Apocal

I sailed around on a boat for awhile. That was fun.
I went somehwere hot for awhile. That wasn't fun.

Currently on my 2nd year as an 11b Infantryman, US Army. 3BCT 101st Airborne

You have a Soviet rifle company and T-34-76 platoon. Enemy in defense have a grenadier platoon with attached HMG section (2 heavy MG-42). HMGs are entrenched, well placed to fire at 500m+. There are no passages for getting close such as forest or buildings, you have to attack through the open terrain.
 
What are your actions?
I would move T-34s forward, then infantry. T-34 would supress MG nests, infantry would get close and kill the rest of the enemy. IRL probably it would work. In the game... T-34s don't see anything. HMG fires 500m ahead - they don't see it. 300m too. I tried to make recon and send messengers to tank platoon leader, so tanks would have question marks for HMGs - it doesn't help, tanks don't spot targets.
Manualy target place, where HMGs are? It is a gamey, far from realism. Manualy target question marks?
Infantry also can't supress HMGs. DP-27 is as useless as BAR.
What you would do?

I am "allowed" to area fire.  But unless I have a hard contact previously and lost it, I generally don't.  It just isn't that effective.
If I had a full spot there a minute ago but it has gone away and I suspect that is just the men going heads down, area fire at the old spot is perfectly reasonable.  
It is also effective enough, often enough, that I will spend the ammo to do it, though generally only for a minute, not for extended periods.  Ammo is too useful to blow on a possibly dead target.
 
Recon by fire is something I only use when there is quite limited enemy side cover and I think I can deduce where they have to be.  Sometimes high ammo weapons like "target light" from a tank to use its MGs only, about it.
 
As for runners, no I don't "simulate" them.  The troops are hard enough to corral without such additional work.  Sometimes I still find I have to run HQ teams hither and yon to get spots or put forces in command etc.  Works.
 
As for the brittleness of infantry, if they go stationary and rally whenever shot at, and someone else moves off, they can absorb plenty of punishment in my experience.  It helps to have steppe terrain / high grass to hide in, and undulating ground and such, to be sure.  It works because the enemy will lose the spot and shift fire to still moving units.  Then the previously hit units get a few minutes of respite, to rally. The enemy rarely has enough firepower to kill a whole company at range.  To scare it sure, or to kill it close enough.  But by then spots happen and I can fire back.  As long as I spread around who is moving and don't push faster than the men rally = want to go, a couple of HMGs can't hold off a whole company of infantry in the long range envelope.
 
Good stealthy defenses can supplement a few HMGs with other weapons, though.  Mortars firing from defilade at units that go to ground; light FOs dropping artillery fire on any sizable group, snipers on top of the HMGs (even harder to see etc).  And if all of it is meant to draw the tanks forward to give ATGs side shots, sometimes tanks ahead won't solve the whole problem.  But just a couple of entrenched MGs vs a supported rifle company, no problem.  It is a standard drill one needs to learn, without needing to rely on great cover to get close.

And parfaits, have you ever met a person, you say "let's get some parfait", they say "hell no , I don't like no parfait?"

1.  Recuperator failure might or might not result in breech out of battery, but most tank crewman would not want to risk firing once they know their recoil system is jacked, especially war-shot ammo. 
2.  Both of the Abrams hit hard by 30mm are now expensive machinegun platforms.  Will look over the rest of the damage to see what else, and will post.
3.  Yes, driving through the woods was risky, and in retrospect, foolhardy.  I failed to anticipate how far forward Bil had pushed his INF.  However, based on where my reinforcements teleported in, I had little choice in the matter.  If I had an inkling, I could have led with dismounts, but it would have much slower and you guys would have roasted me for excess caution in any event. 
4.  Trophy's reset time is marginally slower than ARENA - on the order of 1.x seconds I think, maybe a bit less.  Biggest drawback is, Trophy only has 2 shots per side, but those shots have complete coverage.  If I understand ARENA properly, it has LOTS more segments (21?  23?) but once one of those segments is gone, it has a gap someone could (with luck) hit, say with consecutive rounds on the same azimuth.  I could be in error on this - will have to go back and see if the system does some sort of automatic rotation to cover gaps. 
 
Next post will be a day or two.  I owe next turn back to Bil.  I am exactly one behind on posts right now, and hope to stay nice and tight for the duration.  Next turn will feature gradual recovery from the ambush you witnessed, along with some nifty long range Abrams execution. 

Reminds me of Harpoon 3 and Command Mondern Air/Naval Operations, where you need pen, paper and calculator to figure out how many missiles you need to shoot at a ship to penetrate its defenses of CWIS-guns anti-missile-missiles. To score a hit on an AEGIS destroyer you need something like 40 missiles fired simultaniously, 39 get shot down and one hits the target (hopefully something important, like one of the radars). If you are firing on a formation of multiple AEGIS destroyers, the number of missiles you need increases dependent on the formation of the ships.

Preserve objectives in those cases were not intended to reflect punishment for war crimes, but rather that engaging enemy forces in these locations with a large amount of force (i.e. lots of HE) would award the enemy a propaganda victory.

I forgot how I solved that particular tactical problem. I do remember at one point dropping airburst HE and WP rounds in front of a protected building to suppress the defenders long enough that my Strykers' machine guns (no MK19s) could take over and allow a squad of infantry to get in the side door and finish the job up close. But I'm not sure that was the last mission, it has been years since I played it.

Bear in mind that the attack profiles the Ju-87G is capable of while carrying the 37mm cannons are not particularly steep, so it can't achieve very "flat" hits against the top armor of an AFV except in special circumstances such as when the AFV is on a steep incline.
 
When carrying the 37mm gun pods, the Ju-87G is actually not a dive bomber -- to improve performance and reduce weight, the dive brakes were removed when the 37mm gun pods were carried, and the weight of the gun pods also dramatically reduced the ability of the aircraft to pull out of a steep dive quickly -- each gun pod weighed nearly 300kg and unlike a Stuka on dive bomb run, and the Ju-87G had to drag this weight all the way through the pullout rather than jettisoning it just before the nadir.
 
So the typical Ju-87G attack profile was actually a shallow dive.  Penetrations of e.g., the T-34 16mm deck armor might still be statistically possible, but at these aspects the side and/or rear plates (assuming a flank or rear approach to the target) would make up a much larger percentage of the target cross-section and therefore hits to these plates and/or the tracks and running gear would be much more common than top hits.
 
However, at least if the pilot pressed this type of attack to close range, 37mm APCR from a Flak 18 probably could penetrate T-34 side or rear armor -- bear in mind that much of the effectiveness of the T-34's side armor especially comes from slope, and plunging fire from a 30-45 degree angle will negate much of this slope.
 
It's still not a matchup that's particularly favorable for the shooter.  In addition to being *really* hard to hit a small target like a T-34 with gunfire when moving at 300+ kph (and only getting a few seconds on target, and therefore only a few shots per run), the behind armor effect of 37mm APCR is not good.  So a significant proporation of the penetrations achieved are going to cause only minor damage.

Quick battle dosent make difrense to unit perform. Skill level , leader ship and placing on the map make difrenses how they perform.

Haha, well ok. I think womble said it best: your whole assumed modality for the system is pretty much hokum.

Uh... yes, if you send four bullets at one target and hit him, you save three bullets over the gun that uses seven to perform the same feat.

Once again, how is this wrong?

edit: if you want to see the advantage of a MG42, you probably want to see how they perform when the targets are fleeting...

So in other words, the downside of higher RoF is that you use more ammo per unit of time?

Is this supposed to be bad?