M4a3e8

Could be. But that still doesn't explain the significantly greater lethality of the RPG as compared to the various panzerfausts in the game.

Nope. CM:BB clearly indicated whether the AT team was equipped with Molotovs, RPGs or Panzerfausts. In the real world the Soviets captured hundreds of thousands of them and in 1945 were issuing them as a standard munition, far more effective than anything they were then manufacturing for themselves..

It's the right game. For about four years I played nothing other than Civilization V and Combat Mission. It took me twenty years after "Tactics II" to learn to say 'hexes' instead of 'squares'. I doubt I will live long enough to change back again.

Perhaps it was not supposed to be, but something carried by the Soviet infantry antitank teams marked RPG routinely killed German tanks with frontal shots from two hexes distance. My comparative tests showed it deadlier than the best Panzerfaust. I stopped playing CMBB when multiple opponents began selecting forces with no infantry but antitank teams, sometimes with no vehicles at all.

Barbarossa to Berlin equipped Soviet antitank teams with an unspecified "RPG", starting in 1942. Unfortunately, the weapon seemed to be the RPG-2 or even the RPG-7, deadly at several hexes range and neither of which were actually issued to troops in the real world until after the war. The weapons they should have had were the RPG-40 and RPG-43 hand grenades, weapons that German training films dealt with by saying, "don't worry about them". Less provably, Molotov cocktails seemed a little ineffective but at the same time excessively portable, too easy to deliver but unlikely to do damage when a hit was achieved. All the propaganda pictures of Soviet militia charging forward with canvas bags full of glass bottles of gasoline do not mesh with the accounts I have personally heard from Hungarians who actually attacked tanks with improvised fire bombs in 1956. Molotov cocktails should have equipped only units that started the game entrenched and did not move.

Don't see that I said anything that could be taken as endorsement of the myth. But the "overwhelming American artillery" manifested itself far more often than, say, Tiger tanks. Do I correctly recall that there was no encounter in France between American armor and Tigers until the Ardennes offensive? Nevertheless, it sounds as if CMx2 is worth a try. At some point soon I will also have to discover whether the Soviets in CM:RT are still equipped with ruchnoy protivotankoviy granatomyot instead of ruchnaya protivotankovaya granata, but right now the budget only allows me one game

I loved the system, but CM one drove me nuts because of several equipment/OB errors. I always wanted to play the Americans, but they were so severely crippled that it became too frustrating and sad to play after both of my like-minded frequent opponents, who would cooperate making adjustments, died in the real world. I am now contemplating purchase of the new game. What I want to know is whether any of the following have been corrected in the current iteration: 1) In western front CM, American artillery larger than mortars cost as much as the German. The Allies had four times as many gun tubes as the Germans, each Allied tube had four times as much ammunition and the flexible control system gave units access to the support of more batteries than German units had, but all this was represented by penalizing the Americans. They received no discount for huge availability of artillery. The U.S. units of fire were twice as large as the German, costing so much that it was generally not possible to buy them. The cost was maximized by the lack of an option for telephone spotting in any weapons larger than mortars. 2) American 81mm M1 mortar drove me particularly wild. The British "3-inch" mortar was actually of 81.2mm caliber, and after the Normandy landings a majority of the shells fired by them had originally been manufactured for the U.S. weapon, but apparently the game designers decided that Britain got all the heavy shells. 3) The Germans had their 81mm mortar upgraded. Because of transport problems in foot infantry units a cut-down version had been put into production. By 1944 the original 8cm Granatwerfer 34 had been reserved for regimental artillery units, while companies and battalions were equipped with the Kurzer 8cm Granatwerfer 42, which fired the same ammunition as the old weapon to about half the range. On anything but a small map that would be significant. 4) In CM Afrika Korps, all the German top end vehicles were generally available. Fair enough; the gaming community is overrun with fanboys who won't buy a tactical game that won't allow them to use Tigers, though the availability penalty should have been higher. Historically many of these types only came to northern training areas furthest from Allied air bases. There was a six month period during which there was a single company of Tiger I's in the country, eight vehicles, which never got into action. They did, however, lose three of them in a single cataclysmic road accident. QBs set in that period gave a 20% availability penalty to Tiger I. Do these problems still exist?