Assault planning questions

[Mr Grumpy]

Great post that deserves a more detailed reply than I have time to give.

Assaulting in PzC is something of a "black art" often judged on gut instinct honed from the experiences of multiple games and even then you will sometimes experience an assault result that will leave you scratching your head, this is a good thing as otherwise the game mechanics can become very predictable like the prospective assault odds that SSG gives you and like the good old CRT in boardgames, so prepare for your "crutch" to be kicked away! 

To save time I am assuming you have read and fully understand the mechanics of assaulting as laid out in the manual, so I will not comment on any of that.

So as far as armour is concerned it carries a penalty for assaulting unsupported by sufficient infantry into ANY non clear hex, (trench's and IP's have no effect in this case) and it is OK to use armour to assault in non clear hex's provided there is the correct amount of infantry to avoid penalties.

Not all engineers will enhance an assault, be sure to check their assault value before throwing them in, some titles include "assault engineers" who have a huge assault value while at the other extreme bridge engineers have almost no assault value (no surprise there).

Disrupting all of the units in the opposing stack halves their assault value and makes a successful assault a certainty on the assumption the units you assault with are not low quality and/or heavily fatigued.

Sometimes it seems a good idea to assault with as few units as possible to ensure success while leaving the maximum units to exploit, but even a successful assault may add a huge chunk of fatigue to the assaulting units which may make them unable to continue to attack without being rested.

Although assaulting with your opponents units disrupted is the holy grail of PzC there are situations where you can assault either small units (less than 100 men/10 vehicles) or assault larger units that are not disrupted with such overwhelming force that the assault can be successful or may fail but pile a huge chuck of fatigue onto the defending units making them more likely to disrupt in future turns or just where it lowers their quality to a level where they are unable to resist any subsequent assault. Because you cant see the fatigue with FOW on that is where the experience and black art comes into it, also judging the power of a units defensive fire can give an experienced player an indication of the quality an fatigue of a defending unit.

So understand the mechanics and then try assaulting with different types, quality and number of units to gain the experience of what does or does not seem to work.