From the Front - Smoke

[ComradeP]

A neat tactic is to place a defensive unit then have hidden units nearby to fire on approaching enemy attackers who only some of your force.

This tactic can be very efficient indeed, but it can also backfire rather quickly as you can't set the actual engagement ranges for the hidden units. That makes coordinating fire between units with a different range difficult. Worst case scenario, some of your units open fire at a range where they are not very effective ("short" can still mean 4 or so hexes) and get hammered by artillery in the next enemy turn, whilst the rest of your units doesn't fire.

Playing against myself, the shorter ranges of Soviet units made the tactic more practical than the varied ranges of German units which make it difficult to determine which units will fire when.

One has to weigh the merits of placement based on the situation.

My experience thus far is that for the Soviets I prefer smoke to be as close as possible, even though it might make it obvious where my units are (but in most cases, that's fairly obvious to begin with as most maps have bottlenecks or areas that can be more easily defended than other parts of the map) as if the Germans spot something, it's likely to die.

For the Germans, I prefer using smoke to blind the Soviets so they can't call in artillery, but that smoke is not necessarily adjacent to their units. However, placing smoke adjacent to Soviet units can also be an excellent way to make a counterattack more risky, as the Soviets risk attracting opportunity fire as they move into the smoke hex before they can fire.

No there is no special visibility rule. This works the same as it does in Squad Battles. The rational is the same.

Never having played Squad Battles, that means the rule is new for me.

I fully agree with the rationale, I just didn't know the rule worked that way. I thought being within LOS of an enemy unit still meant a unit was automatically spotted if it was not hidden.