Maj. Bosco

I'd like to point something out about pill boxes that were used at the level CM models: They weren't extremely effective. The 3rd army knocked out lots of them without sustaining significant casualties from them. Simply put static defenses are no substitute for tanks and infantry. The french learned how ineffective static defenses were against tanks at the begining of the war. Though the main thrust of the German offensive was from the north the Germans did attack at the Maginot line and passed through it pretty easily. IMO pill boxes are nice for scenario designers but in QBs they're wastes of points. Buy the essentials, infantry, artillery and armor. A couple of flak guns can't hurt and neither can TRPs. Barbed wire, AP minefields, and pill boxes are all just wasted points.

5 1)3 2)2 3)23 4)10 5)8

I was under the impression that the US M16 AA Halftrack was not rare. Less common than the other types of halftracks but certainly not even in the same league as the T-28 or the Sturmtiger. Regardless of that, I'd like the see the M16 HT in CM or CM2 too. In a slight non-sequitor: Wasn't the Sturmtiger more of a mobile artillery peice than a tank?

Tanks with elite status have a higher % chance to hit as well as that lower reaction time. Just because they're elite doesn't mean that they can't be killed though. IIRC elite status does virtually nothing for the survivability of a tank once it is hit. The same round that will take out a green tiger will take out an elite tiger. Given the advantages confered on the elite tiger by it's elite status, however, it is easier for you as the player to keep that tank from getting hit and thus keep it alive.

Not so long ago there was a pretty heated discussion about game balance in V 1.1 that began in regard to the new tungsten usage. Now that the patch is no longer the "new patch" and everyone has become more acclimated to it I would like to hear the community's thoughts on game balance with regard to point values, availability and all the rest. To keep things in perspective I think it might be helpful if, in addition to your thoughts on game balance, you also specify your prefered side and how you normally play combat mission (QB's v. Comp, Double-Blind Scenario's, TCP-IP etc...).

I've gotta bump this one. I'd like to preface this by saying that there were a lot of needed fixes in the patch and that overall it's a great thing. Having said that there are some problems that seriously need to be adressed. Smoke is one of them. Maybe we need a new command for tanks like "Fire w/o option of Smoke". I've told tanks to fire at buildings for various reasons and they inevitably fire smoke regardless of threat level. They also fire smoke until they're out of it at enemy infantry. Fred isn't joking when he says that you need to fire all your smoke rounds into the sides of hills. It is an honest to god bonafide bug and needs to be fixed. If we tell the tank to use it's main gun we don't mean for it to smoke. We have a seperate command for that.

I'm going to go way back. Oldschool even, on this thread, by pointing out the title of the thread. Unstoppable Juggernauts. The original question was why were German tanks so much better than allied tanks? Well, if you accept my original answer that German tanks were so good because of allied tanks and you accept the premise that tanks aren't going to be great cars then I think the Sherman's short-comings are clear. If the fight was all about who gets the best millage and can stay out of the shop longest then my '89 Honda Civic is the greatest tank ever built. Almost never breaks down. 33+ miles per gallon and it goes pretty fast considering the dinky little CVC engine in it. My Civic would make it to every fight with an hour or two notice. 50,000 Shermans? I bet they could have made an order of magnitude more Civics. It could manuever the hell out of German tanks. However, I think in the end those German tanks that were built half a century before my car would win. Why? Because whatever BB gun you could mount on my car would bounce many rounds off the German tank, and the German tank would put a couple of rounds through me. Though it has an excellent slope in some places I'd bet that my car's armor is only 4 - 5 mm at best. You see, the Sherman is kind of like an upgunned Honda Civic. Cheap, great mileage for a tank, reliable, and stands a snowballs chance in hell against a German heavy tank. A 76mm armed Sherman with Tungsten ammo (very rare in 44-45 mind you) is a better option. That tank still can't take a hit though. Sure Shermans were great anti-infantry weapons. So is my car though. I bet I could run down 20 or 30 joggers before my car called it quits. The problem is that if you have a supported tank facing unsupported infantry then those infantry are pretty well screwed anyway. German heavy tanks might not have had as many machine guns, but they were able to deal with supported infantry as well as unsupported infantry. As for the Sherman vs. the Pershing. The Pershing was IMO a superior anti-infantry weapon. Just as many MGs, carried more ammo, and had a better main gun. In addition it could stand it's own against anything the Germans could feild. As someone said earlier when you're shipping tanks it's not size that matters, it's mass. If we had had 80% of the tanks we had, and those tanks were all, in combat terms, at least twice as good then we would have come out ahead on that deal. Add to that the experience the tank crews would gain from continuing to live. Have you heard of any lighters named after Pershing nicknames? Mechanics might have cursed it but we were rarely concerned about raw materials like parts for tanks. We were concerned about being unable to replace the squishy things inside the tanks. Anyway. 2 cents end of rant and all that. PS: I am truly impressed. A (fairly) civil thread has gone on this long! Wow!

The bomb was developed to end the war. If that meant bombing Germany or Japan then we were up to it. If it meant bombing Moscow then we were almost certainly up to it.

As far as tactics are concerned all the differences between nationalities you mentioned are either beyond CM's scale, or are a matter of training which is already modeled. If you want to see several detailed discussions of this feel free to do a search. It has been rehashed many many times. As for changing the point values, point value is determined by effectiveness on the battlefeild. Tanks were certainly cheaper for the US, as that oft-qouted 5 to 1 ratio implies. However, a Sherman should not cost 1/5th of what a german tank costs because we could feild more of them. That would unbalance the game. Similarly infantry should not be "balanced" to reflect the real conditions because it would unbalance the game. The reason why German troops often cost more per troop is because of the greatly supperior firepower they bring onto the battlefeild. If you want another can of worms do a search concerning request to actually lower the cost of the American infantryman because of his inferior firepower. I now await Madmatt and his love of all things shiny and padlock.

VT artillery is deadly because of the shrapnel. Rarely does the actual explosion of an artillery shell kill anyone - the shrapnel that explosion hurls is another story though. If you watch an artillery barrage of non-VT in game you'll notice that basically all the shells hit the ground then explode. This is ineffecient because most of the shrapnel just goes right into the ground. VT artillery rounds almost always burst in the air though. This sends a greater volume of shrapnel over a greater area. Absolutely deadly. Usually any infantry not dead or wounded after a VT barrage are thouroughly broken and routed.

It has always boggled my mind to know that we could've gone into Europe with Pershings and instead went with Shermans. I know that Patton said he prefered the Sherman but I suspect that had something to do with either loyalty to the tank or to bolster morale. Besides that, Patton had some funny ideas in general.

If you look at the big picture you also can't overlook trains. Panthers and other big boys were able to get around a lot because of intelligent logistics. It all comes down to a question of doctrine. The argument that tanks have to get there and there have to be a lot of them to support infantry and fulfill a calvery role is the WWII era US opinion. You can read the memoirs of some Sherman tankers to find out how well that held up on the battlefeild. Getting to the battle is part of the fight, but the only part that really really matters is getting out of the fight alive.

That German tanks that got left to the side of the road because of mechanical failure or lack of fuel does not necessarily imply that they were flawed. It means that allied bombing campaigns designed to strangle the German war machine by denying it fuel and replacement parts were incredibly sucessful. I don't think anyone on this board would deny that the Allies owned the sky for virtually the entire war. I will grant that in general the German designs were a little too complex I would not say that this deficiency made them any worse as operational tools. I'd wager that even if the Germans had tanks as rough & ready as the Sherman we'd still have plenty of pictures of discarded German tanks. Mechanical things break, and if you don't have the parts to fix them then you're SOL. In defense of the Sherman though: It was an excellent anti-infantry tank. I'd take it over any german tank for purposes of infantry support any day. Some AA capability too. Never underestimate the .50 cal. [Edited because I'm too dense to make tenses agree today] [This message has been edited by Maj. Bosco (edited 12-12-2000).] [This message has been edited by Maj. Bosco (edited 12-12-2000).]

Just an aside, if you're playing the Germans and facing direct fire from VT artillery give up on those infantry and hope that your opponent uses all his arty on them. If any survive (which is unlikely) it's a plus.

Troops do hold fire. When you tell them to hide you are in effect telling them to hold fire. A specific hold fire command that was religously obeyed wouldn't make any sense. "Okay, they see us, they're shooting at us, and they're advancing on us. But remember, don't shoot back." I understand that it might be nice from your perspective as commander to be able to tell all your troops not to fire till they see the whites of the enemies eyes but that's something a Sergeant would say, not a captain or major or whatever rank you're supposed to be in CM. That's the argument from the realism angle. From the coding angle it would cause an issue with the AI. The AI already decides what is a threat and when it it best to fire. The better the troops, the better the decisions. The AI is there to prevent the kind of micro-management that would be "Hold fire until X meters".