Retreating entrenched infantry

[RockinHarry]

Just some observations.

Very high suppression, low cohesion and proximity of high threat enemy triggers this mostly? What disturbs me a little is that very rarely a retreating (from entrenched) unit took any personnel losses, before the retreat. So it´s then purely the suppression amount that exceeds a breaking point at a time, triggering a retreat.

I wonder about cohesion levels at this. An entrenched unit receiveing an amount of Arty (without taking personnel losses), gets its cohesion dropped to almost Nil after few minutes. I´d assume "cohesion" could not drop in that huge levels for a well prepared, organised and fixed defender, like it would for a unit moving in the open. Actually I would assume dug in and particularly entrenched units to have a big cohesion bonus, that could not be reduced that much.[&:]

[Arjuna]

There already are modifiers for dug in units to the cohesion rates. Maybe these could be tweaked some more.

[wodin]

For a unit to retreat I feel it should also be based on casualties and as RH says really an entrenched defender should hardly have a cohesion drop at all. Infact defending unit's cohesion should be pretty hard to break unless they have excessive casualties and can no longer hold the line.

The retreating entrenched unit has been a bug bear for many with regards to the series more so than any other aspect. It has improved but still not enough.

Also attackers should keep pushing forward unless they have excessive casualties or are suppressed nut still very rarely actually retreat. I still feel they way unit's run away and retreat in the series is still way to often. Sometimes units seem to be on rubber bands and retreat with hardly any casualties. I expect a coy to say bog down on the attack and try and claim what they've already taken than run away.

[Arimus]

There are probably many factors that come into play other than total casualties. Casualty rate (several in a very short amount of time), loss of a key leader, fire from an unexpected location, orders, training, experience...
What I wonder about is the retreat recovery period. It seems to be a fixed amount of time and it seems excessive in some situations.

[wodin]

I understand that but for a unit to retreat things have to be going badly wrong on the whole as it's usually a massive breakdown in moral especially when dealing with the time scales of the scenarios. These aren't tactical retreats but routs or just generally running away even when they are on the attack. Now I understand that they may come in for some stiff resistance and end up going to ground until support arrives but getting up and running away I'm not to sure about, especially if they haven't taken many casualties, I also expect the game isn't so hi fi it monitors platoon Lt or NCO's.

It's a sticking point with the game and it has got alot better as the series progresses, but it still seems off to me.

[Arjuna]

There is a world of difference between a retreat, which is a controlled move, and a rout, which is definitely uncontrolled. I see no problem with a unit retreating even though it has taken no casualties. It happened all the time. A simple example - an infantry unit ordered to move to a town gets half way there only to find enemy armour between it and the town. The commander wisely elects to pull back to defensible terrain.

[wodin]

Idea...one thing requested when BftB first came out was more radio messages. How about if a unit retreats due to say the reason mentioned above you receive a message stating the reason.

I'd like yo have alot more feedback radio SITREPS coming in from my units, maybe have a detail level for those who don't want so many.

I do believe units that are defending esp dug in or entrenched should not shift out of their defences unless they are suffering excessive casualties or no moral left. Cohesion on the defence shouldn't really be the issues.

[BletchleyGeek]

While defenders resilience also startles me, I can't really say that it's out of whack by any measure.

If there's a campaign that can be summarized as "small detachments holding up whole divisions until the cavalry arrives" that one is Bulge. What I'm starting to learn - or rather to grasp - is the pretty obvious fact that if you frontally attack a well-dug infantry force in a choke point, you'll not get anywhere. Even worse, your attacking force will probably be mauled by enemy's artillery.

If you manage to get a force on the defenders rear - cutting their supply line - or maneuver so you can pull out a concentric attack, then these defenders are goners. I can't really stand how important is this flanking/getting to the rear in order to collapse a defense. This resilience or "will to fight" also plays against the defender. Having a "fighting withdrawal" become a "stand" because of your troops being engaged is common as well, and very dangerous because you wanted those guys out... and they're not getting where you wanted them to get.

I also think that our perception of what happens at this level is marred by the traditional conventions of IGOUGO games with time coming in discrete packets. Take for instance a PanzerCampaign scenario, with 2 hours daylight turns. There, you command an assault and the result is binary: either the defender retreats or holds. When you obtain the former result, they pull back 1 km.

In Command Ops - and in many operational narratives - you'll seldom find this kind of event, a well-entrenched defender being driven back after just *two* hours of fighting. Usually it could take half a day. As I play Command Ops more and more, I'm starting to feel that in other games what I get are results more similar to those one could expect of a Napoleonic, American Civil War or First World War setting. Latter WW1 and WW2 were much more messy than those affairs, with set-piece battles being an event more rare than it seems.

A final thought. I'm realizing that in Command Ops you can't expect stuff such as "Germans performing as Germans" by "default". If one wants to get anything close to historical performance, has to lead his troops following historical guidelines. So Germans "stacking infantry on a narrow frontage and artillery" to break through, is a mostly wrong way to handle WW2 Germans. You'll get something close to what Soviet commanders had to do, notice I say "had to do", they knew better but they had to make do with what they had, since they didn't have a well-trained officer corps with the the "mission-oriented" leadership in the field philosophy ingrained. As the downfall of the Third Reich loomed, German operations grew gradually similar to that of Soviets.

[wodin]

Well HTTR and CotA also had unit's that retreated a little to often especially out of dug in positions. BtfB has improved it alot. Though I feel it still could be a tweaked a little. Bletchley I'm not sure I understand your position on this. The first post appears you where calling into question unit behavior but your last posts seems to be saying the unit behavior is fine.

I still feel unit's pull out of defences to often and to quickly and also sometime sin attack, not often but sometimes. I do have to say though I haven't tried the game to any degree since the latest patch as I'm busy modding, so things may play differently to how I remember.

You can currently set up a fighting withdrawal in the game. I've done it in one of the CotA scenarios to great effect. Though it all has to be planned in advance or at the start of the scenario. What would be great is if yo could set up a fighting withdrawal or delaying action say at the start of a scenario but set the unit to start the move only when a certain casualty threshold has been reached.

[RockinHarry]

Many good points mentioned here.[:)]

As said, I´m mostly interested in "entrenched" status unit behavior if it retreats for no obvious reason. So far I can tell that "entrenched" units (under human control) hold out quite nicely and for a considerable time actually, so there´s no general problem.

When "entrenched" (infantry) units suddenly start to retreat, they mostly have top unit morale, high suppression, low cohesion and little to no previous personnel losses taken.

It appears the retreating status is triggered rather by identifying an unusual high enemy threat, either an enemy combat unit, but sometimes also an artillery barrage.

Due to my "non firing" event issues, I can´t safely tell if always enemy fire triggers retreats, or just observation of high threat enemies in LOS and effective LOF ranges (by indication of enemy range rings).

If unit "cohesion" levels are an important factor for triggering retreats, then that might be as said a main issue.

From patch #2 notes:

#Prevent units under direct and indirect fire from recovering cohesion while defending.

#Ensure that units receiving fire lose cohesion even if no casualties suffered.

# Modify Retreat code so that it ignores the viz check when getting threats. So long as they are in the current threats list, then they should be considered as "known" and hence avoided.

Think cohesion should be preserved more for dug in and particularly entrenched units for reasons that Wodin and BG explained in detail above, which to I agree.

If it´s not (lack of) cohesion for a whole unit triggering a retreat, could it also be isufficient single unit leader stats (leadership, aggression, determination, judgement..) to make an otherwise good state unit retreating?

I could also think of a battlefield "isolation" factor, that a unit (leader) thinks it might be better to retreat from an entrenched position, before it gets isolated, enveloped or divided from neighboring friendlies. This point definitely needs some particular attention for the east front CO version.

[Golf33]

It's reasonable for even entrenched units to lose cohesion under fire, especially heavy indirect barrage. Noise and concussion affect the ability of even individuals in close proximity from communicating. Having to take cover in the trench means being unable to see either the enemy or the other parts of the friendly defences. Telephone wires may be cut and connecting trenches collapsed, so the troops are cut off from information about the status of the rest of their unit - for all the soldiers in one part of the trench know, the rest of the position may be overrun already.

[Arimus]

One would think that there are enough accounts of real examples of how units reacted under artillery fire that there would be no reason to speculate.

[RockinHarry]

Another recent example from Tut Return to St.Vith. The german Coy. wasn´t really pressed, as it decided to leave its foxholes few seconds ago. It received one time fire from a US tank unit, causing 1 unspecified equipment loss. It put in return a few Fausts and Schreck rounds to what is currently identified a US armor Coy, composed of 10 M5 Stuarts. The german unit stats pretty speak for themselves:

[Phoenix100]

10 stuarts rolling down the hill towards a hundred men? Plus knowledge of the rest of the assault behind the tanks (they've shot off a couple of thousand 7.92mm, I assume not at the Stuarts - was there already an engagement with US inf?). It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they would want to retreat to better positions, even though i would have preferred to see them shooting off more of their 32 fausts and Schreks. But the range to the tanks is what - about 150 metres? So the fausts and schreks wouldn't be so good, right? It doesn't look terrible to me, given it's inf aganinst armour (albeit light armour).

I assume your E&S tally (including MG rounds) is diff to mine because you've altered it? What happened to the HE Schreks - did you remove them?

All that said, when i was running your experiment just now the 2-27 retreated when they came face to face with the first US inf unit (at least, that's what the intel said), without any losses, etc, after firing off about a thousand rounds. That seems cowardly. I ran it five times and they did this three times (as posted in the other thread, however, I didn't notice any issues with the reporting of 'fire events')

[BletchleyGeek]

ORIGINAL: wodin

Well HTTR and CotA also had unit's that retreated a little to often especially out of dug in positions. BtfB has improved it alot. Though I feel it still could be a tweaked a little. Bletchley I'm not sure I understand your position on this. The first post appears you where calling into question unit behavior but your last posts seems to be saying the unit behavior is fine.

I still feel unit's pull out of defences to often and to quickly and also sometime sin attack, not often but sometimes. I do have to say though I haven't tried the game to any degree since the latest patch as I'm busy modding, so things may play differently to how I remember.

You can currently set up a fighting withdrawal in the game. I've done it in one of the CotA scenarios to great effect. Though it all has to be planned in advance or at the start of the scenario. What would be great is if yo could set up a fighting withdrawal or delaying action say at the start of a scenario but set the unit to start the move only when a certain casualty threshold has been reached.

My position is that I *think* the simulation gets a lot more right than wrong in this respect. The problem is that if one compares to other wargames, it certainly feel very different. As if your troops had a jaw made of glass, sometimes, and in other cases as if they're a bunch of John McClane clones. I must say that I don't grasp all the nuances in BftB unit behavior: I'm following with a lot of interest RockinHarry experiments. They're giving me stuff to think about.

Regarding fighting withdrawals. Yes, of course you can set them up. You can also control that "casualty threshold" thing with the Losses setting associated to missions. What I meant is that sometimes, things don't turn out as you expect, as those guys get very heavily engaged - going berserk I'd say - and they don't withdraw at all, because the enemy has plenty of time to cut them off.

That's an example of what Clausewitz called "friction". One example of such friction that comes to my mind easily and happened in the Ardennes, took place during the dash through the Ardennes by PanzerKorps Guderian in May 1940. A Belgian company held for hours 1st PanzerDivision. The reason for the Belgians to hold like that was - not only that they were a bunch of brave soldiers - but that the Germans had dropped a Fallschirmjäger Company behind their lines, cutting their line of communications. So the Belgians didn't get the orders to fall back that their Battalion was frantically trying to send them, since the first thing the German paras did was to cut all telephone landlines

[RockinHarry]

I´m currently investigating my anti virus guard likely messing with the games behavior, so I´m required to declare most my foregoing observations fubar. [X(]

[RockinHarry]

Disregarding the mentioned desynced engagement info observations, I can tell that sometimes entrenched infantry is forced to retreat only after prolonged combat vs. superior forces in close proximity (friendly and enemy footprints overlapping) and taking a number of losses, while at other times an equal quality infantry unit gets quickly ejected just by seeing a "threat" at a distance and receiving 1-2 "under fire" events, that do not cause noticable suppression, nor cohesion, morale and personnel losses. Looks like an an odd random factor is involved here.