Glider

I will try it out... any takers? My turn rate will be quite bad, a turn every two days or so, RL issues are taking their toll.

They can be used in specific situations like these... you target them from 150m-200m away at single squads you need suppressed until your inf can roll over them. They will not kill, they will not panic the enemy but they will keep them suppressed for the critical 60 seconds. A single 81mm mortar will not do much better against a single-squad target we have here, and an 81mm is more expensive than a 50mm.

Actually no, not if the enemy has only off-board artillery. I am not sure what can be done against such a defensive position... except I am sure it is not advancing assault guns because that will only lose you 100s of additional points. Hmmm... I'd want either a 2:1 or 3:1 infantry advantage (with SMG squads, too) AND organic 50mm-60mm mortars deployed at short ranges AND several 81mm-82mm mortars also not too far away (for accuracy against point targets). Or well-protected 150mm-152mm SP&assault guns as support. They can do things even to infantry that is behind 30-40 metres of trees. Even that way it would take a lot of time and more casualties. Thank god my opponents don't play like this

It was almost certainly the 11th Pz Division in Yugoslavia, attacking Nis. That 22nd seems to have been an ill-fated division. The story about mice damaging electrical cables insulation is well-known, I guess it must have really happened.

Here is what I managed to find searching the net: Panzers on the Eastern Front Summer 1942 From Panzer Truppen Volume 1 by Thomas Jentz pages 236-239 By Steve "The Mad Russian" Overton http://www.the-proving-grounds.com/research_results.html?sku=117 22nd Panzer Division (1 July 1942) 28 Pz II 114 Pz 38(t) 12 Pz III Long (50L60) 11 Pz IV Short (75L24)

In my opinion, its madness to advance an assault gun, let alone a Hetzer, closer than 150m from enemy infantry. At shorter ranges they are always buttoned, can hardly acquire moving infantry, take enormous time to rotate so they can engage enemy infantry coming from the sides. Besides, when you check your kills at the end of a game, even successful tanks rarely show more than 10-20 inf casualties caused. Is that worth risking them, bringing them closer so you can increase that number by perhaps 20%? Carl Puppchen, that game style sounds very interesting, have you tried using the heavy 28mm AT rifle against his T-34s? It sounds like an early war game and those "rifles" can kill a T-34 at some 500 metres and remain unspotted down to a few hundred even when firing.

I find infantry to be so effective that I mostly spend the inf points to the limit (if there is at least some kind of tree/hills cover) and then spend the remainder on artillery/tanks. My preferred selection would be something like an inf battalion, 2 crack 81/82mm mortars, 8 regular 81/82mm mortars, 1 crack sniper and then I would try to buy a couple of decent AT-capable tanks.

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IIRC, the old German Armbrust needed just 60 cm (2') clear area. Not that we will see it in this game. Most of various RPGs are much more "hosue-sensitive".

Now, I am going off-topic here, but I participated in these events so bear with me for a several sentences The decision to pull back from Kosovo was a political one, i.e. at that time there was not a single military reason why the army positions there would be considered untenable. The obvious determination of the NATO pact to use ground forces, the destruction of the civilian infrastructure in the Serbia proper and the failure to obtain any kind of significant diplomatic support caused the government to cave in. As far as the troops are concerned, the regime was not popular but NATO was far less so. At the time of withdrawals the losses among ground forces were light and the morale was quite high. They would have fought (and lost), no question about that. Another thing, as a signaller who served with the General Staff I helped with computer graphics for some pre-war evaluations of the expected NATO performance. I couldn't help read some of them, though . And I can tell you that the General Staff signals&communication department severely overestimated the effect of NATO/US attacks on our strategic communication network. [ October 12, 2005, 01:21 AM: Message edited by: Glider ]

Yugoslav Army 1999, serving one year of compulsory national service, trained as signaller. Commanded a small mobile radio-relay post (one truck, four men) during NATO air attacks in 1999.

Didn't the Poles actually participate in the partitioning of Czechoslovakia? Didn't they seize one part for themselves? Talk about diggining your own grave...

If those problems were anything like the problems the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had when facing the Germans in April 1941, they must have been very bad indeed. In Yugoslavia the army practically fell apart along the ethnic division lines, with units firing at each other in some parts of the country, units composed of Croats overrunning the 4th Army headquarters, everybody suspecting everybody else... Of course, I don't think it was nearly as bad in Poland... I am talking about a country that had far more serious ethnic problems and was facing the Germans after they overran most of the Western and Central Europe. But if Poland has similar problems even to a much lesser degree, they could have curtailed its fighting capability.

I might We enjoy our fun where we can find it, we ordinary men

Nah, that lousy excuse for a weapon would never be able to wound our resident superman here. The bullets would just bounce off, you see.