Slitherine

Hi there,
Not sure if someone can help me with this or not. I am puzzled by the effectiveness of Ambush settings particularly with reference to Armour and artillery pieces.
It seems that if I place hull down AT guns on Ambush enemy armour elements engage them pretty much as soon as they are in line of sight (if within 200 metres or so.).
On the other hand enemy armour seems to be able to hide in plain view of my units and fire multiple main armament rounds without being spotted. In the Cobra battle I was just playing I had two Sherman and an M10 Defending to the SW, I seem to recall from CC2 that infantry units have higher spotting abilities so I have an ambushed infantry unit alongside the Armour to enhance spotting.
Despite the SW Defence command all of the armour engages an infantry unit 150 M south (fair enough the whole point of CC is the initiative of units). An enemy panzer fires at least 6 times from cover to the SW (within 200 m) and none of the armour or the ambushing troops are able to observe it's location- it brews up both Sherman units. You wold think that with the precursor command to defend SW, the clear presence of major threat form the SW that the focus of the armour should change back to the SW sector.
If I felt that player assets were equally hard to spot I could deal with this but my lighter, smaller units don't even fire before getting brassed up! what am I doing wrong?

Infantry is better at spotting than armor, and AT guns are more difficult to spot than tanks. Everything is a random chance though so you will see outliers from time to time.

It sounds like what happened is your tanks were spotted by enemy infantry, and the enemy tank started shooting at them while it was still out of line of sight. Once an enemy unit is spotted by any friendly unit all your units can area-fire at it, even if they have not spotted it themselves. This typically happens if there is some extensive 'you can shoot through it but not see through it' foliage or other cover in the way (like a belt of trees). Area fire is pretty inaccurate, but this sort of thing can happen.

Steve

Thanks for that, does mortar and indirect fire also reduce spotting effectiveness oh, and will troops still collect dropped weapons if sent to KIA locations?

Mortar smoke does block line of sight and hinder spotting. HE explosions don't hinder spotting themselves, but they can cause nearby troops to be suppressed, which reduces the chance they'll spot anything.

Troops who are low on ammo will scavenge for ammo or weapons on any nearby wounded or KIA, yes.

Steve