Page 5
Close Combat 5: Invasion Normandy
by Nelson "Admiral" HernandezCampaign
Since it would be impossible to really simulate the whole of the Utah Beach campaign in a game on this scale, the CC5 uses abstraction. The Cotentin Peninsula is divided into many regions, each of which has a related tactical map. The fighting is done by battlegroups when they both inhabit the same region. Each side has supply centers, which, if taken, will deny supplies to the enemy, impeding their effectiveness.
Campaign situation
The campaign is turn-based. First players plot their moves, then the moves are simultaneously resolved, and then the players fight the battles for each region. After all the battles are fought there is a debriefing and the turn is over. There are two turns in a day and the game goes from June 6 to June 30, ending automatically if one side takes all the regions. Victory is based on the player’s performance compared to his historical counterpart.
This is pretty much the same system as was used in CC4, which was set in the Battle for the Bulge. Unfortunately it carries over the defects of that system, which should be scrapped or substantially reworked. The problem is that each battlegroup can only consist of 15 units, and battlegroups cannot stack in the same region. Therefore concentrating your forces to gain the mass to crush the enemy in a region is impossible; you will always fight the same battle of equal numbers, until one unit’s force pool (the pool from which the 15 battlegroup units are picked) becomes depleted. This is clumsy and unrealistic, and it makes things easier on the Germans, who only have to sit in their defensive positions and let the Allies make piecemeal attacks.
Post-battle breakdown
The other problem with this system is that it is impossible to support units. When playing as the Germans, my very weak coastal defense garrison made a stand in one of the beach regions and survived the initial Allied landing, keeping them on the sand. When I wanted to swap out that weak battlegroup and allow a stronger veteran unit to take up its positions and eliminate the Allied beachhead, I lost control of all the victory locations on the map and had to set up far away from the beach. In the next battle the Allies were able to take the trenches and bunkers that lined the beach without a fight. If I had been able to set up in the positions vacated by the coastal defense garrison, or somewhat more realistically have the garrison fight a holding action while the reinforcements started at the far end of the map, it would have been trivially easy to rout the Allies at the beach and win the campaign then and there.
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