troops not shooting back after many attacks

[sjohnson]

I have been watching the detail resolution of combat after a defending unit is attacked many times and at some point (after a few attacks), the defending unit does not shoot back any longer. There is still some fire combat from support units being committed to the combat, but the defending unit in the hex no longer shoots.

Despite the no shooting - there is still some CV value committed by the unit for determining odds. I thought one of the patches at some point had left it such that the defender would always be treated as having at least 25% ammo but maybe this was only for CV determination purposes.

If this is not the case, what is to prevent an attacker from hitting a hex with 5-10 very small attacks or even multiple bombardment attacks to use up the defenders artillery ammo and then attacking at will to either cause a retreat, or more nefarious, simply continuing to attack with low enough odds to not cause a retreat and killing off many of the defenders in place when they can't respond.

Is this working as designed?

[sjohnson]

Definitely confirmed through various tests - bombard a defending hex 5-6 times and attack with 1 combat unit once or twice and the defending units in the hex have no ammo left. They no longer shoot and only cause retreat losses on the enemy if the attacking CV is not high enough.

The only ground losses caused by the defender after the "soak" attacks are caused by either support units or reserves. If you make a situation where there are no reserves possible and no support units then it is quite easy to see.

Certainly, this can't be working as designed? Eg, if 3 divisions sitting in a level 3 fort were bombarded by mortar or gun regiments 3-4 times and then attacked by a single rifle division once or twice that they would shoot all their ammo in response to such a low level attack; saving none for later?

I will repost this in the tech support now.

[Apollo11]

Hi all,

I responded to your thread in "tech" subforum...


Leo "Apollo11"

[Peltonx]

I have been posting about this for over a year and 2by3 is asleep.

Soaking attacks I use to take back door of Leningrad and take Moscow 1 division vs 3 Corp.

Its a joke, but wth I use it whenever I can.

Game engine can't handle allot of these issue's "exploits"

Thats why TDV destories germans during blizzard, and I almost encircled 20 german divisions vs smokendave34. Got 15

I figured out what TDV was doing in January a little to late for that game.

Next game I beleive i can repeat TDV's normal 50 surrended german divisions.

retreating 2 hexs a turn cant stop it as I showed in my AAR.

The same exploit can be used by SHC from 43 on to easly steam exploit GHC.

no skills required.

Very old news, but I will pretend its new hehehe

[Joel Billings]

If someone can send us a save (to 2by3@2by3games.com) along with instructions on what to do to recreate the kind of attacks you mention here, we'll take a look (tells us what hex to attack, and with who and in what order). We've got an idea we can try that might make these kinds of wave attacks not quite as effective at running the defender out of ammo. It would help to have a specific save with a test situation. We don't want to remove wave attacks as a strategy, but agree they should not be as effective, especially when done with bombarding artillery units. We're testing a patch now and are willing to take a stab at a change before we release the patch to public beta if we can get a save situation to use as a test bed.

Alternatively you can post the save here as opposed to emailing it, but in that case please post the instructions that go with it. Thanks.

[Michael T]

I hope your only looking at when only one or 2 units attack (like one div or brigade) and not multiple units. Because wave attacks with many divisions (4+) over the course of a week was a real tactic used to wear down and eventually overwhelm the defender.

I did some tests with one brigade or one division and found that they got wiped out for very little effect on the defender. So some proof would be good.

[sjohnson]

@Joel - I'll post a saved 43 head to head file later today with some data so you can recreate. The problem really occurs with lots of initial small bombardment attacks; then followed by wave attacks.

In general, it can be a little hard to discern the problem exactly with support units committing - if you strip the defender of support units, you can see clearly that the main hex units do not appear to cause any fire casualties. Note - I have not run at combat resolution 7 to see if they are actually attempting to fire, perhaps when time permits.

@Michael - I think I've stated it before, but, I have actually no problem with wave attacks. This was a real tactic. The only concern I have is when you look at the combat details, at some point the defenders stop causing any fire combat casualties to the attacker. I will show some data later today once I collate into a spreadsheet and send a further save detailing the point.

Also, I have found another bug I think - I'll put it in the same save game later. Artillery units attached to fortified regions do not appear to respond to bombardment attacks - eg they do not show up in the combat screen. This in general, may also be an interesting 'fix' to the many small bombardment attacks to allow defender artillery support units to commit and return fire; especially the longer range artillery (certainly not the short range stuff - I am surmising that artillery SU attached to corps, etc. would be back from the front line far enough that response range for counterbattery fire would put many batteries out of range).

[sjohnson]

Here is a save file - I renamed it as a zip although it is not - just a .psv file. I will e-mail it to 2by3 as well.

This is the axis turn prior in a test setup of the 43 scenario.

The routine is pretty simple - I have cleared out the German corps and armies of support units so we are only looking at the response of the in hex defenders.

You should advance the turn to the soviet turn, set the soviet air doctrine to ground support off and there are two hexes set up to be attacked quite easily by several artillery units.

1) hex 98,59; 3 german inf behind level 3 forts
2) hex 105,81; 1 german pz div, very strong, behind level 3 forts

And finally, a third hex to attack - 106,82 which is a German fort region with 3 arty SU attached. Bomb it with a Soviet arty unit and you will see the arty SU do not show up.

Next post I will attach a post-Soviet attack and detail how easy it is to drain the defender of any counterfire opportunity.

[sjohnson]

Here is the Soviet turn - I just ran a quick test again to confirm. If you show battle results and click show details you will see the hexes attacked.

All you have to do is bombard the defender with about 7-9 arty attacks by single artillery units and the ammo is pretty much gone. A couple of attacks by single divisions to follow produce very low losses for both sides. At this point, if you attack further you will see the only losses suffered by the attacker are retreat losses on additional attacks.

Note - this is not do to significant disruption of the defender either as if you total the disrupt losses from all the prior attacks they are a very small percentage of the defender elements engaged. This appears to largely be a function of the defender using up all ammo against the artillery attacks and perhaps the first few "wave attacks".

Thus, I conclude that the way the wave attack works is to consume all ammo up for the defender and then the only losses suffered by the attacker are the "retreat losses" because the CV ratio is not sufficient to force a defender retreat.

In concept, wave attacks should be possible and should build fatigue, etc in the defender - but the defender should be able to actually shoot their weapons back.

Note - this is somewhat masked in a "real game" because reserve units & support units will commit to the combat so you will see ground losses for the attacker caused by those units. However, the in hex defenders cause nothing except retreat losses if not forced out of their hex. I am pretty sure this is not working to intention of the designers.

[sjohnson]

Not sure the file actually attached - trying again.

[Michael T]

Defenders should not use ammo if only attacked by Arty. But if attacked over and over again by significant ground assault they should use ammo and yes it should be possible for them to run out. This is exactly what happened.

[sjohnson]

Yep - possible, but resupply should also be possible in the course of a 7 day turn. Also, the ammo used response should be in measure to the size of force attacking. A single brigade or division attacking a fortified position with 3 divisions in it would probably not see all three defending divisions consume their ammo supply in response.

I think you hit the nail on the head - "significant" ground assault. Currently the game does not measure significant - only that there is a ground assault underway.

I believe units are currently penalized if they have low ammo in terms of the number of shots they fire. A simple fix would be to do exactly what is done with the CV calculation - eg treat units out of ammo as if they had 25% for both final CV odds calculation and fire combat.

The above with a correction for the amount of ammo used in artillery response and it should work.

[Joel Billings]

I can't seem to be able to download the files. Can anyone else? Please email them to 2by3@2by3games.com. Thanks.

[elmo3]

Will try to make time to look at you file this week. Thanks.

[sjohnson]

Hi Joel - I emailed them to 2by3@2by3games.com as well as the original .sav files. I wasn't sure how to upload them as part of the forum post except to make them .zip - they are not actually .zip though, they have to be renamed to .sav.

Correction - when I try to download them it seems to want to treat them as .zip and rename them. Any way to post them as an actual save file on the forum?

Correction 2 - if you download and hit save link as and then rename to something like "43test.sav" of file type "all files" it seems to work and is able to load into WitE.

[Michael T]

I understand what you are saying but resupply is very difficult when under attack. And I have read accounts from the German side where they had to retreat simply because no ammo was left. I like your solution anyhow.

[sjohnson]

I entirely agree Michael about resupply when in combat. Some resupply is possible generally - maybe not in a specific firefight or for a particular company, but, the combat is modelled in a 10 mile hex so on this force scale some limited supply would get through to some components of the force. That's why I was thinking along the lines of the same rule change as was made for the low ammo CV calculation. Actually, I was thinking about it further still, perhaps a similar gig could be done to the artillery bombardment response - something like the target units will not counterfire if their ammo is less than X% - say 75% or so. In practice, artillery units in close support of infantry (eg divisional artillery) would not fire off all of their ammo in counterbattery actions.

These seem like they would be simple (as if anything in coding is simple!) fixes. Just single line checks that are probably already done against ammo supply to determine how many times an element fires in combat.

[Joel Billings]

Got your saves, thanks. We made a few additional changes to the current version in test, mostly to reduce the effectiveness of the bomardment soak off attacks. We've got it in testing now. If it seems to be working out ok, it might get out as a public beta sometime next week, or the week after that.