Help Needed

[Nemo84]

This is how it works for me:

1.  Fire every mortar at the strong point. You will see a lot of no effect, but. eventually you will get a disruption.
2.  If you have AT guns, fire them all the strong point. When you start seeing one man casualties from this fire you know you are starting wear down the strong point.
3.  Fire all your tanks at the strong point.  Again, when you start seeing one man casualties you are wearing down the strong point.
4.  Have engineers clear any minefields that surround the strong point.
5.  Do not have the entire stack of infantry attack the strong point.  Depending on what units are in the strong point, have one or two infantry units attack the strong point.  For example, if you have 6 infantry units in three different hexsides.  Attack with two infantry units from each hex side.  Make sure that they are separate assaults.  The first couple of attacks do not inflict much damage, but, after a while you will start wearing down the strong point.

In you example, you cite 300 infantrymen which represents at least 8 infantry units of first couple of waves.  You can turn that into for separate assaults if you use two units per assault.   To me this mirrors how units assaulted at Normandy.  

Now if you really want a challenge attack the pillboxes at Omaha.

Thanks for the advice, but I already tried most of it and found it quite ineffective. This is already how I manage to take 2-3 bunkers in the 8 turns of the scenario, which is enough to get me a draw at best. My problem, and it seems I'm not the only one, is not that I cannot take a bunker, its that it seems impossible to reduce a bunker in a somewhat realistic timeframe with a somewhat realistic expenditure of men and munitions, which makes these short scenarios unwinnable outside of sheer luck. Bunker assaults should be a lot shorter but a lot more bloody for both sides involved.

1. I've tried using the mortars in multiple scenario attempts (just finished another unsuccessful one). If I spend 3-4 turns bombarding using all my mortars, artillery and naval guns, it results in perhaps one single disruption of one single unit in one single bunker, a disruption that often is removed the next turn. Since there are 8 bunkers, all of which are defended by 2 or 3 units, this is not sufficient in the 5-7 turns my fire support is operational. I've found my fire support far less useless in eliminating the entrenched units behind the bunkers.

2. Using AT guns occasionally results in a single casualty. Again: 8 bunkers with 20-30 men and 2-10 guns each, and only 6 turns of AT gun fire max.

3. Tanks seem to be the only unit that manages to somewhat reliably kill single soldiers. But they seem very vulnerable to return fire from the many AT guns, and often get disrupted by fatigue and/or losses.

4. Mines have not been an issue so far, and engineers mostly participate in bunker assaults. The scenario is too short to bother with obstacle or mine removal, most of my units are of the beach within 2-3 turns of landing anyway. Engineers are very slow however, so rarely get to participate in assaults for more than two turns before the scenario ends.

5. The game won't allow me to use 300+ men in a single assault, and every company is grouped up into one unit chit of around 100 men. So when I said 300+ riflemen and engineers assaulting, that already was split into 2-4 separate assault attacks coming from different directions. But then it still takes 3-5 turns for each group of units to get into position on a single bunker and at least 2-3 turns to wear down the defenders with assaults (each of which kill 1-2 men or a single gun). There simply aren't enough turns to do this for every objective bunker, let alone the support bunkers as well. Not to mention that it feels very unrealistic that so many soldiers consistently make such slow progress in a multi-pronged assault. During the Normandy landings, once a bunker was flanked or surrounded it typically fell swiftly, or was at least mostly neutralized even if a few hardcore holdouts remained.

You mention wearing down the bunkers. Does the bunker object itself become damaged during attacks, reducing its protection? Can this be seen anywhere in the UI?

Also, do you move the DDs and CA closer to the coast? Does this make their fire more effective against the bunkers? Will it result in these assets being available more often, since I rarely get more than 2 turns of shooting out of them?