Depth of attack

[David Fisher]

hi,

I've often been puzzled by how far to the rear some units go when you order them to attack. The preferred formation often seems to be a long trailing column. Sometimes units are so far back it's hard to see what role they could play in the fight. The latest example of this for me was playing the "Terror of the Tyne Tees" scenario. 151st Inf Bde, reinforced by the London Yeomanry and 44th RTR, had taken Zeelst. Wanting to strike while the iron was hot I ordered them to launch a further attack to the north-east, towards Sliffert, on the way to the airport. The attachment shows the plan once all the task lines are in place (filtered to show only HQs for clarity). The rearmost battalion (infantry - DLI) is going to have to march 2km to the rear then 2km back again, before it even starts moving towards the objective! And you'll note the German unit present just south of where they'll end up. Plus the Jerries that I haven't spotted yet in Veldhoven. The result was entirely predictable: the attack was split in two, with the DLI hopelessly tangled up with Germans to the south, while the armour went in on its own.

The reason this happened was that I had specified the attack depth and frontage, something I don't normally do. Frontage was 2000m, depth 1000m. I guess my question is, what does the "depth" setting actually represent? I was probably thinking of it as the depth of the attack *at the point of contact*. In those terms my setting of 1000m, as shown on the map, looks kind of OK. Whereas it is in fact applied in some way to the whole attack formation and results in this huge tailback.

I experimented with different depth settings, and of course you can see the "tailback" get longer the higher you set it. But what struck me was that nothing gave you a shorter "tailback" than leaving it on auto, even having it set at 300m. The annoying thing for me is that varying frontage makes sense, but you can't set frontage without setting depth also, and once it's off auto, any depth setting seems to give you this "tailback." So basically at the moment I would only ever have attack depth/frontage set to auto.

Or am I not using this right? Does anyone have tips for using the depth setting in attacks?

cheers

David Fisher

[MadScot]

I have no advice to offer, but have found the same inability to form up in situ for an attack.

It's even worse with paras - they take so long to walk back then forwards they end up fatigued too....

[JJKettunen]

In my experience a movement order with max aggro is more useful in these pursuit situations.

[Arjuna]

David,

If you want to employ a large formation to attack it is going to need a large forming up place. That is real life. One thing we could and hope to do in future games is give more options for the attack. One that would help here is to ignore the need for depth/exploitation and that would mean you would not need such depth in the FUP. In the interim your best option is to give individual attack orders to each of your Bns.