Close Combat V: Invasion Normandy

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I decided that since I talked about playing it all the time, I'd post some stuff about it here. Close Combat V: Invasion Normandy is a top-down strategic armchair-general sort of game where you command soldiers of either the Axis or Allies during the D-Day landings. The standard strategic map encompasses Utah and Omaha beach, Carentan and a few towns to the east, and everything north and west of Carentan of the Contentin Peninsula. The game is played in single battles, operations that deal with a limited sector, and campaigns that focus on the entire month of June, 1944. Battlegroups are detailed to be similar to actual battlegroups that were present during the invasion. The game takes into account individual weapons of each soldier in a squad, individual ammo, individual soldier morale, strategic supply lines, off-map artillery, air, or naval support, and a wide variety of other things. Realism is an integral part of this game, more than any other I've seen.

In this instance I'm playing the Gold Juno Sword mod, which focuses on British and Canadian amphibious and airborne battlegroups that assault eastern Normandy.

Here's a picture from Sword Beach

This can't end well for me...
Key:
1: Command DD Sherman
2: Centaur IV
3: Firefly
4: Destroyed tank wreckage from previous attempts from the Brits trying to assault the seawall.
5: My forces. The green bars are there to distinguish that I'm ordering them to ambush in a given direction, which is more or less hide until something that they can actually shoot gets close enough to them. The buildings that my soldiers are in have their roofs invisible so I can see inside. To the bottom left you can see where some of the building's roof is still opaque. The yellow dot is a sneak order for one of my nearly destroyed Panzerjager AT squads after a failed attempt to rush the DD Sherman just outside the house.

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Here's a pic of another assault on Sword Beach after the first shot was taken.


The two tanks that are destroyed were assaulted when they tried to press an advance. The Firefly on the left was taken out by two Panzerabwehr squads, one of which you can clearly see just to the northeast of the tank, where one lone soldier remains next to his two squadmates and a crewmember of the Command DD Sherman tank that was shot after running away from the wreck. The DD Sherman was taken out by the Flammenwerfer duo that I've currently got selected. In the soldier monitor you can see their names, their position in the squad (Assistant Leader and Gunner, which are somewhat useless positions for a flamethrower unit), and their status of morale, fatigue, and injury. One is "Healthy", denoting that he has at least decent morale, no fatigue, and is uninjured. The other is just injured, probably by some gunfire from a British squad that tried to assault through the building (which are the charred corpses that have flames sprouting from them) or from naval artillary that peppered the buildings shortly after I destroyed the DD Sherman. You can also their current tasks, a picture of their weapon, what type it is (SP for Special in this case), and how much ammo remains.

If there's no ammo, then they don't fire unless they're carrying pistols or can salvage a weapon from another squad. If their morale is low, they won't listen to orders and will likely try to flee the battle no matter what you do. The severity of the effects of morale change with the level of difficulty. Right now I'm playing on the equivalent of "Medium" while the AI is playing on the equivalent of "Very Hard" for leisure play. If I start up a Let's Play section, then I'll switch it so it's unlikely that I'll have such a superior edge.

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Here's a picture of the strategic map. This one is interactive, something that was found in CCIV and CCV, whereas CCII had a strategic map that really only detailed the location of 30th Corps trying to go into the low countries.


The names in yellow are added by me, in case you were wondering.

Here I've laid out the names of each sector. You can also see weather conditions (affects aerial assistance I believe), what day it is, what day the operation or campaign ends, what time of day it is (important when you hold truces), grayed out areas where I would be able to place my artillary/off map support during a movement phase (this is combat phase), a minimap of the sector I'm looking at, a description of the sector (Kind of stupid, but this is from a mod), and a minimap of the campaign/operational map.

The numbers stand for:

1: British Battalion assaulting Sword Beach
2: My German Infantry Battalion
3: The little green box stands for mortar support that I've designated
4: The green barrels indicate that this beach is a base of supply for allied forces, and supply lines extend out from it.
5: The circle with the two figures fighting in flames indicates that this will be my next battle.

In the main minimap to the bottom right you can see that I've had enough time to put a really heavy defense up three battalions thick in most places. At this point it's pretty much impossible for the Allies to win. The green dot to the north is either Juno or Gold, but probably Juno. I forced one of the other battalions to disband that was there earlier.

And, if ever I lose Sword Beach, you can see a nifty little SS Armored Panzer Division sitting happily at Perier's Ridge which I have selected.

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