Okay, I've just played through "Assault on Sauer" as Axis.
Here are a bunch of weird things that happened. I can send saves for any of these on request:
Not sure if this counts as over 500m, but it's still silly. From 7:42-9:20 the whole unit slowly surrenders while just sitting right there in the middle of the open because of "rout recovery".
This allied mortar platoon, due to artillery fire, surrendered when the nearist Axis unit was 900m away and out of sight.
This allied unit surrendered to an Axis unit...which was also routed! I don't think that should be possible. Other Axis units shown here were out of sight.
This Hetzer company was assaulting with no losses. Then a couple got destroyed in an airstrike, so they routed and one surrendered. Maybe you could say the crew abandoned it, but that still seems sketchy.
That company of 9 Shermans ran into this dug-in German infantry company in the middle of the woods...at night. The infantry fired off all 10 of their faust and schreck ammo with no luck. They got fired on, routed to the location seen here, and started surrendering despite not taking one casualty. All 105 men surrendered while in "rout recovery" there.
This is not only an example of routing/surrender issues, but also how useless infantry is. Tanks should not be able to barge through a defended forest at night without losses.
That same tank company makes another unit surrender which could've simply run into the woods a little. At this point I'm wondering how those 9 tanks can manage a trail of ~200 German prisoners behind them.
6 Hetzers have spent all their AP ammo (~60 total) on the Shermans from 250m and still no kills. The routed infantry company seen here started surrendering again 2 minutes after this screenshot, despite being 200m deep in the woods while the Shermans were engaged.
How are those Shermans hidden? How did they dig in while engaged with Hetzers? How can tanks dig in in such a short time anyway?
The Shermans then proceeded to move onto the helpless Hetzers and rout them. I sent an infantry battalion to close assault from behind but once again, infantry AT proves useless.
The Hetzer company kept getting resupplied, but for some reason never received AP ammo until day 6.
This company was routed from artillery fire while attacking that village earlier. Two hours later they start surrendering because they decided to recover right there and that little AT platoon just came into view.
Panzerschrecks = useless
Okay apparently those guys were resting when the screenshot was taken, but they were firing and assaulting too.
This Sherman company just rushed through that SE forest trail right on top of an infantry batallion with impunity.
Note how all fausts and schrecks have been used to no avail.
Finally, I got to beat some Shermans! The only reason I could, though, is because they were routed by an airstrike. All I had to do was move up any unit to them and make them surrender while in recovery.
Picture says it all. Infantry AT is useless.
Once the Hetzers were finally resupplied with AP, I sent them against a company of 15 Stuarts. Again, all ammo is spent without any kills.
Why did they decide to refuel just before exiting, and why did that take hours?
Total units destroyed on both sides were:
35 surrendered
17 disbanded
1 destroyed by fire
Even assuming that all the disbandings were more from casualties than surrender (which they weren't), that's way too much surrendering.
Lieste said most of what I wanted to say. Reducing max range to 300m is a good start, but the main issue is that units don't rout far enough and often get stuck in recovery. Maybe some restrictions are in order too, so you can't have hundreds of men surrender to a tiny unit...
I remember reading somewhere (yeah yeah weightless phrase, deal with it) that surrenders by individual soldiers were very risky and uncommon. Weren't the vast majority of POWs taken from organized surrenders of large units, like 6th army at Stalingrad?
BTW, I noted a few other things:
- German machine guns don't seem to have any armor penetration. Historically they were notorious for swiss-cheesing American halftracks out to ~300m.
- Panzerschrecks have AP and HE ammo. I thought there was only the same HEAT rocket for both roles?
- Airstrikes have become fairly effective since CotA. Nice.
- Intel works much better too. No more going straight from 'vague' to 'excellent'.
