Script: CM Basics How to Enter Buildings (Patreon)

I feel like I'm getting better at remembering to put the scripts up! This one had a major rewrite about halfway through because I was getting into far too much detail.

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Welcome back to Combat Mission where we are going to take a look at urban warfare again, specifically by asking the question: what orders should we use to enter buildings?

This comes up in the community every now and again and there is certainly some interesting advice floating around, so I thought I’d tackle it.

To do so, I’ve set up a really simple test in Shock Force 2. We have two units: an attacker and a defender. The attackers are a US rifle squad of 9 men with the usual smorgasbord of modern infantry weapons. The defenders are a 4 man Syrian recon team armed with AKMs. Everyone is regular experience with no modifiers.

The defender’s job is to hold a single-storey target building. The attackers, starting from behind another building 40m away, are going to try and take it. Simple stuff.

There are 6 infantry movement orders we could use: Fast, Quick, Move, Slow, Hunt and Assault.

Fast, Quick and Move broadly correspond to running, jogging and walking. Slow is a crawl: that’s going to be too slow to be any use in this context. Hunt is a kind of movement to contact where the troops will stop upon spotting enemy. We want to advance in this test, so that command is also not very useful.

Assault is more complex: the unit splits into fire teams and the TacAI moves forward approximating a kind of bounding overwatch. This is something that it is a lot more effective when micromanaged- I generally consider the assault command more trouble than its worth- but I’ve included it in the test because we are assaulting a position and it’s reasonable for people to expect the assault command to be good for that.

So we have our test, I’ve run it ten times for each order, giving us a total of 40 runs. This isn’t a good sample size, but it should give us an idea about what we need to focus more closely on.

Now, it’s important to remember that this series is about covering the basics. If you have any amount of combat mission experience you know exactly what’s going to happen when our attacking squad goes round that corner.

The defenders are ready and waiting, the attackers get shot to shreds almost every time. Out of our 40 runs, the attackers failed to reach the building 37 times. If we plot the location of casualties, we can see that almost all the losses take place as the attackers leave cover and come out into the open. Each dot represents a casualty, the colour of the dot corresponds to the colour of the order being tested: orange for Fast, yellow for Quick, blue for Move and red for Assault.

As you can see, it doesn’t really matter what order the attackers are using.

But, if we had 37 out of 40 failures, we have 3 non-failures. Working out why things went better in those examples is going to help us figure out what’s going on.

The recurring trend in the failures was that the attackers would suddenly come under fire, take casualties, become suppressed or pinned and either get wiped out or run away.

In all of the non-failures, the defender’s initial fire was ineffective: whether that’s because they were inaccurate, because the attackers shrugged off the suppression, because several defenders stopped firing to reload at the same time or because, in one instance, the defenders decided to reposition inside the building.

Whatever the reason for the decrease in the effectiveness of the defender’s fire, in our non-failures the attackers were able to take advantage of the drop-off to return fire, swinging the firefight back in their favour and creating the advantage they need to advance.

So the dominant factor in determining whether the attacker succeeded was not which movement order they had. It was the effectiveness of the defender’s fire.

This is not a movement issue. This is a fire superiority issue.

In theory, this sounds like a job for the assault command. The attacking squad splits into fire teams which alternately fire and move towards their waypoint: one team suppresses the enemy while the other closes. Due to the setup of our test though, the squad has to go out into the open before they can start fire and movement: otherwise, the base of fire team would stay behind the start building and never see anything to shoot at.

Because of the proximity of the enemy, the attackers always took fire as they left the corner of the start building. Looking at the casualty plot, the assault casualties are all clustered on the corner and against the wall because they needed a brief pause to get themselves sorted out for the assault order.

Which is a long winded way of saying the assault command is not going to cut it. What we need is support by fire from other units.

So, now we can get into Batch 2. This has two changes: firstly, the attackers are now supported by a pair of M240 medium machinegun teams who have spent the previous turn suppressing the enemy. They will continue to fire on the target building for another 15 seconds, then stop to avoid friendly fire.

The second change is that I have split the attacking squad. Now only one five man fire team will try to take the building. This is because it was very common in Batch 1 for all the soldiers to get in each other’s way as they were trying to go round the corner of the start building.

That’s important because in Batch 2 we’re really examining speed. The faster our attackers can reach the building, the less time the defenders will have to recover from the suppressive effect of the supporting fire. So in theory, Fast should do best, then Quick, then Move… Assault is its own weird thing.

Running the test ten times for each order again we get a much improved performance from the attackers. They successfully cleared the target building 26 out of 40 times.

That makes for 14 failures: seven of them involved the Move command. That fits neatly into our theory: Move is the slowest, the enemy have the greatest amount of time to recover.

But after Move, its Fast and Assault that are tied with 3 three failures each. Quick is at the top of the pile with only a single failure.

So what’s going on here?

The Fast set had very binary results based on whether or not the defenders opened fire. In the seven Fast successes, the defenders never fired a shot. The attackers entered the building while they were still suppressed and then shot them all.

In the runs when the defenders did open fire, they caught the attackers in the open and we got the same results as Batch 1 despite the support by fire. Except for in one run when the attackers got inside the building but failed to spot the defenders who proceeded to wipe them out from behind once they’d recovered.

With Quick, we only had one failure and that was a failure to suppress by the supporting fire: the attackers took casualties and fell back. Of the successful runs, the defenders failed to open fire twice. But in the remaining 7, they did.

Most of the time, this involved a single defender recovering and opening fire, by which time the attackers were usually at close range where they would spot the enemy and rapidly return decisive  effective fire.

The Assault runs should theoretically pan out the same way: we have an organic base of fire element that is maintaining suppression on the target building. But Assault failed more often than Quick.

Only twice more, which is not exactly a solid margin when you have a sample size of ten, but I think it helps highlight an important distinction between different types of fire that we need to consider.

Both the supporting M240s and the base of fire team are targeting the objective building with area fire. In Combat Mission terms this means they don’t have anything specific to aim at, they’re just putting rounds into the building. The defenders are spread out across the area being targeted so some of them will get suppressed more heavily than others based on the random distribution of incoming fire.

This explains why, every now and again, the suppressive fire doesn’t appear to be that effective and we get the Batch 1 experience. Its variable in effect, especially once we factor in the idea that Combat Mission models individual soldiers with different levels of motivation.

So getting back to the Assault command, because I’ve given the attackers an area fire order on the building the level of suppressive fire going out has increased, but it’s still variable.

When the advancing element is firing, it’s because they’ve spotted the enemy and have a specific target to shoot at. They’re engaging in aimed fire. Obviously if they hit then the defenders lose a man and the others get deeper into their emotional event, but even if they miss, because the fire is much closer to the target, it has a greater suppressive effect.

So although suppressive supporting fires are absolutely critical, we also need to consider that the closing element, the attacking unit that is trying to enter the building, needs to be able to react when they spot the enemy at close ranges.

Close range is an important factor here, but it does not necessarily mean inside the building. In our test, the defenders are manning the same side of the building that the attackers are approaching. So they will be at very close ranges where spotting ability greatly increases before the attackers reach the building.

There was certainly some fighting and some mopping up inside, but the attackers frequently engaged, suppressed and killed the defenders through the windows or the door within a few metres of the doorway.

And this was usually decisive because close range fires are more effective. Naturally it was also decisive for the defenders if they recovered quickly, which speaks to the importance of choosing the right movement command to balance arriving at the building before the suppression has worn off and maintaining enough situational awareness to deal with the enemy if they recover.

So which movement order is the best for entering buildings?

The Fast order gives us the best speed, but that speed also makes it harder for the troops to spot targets. Assault is essentially quick with extra steps- the advancing element moves at the Quick speed, but the unit as a whole loses time messing around and the base of fire element is never going to be as reactive as the much closer lead element. Move is out for what should be obvious reasons.

So we’re left with Quick. This looks like it gives us the best balance: the attackers move fast enough to close the distance rapidly, but they retain the situational awareness they need to engage any enemy troops they encounter.

But this is only in the context of supporting fire. We need fire and movement to get to the target building and of the two, fire is the enabling component. Fire without movement is just indecisive, movement without fire is suicide.

Obviously, the testing I’ve done here relates to a very specific scenario. If the attackers started closer, spent longer preparing the target building with fire or brought heavier weapons to bear then they would find it easier. If the enemy had mutually supporting positions in depth, more men or a higher degree of motivation then they would find it harder. There are hundreds of variables and we certainly don’t have time to go over them all.

But hopefully this video has helped contextualise the problem. Entering enemy held buildings is not a question of finding the right movement command, it’s a question of integrating fire and movement. Getting to the target building alive is almost always much more dangerous than actually clearing it. Quick is probably the best catch-all answer, but fast may be a better option if the greater situation means you don’t want your troops pausing in the open to engage.

And of course, in true Combat Mission style, it’s important to remember that you can do everything right and still have a bad day.

So, that’s another Basics video out of the way. If you would like to see these videos early and support the channel you can do so via Patreon and Youtube memberships. Whether you do or not, thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next one.