tss

Juardis wrote: The way it works now is the platoon leader is in contact with you, the battlefield commander, via the radio and his little cyber dudes via earshot, hand signals, predetermined orders, etc.. Your propolsal would take out all fun from playing Germans, or pretty much from every army except the U.S. army. This is because German infantry had very few radios. I would wager that by 1944 only infantry batallion HQs (and most artillery FOs) had radios. Company and platoon leaders would have to manage without. So, for the German player would give his orders on turn one and then hit GO for 30 turns. The CMs radio symbol is a convenient abstraction and it doesn't imply that all platoons have radios. However, some sort of limited command could be interesting but it would be pretty difficult to implement properly. I don't know very much on practices of other armies so I'll use the Finnish army here as an example. The basic command unit in battle was a usually a platoon. Before an attack the regimental commander would give the objectives to batallion commanders. He would also allocate artillery and mortar FOs to different batallions. The batallion commander then decided the order of the battle for the companies. After that each company commander would make a pretty detailed plan, usually working with the platoon leaders. However, the actual execution of the plan would, in practice, be left to platoon leaders. They were expected to react to threats independently and using their own initiative. This organisation would lead to a CM behavior where a unit can be controlled when it is near its platoon leader. However, this is not satisfactory. Especially in forest battles it was very common to split a platoon in half (in some cases even the standard procedure): one half (usually with the platoon leader) would form a fire base that kept contact with the enemy while the other half (led by the assistant leader) flanked the defenders. I think that this tactic would be practically impossible to use if the player lost the control of the flanking unit. It would be very difficult to program the AI so that it would recognize the intent of the player and perform a ruthless attack against the flank. - Tommi

Kanonier Reichmann wrote: was it just a fallacy that the Soviets had 76mm AT weapons & 82mm Mortars so they could utilise captured German shells, or was it simply a coincidence thet some of their major weapons were 1mm larger in diameter than their enemies. Russian guns were traditionally measured with "pound" system (as were British guns). The basic field gun size was 12 pounder with 87 mm calibere. The other pound-based calibere was 24 pounder (107 mm). Additionally they also had several 6 inch (152mm) guns that were 20 to 60 pounders. In 1900 Russians started to design a new gun family that would be measured using the size of the barrel. The first gun to be designed was the 3" gun (76.2 mm). It was updated 2 years later to resemble more the famous French 75 mm gun. So, the 76.2 mm calibere comes from inch-based measurement system. (That gun, "76mm pushka obr. 1902" formed the backbone of the Red Army in 1941. Incidently, it was also the main gun type of the Finnish army where it was called 76K02). Similarily, Russian 152 mm guns were almost exactly 6 inches. I don't know why they decided to use 122 mm guns (4.8 inch) instead of 127 mm guns (exactly 5 inches). I'm not certain why Soviets decided to use 82 mm as their mortar calibere. - Tommi

Jadayne wrote: Whereas I'm having a bit of trouble as allies. To tell the truth, I got much better side of the map in our game: A nice hill to put all my vehicles on with good LOS and a covered approach for infantry. For my other two games, both were major victories for the Allies. Too bad I was German in one of those. In case you wonder where the next turn is, I once again saved it in a defective floppy this morning. - Tommi

Olle Petersson wrote: I've seen several postings in several threads asking for the M16 to be included in CM... A sergeant to a soldier: "Hey, put on your M1, grab your M1, and drive to HQ with that M1 to get a M1". That's why I remember German and Soviet stuff much better than US stuff. - Tommi

Compassion wrote: It has been having problems not inheriting the right permissions (using the uploaders perms rather than the guest rx perms on the root) and I'm leaving town in a few minuites. That seems to have happened. I just went to the directory and all files had 000 permissions. - Tommi

jshandorf wrote: It was that in some cases rear guard troops sometimes have to pick up guns and fight. That's all. Therefore to do it in a game occasionally when your desperate to capture a certin VL it may not be considered gamey. However rear area troops were usually used only to strenghten the line in face of possible enemy breakthrough. I can list many cases where those troops were thrown to delay enemy's advance (in fact, my great uncle died in exactly that kind of situation on 13.2.1940 near Summa. He was a sapper whose company was sent in to plug the enemy breakthrough. They failed) but I can't recall any cases where those troops were used in offensive actions. - Tommi

Croda wrote: I hate to be an ugly American, but is this movie in English, or will the DVD version be subtitled? Probably subtitled. The new Finnish war movie "Rukajärven tie" or "Ambush" as its international version is called was released as a DVD a couple of months ago and it had subtitles. Note that Ambush is also worth seeing but it is not as good as Winter War. In particular, I was disappointed on the amount that they hollywoodized the story and it has one pretty large hole in the plot. The movie is also based on real events, but the director decided that reality was not enough and threw in lots of additional stuff. In the end only four or five scenes in the whole movie are real occurences. However, I have to admit that the director managed to create one of the most powerful war movie characters of all times. The laconic psychopath Jussi Lukkari surely leaves a lasting impression. For those who can read Finnish, Antti Tuuri's "Elämä isänmaalle" tells the real story and it is also mentioned in "Raappanan miehet" or its companion book whose name escapes my memory now. - Tommi

We see them leaving their farms on mobilization, to assembly at the border, and follow them into battle until the armistice some 110 days later. Just nitpicking on that review. The war lasted for 105 days. The movie is based on real events and battles but it is not documentary. The unit that they follow in the movie is one company of JR23 (Infantry Regiment) that fought at Taipale and Vuosalmi. The main battles that are depicted in the movie are: - The diversionary attack to Terenttilä village on Christmas '39. (The main body attacked over Lake Suvanto and got mauled pretty badly). - Attack on Linnakangas sector (closest to Lake Ladoga) on mid-January 1940 (I can't remember the actual dates right now). (The "bunker fight") - The battles of Vuosalmi-Äyräpää in early March 1940. My grandfather spent his whole Winter War in Taipale but he was in Kirvesmäki sector that was to West of Terenttilä sector. He was in a sapper company whose job was to go to front lines each night to clear trenches after the enemy had destroyed them with artillery during the day. A couple of weeks ago I went to read the war diary of his unit and it contained one pretty grim entry: <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR> (14.2.) ... few squads of III platoon were ordered to clean trenches in Stronghold V. The trenches were full of dead russkies after a counterattack. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Another source ("Posliinipojan talvisota") asserts that after the nightly counterattack 95 dead Red Army soldiers were counted in the trenches of stronghold V. Finnish losses were a few lightly wounded men. Though, Soviets captured the stronghold again the next day, this time for good. If you want to know where the battles took place but your maps don't mention those places, you can find them by first locating the Lake Ladoga to the North of Leningrad. Then look for a river that flows to the lake from West. The mouth of the river is almost directly to the North of the city. The river ends in a hook flowing first to South and then again to North. The front line went through this hook. The Linnakangas sector was at the mouth of the River and Terenttilä was few kilometers from the mouth. - Tommi

Two of my games are over though I haven't had a chance to look at the final PBEM file from Gaffertape to see exactly how badly I lost. (I brewed 2/3 of my vehicle force by turn three and the final StuG didn't get a shot out when I finally moved it out from cover and all my Panzerschreck gunners turned pacifists, either refusing to fire at all or deliberately warning the opponent by opening fire from 150 meters. After that I just sat and looked his tanks pound my infantry for rest of the game). My game with Jadayne had a pretty slow start because of some communication problems but it is now advancing fast with lots of buildings falling on infantry. - Tommi

Bobbaro wrote: A most intriging discussion; don't see old K. Godel mentioned that often. Then you move in different circles than me... Old K.G rigorously proved that every symbolic system contains a contridiction, if I am putting it rightly, hopefully at least approximately. Quite close. He proved that we have to make a choice with all sufficiently powerful symbolic systems (where a system is "sufficiently powerful" if it can express the theory of natural numbers): either we have to make the system inconsistent or we have to make it incomplete. In effect, you have to make a choice between having an incorrect answers now and then or having questions that you can't answer. (Sometimes you can't even know whether you can answer a question or not). Note that one might argue that humans are "sufficiently powerful". So we might all be inconsistent or incomplete. - Tommi

Elijah Meeks wrote: Right now we can't build a computer that can play a good game of bridge (Or go, both incredibly complex games) but with quantum computers and nanotech, this thing will be possible. There's a lot of strange ideas floating around with respect to quantum computers. During the recent weeks I've delved into the subject for the first time. I don't claim that I understand all about the subject. To tell the truth, on the average I've been boggled a couple of times per page. But one thing that I've understood is that quantum computing is not, in the end, fundamentally different from current computers. Quantum computers may solve some problems faster than classical computers. They may even solve all problems faster but thus far researchers are found only three problems where it is actually the case. No one has been able to prove that no efficient classical method exists for them. And even if quantum computers were always more efficient, that doesn't mean that they are efficient enough. Lets say that there's some problem that takes current computers 10^50 years to solve. Then, suppose that Moore's law holds for 100 years more. The computers will be then 5.3*10^16 times faster than today. The problem will take still 1.8*10^33 years to solve. Certainly a big improvement but I wouldn't want to start that test run. Now suppose that quantum computing reduces the running time to its 10-based logarithm. Then the original running time gets down to 50 years. Woohoo. The above figures do not correspond to any real problem but serve only to illustrate the fact that no matter how fast a computer is, there are still problems that can't be solved in reasonable time with it. On a more fundamental level, Kurt Gödel proved in the 30's that there are questions that cannot be answered at all and these questions stay undecidable even with quantum computers. The interesting question now is that how difficult would a "perfect WWII simulation" be? The easy answer is "pretty helluva difficult" but let's try to quantify it more. Let's consider a 2 km x 2 km battlefield. To get a really good simulation we have to model the world detail to millimeter level (otherwise dust clouds from artillery fire will be wrong). So let's use a 1x1x1 mm cube for the basic building block of the world. It is probably enough to go about 30 meters underground in most cases but we need much more space overhead since otherwise artillery firing trajections will get wrong. To be sure, let's go up to 4.5 km. (This is enough for 60 second flight times). In the end the world simulation will consist of 2*10^6 x 2*10^6 x 4.5*10^6 = 1.8*10^18 cubes. Let's say that someone builds a hardware simulator that can find a new state for one cube using only one instruction. Now we need to know how many state transitions we need for one turn. The best AT guns had a muzzle velocity somewhere along 1000m/s. Let's take that as a guideline. That round will move 10^6 mm/s so we have to use time granularity of 10^-6 seconds. One 60 second turn will then need 6*10^6 state transitions to get a total of about 1.1*10^25 instructions. Current computers can do at most 1*10^9 instructions in one second, so the simulation would take about 3*10^8 years to process one turn. Using the above figure for the computer 100 years in the future, the time drops down to 0.2 seconds. That's certainly fast enough. Most users would be satisfied by 10 second wait. This point would be reached somewhere 90 years from now, if Moore's law continues to hold. Note that the above stuff related only to the computational aspects of the simulation. The model building would be much more difficult and practically impossible without a time machine. - Tommi

Kanonier Reichmann wrote: If you want to see another war film with humuor, check out "The life & times of Private Chonkin" or some such. It shows how f**cked up the Soviets were in the early part of the war, very entertaining. Hey, has someone filmed that book. I stumbled upon it about a year ago and I couldn't stop laughing reading it. I don't know whether it is translated to English, but the author is Vladimir Voinovits and the original title is "Zizn i neobytsainyje prikljutsenija soldata Ivana Tsonkina". (The Finnish version is "Sotamies Ivan Tsonkinin ihmeelliset seikkailut"). - Tommi

Finnish army has always had the tradition that no soldier should be left to the enemy, dead or alive. Of course, it was not always possible to retrieve all dead bodies and sometimes even wounded had to be left behind, but more often than not all soldiers that left for the battlefield also returned from it. During the Winter War this practice was very efficient in demoralizing Soviets. They were on advance and paying terrible price for each meter that they advanced and they wouldn't find any Finnish casualties. One veteran of Soviet 95th Infantry Division wrote in his memoirs the following lines: "During the battle we picked up a dead Finnish soldier from the shores of the Gulf of Finland -- for some reason he was unarmed (his comrades had probably taken his smg and knife). The body was transported to I batallion's HQ and left guarded in front of one dugout. During the night Finns killed both guards and the body disappeared. At the same time the batallion commander Burmitstrenko and chief of staff Lieutenant Colonel N.V. Pirogovski slept peacefully in the dugout without guards. They were lucky, it could have happened worse". The author was Grigori Garashenko who served as a MG gunner in 90th Infantry Regiment. He also writes that he lived for a whole month in a hut that was made of dead and frozen bodies - Tommi

jshandorf wrote: It just makes sense to me that if I was a General and I could request certain units for an attack I was assigned I would at least have an idea of the terrain and the limiting, or beneficial factors it would impose. On the other hand, if you were a batallion commander and your regimental commander ordered you to take a hill or a village with your current troops, you would say "yes sir", and start planning the attack, even if you had only a bunch of a meter-tall pygmies armed with grass and sharpened mangoes (courtesy to Black Adder). My point? Sure, a commanding general would like to assign right troops to right places at the right moment. Whether that happened in practice or not, depended pretty much on the situation. - Tommi

Lorak wrote: Bad manors is using something that the game allows, but leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I thought that bad manors were always on a far-away clifftop in the middle of a great thunderstorm. And maintained by a hunchbacked servant called Igor. I just had to write that. - Tommi

Chupacabra wrote: the Brewster Buffalo Buffalo was not that bad plane. Finnish pilots claimed 475 air victories with it while losing at most 17 planes in air-to-air combat, assuming that all unknown losses were by fighters. A very significant percentage of the Finnish claims has been confirmed by archieved Soviet sources. I'm not certain how much exactly, but someone once stated that the figure was over 60%. If we discard the rest 40% as overclaiming (definitely possible), even that gives a kill ratio of 285:17, or about 17:1. Finns lost more Brewsters than those 17, but those either crashed or were shot down by AAA. Four fighters were destroyed on ground by two bombing runs. - Tommi

coe wrote: So I ask did the allies do strange things like that? they must have? Every army did its share of stupid things. Here's one example from the Finnish army. (I've posted this once before): During the Finnish advance to Rukajärvi Soviets established one defence line on the far side of a wide (1-2km) marsh. Finnish scouts noticed the enemy forces and came back to tell the information. The commander of the forward company wisely decided to wait until artillery units could catch the main unit. A little later another Finnish company that was subordinated to the commander of the first company. Its captain decided to attack over the marsh immedietely. Without waiting for artillery. Against direct orders. The result: he lost over half of his company. I can't remember the actual casualty figure but it was somewhere along 70 KIA and dozens of wounded. The worst thing in this was that the captain was not court-martialled. - Tommi

CavScout: Seriously, the allies had much more practicle uniforms as a whole. In particular, the German uniforms were terrible during the winter. Their northermost army corps (I can't remember its number, the one that tried to attack to Murmansk) got hit by a sudden snow storm in September 1941 and lost its fighting capabilities for a long time. They had the additional problem that the supply officers were situated at Oslo, over 1000 km South to Petsamo, and they didn't realise that the Arctic winter was already approaching. - Tommi

Wayne wrote: the manpower ratio on the Eastern Front was about 5 to 1 against the Germans and they managed to almost defeat the Russians and hold them off for 2 years. Only in memoirs of German generals. After July 41 Germans had a numerical superiority at front until December 41. The Soviets had then a 3:2 superiority until late '44 when they first time achieved 2:1 superiority. And about pretty impressive victories: the Iasi-Kishinev stategic offensive on August 1944. Germans lost 275000 men KIA and MIA and the Rumanian army surrendered. Soviets lost 13197 KIA and MIA plus 53999 WIA. Even with adding 30% unreported casualties for the Red Army, the result is still better than 16:1 irrecoverable casualty ratio for Soviets. Disregarding German wounded (because I don't have a slightest idea of their number. However, that figure was probably pretty insignificant as most were captured) while counting Soviet ones leads to 3:1 casualty ratio favoring Soviets (with the 30% inflation). Considering only the casualty reports, the ratios are 21:1 and 4:1. That operation was one of the best examples of blitzkrieg in the whole war. The small losses of Soviet forces is mostly explained by the fact that usually vast majority of Soviet casualties occured during breakthrough battles. This time they had made a deal with the Rumanian troops facing them so that they would offer only a token resistance. - Tommi

The whole bloody thread originally started by PeterNZer: Ok folks, here's the pictures! I'd like to fill a casualty report. This thread killed yesterday my test run that had been happily churning away for about 16500 CPU minutes. That's about 11 and half CPU days. In the real time it had been running since early September. My Netscape went insane from downloading and rendering all those pictures and started to run amok, filling up the swap space in matter of seconds. The resulting trashing trashed something important and I couldn't kill the rogue process anymore, as even 'ps' command gave a segmentation fault. I had to reboot, so bye bye all test cases. This was the second Linux crash that I've experienced in the past four years. I'll just hope that this new test run will have a luckier fate than its predecessor had. - Tommi

Pillar wrote: (Bold used for ease of read) Actually, I find using normal text much easier to read. Bold text indicates to me that something is emphasized and my brain goes through a few loops trying to sort it out. - Tommi

Tiger wrote: The Germans often beat the Russians at 5:1 odds against, sometimes even more. True, but I'd like to point out that sometimes Russians could beat Germans with similar odds, that is, when Germans had 5 men to 1 Soviet soldier. A case point (from the Kiestinki area like the example I posted today in another thread): in early September 1941 a Soviet 80-man detachment broke through lines of SS-division Nord and lodged themselves in their rear area. Germans tried to destroy the infiltrators first with their immediate reserves (I don't know how large these were, probably a company or two, a batallion at most) but got thrown back. General Siilasvuo (only officer of a foreign army to ever have command over a SS division) then dispatched one full SS batallion from Group J's reserves. Even with that batallion and almost 10:1 superiority, Germans couldn't destroy the pocket for few days and even then most of the Soviets escaped unharmed to their own side. Siilasvuo was not impressed. Though, the SS division Nord was one of the worst German units in 1941. It probably has the questionable honor of being the German unit that stopped fastest. Less than 18 hours after its initial attack against Salla village started its commander General Major Demelhuber had to report to his superiors that his division couldn't attack anymore. Some of its men routed as far back as to the Army Corps HQ and demanded that bridges should be blown up so that Soviets couldn't use them. (To clarify: the Soviets didn't even dream of attacking at the sector). - Tommi [This message has been edited by tss (edited 10-06-2000).]

Thomas K wrote: The Germans could always win tactically but made mistakes on the grand scale. There were plenty of cases where Soviets won also tactically. I'd say that they were better than Germans in two enviroments: forest and city. Forests were difficult for Germans because they depended too heavily on roads. Even their horse-drawn wagons were too heavy to be truly useful offroads and without cartloads of ammo their MGs got useless pretty quick, and their infantry tactics were centered on MG support. The Germans simply couldn't mount sizable offensives without roads. Soviets could do it. In April 1942 they caused a serious trouble at Kiestinki when they attacked with three regiments from three different directions, through forest. One of their prongs was aimed against German positions there. The Germans initially estimated that a 80 men patrol had managed to sneak through their lines. By that time there were already two batallions... (In the end the reserves of Finnish 6th division managed to throw back the offensive after heavy fights that lasted for a month). - Tommi

One concrete datapoint that I just stumbled on: During the Finnish counterattack at Koukunniemi on the night between 6th and 7th December 1939 the Soviets torched two buildings that were in the front of their lines. Later in the battle two Finns set on fire one building using thatch. (There was a Soviet MG nest inside the building). - Tommi

gatpr wrote: the original soviets were committees formed around 1917 the revolution. Actually, even earlier than that. Soviets were formed during the 1904-05 unrest that was caused by the Russo-Japanese war. I think that was the first large scale soviet formation but there were some isolated occurences even before. - Tommi