattach them back to their parent unit. But in doing so, the parent unit decides it does not like their positions and have them move somewhere else, and that screws up the coverage you wanted to have with these arty units. Is there anyway to prevent that, or once a unit is reattached, tough luck, it's the parent unit that decides what's happening with these units ?

[Arjuna]

We have spent a lot of time on refining the firebasing code for COTA. Long range arty units now deploy very well. One thing on our list of things to do, however, is to stage arty as a force moves such that there is always at least one arty deployed and ready to support the advancing units. This will require a fair bit of work and will have to wait till a later game.

I might add that mortar units, being short range ( 2 to 3kms ) normally Move as "support fillers" and hence should travel behind their HQ. For a typical Bn advancing in road column, they would be about 1500m behind the lead unit. Of course this will depend on the terrain and enemy actions. We have worked hard to prevent the tendency in HTTR for mortars to charge off ahead of everyone once they deemed they were close enough to their objective.

[Tzar007]

Thanks Dave for the answer. Having a mortar unit following closely does not happen all the time, but it just happened to me recently. Might have been the conditions prevailing however: the Bn was crossing a heavy bridge so all units had to go through the bridge and I guess the mortar unit caught up the forward elements since they were going more slowly to cross the bridge. Once on the other side, the mortar unit was then moving in the middle of the pack. Perhaps after a while it would have dropped down behind.

[MarkShot]

Two quick thoughts:

(1) About mortars as part of a force on the move getting caught by surprise. Recon. Send an AC or Stuart unit up ahead to see what is lurking in the woods.

(2) You have to move all your gun units individually to create your firebase. However, once they have all arrived at the firebase, then you could group them together as a force and give them an in-situ defend order. This should reduce command load while leaving the force still under your command and in place. Myself, I don't do that since I like the fine control that keeping them separate gives.

[Arjuna]

Tzar007,

Yes that would explain it. When units move in formation, they each have a certain leeway in which to move. This allows them at times to compensate for difficult terrain and still keep the foprmation as a whole moving. However, for road column this can result in units actually moving ahead of the unit supposedly in front of them for a short distance. On the wish list is a change I would like to implement where we redo the way road column formations work. This requires reseeding the sequence of events so that the head of the column always executes its event before the next unit and so on. This would overcome this behaviour. But it's a fair amount of work and one with potential downstream side effects. So it will have to wait for now.

[Praesidium]

Will this work for line units as well?
I was playing Nijmegen CDM and had 1/325 Bn spread out in line of road blocks. I had positioned each company but then ReAttached them to Bn HQ - OOPS. Bn commander decides to rearrange things. If I reattached with defend in situ orders would I avoid this?

Thanks for a great game and the wonderful support on these forums. I was a big fan of the old SPI HTTR from the mid 70's - love your work here! BTW is there any thought of a Grand Campaign for HTTR or is that too many unit for the engine to handle at once?

[JeF]

ORIGINAL: Praesidium
Bn commander decides to rearrange things. If I reattached with defend in situ orders would I avoid this?

Yes. First order the higher HQ to defend in situ, then reattach.

JeF.

[Arjuna]

Praesidium,

Glad to hear you are enjoying HTTR. Yes there would be too many units and too much space to cater for the entire Market Garden as one scenario. Maybe in a few years time when CPU performance improves.