CAS and suppressive fire

[migkillertwo]

These are two ideas I have for the game that I think could make it much more interesting.

The first is supporting fire from artillery, archers, and close air support from planes. In practice it would work like this:

If you're on the offense, you could have artillery or attack aircraft set to provide support fire/CAS (I'll just use CAS from now on). If you have a land unit attack another land unit, your bombers/artillery could provide CAS, and more than one unit could provide CAS depending on how hard it is for your guys to defeat the defensive unit. Perhaps it would be smarter to have the CAS function as a default until you specifically order your artillery or bombers to bomb the unit/city in question, as this would add essentially the same element without creating too much micromanagement.

I think this function should require the attacking and supporting units to have CAS promotion because, in real combined-arms warfare, there needs to be an incredible amount of coordination between attacking units and supporting units.


The next idea is to allow some units to "suppress" enemy hexagons. This would be where artillery, planes, or machine gunners put a large amount of fire on a hexagon which doesn't necessarily destroy or significantly harm the unit occupying the tile, but rather would harm it significantly if it were to change its position.

I think this could add another tactical element and give the offense a new way to flank the enemy.

In practice, it would work out something like this:

If you have a line of infantry that you need to break through, you can get your strongest, most mobile units to punch through a single hexagon, and in the hexagons this enemy lies in between, you could have artillery or machine guns suppressing them. So if the enemy tries to move their infantry to close this hole in their lines they would suffer a penalty.

I think this could work on the defense as well by allowing machine guns and artillery to "cover" the retreating forces. The enemy could attack your defensive unit, but your unit has to retreat. If the retreating unit has a CAS promotion it could request artillery and bombers to cover their retreat by blocking the attacking enemy from advancing.

I tentatively hold to this because I'm not sure if it would add too much micromanagement.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

I've read elsewhere that suppressive fire is already in CivV, so wish granted eh?

Aussie.

 

[Grubsnik]

Defensive suppressive fire is something that was present from PG, and sounds like they will bring along.

Offensive suppressive fire, only existed in PG from the level bomber units, which rarely caused any casualties, but could cause a whole lot of suppression in a unit, that stayed active throughout the turn. They have already stated that a defending unit will always get to use all it's remaining strength when defending, so i don't think they are planning on having offensive suppression fire carry over from combat to combat.

My personal experience from PG was that if you had a few effective level bomber units, defending simply became impossible. First you bombed the AA-gun (to reduce the amount of damage your other bombers took), then you bombed the supporting artillery and finally you bombed each unit you wanted to attack. Then you sent in your ground troops/tanks in a simple 1-1 relationship and destroyed their position. If you had any spare units on top of that, you could send them in to kill off the wounded and fleeing enemy units. Either way, their entire defensive perimeter could get eliminated in a single turn, even if it was set up in a textbook manner.

Offensive artillery still offers you the chance to soften up an enemy unit before sending in your ground troops into a direct confrontation.