People's Tactics/Combat

Possibly the most important part of the manual is how combat is actually resolved. Actually it is quite easy. All formations going in to battle have their strength calculated on their actual combined stats (of all their unit types * their quantity or number of men). The following modifies these:

Modifiers

It is interesting to note that the below modifiers have already been calculated in to the approximate attack and defence values listed on the unit’s counter on the map.

Experience modifier

Experience reflects the training and frontline experience your men posses. The higher the experience of your formation, the better that formation will fight. A unit with XP=100 fights 50% better as a unit with XP=50. And a unit with XP=50 fights 25% better than a unit with XP=25. Usually, when you receive new men, they will have low XP. This low number is slowly built up over time through training, but once a unit reaches the maximum experience value allowed through training, only participating in combat will raise this number.

Units begin with 25 experience and gain 6 experience a turn, up to a maximum of 50. A unit requires 4 turns to reach 49 experience and 5 turns to reach 50 experience. At this point the unit will have doubled in effectiveness compared to its initial state. This shows the importance of creating units behind the front line and allowing them to develop their readiness and experience before throwing them in to battle.

Readiness modifier

The higher the readiness of your formation the better it fights. It reflects the fitness and battle-readiness of the troops. The tactical implication is the more battle a formation does the more disrupted, dispirited and unorganised it will become. The lower the unit’s readiness value, the easier it will be to overcome that unit in battle. So, it is wise to monitor the readiness values of your units and allow heavily unorganised units time to rest (if possible) before throwing them back in the fray.

Officer bonus

The officer’s relevant skill (land/air/sea) becomes a bonus. An officer with skill 9 fights about 2 times as well as one with skill 1. Having fame points gives further bonuses. The officers in the entire chain of command play a part, not just the officer in direct control! The ratio for how much influence an officer has on the unit is 3:2:1 for the Formation’s officer, the THQ’s officer and the SHQ’s officer.

Disruption Modifier

If a unit is disrupted it gets a penalty on its fighting ability. This reflects the impact of having organizational problems during battle.

Combat Mechanism for Land Battles

All land types have 5 prime stats: Soft Attack, Soft Defence, Hard Attack, Hard Defence and Hit Points. The basic combat procedure is as follows:

• An attacking formation counts up all its Soft Attack and divides this by the Hit Points of defending infantry to determine defending casualties.
• A defending formation counts up all its Soft Defence and divides this by the Hit Points of attacking infantry to determine attacking casualties
• An attacking formation counts up all its Hard Attack and divides this by the Hit Points of defending armour to determine defending casualties
• A defending formation counts up all its Hard Defence and divides this by the Hit Points of the attacking armour to determine attacking casualties

Taking in mind the following extra rules:

Front-size limitation

There is a maximum number of men and equipment that may participate in combat with an enemy unit. Just because a formation has x amount of infantry, doesn’t mean that all of x will fight in a given battle. This rule reflects the impossibility of attacking with everybody in one go.... You can see a prediction of which % of your forces can attack in 1 round in the topright bottom of your unittype picutres.

Landscape modifications

Some landscapes favour infantry defence and give penalties to armour. Forests obviously give good defence and urban areas provide even better bonuses.

River penalty

Attacking over a river gives a large penalty.

Tactical Bonus Modifier

If you attack an enemy hex from different sides you get a bonus (15%) on each attack. From the more sides you attack from, the higher the bonus will become. The defender gets half this bonus (7%) for every covered flank.

Coordination Bonus Modifier

If you attack from different sides you get the tactical bonus, but if you also have formations from the same THQ attacking from the different sides you get an extra bonus on top. The defender gets half this bonus for every covered flank.

Amphibious/Paradrop penalty

If the attacker has been unloaded from a cargoship it gets a large penalty if it meets resistance on the beach. The same applies for airdropped troops that land on top of an enemy formation. This is done to reflect that for a while the attackers are sitting ducks.

For paradrop attacks, the paratroopers will fight to the death. Combat does NOT end after 6 rounds, and continues until all attackers are dead, or until the defenders are dead or retreat. This means that if paratroopers are dropped on to a an airwing or naval unit, they will grind through the airwing until it is utterly destroyed. Since the airwing cannot fight back, even a small number of paratroopers can destroy any number of planes.

A clever general will paradrop air wings in his opponent's rear. This makes guarding the location of your air wings important - either base them in obscure locations, or keep a unit in the same hex to fight paratroopers.

Fortification penalty

If the attacker has to attack through a line of fortifications its attack strength is greatly diminished. Level 1 fortifications decrease the attacker's damage by 10%, level 2 decrease it by 40%, and level 3 fortifications decrease it by 70%. The difference is not very noticeable at level 1, but level 2 or 3 fortifications require massive numerical superiority in order to break through.

Retreat

If a unit has lost enough in the opinion of its leaders (Chain of Command) it will retreat. The consequences of retreating are usually more severe for a defending unit than an attacking unit. Consequences are loss of readiness, mobile type and artillery-type.

Combat Mechanics for Artillery Attacks

These attacks occur if a land formation with long distance artillery attacks, a naval unit bombards a unit on the land, or if a naval unit bombards another naval unit from a distance. The calculations for this type of attack are extremely simple. The attacker will destroy a defender number of hit points equal to its artillery power. However there are three exceptions, below.

Note that artillery fire does not seem to suffer from diminishing returns: a small unit takes as many casualties from artillery fire as a large unit would. This is different from interdiction, which seems to suffer from dimishing returns.

Artillery damage is spread across all unit types in the target's hex fairly evenly. Unlike interdiction, infantry will suffer as many casualties as the mobile, artillery, and armor will (although see the armour protetion point below).

Submarine invulnerability

Subs cannot be destroyed by artillery fire. Indirect artillery fire is too sluggish to hamper the sub in diving.

Armour protection

Artillery is only half as effective against armoured unit types as against the other land unit types.

Fortification

The protection from fortifications applies to artillery damage that the enters the hex through a protected border. Level 1 fortifications decrease the attacker's damage by 10%, level 2 decrease it by 40%, and level 3 fortifications decrease it by 70%.

Combat Mechanics for Naval Battles

The mechanics behind naval combat is the same as a two sided artillery duel, except that the submarines have no invulnerability. Retreating is not an option in naval battles. If your warships have long-range guns, it is advisable to bombard from a distance.

Combat Mechanics for Amphibious Invasion

Is handled as a normal land attack except that there will be severe penalties for the attacker and also the attacker will not be able to retreat. It is not possible to amphibiously invade a town that has warships in the harbour.

Combat Mechanics for Air Missions

Every Air mission, being it airtransfer, interdict, bombing or air supply will first suffer from Interception and A-A Fire. After that the actual mission is executed.

Interception

All enemy fighters with adequate readiness and within range of the mission target will intercept the attacker and use their dogfight value to do battle. An air unit could be intercepted by multiple formations.

Interception targets fighters first, and once all fighters have been destroyed, it begins to target other aircraft (bombers, transports, recon planes).

Because there are only four rounds of interception, the total number of casualties is often quite small. Two large airforces will scratch at each other's fighter escorts without ever breaking through to the other planes, so it is possible for two sides to launch a string of successful airstrikes against each other. To cause large amounts of air losses, it is normally necessary to build lots of Flak units.

A-A Fire

All unit types with AA capability within range of the target will open fire on the attacker. The default AA range is 2 hexes. AA fire occurs after interception. Any air units surviving interception and AA fire then carry out their mission.

Most artillery and armor units have a very small AA value (5 or 10) but this will rarely cause any casualties unless you are extremely unlucky. The real danger is from Flak units, which can easily wipe out an entire air wing if there are enough of them.

One Flak unit will shoot down, on average, one plane, leading to massive losses if the number of flak units is greater than one or two. Consider attacking or disrupting the Flak unit first (via artillery bombardment, land attack, naval bombardment or even a suicide paradrop) before interdicting nearby units.

The effectiveness of AA is not affected by readiness or experience - one Flak cannon always produces 300 units of AA fire.

Interdict

Fighters and bombers use their Soft Attack and Hard Attack to strike at enemy. Soft Attack for Infantry, Mobile, Artillery, or Aircraft on the ground and Hard Attack for armour. Fighters and bombers use their Naval Interdict score to strike at enemy naval vessels and submarines. Take in to mind that submarines can still dive, but usually have a lesser chance to do so than against naval attack. Naval interdiction is very difficult, even for torpedo bombers, because the planes have such low damage capacity relative to the hitpoint of warships and cargoships. Naval interdiction will typically result in a few or zero casualties, but involve large losses.

Interdiction damage seems to be concentrated on mobile, artillery, and armor units, with very little damage falling on the infantry portion of a unit. This makes interdiction an excellent tool for surgical strikes on artillery units. On the other hand, interdiction is ineffective when used against large units of infantry.

Interdiction seems to have diminishing returns, so that attacking small units causes few casualties, while attacking large units causes more casualties. Artillery attacks do not seem to have this diminishing returns problem.

Fighters are surprisingly good interdiction units, and the advantage of building bombers is fairly low, particularly in the early game, since if your opponent builds 100% fighters, while you bui; 50% fighters/50% bombers, you will lose most pre-interdiction dogfights.

Strategic Bombing

Bombers use their Strategic Bombing value (50 for regular bombers and 100 for strategic bombers under default rules) to cause damage to a town and thus diminishing its production and supply generation. Towns controlled by a player rebuild roughly 5% damage a turn if they have an SHQ assigned (even if they do not have a supply line to that SHQ!). Neutral towns do not rebuild damage, so strategic bombing can be an effective "scorched earth" strategy to deny an oppponent access to productive towns.

The value of a plane's strategic bombing is affected by its experience (so a strategic bomber with 50 experience has an effective strategic bombing value of only 50!) but not by other variables like readiness, officer skill, etc. Strategic bombing runs add experience to the unit as long as it causes actual damage (bombing a town at 100% damage is not worth any experience).

Combat Mechanics for Air, Navy units attacked in towns by land units

You should avoid this at all cost. Air formations can hardly defend themselves against a land attack. Naval formations in a harbour are also extremely vulnerable to land attack. The expression sitting duck could be used for the defender in this type of attack. Evacuate the formations instead of letting this type of attack occur.

That being said, both air and naval units have a lot of hitpoints, so they can withstand a lot of damage and if they are mixed in with a defending land unit, they will divert a lot of damage from the garrision.

See the Paradrop section for an important point about attacks on air units stationed in towns.

Example of Combat Mechanics and Modifiers at work

Here will be explained how the various modifiers work against each other, to illustrate, here an example of a combat report featuring battle between two land formations.

The amount of casualties the attacking unit will inflict on the defending unit is based upon the Soft Attack value against soft targets (infantry) and on Hard Attack against hard targets (armour). The amount of casualties the attacker will suffer depends on the Soft Defence and Hard Defence values of the defender. All 4 values are initially calculated by just totalling all the unit types respective stats (soft attack and hard attack for attacker, soft defence and hard defence for defender).

However, there are quite a few rules to give some realism and to give some tactical options to the players.

In the above example the attacking unit has a Readiness value of 100, so it gets no readiness modifier. If it were to have a readiness value of 80, it would be 20% less effective in attacking. It has experience value of 50, so it fights with only half the potency that it would have done had an Experience value of100. It gets a bonus of 59% for the officer(s) in the chain of command who are controlling the unit. It gets no disruption mod, but if it would have been disrupted say 25% it would then fight with 25% less effectiveness. This attacking unit gets a whopping 70% penalty on its remaining strength due to attacking over a river! However, it gets a tactical bonus mod of 30% since the attacking is done from 3 different sides, and a further 15% coordination bonus on the remaining strength is given since the attack from 2 of the 3 sides is executed by formations belonging to the same THQ. Fog of War is on, so the only thing we can see about the defender is the end values of its defensive strength after all the modifications have been calculated. However, we can see here it gets a 30% bonus due to fighting from a forest.