US troops land at Omaha under heavy fire.

The Omaha Beach scenario is also tutorial 3, introducing a number of new Lightning War features. The new fatures include Minefields, Commandoes, Off Map Artillery and Uncertain Reinforcement Arrival. Make sure you have played the free tutorials up to tutorial 2 before playing this battle.

Minefields

Minefields are displayed with a border indicating which side owns them, axis or ally. Often enemy minefields will not be visible until your first troops move onto them, but in this case the german minefields on the beaches were well known to the allies and so they begin the scenario exposed. When a company moves onto an enemy minefield it becomes suppressed and cannot move off the minefield until it has been cleared. Armoured units have a small chance of avoiding supression, allowing them to move through.

The black dots represent the number of mines to be cleared, or at least marked, to allow troops to begin moving through safely. Each turn your troops may clear some mines, reducing the number of dots, until the field is completely clear. If there are no engineers around this can be a very slow process. Engineers in the minefield, and unsupressed engineers adjacent to the minefield, can speed up the clearing process significantly. In other scenarios armored units may have special mine clearing capabilities (such as Flail Tanks).

You may toggle the visual display of minefields using the hide/show menu item under the show menu. Alternatively you can press the 'm' key on your keyboard to toggle the mine display on and off.

Commandoes

Like recon units, commandoes can operate far from their chain of command. They also have the special ability of being able to move, probe and assault across cliff faces. It is still a difficult task, putting the commandoes at something of a disadvantage so don't try to use them against a well defended cliff top. In the Omaha scenario the best bet, if the commandoes don't drift too far east, is to take on the small heavy weapons unit to the west of their designated landing zone. Once successfully over the cliff they then have a better chance of taking on the other emplacements at the western end of the beach.

Off Map Artillery

Long range artillery may be placed in special off map areas and may fire onto the map, as well as being fired apon by any on or off map artillery within range. Off map artillery comes in two varieties, static land batteries and ship batteries.

In Omaha you have a fleet of ships at your command. They have a considerable range inland and their position is considered to be anywhere along the coast necessary to reach the targets you designate. Static land artillery (there are none in this scenario) have a fixed location relative to the map. They may fire at any location on or off the map that is within range. Batteries that are on the map may fire at ship and artillery targets off the map if they are within range. To fire artillery at off map targets requires issuing the "Fire Off Map" command, which will only appear if there is at least one valid target. Selecting that command will display a radio button over each valid target and you may click any one target to fire at it.

Static land artillery requires the same shell resupply process as any on map battery. It is always considered to be in communications and in supply though. Naval batteries on the other hand always have enough shells to fire barrages continuously if they wish.

Uncertain Reinforcement Arrival

In battles things don't always go according to plan. Parachute drops can be off course and troops scattered far from their designated targets. In the case of the amphibious assault at Omaha there was a ferocious current to contend with, forcing many landing craft to drift far east of their designated landing zones. Additionally many craft, especially the special "dual drive" or swiming tanks, sank before ever reachin shore. So when making plans for your reinforcing troops be prepared for some very unhelpfull chaos on the beaches. The first three waves, which all land on the first turn of the scenario, are the most likely to suffer from drift, scatter, disorganisation and losses. Each turn after the first the arriving troops suffer fewer losses, perhaps a bit less disorganisation, but generally the same amount of drift and scatter.

Winning The Scenario

Your troops are in a hellish situation. Although you have a special force of engineers to help with clearing the mines they generally will not arrive as planned and will be scattered in an unhelpfull way across the beach. Being in close proximity to the enemy, even when the mines in one sector are cleared, you will need to use probe commands to move the engineers along the beach to the next uncleared minefield. While this is going on you cannot sit still on the beach. Even though supressed and scattered your troops must try to probe or assault the smaller heavy weapons units, letting your naval bombardment try to reduce the strong points. The sooner you can move troops off the beach the sooner the reinforcements stacked up behind them can land and stop losing landing craft.

Although the scenario includes distant objectives like Bayeux, Traviers and Lisigney, your priority is to capture the two beach front objective areas. Do this and you may scrape through a victory. Capture, or at least contest, any other objective as well and you might score a major victory