I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of the majority plan of:
"Help the uncontrollable berserk madmen claw their way through vehicle-grade armor with hand tools while under constant bombardment, roll up and obliterate the broken enemy force using chainsaws and flamethrowers-
-but, oh yeah, make sure to use restraint and take prisoners to interrogate for information because we convinced ourselves that people using explosives on a world where explosives literally grow on trees must imply the existence of some shadowy, high-tech rival we need to root out."
Can we just flank them? If they feel like going into melee with our allies, what keeps us from shooting into their sides?
[X] Hold the line
- [x] Flank them
The fact that they are in a reinforced tramway designed to indefinitely resist the periodic, atmosphere-igniting hellstorms of a 40K deathworld. The Imperators are smart, experienced, and well-organized. They have known that we were coming and been preparing for it for months. They chose this location to have the battle and had plenty of opportunity to set it up just right. Hell, they could have intimidated Amethyst Gardens into allowing them to hide troops there and be even now moving in to hammer us from behind or be raiding the supply caches we were depending on to get us home so that they can starve us to death and seize our weapons and armor without firing a shot.
To clarify, the shield wall stretches along the entire breadth of the railway enclosure. If you could have seen the grenade launchers (because they are mechanical to get the grenades as far as they did) you would have ordered your men to fire on them right away. Actually, if you could have seen them your entire strategy would have been different. The only way to flank is to have your men run the stairs of the Empire State Building first, more or less.
So, for the sake of clarity, we can't really observe
anything about what is behind the shield wall, and for all we know they have another shield wall, and another, and another, manned by thousands of reserve troops anchored by dozens of fortified fallback positions stretching for miles. They could, in fact, have the positions they are pretending to be pushed back from rigged with mines and claymores to wreck advancing forces in a deliberate ruse, or even have the entire tramline rigged to blow out underneath and behind us, leaving the disoriented survivors to face an advancing vehicle-armor-grade shield wall forcing them over the edge of a quarter-kilometer drop? These experienced and professional raiders could, in fact, have troops already navigating the forest and climbing up to attack us from behind while our troops who are
supposed to be anchoring our positions with automatic weapons are busy wailing on inch-thick-steel-equivalent shields with rifle butts and bare hands shoulder-to-shoulder with raging, flamethrower-wielding madmen in a deafening, disorientating, confined killbox where effective command and control is nigh impossible?
...You guys realize Hold The Line is basically 'stand there and pray they don't have more grenades' because we can't shoot into them while the 504 are engaged right? Whereas they can pretty much arc grenades right up over their shield wall into our line?
I know people are still pissed at the 504s and think there's a big advantage in letting them get killed off. But the Imperators already threw two volleys of grenades and the one of them that was aimed at us gave us 19 casualties on a roll of 51. If their next grenade volley crits, we are going to lose a lot of men, and it's going to increasingly hard to keep our morale and prevent our whole unit from being broken the more we're forced to sit and just eat grenades. Losing a battle to raiders like that could have political consequences.
Yes,
so let's pull back out of grenade range.