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Peterk

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Posts posted by Peterk

  1. How do you do defensive fire through VASL? I just curious on the mechanics.
    By e-mail, moving player prepares a log that defender goes through line by line. If both players are on at the same time, it's done in the normal way, via an interrupt.

    There is a nice tension in an ASL MPh which perhaps CM doesn't have....because the pieces are being moved one by one in an almost chesslike fashion. Trying to find a winning combination, luring your opponent into taking a shot that opens up a movement opportunity. Might not be realistic but definitely fun. Static defender definitely has more to do.

    [ September 07, 2006, 09:07 AM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

  2. And over what time period?
    Looks like 3 hours at the beginning of a large attack. Is there any way to use a smoke grenade in an unorthodox manner? Grouping them together and setting them off en masse?

    Anyways, regardless of the details of that one single paragraph, that article makes a very strong case that Russians often used smoke for...

    i) covering retreats

    ii) covering recon/raiding units returning to the lines

    iii) deception at the beginning of attacks

    iv) hindering enemy fire and sight during beginning of attacks

    v) assaults in urban terrain

    ...and that usage of smoke tactically was very much part of their mindset pretty much from the beginning of the war onward and that smoke use increased as the war went on.

    They had "chemical battalions" who appear to be smokescreen specialists.

    You can of course discard that article entirely, but it does look fairly authoritative in answering the question "did the russians use smoke?" and "did the Russians use smoke grenades?".

    Personally, I can live with TOW not having infantry smoke without too many misgivings. I just threw that article out because I found it interesting when I discovered it.

  3. 4,000 smoke rounds for the Ukrainian front?
    Smoke GRENADES....infantry grenades.

    Not artillery smoke rounds for big smoke screens.

    Read the article. You'll be surprised at the figures and the details of use.

    BTW...there's lots of great stuff on that Red Army Studies site. The issue on Stalingrad is particulary good.

  4. Just my take....

    The CM games shine in

    i) the countryside

    ii) really small towns

    iii) farmland

    Once you get into monotonous terrain...heavily forested maps, large cities, I don't think CM does all that well.

    In the cities, the buildings are a little too generic to give much flavor. If there were rooms, staircases in fixed locations, it might be a bit better.

    It's not really European, but try to play a long scenario, or a linked set of battles on a Stalingrad type map...gets boring pretty quickly.

  5. Upload glitch?

    How can an upload glitch? You send something...it goes....done. If it's big it takes a while; if it's small then it's fast....but....that's about it.

    Jeez. And we can trust these guys to write a whole game????? Are there CD's not round enough glitches hiding around the corner too?

    smile.gif

  6. Interesting.

    I've read a couple of books recently on the Stalingrad fighting - not the big, general books, like Beevor and Craig - but soldier on the ground accounts.

    They went into a great amount of detail both for their own attacks and the way the Russians attacked and absolutely no mention of ever using smoke for cover.

    I'm not really sure where I stand on the issue. It seems such an obvious thing to do with the equipment if it was available, but almost never (to my eyes so far at least) shows up in the stories.

  7. What's with all the stupid bloody smileys all of a sudden?!?! Do you people know something or is it a typical bloody Battlefront forum "string them all along and then let them down" joke?

    GRRRARRGGGGARRRGGAAARRGGGARRRAGGG! :mad:

    Ok...breaking this down....Whaco, your member number's too high, you can't possibly know anything.

    MeatEtr...your recent posts are NOT screaming "I am a beta-tester who knows something" to me....sorry. You know nothing.

    Who else posted a smiley in this thread?

    That's it?

    PAH....NOT waiting for the demo on Monday.

    Unhappy. :(

  8. Everyones awfully quiet about this post.
    Checkmate. smile.gif

    Smoke is pretty curious. Really tough to find references to it in the literature even though you KNOW the troops had it and used it.

    I read Band Of Brothers soon after reading that Red Army document. The US paratroopers are smoke grenade belching monsters in ASL...so I decided to keep a very close eye out for mention of smoke grenades in the dozens and dozens of personal stories recounted by the 101st paratroopers in the book. Not once!

    So does that mean US paratroopers did not use smoke grenades?

    [ September 01, 2006, 01:51 PM: Message edited by: Peterk ]

  9. According to our own research (and why there are no smoke grenades in CM for example), smoke grenades have been mainly used for signal purposes
    Not meaning to issue a big challenge to anyone who amay or may not be the owner or moderator of the board...but...

    This came up on the ASL discussion boards a while ago and I found the following document while checking it out myself. It's a good read. The Russians seemed to love smoke.

    A Red Army document on the use of smoke in WWII

    http://www.redarmystudies.net/smhj/1987/1987_05.pdf

    On page 27, description of a Russian breakthrough in which 4076 smoke grenades were used in Jan 1944 on the Ukrainian front. Rifle troops making smoke mentionned for the first time!

    On page 31, description of assault groups in cities setting small frontage 50m-200m smoke screens to cover advances.

  10. Hmmmm....the next ASL module, Valor of the Guards hit its preorder mark in a couple of days, I think its up to over 2000 now. It was very cool to watch that number skyrocket so quickly.

    http://www.multimanpublishing.com/preorder/preorder.php

    When that happened, people were talking about how it was some kind of record not seen in over 20 years. Interest is really quite high right now and I'm sure I would have way less problems finding a few PBEM opponents for ASL than I would with CMBB.

    We have VASL now and they didn't back then. A lot of people like myself who don't have a regular face to face opponent are now able to play a lot anyways which wasn't the case 10 years ago.

    Conventions and tournaments only represent a very small cross-section of people who play the game. If we had a CMBB convention, how many people would show up and what do you think their ages would be? Most likely mostly the 30 and up crowd as well.

  11. The arguing is pretty optional. I've found that most ASLers (granted I don't play much face to face or ever do tournaments) don't argue too much. The problem is the ones that do argue can be kinda LOUD and hard to ignore and fill threads 10 pages long (kind of like the Pengers here...but they're really easy to ignore) !!!

    I don't take rules/mistakes too seriously. Most of the time when I go back to fix a mistake (I have detailed VASL logs for all my games), I find that there is no difference in the result anyways. I learned that early and don't let the rules get in the way of having a good time with the system.

    As an aside. Just played a PBEM turn of Red Barricades this morning and a turn of Pegasus Bridge after lunch. Even with monster rulebooks and headaches from checking stuff up, those campaign games still rock! Good fun.

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