The only big surprise here is that we got to fight over Alpha! Apart from that, the CV90s turned up, did their thing and catapulted straight to the top of the leaderboard.

That does make this script and the video pretty short, but frankly it's so hot right now that works for me.

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Platoon Patrol 09 Dutch Mech (CV90)

Welcome back to Combat Mission Shock Force 2 for the ninth run through the Platoon Patrol. This time the Dutch mechanised are up in their CV90s, which should be fun because the CV90 has lot going for it, definitely one of the higher end IFVs modelled in Shock Force 2.

As always, the platoon’s mission here is to find and destroy a reinforced squad of US Marines holding one of five locations of our map. To keep things fresh, we’re also starting from a random entry point along the map edge. This time, I rolled up another 4 which means we’re coming in on the wrong side of the river again.

For the CV90 run I thought I would change things up a bit and advance down the highway. This panned out really well because the enemy weren’t at Echo covering the bridge, they weren’t at Delta where they could cover the embankment and they weren’t at Charlie which is the next objective along.

Consolidating on Charlie, I decided this was the best place to cross the highway ditch and tackle Alpha. There’s another bridge further upstream, but this would take the platoon into some very dense terrain and give the Marines the potential to get some close range ambushes in where I would find it difficult to bring my firepower to bear. Bravo, meanwhile, is well enough back from the highway and the ditch that it’s pretty much its own thing and it doesn’t matter how I deal with it.

Crossing at Charlie then, there’s some immediate cover and concealment from the Charlie orchard that leads into a pretty good infantry avenue advance onto Alpha’s right flank. At the same time, to the left of the orchard there’s a big open field that I can use for some more distant, less risky spotting and fire support.

Contact Alpha

I’ve already got the platoon’s 4th squad with their marksman rifle and binoculars up on the roof of the Charlie tower. It’s a good 500m from there to Alpha and I’m specifically looking for those rooftop SMAW teams, but they can’t see anything.

Dismounting 2nd squad and sending them along the irrigation ditch past Charlie into that corridor of open ground where they have direct line of sight to Alpha doesn’t reveal anything either. But 3rd Squad’s CV90 catches a glimpse of Marines on the roof of building A3 as it sneaks up the right through the orchard.

So, finally, we’ve got contact. Finally because it’s high time we got to fight over the Alpha objective, but also because it’s taken forty minutes of carefully advancing to get here.

The SMAWs

On the next turn, I bring 2nd a little further forward because they don’t have a good view out of the ditch. This attracts some potshots from the enemy SMAW team on top of A3, but also reveals the other one nearby on top of A1.

2nd return fire and manage to dome the A3 SMAW gunner with their first shot at nearly 400m, which is excellent news. Further up the other flank, 3rd have dismounted and lined the wall just past the end of the orchard where they’ve come under fire from a Marine fire team in the Alpha orchard to the right of the objective compound.

It’s not difficult to come up with a plan from here. First I need to neutralise the main antitank threat- those two SMAW teams- then I can start closing in. I want the CV90s to stay at arm’s length as much as possible and use the dismounts to reveal targets for them by carefully moving up through those fields on the right. The idea is to uncover those Marine fire teams and delete them with firepower one by one.

So CV90s C and D engage the SMAW teams from the Charlie orchard, supported by B, which comes up behind 2nd squad in the open field and gets stuck in at long range.

At first, it looks like the KETF rounds aren’t going to be that effective. It’s not that difficult to get rounds on A3, but they seem to be detonating in front of it rather than over the top, and the A1 SMAW is masked behind other buildings, so it’s a harder target for area fire.

Within a few bursts though, it looks like the surviving Marine on A3 goes down and a couple of turns later CV90 B gets a solid spot on the A1 SMAW and takes it out.

The Orchard

While all this has been going on, CV90 C has come up alongside 3rd squad where it’s screened from the Alpha compound by some farm buildings. From here it puts two bursts of KETF onto the enemy fire team in the orchards- a total of 39 rounds- and the contact disappears.

This doesn’t mean we’re done over here though. I’ve brought 4th up from the Charlie tower and as they start to advance through the fields on the right, CV90 C’s commander gets hit. I’d had all the vehicles opened up to get some better spotting while I was trying to find the Marines and forgotten about it. Luckily, the two man turret means the vehicle can keep going.

I have got plenty of infantry forward now- 3rd and 4th squads are getting into the fields with 2nd moving to join them from in deep while 1st stays mounted in CV90 A as my reserve.

The infantry quickly spot the offending Marine team: they’re tucked into some dense undergrowth in the far corner of the Alpha orchard. Unluckily for the Marines, they’re on the forward slope and it’s easy to shoot them up.

CV90s B, C and D all engage in some area fire. This does a pretty good job of suppressing the Marines, but the foibles of Combat Mission’s engine mean they don’t seem to take any casualties. The enemy team looks like it’s tucked into the corner of an action square and I can only target the centre of the adjoining squares.

So a lot of valuable and rapidly dwindling KETF ammunition goes downrange, only for the Marines to take a potshot at CV90 D with an AT4 or a LAW66. Thankfully this falls short and detonates in a field.

The backblast might have given the Marine’s exact position away though, because on the next turn CV90 D gets a proper spot and I order it to expend the rest of its KETF on them. That takes three of the Marines out, the last one is picked off by the marksman in 4th squad.

Mopping Up

With both SMAW teams and two of the three Marine fire teams crossed off my hit list, the back of the defence here is obviously broken. That doesn’t mean the Marines can’t ruin my day if I get careless, so I spend my time leapfrogging teams through the fields and maintaining overwatch with the CV90s.

The fields themselves are actually a little lower than the surrounding ground, or rather their surrounding walls are up on small berms, so there’s plenty of dead ground to exploit. That does make line of sight a little tricky sometimes. The Marine platoon HQ pops up on the edge of the Alpha compound near the road- they’re in a little dip there behind the orchard wall and the Dutch infantry can’t get another good spot until I get them up into one of the farm buildings.

With the enemy HQ team suppressed by some long range coax fire courtesy of CV90 B, still way back in depth, my infantry make short work of the two Marines.

That leaves a single fire enemy team… it’s not until I’ve brought 1st squad and their CV90 up the far right and gotten them advancing into the orchard that I get the final spot.

It looks like the last Marines are on the close corner of A3, but closing in on that position it turns out they’re already out of action. Obviously the KETF fire aimed at A3 didn’t just hit the SMAW team on the roof. With that, I’ve actually managed to wipe the Marines out before touching the objective, which is a first. One turn later that’s rectified and I can cease fire.

Endex

Obviously, this is a very good result for the Dutch Mech in CV90s. All the Marines are out of action and the objective touched at the exceptionally low cost of a single vehicle crewman: CV90 C’s commander.

That gives them a total score of 992 out of a possible 1000 and sends them straight to the top of the leaderboard. Their time from contact to ceasefire was also only 19 minutes, which is the new fastest time.

The Uncons did do it faster, at 12 minutes, but their run had some issues with the SMAW teams having an armour target arc and the Marines surrendering, so I’ve put them through the platoon patrol again and they did considerably worse than their first time.

That’s an aside though, our Dutch in CV90s have done really well here.

This played out pretty much as anticipated, which is the way any firepower heavy mechanised platoon wants it to: find targets, shoot targets, find more targets. The Marine deployment played into this: they were set up on the forward slope facing my attack where it was easy for me to bring the CV90’s firepower to bear. Coming at Alpha from the north and having to deal with the same deployment from that side would have put them on the reverse slope and made life considerably more difficult.

The forward slope nature of the defence also arguably took something away from the KETF rounds. Normal contact HE from something a BMP or Bradley would also have been really effective here, because any high rounds going over the target would have hit the slope behind it instead of sailing off into the distance. It’s quite a steep slope, so any misses like that could still have done a fair amount of damage.

That shouldn’t take anything away from the CV90s though. The KETF ammo was excellent, it really chewed up the Marines here. We’ve seen in other runs that it can be quite difficult to get effective fire onto those rooftop SMAW teams, especially when they duck down and take cover. Airbursting HE solves that problem pretty decisively.

My one issue with the CV90’s is that they really use a lot of ammunition. By the end of the engagement one of the CV90s was completely out of KETF, two only had 35 rounds left and the last one never fired a shot because I kept it back the whole time.

This is partly because they only have 105 rounds, but I think it’s also to do with how the TacAI uses it. The pixeltruppen gunners have a tendency to fire very long bursts with the 35mm cannon. That’s not necessarily a bad thing and it doesn’t look like it compromises the accuracy that much, but it haemorrhages ammo and I would much rather they stuck to a steadier rate or shorter bursts. Case in point: yes, CV90 C wiped out a whole Marine fire team with KETF rounds early on, but despite only having a 15 second ‘target briefly’ order it managed to chuck 39 rounds downrange. That’s a good 37% of its KETF ammunition, which seems a little excessive.

Apart from that issue, the CV90s were awesome. I don’t really have any notes for the infantry, they did their thing, though I was surprised that one of the marksman contributed.

All in all, this was a pretty classic, straight-forward mechanised platoon attack and the Dutch CV90 Mech pulled it off almost perfectly. That’s going to be tough performance to beat.

New Batches

It also marks the halfway point through the Platoon Patrol. We’ve now done two platoons from each of our four groups, so I’ve consolidated the remaining 8 platoons into two new groups, Groups 5 and 6. Or the semi-finalists, I guess.

Group 5 is up next, so we have a choice between Syrian Republican Guard in BMP-2s, Canadians in LAV IIIs and both the British platoons: mechanised infantry in FV432 Bulldogs and armoured infantry in Warriors. Bit of a mix there, some very different capabilities. As always, we will get through them all, but it’ll be interesting to see which ones you guys pick.

That is it for this run through the Platoon Patrol though. If you’d 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.