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Hello !

New player here. I have played a few WITE scens but no campaign. I find the western front more interesting, so digging deeper in this one.

I'm playing the Westwall scen after the two tutorials. I am at turn 8. So far, historical Market Garden (took Eindhoven/Nijmegen, lost Arnhem/6th AB). I also took Metz, Achen, Belfort and Mulhouse.

Here is the overall situation :



My plan for the end of the scen is to capture Colmar and Strasbourg. I think I can get a minor victory with those two cities.

But, problem... The CV of my units is going alarmingly down.

Here's a typical exemple :



Only 2,97 CV / 17.87. I wont take Strasbourg with that. Here is how I understand it, and what I don't understand... yet. Any comment welcome !

1) Combat losses. Roughly 1/3 of the unit's elements are damaged or destroyed. I guess it means only the 67% intact elements are contributing to the CV. Fair enough.

2) Morale. I dont think I can influence the morale of a individual unit, but confirmation appreciated.

3) Fatigue. Most elements have a fatigue ~50, half the max possible fatigue. This is surely no good, but to what extent ? Does this mean I am losing half the CV, or is it more complex ?

4) Supply. Not perfect but not terrible either. Again, how do I know how much CV I am losing from the missing supply ?

5) Weather. After some rainy turns, it is now heavy mud about everywhere. The manual said to go have a look in the editor to find weather's combat effect. I found that, for every unit in heavy mud and good road system, CV is halved. Is this correct ?
And is this combat effect directly visible, or only in combat ? To ask it otherwise : If I make an attack with my poor armored division, is their CV with heavy mud effect 2,97 or 1,49 ?

Any help appreciated. This is a great game that needs time to master. I guess one could write a complete thesis from my questions here [:D]

The big drop in CV is due to the heavy mud. Counter CV is not as accurate as that shown on the popup just before you launch an attack.

There is no easy way to tell how much losses, fatigue and supply contribute to the drop in CV.

This quick you're doing pretty well with Westwall. (Hint: Open up Antwerp to get improved logistics)

Nico165, don't forget to attach support units (3 per division, click on the 'assigned' tab) to your American divisions. For armor maybe a tank destroyer, SP artillery and an engineer or SP flak unit. That will help the CV but Red Lancer is right, bad weather is your biggest enemy now but fatigue/damaged elements not helping either so maybe don't move or attack for a turn with units in this state (especially in heavy mud which has wicked consequences on fatigue). Make sure your corps have lots of artillery attached also to help in attacks.

Good luck!

Thanks ! Scenario ended with a draw. Small bug spotted : I had a 1,06 final VP ratio. The victory screen correctly interpreted this as a draw, but I had the allied victory video. Not that I didn't merited it, but thought I would still mention it [:)]

ORIGINAL: Red Lancer

The big drop in CV is due to the heavy mud. Counter CV is not as accurate as that shown on the popup just before you launch an attack.

There is no easy way to tell how much losses, fatigue and supply contribute to the drop in CV.

This quick you're doing pretty well with Westwall. (Hint: Open up Antwerp to get improved logistics)

Well understood about heavy mud effect. I saw the CV going up and down and up and down with light mud, heavy mud, cold... Westwall is a good scenario to get a better grasp of the weather engine and its effects.

I did open up Anwterp. 8 key is very handy to spot the effect : every British unit began to resupply there. Which helped the US too because they had less competition on the other depots.

ORIGINAL: chris.munson

Nico165, don't forget to attach support units (3 per division, click on the 'assigned' tab) to your American divisions. For armor maybe a tank destroyer, SP artillery and an engineer or SP flak unit. That will help the CV but Red Lancer is right, bad weather is your biggest enemy now but fatigue/damaged elements not helping either so maybe don't move or attack for a turn with units in this state (especially in heavy mud which has wicked consequences on fatigue). Make sure your corps have lots of artillery attached also to help in attacks.

Good luck!

Good to know. I thought there was some sort of automatic attachments and chose not to care about it for now. Guess I'll have to study this point deeper. I took Colmar but fell 2 hexes short from Strabourg and 1 from Salerne. Both of which could have transformed a draw in a real minor victory. Every offensive punch is really needed !

One question about fatigue. It's not an available "soft factor" display (hotkey s) right now, is it? Any chance the devs would consider adding a "soft factor" setting for it? Right now I'm relying on the Commander Report (hotkey c), which works, but isn't as intuitive as the soft factors.

Do you have a save just before the end of the game, or an end game save that you could post so we could see why the victory video was wrong. Thanks.

Here are fatigue effects from manual:

Fatigue impacts the Combat Value (CV) of a ground
element and this is reflected in the CV value shown
for a unit in the game. The CV of a ground element is
reduced by 1/3 of the fatigue level. Thus, an element
that has a fatigue of 60 will have its basic CV value
reduced by 20 percent when calculating the CV of the
unit. Fatigue also impacts movement point allowance
(14.1.2).

The best way for a unit to recover is to get off the front line and put the unit in refit mode (don't be adjacent to enemy controlled hex) but move as little as possible (to avoid damage to elements from movement). Better still is to get to a nearby depot and put the unit on refit if you have the freight (not so likely in Westwall scenario).

We've already got 8 soft factors, IIRC. At some point doesn't the number getting big cause it's own problems (i.e. having to cycle through all the factors)?

ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

Do you have a save just before the end of the game, or an end game save that you could post so we could see why the victory video was wrong. Thanks.

Here you are. It's the last save, you'll directly have the WE victory video, then the end game screen saying "allied minor victory", but when you click "victory points" it correctly says it's a draw.