Tips from the Frontline

[RNL Tiger]

Playing a QB attack

At the start of the game POS had noted "Attack tactics are basic in the extreme - the attacker must simply roll forward until something shoots at him, they he must stop and blow it away. He then continues rolling forwards and repeats the process when something else shoots at him, and so on, in a series of rolls and stops down the map. An attack can therefore be summed up as - roll-stop-shoot/ roll-stop-shoot/ roll-stop-shoot

Remember, you want the defending enemy to shoot so he'll give away his position and you can annihilate him with your numerically-superior force. The fly in the ointment is that every time he fires he might knock out one or two of your tanks, so the whole thing boils down to who runs out of units first."

I favoured the find-fix-flank-or-destroy approach leading with infantry to screen the attacking armour and to identify the key defenses. That sounds good in theory but it also needs to consider the time element. This is a slow approach to the enemy and this became painfully apparent...

It is turn 8 of 20 and I have marched up the left side of the map and occupied a nice hill with a fire support element [2 x 82mm mortar spotters] and a platoon of infantry that can see the nearest two flags. The reconnaissance element was supposed to be the scout car that is zipping around in the front on the left and the two sharpshooters in the centre. Both have come across something but the defence is still pretty much unknown.



There are two key points:
1) Time is fast running out for the attack that has still not really engaged the enemy and it is approaching the half-way mark of the battle
2) The reconnaissance has not worked well because the defence has exercised fire discipline and consequently the attack still has neither identified the shape of the defence nor priority targets to find-fix-flank-or-destroy.

This leads to the following conclusions:
* Infantry led attacks are slower and consequently this needs to be considered during the planning stage
* Reconnaissance needs to identify the defenders, this can be hard when the opponent exercises good fire discipline

There is a place for both roll-stop-shoot and find-fix-flank-or-destroy in the attackers repetoire the key is to use them as needed for the circumstances [forces, time, map...].