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1st battalion, 68th armor 8th infantry division began tasked with moving up and holding off the 79 Guards Tank division somewhere on the road to the east. Task force Lionheart deployed an HQ with 3 M1 Platoons and TOW and AA in the North and another with pretty much the same composition in the south. Much of the area in the middle was wooded with 1 lateral road running north south toward the west edge of the map. The biggest concentration of vps was in a cluster of towns to the north.

The battle started with my northern units moving up with recon elements out ahead of them. My intention was to hold the southern group of forces at Sandberg on the road juction with the lateral road until I was able to determine where the main effort was being made.

First contact was made with recon elements including Hind attack helicopters in which I lost a TOW unit and suffered some casualties to a recon unit. Fortunately the attack helicopters were brought down by AA defences - I've seen the destruction they can dish out if not dealt with succesfully.

My Apache units arrived and were sent out to the east where they found a long column of Soviet armor strung out along a road running north alongside a river. The apaches dished out tremendous punishment and were soon joined by the arriving artillery delivering an orgy of destruction to the strung out Soviet units. The remnants of the long column suffered further punishment rounding the corner to head west when they were struck by my northern M1 platoons who had received plenty of warning of their arrival.

Meanwhile further south the leading recon elements of a secondary Soviet effort were easily dealt with before the southern tanks began to dish out brutal punishment to the accompanying infantry. The Soviets finally broke off the attack having suffered losses of 72 percent and being rendered combat ineffective. Reports are that the Colonel Commanding the Soviet force has been relieved and recalled to Moscow.

Friendly units were at 87 percent strength at the end of the engagement and required only a short period of refit and reorg before heading back into battle.

attached is a shot of the end of battle picture.

That's all great and wonderful, what was your result???

Good Hunting.

MR

ORIGINAL: Mad Russian

That's all great and wonderful, what was your result???

Good Hunting.

MR

I won a decisive success securing 87 percent of victory points and my performance was rated as excellent.

It was my first victory in 4 battles - I'd previously played the tutorial twice as Nato and Black Horse once.

One of the things contributing to victory this time was that I was able to easily identify the choke points for the Soviets - which by the nature of the map and starting points were actually fairly lengthy. I decided to approach more cautiously than the intial briefing suggested - particularly in the south where I had a fairly sizeable force in postion to guard against a move through the woods. In hindsight is probably wasn't necessary to position quite so large a force down there as I started with but the lateral road running north-south made me think that there wasn't much of a downside. However if the Soviets had been further north and turned the corner earlier for the move west towards the northern group of vp locations it might have been much more dicey. As it was I had time to deploy artillery and Apaches to hammer them strung along the road leading north.

Artillery and the Apaches devestated the Soviet column. I threw mines and improved conventional munitions at the head of the column and I tried to keep the Apaches at a safe distance from the Soviet AD units. I noticed that both Apaches were quite fatigued at one point so ran them back to the HQ to rearm and rest before sending them out to hit the column again. My M1's were waiting for the Soviet lead elements as they turned the corner and pretty much ripped apart was was left.

Another critical factor was the luck I had in eliminating the Hinds - I hardly lost anything to the Hinds which in other scenarios had fairly savaged my units. I've found that the Apache's are actually quite good in an air to air combat role versus the Hinds (LOL!) and one of my stinger equipped M1 Platoons had excellent success - i don't think my vulcan AD units actually took down any of the Hinds surprisingly. The removal of the Hinds likely also helped to keep my southern units hidden from the AI. They were able to deal quite easily with the mech infantry advancing down the narrow road through the woods. I didn't notice those units in the woods to the north of the road until they were revealed at the end of the battle.

Love the game and thanks for building such enthralling scenarios! One question I have - I noticed that the Soviet artillery has a habit of pounding empty hexes. Is that modelling some deficiency in their equipment/doctrine or EW environment (lots of fake signals and jamming) or is their an issue with the AI artillery targetting?

Thanks,

Doug

These are all uniformly high EW environment scenarios. The main cause for that is they fire at a target until they get new information. In this kind of a war that can be awhile.

Thanks for you kind words, I'm glad the scenarios are playing competitively for you. The scenarios were the first things laid out. As I created them we worked through each one addressing whatever code issues there were. When we got to the end you see the code as it is now.

Good Hunting.

MR