SgtMuhammed

Depends on the target. If you are anticipating a lot of soft targets (infantry, trucks, etc.) then the LMGs are more cost effective. The HMGs though will give you an increased ability to deal with light armor. Just ask yourself what you are defending against and what capabilities the rest of your force has.

I wish for whirled peas and huge pectoral muscles.

That is my only gripe about CM, too little "what if" ability. "What if" Patton had his way (Pershings vs IS-2s) or if the Russians had attacked into the Middle East against the Brits. While it may never have happened there are a lot of interesting turns that would be fun to game out.

A friend of mine was an M1 commander in the Gulf and he told me that the Iraqi darts looked like they had just melted a bunch of pots and pans and poured them into a mold. Really poor quality stuff. Another buddy told me that the DU sabot round (which they called Silver Bullets) were so much more powerful than the normal training rounds that they lifted the tank to the middle road wheels. Then again tankers do tend to exagerate.

There seems to be a general lack of legs, long or short here. If any of you wanabes want to prove your manhood send me a set up (2000 points or under, anything else is up to you).

Fewer destractions I guess. I do agree that spotting seems to be a little easy.

Firefly, I've liked the Hetzer ever since I commanded the 26th VGD during a game of Command Decision. I was going to send you a picture of the one at the Bastogne memorial but I don't know how to load pictures.

Don't you think it is more exciting though to enter a fight knowing that your opponent could do anything? There is nothing to prevent the attacker from sneaking up on the defender as long as you do it how it is really done by making use of terrain or weather or light. Sneaking a few infantry is doable but if you want to infiltrate an entire company or vehicles you had better be darn good. Just like in RL. One must also take into account the types of battles that CM normally simulates. These are battles on active fronts or during ongoing operations. It would be more unrealistic to expect to find troops totally unprepared than it would to find then at heightened alert levels. Plus it is possible to simulate the effects of long periods of over alertness by adjusting the fatigue levels.

The spin not only affects HEAT rounds but APFSDS (Sabot) rounds as well by hindering the ability of the penetrator to bite into the armor. This is the primary reason modern armies have gone nearly exclusivly to the smoothbore cannon for tanks. Some of the attempts to eliminate spin from rifled cannon were pretty neat like rotating rings around the shell. It was the discovery that AP shells with smaller bursting charges were better at piercing armor that propted most armies to go more with AP Shot. This was further fueled by the realization that if an AP slug actually entered the insides of an armored vehicle it really didn't make much difference if it exploded or not. On the other end of the spectum you have the HESH or squash head shell that was never designed to penetrate the armor. Rather it was designed to use its explosive energy to cause internal flaking and cause casualties that way. In a side note, it was the developement and proliferation of the HEAT warhead in everything from tank rounds to hand held rockets that led to the developement of the Chobham or composite armor that most Western MBTs now use. It is a never ending battle between offense and defense.

I agree with the philosophy that the best way to stop armor is to kill it by direct fire. Unless you get perfect terrain you can spend a lot of time on a mega minefield and never get any customers. Never count on obsticals to be impenetrable because you usually find out the hard way that they are not.

According to German Tanks of World War II the Jagdpanzer IV (Panzer IV/70)(Sdkfz 162/1) should have a forward hull mounted MG 34. I noticed that they didn't have them in a scenario I was playing.

Armies that practice active defenses do patrol day in and day out. There is not point in having the doctrine if you are only going to use it if you know an attack is coming. I was OPFOR here in Germany and when we fought the Germans they patroled constantly. Even U.S. units send out patrols when on the defensive (not as much as the Germans though. I swear sometimes they must have left their MLR empty so they could have guys running through the woods). The whole point of patroling is to warn of a coming attack and to prevent enemy recon from finding the MLR.

Good test. It actually works out realistly. Consider: The pilot has only a few seconds to identify the target, line up the shot, take the shot, and then leave. All the while he is looking for AA and enemy aircraft. It is not surprising that given a possible target (even one that we know is dead) in the open he would spend little time to try to find a concealed one. On the other hand, no targets in the open also means no threat (real or percieved) from those areas and so the pilot is able to concentrate on threats from the wooded areas. Kind of shows how deep this game is. [ January 01, 2003, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: Sgtgoody ]

The infantry basically have to be riding on the tank.

But then that would take away an option that real commanders have in real situations. It is always possible for the defender to counter attack but it is not always wise to do so. If you want to give up your good defensive positions and turn the fight into a meeting engagement with me enjoying numerical superiority (as the attacker usually does) then bring it on. Just because an option is availible doesn't mean it has to be used. Your suggestion would also limit people who like to conduct an active defense with lots of patrols and moving ambushes. Again presenting a set of restrictions that don't exist in RL.

They put that in because some games advance units experience in totally unrealistic ways. In some games I played it was possible to advance from regular to elite within the space of a couple of days of simulated time. This simply does not happen in real life. It takes time for a unit to establish the bonds and interactions needed to "level up" (for want of a better term). Even a unit composed of elite soldiers needs time to get to know itself and each other. The timeframe of even an operation just doesn't give enough time to do this. You can become hard during a fight but it takes time to sort things out to become good.

I don't know why everone is getting so worked up about bias. I am studying to be a historian and I can tell you for a fact that there has never been anything written that does not contain bias no matter how objective the author claims to be. Even combat reports of the battle themselves are slanted to make the unit look good (The phrase "The enemy launched an unforseen attack on our flank" often means that either security was not out or someone was asleep). The slant of such primary material is only made much worse when it is turned into secondary material by the various authors after the fact. Unless you can assume a god's eye view you will never know what "really" happened, all you can do is weigh the evidence and decide what you believe.

You have to look at the way the machine guns are aranged on the tanks you mentioned. All of them have hull mounted guns and coax guns while the Stuart has a commanders gun that can only be used while standing outside the turret. Gunners are more likely to use their main gun even if they are small just because they are HE (tankers love to use HE agains us grunts). The other guns have a limited field of fire and are fired by a guy looking through a vision block. This guy is also usually driving or working the radio as well. (I don't know how accuratly the AI models this but during a fight I was constantly telling my driver to move a few meters or less this way and that leaving him little time to do much else.) The fact that a tank may have half a dozen machine guns hanging on it doesn't mean that they are all easy to use. For comparison the M1 has 3 machine guns. The commander's M2 and two M249s mounted on the loader's hatch and coaxially. During combat the TC will only use the M2 in an emergency as he is busy fighting the tank. The loader is feeding the main gun and it takes an act of god to make the gunner flip from main to coax. So in RL you will rarely see crews firing a lot a machine gun rounds. Remember that tank crews are trained to rely on the power of the main gun and in the heat of battle you tend to fall back on how you have been trained. [ January 01, 2003, 11:14 AM: Message edited by: Sgtgoody ]

All I can say about the weather is, "El Nino."

I love the Pershing for its firepower and have always had a softspot for the Panther. I have to agree with an earlier post about the M5. I have had 1 or 2 of them eat a German recon company. As for arty nothing ends a game quicker than some big naval guns. I once had a company of infantry and a platoon of P4s spread over about 1000 meters completely wiped out by two volleys of naval arty.

Forget the Char, I want the Maus.

Happy New Year everyone. May your news be good and may all your tanks be King Tigers.

Actually big explosions may have been fairly common if Tigers were involved. The Tiger's 88 was so good a blowing the turret off that German soldiers quickly began the saying that "The T-34 tips its hat whenever it meets a Tiger." Even so most tank kills weren't massive pyrotechnic displays, unless you were in a Ronson, I mean a Tommy cooker, err.. a Sherman. There is a film of an Pershing taking out a Panther in Koln that shows a pretty typical view of a tank "brewing up." Flames shoot from the hatches but it is actually less spectacular than in CM. I don't know if it is publicly availible but there is a film of the new Javlin missile taking out a T-80. The missile was in pop up mode and comes in through the top of the turret. There wasn't much left of the tank when the smoke cleared. :eek: [ December 31, 2002, 08:42 PM: Message edited by: Sgtgoody ]

Maybe the Russians set a tiger trap for your AC.

The infantry number is a numeric value for the units hitting power. The higher the number the more death and destruction it can send your way. The rating will increase as range closes as more weapons are able to come into effective range(MGs then rifles then SMG then Pistols, grenades, fists, etc).