Matrix Games Forums

Manual and Tutorial documentation both say something about limited attack. According the Tutorial.doc, limited attack should appear in menu when enemy unit is right-clicked. No menu appears when I right-click on enemy unit. Why not? And how do I do limited attack?

It does appear, maybe You have to change the settings for Your game to have the context menu show earlier and / or stay longer, but it is functional.

Matti,

There are two possibilities. As Burroughs says, in the Advanced Game Options you may have set the Menu Delay Option too high. Personally, I just have it on 1.

The other option is that you are playing with the Standard Rules and if that is the case then right-clicking will not work. If you are playing with the Standard Rules, the best advice I can give you is to stop doing that.

Best wishes,
Steve

ORIGINAL: shunwick

There are two possibilities. As Burroughs says, in the Advanced Game Options you may have set the Menu Delay Option too high. Personally, I just have it on 1.

Guess it was the Menu Show Delay. I just had left it on default. Thank you!

Now if I could get limited attack in planning screen...

I can't remember the exact name, but if you go to Player Options there is an option in there to "reset defaults" or something similar. What you want to do is reset the defaults to "Classic TOAW".

After you do this, the tooltip pop up goes away and when you right click on an adjacent, enemy unit you're given the full menu selection of attacks, including limited attacks.

Limited attacks are crucial to achieving major breakthroughs, especially of fortified lines. I can't understand why they were excluded in the new interface.

You can use a split up AA unit or Armor unit to cause more than it's share of damage - I think that's why 3.4 was changed - for the worse IMO

ORIGINAL: Foggy

You can use a split up AA unit or Armor unit to cause more than it's share of damage - I think that's why 3.4 was changed - for the worse IMO

Reading the thread about it, it looks like the change was fixing terrain's effect on retreat from combat. The problem with doing this is it exposed a day 1 design issue that makes it disproportionately difficult for a low proficiency attacker to make progress against a high-proficiency defender in Ignore Losses. The problem is every Eastern Front scenario features low proficiency Soviet forces facing off against high proficiency German units.

ORIGINAL: sealclubber

Reading the thread about it, it looks like the change was fixing terrain's effect on retreat from combat. The problem with doing this is it exposed a day 1 design issue that makes it disproportionately difficult for a low proficiency attacker to make progress against a high-proficiency defender in Ignore Losses. The problem is every Eastern Front scenario features low proficiency Soviet forces facing off against high proficiency German units.

Isn't that historically quite right? It was said that one finnish soldier equals 10 ruskies, and plenty of germans are in equal proficiency. Then Soviets brought the 11th backed by T-34s and Sturmoviks...

Trevor Dupuy's extensive statistical analysis suggests it's something closer to 1.3:1, but that's another can of worms entirely.

If you take 1000 Soviet Rifle Squads and attack 100 Fortified German/Finnish soldiers that are set to ignore losses, you cannot make them retreat from combat 9 times out of 10. Realistically and with those odds, that should result in defenders retreating from combat 9 times out of 10.

It introduces serious playability problems for a lot of scenarios where the historical outcomes are very difficult to achieve and WW2 eastern front becomes WW1 western front.

Even if you reverse the sides with high proficiency Axis troops attacking low proficiency Soviet troops the net result is you burn extra rounds in combat because the attackers don't retreat due to high proficiency and the defenders don't retreat as frequently as they should with low proficiency.

So even thought you have 10:1 odds against a Soviet defender you burn 2-3 combat rounds in the attack rather than rolling over them as you would expect. These playability problems are bluntly compensated for by scenario designers with massive shock effects, but that introduces all kinds of other design issues.

Imagine if the Germans were more or less halted at the frontier in the first week of Barbarossa. That's possible if there's isn't a massive shock effect and the Soviet frontier units are all in fortified defensive status.

I think it's a problem without question, but that's my opinion.