Musings on Normandy

[Mr Grumpy]

Welcome to the board your comments are always welcome. 

Not owning N44 I have to take a back seat on this one, however having been reading these boards since N44 was released I know that the Omaha beach situation has attracted a larger than normal amount of discussion over that time.

[Vasili.I.Chuikov]

Trying to leave the beach at 2:00 pm in Normandy 44 is impossible because of the time scale does not match. this does not happen in PB Normandy. But I do know that a good bombardment of aviation and artillery of high values ​​of hard attack and the sum of armored assault and engineers concentrated in a hexagon is the key to get out of that damn beach.

[CheerfullyInsane]

Trying to leave the beach at 2:00 pm in Normandy 44 is impossible because of the time scale does not match. this does not happen in PB Normandy. But I do know that a good bombardment of aviation and artillery of high values of hard attack and the sum of armored assault and engineers concentrated in a hexagon is the key to get out of that damn beach.

Quite true. Trouble is, you don't have any.
The best you can do re. airplanes are the Typhoons with a Hard attack of 8.
In comparison, the Shermans have a Hard attack of 26 and the 57mm AT-guns have 22.
So the flyboys might scrape the paint off the bunkers, but that's about it.

The Navy is slightly better, the big'uns have a Hard attack of 16. But you only have a handful of those, and they won't be available every turn.

The engineers aren't of much use with the Mac PDT. Since the pillboxes/bunkers are Hard targets, you attack with the Hard attack of 3, instead of the Assault of 16.
Not to mention that the engineers have far too many other things they need to do what with minefields and AT-ditches to be able to assault anything until very late in the day. Assuming they survive in the first place.

Oddly enough I've found that the best (or least bad) way is to ignore the advice in the Alt. documents.
Never mind getting more infantry onto those beaches, what you need is the AT-guns and plenty of them.
If you can't have armor, you'll want whatever you can get with a decent Hard attack to hammer those bunkers.


I did another test, this time with the Beach TEM set to 100% instead of 200%.
(Still Alt_ scenario with Alt. fire/assault on, against the AI.)
Now that helped immensely.
Make no mistake, Omaha is still a bloody shambles but it is at least possible to get off the beaches.


The above is the situation after Turn 4, so it's 2pm.
All three possible breaches have been made (I got a little lucky with Disruptions).
But while the initial breaches have been made, it's worth noting that they're still adjacent to good-order enemies in bunkers, and every hex of the beach is still under fire. And that beach is still heavily mined.
The only good-order troops I have available are the ones in the breaches, anything on the beach is either Disrupted or has high fatigue. And none of my armor is undisrupted.
So it's not as if I'm about to jog across France......
With four more turns of daylight, it should be possible to reduce two more bunker hexes, and widen the gap a little bit.
But I doubt the advance will get much further than the highway, and this is still against the AI.

Casualties have been roughly historical for the Allies, while the Germans have (thus far) taken very few casualties.
If memory serves 352nd Inf. lost something like 1200 men on D-Day.

There are still a few things that bother me about the Alt_ version though.
Engineers aren't very good at doing what they're supposed to be doing, i.e. destroying strongpoints.
Without good Hard attack, they're only slightly better than standard infantry. On the other hand, if you crank up the Hard attack, they suddenly become AT troops, which they most certainly weren't.
So there are two possibilities that I can see, both unfortunately requiring hard-code changes.
Either there's a third 'anti-bunker' value added, separate from the Hard attack. Or bunkers are changed from being Hard targets.

The other niggle is the use of AT-ditches to simulate....er, AT-ditches.
While I get the idea behind it, there's an unfortunate side-effect. In order for it to work, the engineers have to land Disrupted, otherwise they can remove the AT-ditch upon landing.
Which means that on Turn 2, you only have 2/3rds of the available engineers available to do engineer stuff.
Which in turn means fewer targets the Germans need to concentrate on.
I'm not sure the scale is right for AT-ditches of fairly small sizes. I think it's better to simply use escarpments to funnel the attacks in the historical direction.
But that's just me.

Finally, I do hope nobody is taking any of the above as a critique of either the PzC series or the Alt_ scenarios.
Seaborne invasions are highly specialized undertakings, and asking a game-engine built for armored mobile warfare to do something like this is perhaps a bit of a stretch.
Same goes for which ORs are 'right'.
After nearly three decades of wargaming I have learnt one thing for certain:
Put three wargamers in a room, and you get five different opinions on anything. ;)

EDIT: Typo-corrections.

[Plain Ian]

Well you beat me to it. I've spent more time doodling with my map than I have playing. Here's the map. I'll add proper comments tomorrow. The X is supposed to mark the spot which I think Vasili says is the weak point?



A lot of good and inciteful (doh...I meant insightful) comments there Cheerfully. I'll add my thoughts as soon as I get around to playing.

[lycortas]

We do not need a 4th fire category; pillboxes should have a facing for all units and if assaulted from the side/rear should have seriously reduced assault strength.

We have all read something from Normandy, literally within an hour of landing there were fire teams moving around bunkers and then using charges to blow back doors, grenades in the vision slit , or my favorite, sten gun hosing the vision slit.

[CheerfullyInsane]

Well you beat me to it. I've spent more time doodling with my map than I have playing. Here's the map. I'll add proper comments tomorrow. The X is supposed to mark the spot which I think Vasili says is the weak point?

If it's any consolation, your map looks far better.
And yes, that solitary trench is the weakest spot. There are two pillboxes with lessened defensive values as well, one right next to the trench hex, and one at the western edge of the beach at Vierville. These are the only three hexes where there isn't an escarpment, and thus the only three hexes where you can get the needed armor-support through.

We do not need a 4th fire category; pillboxes should have a facing for all units and if assaulted from the side/rear should have seriously reduced assault strength.

We have all read something from Normandy, literally within an hour of landing there were fire teams moving around bunkers and then using charges to blow back doors, grenades in the vision slit , or my favorite, sten gun hosing the vision slit.

Wrong scale for that sort of detail. If you instituted facing-rules (like for some of the coastal artillery units), you'd still end up with the bunkers facing every possible assault. Even if you restricted the bunkers to only be able to fire directly forward, it wouldn't help since the only assaults possible are through the gaps in the escarpments which are directly facing the bunkers.

One way to do it was to enable an assault with engineers to negate some of the defensive benefits of bunkers.
Something like the Combined Arms penalty in reverse, so that if 10% of the assaulting force is combat engineers, bunkers are no longer Hard targets. Although that would still require the engine to differentiate between fortifications and other Hard targets, otherwise the engineers turn into tank-hunters.
But again, this would require hard-code changes, so I'm just thinking out loud here. :)

Suffice it to say that with the Alt. Assault OR bunkers are a b*tch, even when you have room to maneuver.
One of the weirder side-effects of the Alt. Assault OR is that you're actually better off sending armor in against a bunker complex without infantry support.
Granted, they'll take Combined Arms penalty so they only attack at half-strength, but that's still six times better than infantry. And since they're Hard targets, you've just cut the defensive fire in half, more if there are no AT-guns in there.
Not really relevant to the invasion, since you can't get the infantry out of the way, but something to keep in mind for e.g. Kursk.

[Vasili.I.Chuikov]

Right, I mean that area of ​​hexagons. Of course, priority to break the antitank ditches. Also approach the BB boats as much as possible, since I understand that with a closer approach to the beach it improves the impact against the bunkers

[CheerfullyInsane]

Also approach the BB boats as much as possible, since I understand that with a closer approach to the beach it improves the impact against the bunkers

Nope, range has no effect on the fire-values of artillery.
The only exception is the close-range Hard attack modifier in the PDT, but that only applies to artillery using Direct Fire at a range of 1.
So you'd have to run the battleships onto the beach itself in order for it to have any effect.
Granted, after the beaches have been cleared the Navy should move in in order to increase the range inland.
But it doesn't have any effect on the invasion itself.

[Vasili.I.Chuikov]

I have my doubts according to the rules, some designer could clarify it. Actually, the BB came close to the maximum to hit the target of the bunkers.

[Plain Ian]

Well you beat me to it. I've spent more time doodling with my map than I have playing. Here's the map. I'll add proper comments tomorrow. The X is supposed to mark the spot which I think Vasili says is the weak point?

If it's any consolation, your map looks far better.
And yes, that solitary trench is the weakest spot. There are two pillboxes with lessened defensive values as well, one right next to the trench hex, and one at the western edge of the beach at Vierville. These are the only three hexes where there isn't an escarpment, and thus the only three hexes where you can get the needed armor-support through.

Well there are 5  Ditches so in theory 5 target hexes. I'm not so sure that this is the weakest hex? Its the only one which isn't a Hard target but it qualifies for a net -85% modifier I think (TRENCH/Woods/Elevation). Yes the other target hexes require hard attack factors to attack but they have lower modifiers. The St Laurent hex is definently the hardest when you add up the modifiers and is one I wouldn't pick. 

I still think its a bit incongruous that a unit in a Pillbox/Bunker becomes a hard target and gets a modifier for this BUT it also gets the modifier for the other terrain in the hex? Its a hard target because of the concrete but it's somehow also in the woods/village whatever and gets that benifit as well? Why does it get both? 

I'll wait until Friday to start the playthrough. The playthroughs I've done suggest trying to exploit the TRENCH weakness will be difficult. Any savvy German will just hammer the beach hex opposite so you really need to try a multi hex approach.