March to the Gothic Line Tournament

[McIvan]

Well I forgot my own plans and inexplicably sent infantry hastily into an area where I knew full well my opponents Brumbar had to be hiding. That's put a bit of a hole in them ten platoons :) Was going so well up to that point too.

Anyways, I do think the US forces have a bit of an advantage. The Gothic line was about interlocking fields of fire, and the Germans don't have any. One problem of CM vs real life is that you can't spray automatic fire around on fixed lines....if you can't see it, you can't shoot in that direction, whereas in real life they did that all the time. I also usually thought of the various "lines" in Italy as having concrete & steel pillboxes, many quite small, but quite possibly that simply wasn't a feature of this portion of the line.

On the setups, I agree with Col Talvela....they make it very difficult to place mines correctly in particular....they should be ahead of your positions and covered by fire, but that wasn't really possible. I also agree that having no LOS to open ground beyond the centre-left woods made things very difficult since you can't effectively defend against enemy infantry before they get into cover. It tended to force the defending germans right to the back of the woods...not that this was too bad a place to have them, but it could have been better.....you want some breathing space before any retreat flushes you right out the back!