MOS was 71331
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Posts posted by MOS was 71331
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Blackhorse -- I thought those squad assaults were simply a reality check to see whether the game was reasonably simulating the effects of small arms fire.
After playing the US in Last Defense, I went through all my units to see how many casualties each had inflicted. My TDs had all the armor kills, the best one getting the Tiger, a STUG, and 2 half tracks (= 1 whole track?) As for my infantry units, the best result by far was achieved by a 1/2 squad I'd left in the flagged building next to the woods: 18 Kraut infantry casualties! Nobody else, MG or squad, had more than 3.
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Yeah, Steve. OK, you gave us a great demo. And then you surprised us with an extra scenario. The question is: what have you done for us lately????
Seriously, you've had my credit card number for about three months now. PLEASE CHARGE AGAINST IT AND SHIP ME THE GAME. I WANT IT NOW!!!
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Airborne Combat Engineer Troop Leader (1966-1968)
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In the movie "Attack," set during the Battle of the Bulge, after being run over by a Tiger, brave platoon leader Jack Palance somehow struggles back to the CP of cowardly company commander Eddie Albert, whose reluctance to engage the Krauts has resulted in the destruction of Palance's platoon. Palance intends to shoot Albert, but drops his 45 and collapses to the floor as he weakens from shock and blood loss. (Evidently being partially crushed by a Tiger does have SOME effect!) Palance crawls toward his dropped 45, but Albert giggles and kicks it a few feet further away everytime Palance gets near it. Another officer in the CP kills Albert with his carbine and says he's going to call the regiment HQ (where Lee Marvin is either the XO or the S3) to report what he has done. Everybody else in the CP then fires his weapon at Albert to convince the officer that he can't be sure he fired the fatal shot.
As I recall the story line, the regiment was a National Guard outfit with personnel mainly from one state. Eddie Albert's father was a judge, and many of the other officers in the regiment wanted the judge's political support.
Anyway, that's a long digression, but at least Hollywood believes enemy tanks can run over friendly troops.
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In a design-your-own situation with a budget to allocate for your side, field fortifications can have prices just as well as troop units. If you'd rather allocate purchase points to foxholes than to tanks, who am I to say you're wrong?
For the situation designer, I suppose it's a question of how long the defender has been in his (his/her for the PC crowd) positions. The longer the troops have been there, the better their prepared positions.
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I've only seen a TOT once, at an ARTY demo during ROTC summer camp in 1964. The target area was maybe 500 yards -- sorry, meters -- from the stands where I and my 2000 or so fellow cadets were sitting. As the TOT concept was explained, the batteries involved coordinated their firing times to ensure all the shells arrived at the target simultaneously -- or close enought to the same time for government work.
This sort of exercise was fairly simple for the artillery, but I doubt 81 mm or 4.2 in mortars, belonging to infantry or armored cav units, could join in. They wouldn't be on the ARTY commo nets in any case.
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I'm sorry CM probably won't be out until some time in the new year. My employer shuts down during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. I was hoping to spend the time in France and Belgium instead of Colorado Springs!
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It seems there's another factor which will affect facing: uncertainty about where all the opponents are. If I see one Sherman 600 m away, I can use a protractor and angle my Tiger at 37.5 degrees from it. But what if I'm not sure exactly where it is or whether the Sherman I see is being covered by an AT gun?
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Special for Scarhead -- I believe the author of the 08/15 books was Hans Helmut Kirst, and the series has been released in English using the name of the main character, Asche. The English titles are like
"Forward, Gunner Asche!".
One of Kirst's novels which was NOT part of the Asche series was "Night of the Generals." This one was made into a movie in 1966 or 1967, with a whole bunch of Brit actors taking the German parts: Peter O'Toole playing the villain, an SS Pz Div CO named Tanz; Donald Pleasence (Blofield (sp) in one of the James Bond flics) playing another German general, the COS to Tanz's Corps CO; Christopher Plummer playing Rommel; and Harry Andrews playing another senior German general -- either Rundstedt or the CO of the military government in France. The only non Brit actor in the film was Omar Shariff (I believe he's Egyptian) playing a German MP major trying to solve a string of serial murders of prostitutes, the murders occurring wherever Tanz, the corps CO, and the corps COS are assigned, first Warsaw and then Paris.
I didn't care much for the Asche series, but I can recommend both of Kirst's more serious WWII novels, "Night of the Generals" and "The Officer Factory."
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Hey, these are training exercises. I'm playing them repeatedly to become comfortable with your system for controlling "my" troops and vehicles. Perhaps the CM release will have a player training feature, but your two demo scenarios fit the bill.
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While I grant Fionn's point that actual troops wouldn't know that it will take them 22.7 seconds to reach a particular point, we want some mechanism enabling us to tell squad A and vehicle B to coordinate their arrival at that point. If squad and vehicle can see each other, they can adjust their movement to reach their rendezvous more or less simultaneously and at the same time. If I am a platoon leader, I can tell the men what I want them to do. As a CM gamer, I have to fumble with separate movement orders to squad and vehicle, only to see the vehicle wait while the squad has another twenty meters to go.
Actually, now that I think about it, why not have the squad wait where it is and move the vehicle to the squad's position? Let the men rest while the machine works.
In playing Last Defense, I've given movement orders to the Tiger and to the squads in front of the Tiger. For some reason, at least one of the squads appears to wait until it's run down, pushed to the side, and immobilized for the rest of the movement phase. Do I have to pause the Tiger to prevent this?
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Could your post please include a URL I can click on? I'd like to read these AARs!
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Can't a fire order also include an amount of ammo to expend? Once I target something, it seems the shooting continues for the whole turn even though the target was destroyed by the first or second shot.
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It took me a while to discover that you could cancel a unit's orders by selecting the unit and pressing 'DELETE'. This may be documented somewhere, but I didn't see it.
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I remember carrying an 81 mm mortar base plate in ROTC summer camp. Run with it? Hell, the damn thing weighed about 40 kilograms. I could barely lift it.
We also did bayonet training. I think a rifle plus bayonet weighed maybe four kilos. I moved at a good clip through a forty meter with five dummies course, the first time. Two more passes through the course, and I felt I was about to have a heart attack! Of course, screaming "KILL" every time I struck home took some effort as well.
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Before the day became "Veterans' Day," it was "Armistice Day," celebrating the end of WWI on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.
Remember the words of the Tom Lehrer song: "Heil -- Hail -- the Wehrmacht, I mean the Bundeswehr. Hail to our noble allies. MLF will scare Brezhnef. I hope he's only half as scared as I."
Lehrer also said, "We taught them a lesson in 1918, and they've hardly bothered us since."
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I'd like to put someone in that church steeple in Last Defense. The highest any of my men can reach is the upper floor.
As the German CO, I have had one of my Stugs shell it.
[This message has been edited by MOS was 71331 (edited 11-10-99).]
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What's going on? The screen says there are nine posts on a topic, yet when I go to read through them only three posts are there. I find myself all too often revisiting a topic to see what new has been added only to find it hasn't changed since I was last there. Should we "refresh" when we're in a topic to get the latest material?
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In my experimenting with Last Defense, I've tried to move half tracks through the trees. No matter what route I plot, as soon as a track gets near a tree icon, its driver seems to lose any semblance of intelligence and just moves the track backwards and forwards in short spurts for maybe fifteen seconds and then stops completely. Can any vehicles move through the trees, or is that terrain impassible for them?
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I guess I don't see the problem. I don't care whether I'm playing Fionn or somebody else claiming to be Fionn. I just want a game with an opponent who plays well and has a few surprises up his sleeve.
Even if we're in a tournament, what difference does it make what name is used by the best player? However, if somebody's able to patch the program to improve his men's shooting and the effectiveness of their ammo, that's cheating that would upset me.
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While I expect many Squad Leader games will convert nicely into good CM games, there are a few OCMH [Office of the Chief of Military History] books that cover small unit actions.
"Small Unit Actions in Korea" has perhaps twenty articles giving good detail on at least the US TO&Es for the situations. The commies, though, usually are organized as "three swarms make a horde, four hordes make an inexhaustible reservoir of men."
My favorite is "An Artillery Batallion in a Perimeter Defense" in which the HQ battery and one 155 battery defend their position against a few companies of Chicoms while they continue performing called fire missions.
"Small Unit Actions of the German Campaign in Russia" has a similar set of interesting battles. There was one in which a single Russian KV2 heavy tank with no infantry support got astride a German division's main supply route, and it took the Krauts a few hours to deal with it. One soldier was able to place a demo charge which immobilized the tank, and a few hours later an 88 was towed in to destroy it.
Anyway, if you're after real actions to game, there is material out there.
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I don't think "The Bridge" is a true story. If it's the movie about ten or so teenage German boys from a small town in the spring of 1945 drafted and minimally trained together and ordered to hold a bridge against the oncoming Americans, "The Bridge" is based on a German novel of the same name. I read the novel in the late 50s or early 60s and saw the movie a few years later. While there were probably many similar events in March and April of 1945, this story is fiction.
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Which one was low on ammo -- the American one or the German one.
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As I recall the procedures from my training in 1966, the FO first has to give his position accurately, then his compass direction to the target, then the distance from his position to the target. Corrections as the rounds come in are in meters left or right to get the rounds on the line from his position to the target, and then meters up (further away from the FO) or down (closer to the FO). All of the gun adjustments can be done in a few seconds, so the delays between adjustments are mostly time of flight between battery and target. The arrival time of the first round, though, depends on what the guns are doing when the fire mission arrives. They may be shooting at a more important target somewhere else.
I do remember an army cartoon about commo security. In the first panel, some radio operator is saying "there's some artillery fire coming down about two hundred yards to my left." In the second panel, there's an artillery battery and the caption "right two hundred; fire for effect." It couldn't work hat way, but the cartoon still cracks me up.
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Wasn't there a National Enquirer article a few years ago about individuals spontaneously exploding? Perhaps one of the CM designers remembered the article and decided to incorporate the concept into the game! Wow, this is cutting edge stuff!
HMG and Small Arms Lethality
in Combat Mission Archive #1 (1999)
Posted
Blackhorse -- I thought those squad assaults were simply a reality check to see whether the game was reasonably simulating the effects of small arms fire.
After playing the US in Last Defense, I went through all my units to see how many casualties each had inflicted. My TDs had all the armor kills, the best one getting the Tiger, a STUG, and 2 half tracks (= 1 whole track?) As for my infantry units, the best result by far was achieved by a 1/2 squad I'd left in the flagged building next to the woods: 18 Kraut infantry casualties! Nobody else, MG or squad, had more than 3.