MikeyD

Bren and BAR do have their modern equivalents, more-or-less, in the proliferation of big bullet 7.62 sharpshooter rifles like M110. You want something that can reach out to targets beyond your infantry carbine's reach. Are they better than M249 and M240 mgs? Well, they're different than them. They're certainly less cumbersome while maneuvering and they're less conspicuous to anyone who may be looking for something to mortar. Modern conflicts are now circling back to WWII-style warfighting where sustained fire for area denial is a desirable option again.

Here's a fun exercise. Check your real world area in Google Earth and measure out how far 900m really is. Then go to Street View to check what you can actually see from that spot. For the example I randomly picked the German town of Linnich. I tried this for downtown Boston awhile ago and much beyond 180m you lose your 'target' in all the clutter. In-game if you've got lots of experienced eyeballs all in the chain of command things are going to get spotted pretty quick. If you've got individuals out of the command loop things will take more time. Oh, and I just checked. That 'Erosclub' in the lower right corner of the overhead is indeed a strip joint.

This may be of no use, but my last install I ran into an oddity. The install wasn't happening so I had to right-click the exe and 'run as administrator', then everything worked as advertised. As a Beta tester I install CM stuff all the time with no problem, but that day Windows just decided to mess with me.

A metaphor: CMx1 is your first high school girlfriend. We eventually grow up, date other women, become jaded and cynical over time. But the memory of that first girlfriend remains untarnished. Of course if you were to look back dispassionately you'd see she was just a gangly 16 year old not much different from any of the other girls in town. Just because she was special to you doesn't mean she's some paragon to compare all subsequent relationships against. A reminder, this was a CM game engine metaphor.

To bring up that much-overused phrase, war is politics by other means. Russia 'wins' this war only if you define the word 'win' to fit parameters favorable to Russia. Russia 'loses' if you define the word 'lose' in ways that are unfavorable. Did Russia overthrow the Kiev government and divide Ukraine and Romania into multiple Russian provinces? No, they did not. Did they make Ukraine a client state? No. Did they seal off Ukraine from the Black Sea? No. Did they neuter NATO? Nope. Did they spend much blood and treasure trying to straighten out their front line north of long-held city of Donetsk? Yes, they did that.

I don't know the specifics here but summer uniforms are disabled in winter/spring seasons. You might be able to see 'em if you go back to Oct.44 but I haven't looked.

In CMSF2 Bradley comes in two flavors, either with or without reactive armor. I just checked Wilcox. No era armor package. So you're basically naked.

Some console games cost as much as franchise superhero movies to produce. If you want BFC to spend $ 100 million developing their next game you probably wouldn't like the price tag at the end.

I'm from Maine. The greatest complement I received was when a historical journal publisher I used to correspond with told me that he mistook me for a Canadian.

T34 suffered from over-active propellant in the rounds. A burning tank would go off like a bomb. Russian tankers appreciated how Sherman rounds would just burn and pop in a burning tank compared to BOOM!!! from T34s. It rarely gets mentioned that PzIV was a notorious burner. Gas tank directly under the turret basket.

When the Army introduced the M18 'Hellcat' TD to the Italian theater the crews rebelled. M18 was just too porous to mg fire for their liking. I believe some units switched back to their old M10s until war's end. M10 had a slightly better reputation for shrugging off hits, plus it used Diesel fuel which greatly reduced the risk of fire.

For decades the armor standard for most-everything not a tank was proof against 7.62 caliber. By that standard M22 does as well as everything else. The problem comes from labeling it a 'tank'. When you call it a tank people will try to use it as a tank. Currently the army keeps repeating that the new M10 Booker is not a tank, its an MPF combat vehicle. They have a horror of people thinking of it as a tank.

The US delivered 31 M1A1SA Abrams tanks to Ukraine back last October. Reports claim the DU armor was removed and replaced with Tungsten before shipping. The optics are a generation behind current US standards. Abrams are said to be finnicky beasts and you have to constantly keep ahead of the engine air filters or you'll kill the engine. I would say those converted M84s would be 'workhorse' tanks for Ukraine while Abrams are 'racehorse' tanks. You wouldn't want to try running a race on a workhorse, but by the same token you wouldn't want to try plowing a field with a racehorse.

Building clearing of this sort sounds like 'anti-terrorist' operations where you're theoretically only operating against a few isolated belligerents at a time on friendly ground. For a full-up war I expect you'd want to simply knock the building down. In the siege of the Japanese embassy in Peru in 1996 they did the opposite, tunneled under the building, blasted their way up into the ground floor and... didn't take prisoners.

Why did I do a weird little scenario like 'Das Hochwasser'? While researching likely battle locations I came upon the picture below. Operation Grenade, the US crossing the Roer river. Conditions looked so miserable that I wanted to try a scenario to match. You know those famous WWII Bulge battle photos of tanks covered in heavy snow? That snow happened after the battle in January. Photos were taken once combat photographers dared to return to the field. What came after the snow? Torrential rain that melted all the snow cover, flooded the countryside and made forward progress... uh... difficult. To add to the misery the Germans also sabotaged two Roer dams upstream. So, I concluded, this title needs an engagement on flooded ground.

I'm frankly surprised Sherman V is in the game. I thought the consensus was Sherman Vs would have all been stripped out of units by this timeframe and returned to depot for conversion to VC Fireflies.

We hit the CM paradox of 'reality vs playability'. CM has all the tools to do a real world assault but players want balanced gameplay. Therein lies the paradox. If you're conducting an assault into the teeth of equal forces you're already doing it wrong. An evenly balanced battle negates the impact of localized overwhelming firepower. Back in CM:Afghanistan days I used to joke the role of Russian infantry is to march forward over the charred corpses of their enemies. Anything less than that and your Russian infantry platoon will get bogged down and chewed up.

Vehicle tactical spacing is a do-it-yourself affair. With the exception of CMSF desert or CMRT steppe you can't really pull off training manual formations without quickly running into one obstruction or another. I recall European LOS doesn't often exceed 1200m and is more often much shorter. So your flying wedge formation gets about 2 minutes of driving time before you hit the next village or tree line.

I assume you downloaded the installer then went through the installation process. When I did that the installer refused to install the module til I did the 'Run As Administrator' thing. For me the problem started with the installer, selecting 'Run As Administrator worked. I should mention I was the only person on the team with this issue. Everyone else had no problem. If you purchased through Steam you may need others to help you.

I had a similar problem on my PC. So I right-click selected the installer and clicked on 'Run As Administrator'. Then everything worked just fine. I haven't had to do that to get an exe to work in a long time.

I'm no uniform guy (though my boss believes otherwise ). For unused German (and other) uniforms in the BRZs my guess might be that summer uniforms don't get much use in a fall-winter-spring title. I do have a vague recollection of a discussion on this topic back in CMRT module day of Steve nixing the plan for German M44 uniform because it wasn't battle dress. Again, not a uniform guy working off unreliable distant memory.

My Volksturm (may 1945, look military) looks okay, though everyone is wearing helmets besides the company and battalion HQ. When I switch to 'standard' appearance there are lots more hats but they're all mapping properly.

I haven't tested this for a long time but when you're in your scenario you might want to check wind direction and speed (in the 'conditions' screen) before plotting your fire mission. Is the wind effect consistent enough on artillery to be able to adjust to compensate for it? I can't really remember, its been a VERY long time since looked at it.

By the end of the war tank riding on American tanks was becoming more common. This was when advancing forces were covering dozens of miles at a time being met mostly by surrender flags. Different circumstances than the Normandy hedgerows 9 months earlier. So not appropriate for that title, appropriate for this one.

My last post got me curious how many tank riders can fit on a Churchill. The answer was a lot.