Early war engineers

[XLVIII Pz. Korp]

To come back to the game. I still think that engineers armed with flamethrowers and satchel charges should be able to harm/disrupt a pillbox regardsless which nation they are. What the best method of achieving this is, I'll leave to the technical guys such as Jason, Umbro & Wyatt.

I've been following this with a lot of interest as I always thought that some hard attack abilities should be given to all engineers not just the select few we see now. I would like to point out though that under existing rules engineers "armed with flamethrowers and satchel charges are able to harm/disrupt a pillbox regardsless which nation they are."

Point of example; to get a good look at the pillbox situations being discussed, I played the scenario "Big Bully" last night vs. the AI. I found that by forming company strength assault groups of Engineers the Itallians were able to bust three pillboxes all occupied initially by undisrupted Albanian units. The procedure used was; turn one an initial assault of the undirupted pillbox by four engineer platoons (usually resulted in a d1 effect) and a followup assault by a company of infantry. Turn two repeated the process and usually the infantry company carried the position after the second engineer assault. If not the same process was repeated on a third turn which always carried the position. Two to three turns of continuous assault is not quite as efficient as the Germans but I think we can all agree that the Italians were not quite as efficient as the Germans in most aspects of the war. This series of tests was conducted under 1.04 with extreme assault rules active. Kind of surprising. Of course one also has to remember that the terrain surrounding the assaulted pillboxes was beneficial to the attacker (high defense modifiers kept the attackers undisrupted and adjacent to the defender over multiple turns.) Were these pillboxes in open ground and if the defender had good artillery support available to break up the assaults before they went in it may be a different story. Just wanted to point out though that under these conditions in this scenario the engineers were able to achieve results.

Does this mean we should go mucking about with the hard attack values? Don't know, that's for others to decide but higher hard attack values wouldn't have made any difference in this since none of pillboxes taken were ever fired upon, just assaulted.

Just my .02