Combined Unit Fire

[Mike Abberton]

For direct fire, there is no game-engine benefit to firing with multiple units at the same time. Or in other words, firing together does not increase your chances of inflicting more SP losses or disrupts or retreats or whatever. But that doesn't mean that it makes no difference which way you fire. It should be noted that if the target retreats (or is destroyed) before all the fire is complete, the remaining fire will be canceled, which shows that the computer is performing the fire sequentially despite being resolved as a single "event".

The primary benefit to firing together is that the combined fire is treated as one "event" for triggering enemy op fire, i.e. all your units will fire (and potentially do damage) before the enemy can op-fire back.

The primary disadvantage to group firing is that you are committing all the selected units to fire at the target, which might be overkill. For example, say you are trying to disrupt all the units in a hex. If you group fire with your 3 tank platoons at the first target, you might get a disrupt results on the first or second shot, and the remaining shots are "wasted" as far as disrupting the unit is concerned. If you single fired the units you might have been able to spread the shots around more and disrupted more enemies.

So for me it is generally a situational decision of whehter to group fire or not. If I am generally trying to reduce enemy SPs or am trying to get in the first shot, I'll typically group fire. If I am going for the disrupt or trying to reduce units in a hex evenly, I'll single fire. I generally tend to lean towards group fire in a lot of situations, just to save time.

I hope all that helps,
Mike