Stratagies of War - Economy of Force

[JasonC]

Yes, CM is much harder on the ammo count than many other games, and undoubtly harder on them than reality, either. It does have the overall lethality about right and the emphasis on suppression rather than outright kills. Most games make the opposite mistake and let you fire as often at you want even at marginal targets, and make it easy to rack up permanent kills and wipe forces out to a man. If those things were accurate the war would have taken about 2 months and ended in complete slaughter of the losing side right on the field.

The errors in realism in CM are basically twofold - ammo vs. cover effects and rally speed. CM has it right that if infantry or even a well stocked MG team just blazes away continually, it would run dry in a matter of minutes. They therefore did not blaze away continually, however, and in fact fired far less often than we see our units doing in CM. I mean, American infantry expected a basic load of at most 90 rounds of rifle ammo to last a rifleman *a week* in combat. Maybe two per week in the heaviest fighting, of the push to St Lo or Hurtgen variety. In CM, we fire off that load in 10 minutes and think nothing of it.

Why were they shooting less? Because they saw actual targets much less often. In CM, cover gives an exposure percentage, then you fire at them full blazes anyway, and the exposure percentage "catches" some of the fire and keeps it from hurting the target. That can happen sometimes but it isn't the usual way cover works. Instead, the shooter just can't see anyone exposed and doesn't pull a trigger. He doesn't want to reveal his own position without a chance to really hurt the enemy, so he holds his fire. In short, cover makes the potential shooters fire less, not fire just as much but hit less.

In hits per unit time those are the same, but in ammo expenditure they aren't. They therefore also aren't the same in total achievable hits before running out of ammo.

I suggested to the CM designers a partial solution, to make a unit-shot only expend ammo on a "roll" of the square root of the exposure of the target - so a shot at a unit with 30% cover would only use up an ammo point half the time, a shot at a unit in really good cover only about a quarter of the time. There would still be a benefit in total achievablle hits from cover that way, but the cover effect would be "split" about half way between shots taken but "intercepted", and shots just not taken in the first place. Shouldn't have been hard to implement, but they didn't act on the suggestion.

The second thing CM gets somewhat wrong is the speed of rally from infantry fire - at least at the typical levels of unit quality and command bonuses you usually see. Arguably the green units without morale bonus leaders are about right - if anything even those are a bit too resilient to light fire.

The way it works in CM, only the really deep "red" morale levels are hard to recover from quickly. The others matter because they stop movement and because they reduce outgoing reply fire - which is important and lets CM get the tendency of firefights to "snowball" one way or the other, correct. That is why your point about suppression turning that balance is spot on - it is the key thing in even infantry match ups. But for lopsided shooting in other situations, the medium suppression is just way too easy to shrug off.

Good *CM* infantry tactics exploit this. "Rally power" I call it. If enemy firepower can be spread over a whole company worth of units, and all of them only push hard enough to hit yellow morale states, and pause if they are that suppressed, then they just recover and recover and "eat" the incoming ammo. They slow, but don't stop, and don't die, and don't break. If the enemy could then wade into them at point blank it might finish them off - but if they are far enough away and covered by your own support weapons, there is no danger of that. And the enemy will run out of bullets to throw at them before they run out of courage.

Scenario designers can address the second by erring on the lower quality side, instead of putting veterans with +2 morale bonuses everywhere. The lower quality troops can be more frustrating for newer players to command - one reason CM probably toned it down. CMBO was way easier still, brokenly-so, so CMBB was definitely a step in the right direction and the best yet. And CMBB prompted complaints that attacking was impossible and MGs too powerful. Untrue with proper tactics, but it explains why the designers didn't push further in that direction.

At any rate, the realism issues of CM are a separate question from how to implement economy of force within the game as it stands. In the game we have, ammo expenditure management is absolutely critical to CM tactics.