The life cycle of a CM meeting engagement

[The Coil]

I'm usually not much for keeping a reserve until late in the fight, my theory being I'm better off with everything in the fight I can bring. If I can fight my opponent even with 80% of my forces for 25 turns, and then crush him with a reserve, I could have crushed him even sooner with 100% of my dogs in the fight.

You use the reserve to decide fights, the whole point is that you have a bunch of units available for commitment at the decisive moment. If you throw it in early you probably won't decide anything.

You'll win a fight what you would win without the reserve, or you'll reinforce failure and lose the fight together with your reserve. You commit the reserve when you know you need it.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I'd say in your typical CM QB ME, you know where you need it pretty early on. With the time scale and map size of a typical QB, it's not like you're going to do a bunch of testing probes of the opponent's defenses, and then throw a reserve at a weak spot in the line. Most of the time maps are small enough that you can reposition on the fly anyway.

I've always thought of it this way: If my opponent wants to play me for 25 turns of a 30 turn game with only 80-90% of his men in the fight, that sounds good to me. I've generally found with equally matched opponents, a 10% point advantage will translate to more than a 10% casualty differential.

You'll win a fight what you would win without the reserve, or you'll reinforce failure and lose the fight together with your reserve. You commit the reserve when you know you need it.

I've always found the opposite to be true, in a CM-scale fight: Your reserve will either bail you out of a fight you would have won more easily if they were in it from the beginning, or your opponent will beat you in two stages in a fight you might have been able to hold your own in if you didn't keep reserves.

Just my two cents, and unbacked by any sort of empirical evidence, so I certainly wouldn't go to the bank on it.

The one nice thing about a reserve is that if your main armored spearhead gets bushwhacked late in the game by a hidden gun, you still have something left to fight with, instead of having your whole tank force pantsed in one turn. Not that that's ever happened to me... (Grrrrr, Zemke).