Anybody else ever feel this way?

[Rabbit]

In general, I would say the answer to your question is actually the reverse of your question. That is, when is the point when you should START to fire? Once you have opened fire, you will often find yourself firing away until the bitter end. Your weapons lose effectiveness as you fire them, so you need to be purposeful when firing them rather than firing away at enemy units as they come into your line of sight. And I would go so far as to say that learning to effectively hold your fire is the number one way to improve how well you play Squad Battles.

I find it helpful to choose a very small number of squads (preferably mortar teams or machine gun crews) to fire at advancing troops just to slow them down, while holding fire with the rest of my troops. Then I will open fire with everything I’ve got when the enemy is within half the range of most of my weapons and preferably in vulnerable terrain. (I say half the range because a weapon’s firepower is usually halved when firing at targets that are further than half their maximum range.) This approach has several key benefits:

1.) Most of my squads remain concealed until they open fire, which means their effectiveness hasn’t been reduced by enemy suppressive fire.

2.) A sudden ambush using maximum firepower (e.g., firing all of your squads’ weapons at once and within half their range) is more likely to leave an enemy pinned in vulnerable positions. When you fire from a distance, you usually cannot bring all your firepower to bear so you are less likely to pin the enemy. And there is a vast difference in pinning an enemy as opposed to merely disrupting them.

3.) Information is power. Exposing your positions too soon allows your enemy to chart a more effective approach. The longer he’s left guessing where your units are located, the more cautious he will have to be.

By the way, hopefully I am not going too far off tangent from your discussion topic. I bring it up because it took me a long time to learn the tremendous value of holding fire … essentially it took a lot of major defeats to Oz and some of the other excellent veterans here before I finally understood some of their effective tactics.

Best,
Rabbit