Freyberg

Shoot from further away...

I think the topic of the morality of war is one I could only discuss with someone reasonably conversant with military history, face to face, while drunk...

I love playing the Soviets - and that's how I play them. Having said that, 'swarming' to me is very difference from the earlier human wave assault. I think of it more like WWI Stormtrooper tactics - pushing forward relentlessly, en masse, to get up close, but through the weak points and the gaps, where possible, or overwhelming more isolated strongpoints to make a gap. It's fun, it's aggressive, it's sometimes costly - it's not dissimilar from Blitzkrieg.

I get your point, but I wasn't trying to participate in a moral debate - I just meant to suggest that 'nuking the whole place from orbit' (so to speak) was in fact a part of British urban warfare doctrine.

"Then they came to me and they said, 'Do you want the town of Cleves taken out?' " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleve#History

The other thing with the British is that their style of war was 'slow and careful and don't get too many men killed'. The standard infantry company is not really intended for aggressive close assault. Having said that, they have some very varied formations with different capabilities, some of them quite useful in urban settings - every scout section of 9 men has 3 Bren guns and 3 Thompsons; every MG Company section of 9 men has 3 Thompsons; and the Airborne sections have so many SMGs it's actually annoying.

You're right that the British infantry squad is not designed for urban warfare - their bolt action rifles are OK at a distance, but they are at a distinct disadvantage in many settings. All the Commonwealth nations have HMG companies or similar - which are a must to support the infantry, whatever the setting. In the late war, the Brits have Crocodiles and Wasps, which a deliciously useful in urban combat. The Canadians have one of the best urban warfare vehicles - the little Fox armoured car, which has a .50 cal MG in a closed turret, which counters the main problem all other .50 cal armed vehicles have - the vulnerability of the gunner.

Well, I'm impressed.

Cold War sounds really great, but RT was my number one game for so long. I love playing the glorious Soviets - this module will breath fresh life into it bigly.

You're not playing Rome to Victory....??!! (rolls eyes vigorously)

I always assumed flamethrowers would cause friendly fire - they should. The rule against friendly fire with small arms is because the player lacks the fine control you would have in real life not to shoot your own men with a handheld firearm. For that reason, casualties to ricochets also make sense. But a flamethrower is an imprecise, indiscriminate weapon, if you don't order your men to stand back when it's being fired, you should be court-martialed...

That looks like Accelerated Assault - good Soviet doctrine

I once saw an M113 trundling down the Eastern Freeway in Melbourne, and I remarked to my then wife, "check it out - there's a tank on the road."

In CMFI, which is still the title I'm playing all the time at the moment, HQ units without radios can call in artillery. I never bother to use them though, so I can't tell you how long it will take. I have found spotting duration and strike accuracy vary significantly between FOs and other HQ units, although that is not fully reflected in the initial call time.

I'd be interested in how long the spotting phase takes.

There's always runners and so on - a fire mission in these circumstances is going to take a while...

There were some very militant communists in Germany and Europe in the 1970s - a module including European Communist insurgents would be seriously quite interesting.

Yeah, I don't imagine France will be a module, but as a Francophile, I would love to see it

CMBB (and the other v.1 titles) had a lot more models and were great games for the time, but the models, game mechanics and TOEs were much much simpler - I prefer the current game by far. It would still be possible to set up a similar scenario with some of the field guns the game does model - like the German infantry guns...

I've found Archers a bit fiddly to use in-game, but they're certainly not an inferior AFV. Anything with a 17pdr is best used with maximum stealth, since nearly every Allied vehicle is vulnerable to any German tank from PzIV upward; and since 17pdrs are usually hunting Tigers or Panthers, the trick is to be just outside the edge of LOS, stationary, waiting for a glimpse, which hopefully is enough for a single kill-shot. Archers can do this as well as Fireflies and Achilles, they're just take a little more practice, with the whole reversing thing...

There was a fun scenario in CMBB based on the idea of Soviet tanks attacking a battery of howitzers.

OK - well that's about as clear as you can get

This reminds me of a discussion a while back on the merits of We-too vs RT play, and (sorry I didn't look it up), I think it was you MikeyD who pointed out there are two different ways of playing Combat Mission, which can sort of be exaggerated to 'chess with tanks', and 're-living the gritty horror'. Of course most of us are somewhere between, and I understand that the designers of this particular title may lean toward the 'chess with tanks' part of the spectrum and would prefer the title lean that way also, but there are a lot of players (myself included) who lean somewhat towards the 'living the horror' side. I didn't experience WWII, but older relatives did, and I want both to understand the large scale historical, technological, tactical and other factors, and also to gain a feeling for things like the chaos of house-to-house fighting, storming fortified positions through mud and pouring rain, and so on. Combat Mission for me is both fun and deeply educational. I was a child in period CMCW; I don't have military experience of that period - but it was nevertheless a frightening reality. It's educational (and fun) to test the capabilities of each side's various pawns, queens and rooks; but it's also meaningful and educational (and, dammit, it would exciting and fun), if the game were to allow players to understand the horror that might have been. Forget reason and strategy; no plan survives contact; nuclear or chemical warfare could very easily have happened. This customer politely requests BF consider incorporating some aspect of that

It would be fun to have semi-post-apocalyptic landscape option - defoliated trees, heavy overcast and so on - just for the really adolescent players like me

As sandboxes go, I would actually really enjoy this period. I would like to see it include the Wehrmacht though - I'm not terribly interested in silly things like the Maus, but the Germans had some interesting and more sensible designs on the drawing board at that time too. It would be fascinating to see things like the T44, early Centurion, E-series panzers and so on - but I'd buy any game Battlefront might make...