Andreas

I am sure that if you go down to customs, and explain the mistake, they will happily charge you the correct amount of customs duty.

1) I just see this as another laucher being available. Not perfect, but still okay. 2) I am not sure if this is a bug. I think it could be explained by saying that in order to undertake an assault, you have to reform your men, since they will arrive strung out after movement. That reorganisation would be done during the command delay.

I notice by chance that Pansenfuehrer is not much into the provision of gamey updates. How about it sunshine? Let the nice folks around here know how much aggro you get from my guns? I am sure they won't care a bit until the realise how truly up ****creek you are...

I also think the British were certain they were not going to fight the same war again. Their problem was more that they did not quite know what kind of war they would fight. They had the only fully mechanised army in the world in 1940, and had a plausible theory of strategic air warfare before the war. Unfortunately they could not quite agree on what they thought, it seems Rommel's book - according to the original intro (I own the English language Greenhill edition), it was barely noticed before Rommel rose to fame. The translation was undertaken in 43, the translated version published in 44. Contents: All small unit (below BN level) infantry actions. Mostly in difficult terrain. This is not the official ToC: 1. War of movement 1914, Belgium/northern France 2. War in the trenches in the Vosges and Argonne 3. Mountain warfare in the Carpathians 4. Mountain warfare in Italy Hope that helps.

Snarker - your guys are not exactly where you see them in the tile. Their real position in the terrain is abstracted somewhat. So one of them could have been a lot closer. That is why you can see e.g. Haftminen used when your squad is about 20-30m from the vehicle. One man just strolled over to it and placed it, without this being shown in the game.

Redwolf, I think I have to disagree again. For the end of the war you are certainly right about the fuel issue. At the start of Barbarossa though, having a fully mechanised army and to me that does not just include having wheels instead of horseshoes, but also full all-terrain capacity in the Panzer and motorised divisions, this could have made the critical difference in getting to Moscow quicker, by being able to reduce the large Kessel much faster and more reliable. The Germans themselves saw this absence of all-terrain capability as a serious drawback.

Kip, I agree that the Panzerdivision was a very well balanced force. Especially when it was up to strength, with additional pioneer and recce forces and one armoured infantry battalion. The SP artillery of the divisions and the presence of dedicated, and armoured artillery FOOs also supported them well. All in all much better than the British model. It would have been the ideal exploitation force - what I think it was not balanced for though was the slog through the defense. And the motorised (PzGr) divisions that were supposed to move on with them only had two regiments of infantry and lacked the SP artillery, on the whole making the force too weak to get anywhere in the face of determined resistance. Michael's point about motorisation in general is also critically important. The Wehrmacht in 1941 was a force with a great, winning strategy (at that time!), but lacking the means to achieve victory. It was only downhill from there.

Gary, hi. Good to see you weigh in. Can you maybe elaborate on your Jassy and Vistula examples? Particularly the former. I assume you do not mean the August 1944 Iassy-Kishinjew operation? I agree it did not always work - I think though that when it really was critically important, it delivered every time. The late summer 44 attacks along the Vistula failed against ad-hoc defenses. But at that time, the doctrine was not properly acted upon (and could not) because the Red Army was at the extreme end of its supply lines. When they tried again against an entrenched Wehrmacht (in prepared positions, who knew that the Red Army was coming for it) a few months later, they went through it like a warm knife through butter. Kurland puzzles me - I am still wondering whether it was a case of the Soviet forces there being commanded by less capable commanders, or whether it was just seen as a secondary theatre, once the Germans were bottled up with their back to the Baltic sea, and the local front did not receive the means to really finish them off. If you have any reading suggestions on the winter battles in AGC 43/44, I'd be very interested.

Redwolf - you are probably right on the offensive level. I would argue though that by not having this understanding, the Wehrmacht suffered heavily at the hands of the Red Army. They did not understand that the rules had fundamentally changed, and the Red Army was simply playing a different game than they were.

Dale, I agree, and that is what I wanted to point out. I do not agree with Renaud that the Red Army was practicing Blitzkrieg. What they did was very different, and much more effective. It employed some elements of Blitzkrieg, but was more than that. Stixx, I would be very interested in getting a hold of that thesis. Could you check if it is okay to send it on? email's in the profile.

Okay, the Ardennes have come up twice now as a counter-example. There are two pieces of evidence that I would hold against the Ardennes showing that the German high command actually learned the lessons of warfare practiced on them by the Red Army. 1) Terrain - the Ardennes (and Nordwind) were areas where leading with tanks was at the least difficult, and in the southern sector of the Ardennes impossible, since bridging needed to be undertaken to get Lehr across (IIRC). 2) Later offensives, and those just before - Fruehlingserwachen (Lake Balaton) and Sonnenwende (Stargard) were again back to leading with armour. To me this would indicate one of two things - the Germans had either not learned anything, or they simply were too arrogant about the Red Army, so they used a different technique in the east from the west. Having said that, the quite successful attack in the Overloon area in October/November 1944 just before the Ardennes again was undertaken by armoured forces. There was high-quality infantry around there, the Fallschirmjaeger who would cause so much trouble during the Rhineland battles. It is of course equally possible that the Germans were so starved of supporting weapons (air and artillery) that by this time the infantry alone could not be expected to do anything, even if they were strong enough and reasonably well-trained. Bottomline to me for this argument though is - the Ardennes do not indicate that the Wehrmacht ever learned the lesson. It was a special case due to terrain. The much too early commitment of the armoured forces behind the breakthrough armies indicates that, to me at least.

More importantly - most of it lessons learnt from more mobile warfare in the Romanian and (I think) Austrian/Italian mountains. Rommel does not really deal with trench warfare. Most of it is company level, up to Battalion I think. I see if I get around to digging it out tonight.

To reiterate what the Tortenhauptmann said, the game's graphics are not its main selling point. For various reasons they can not be as good as those of a latest-generation FPS. The unique selling point is the quality of the simulation. It really depends on your taste - if the demo intrigues you, you should probably get the game. If it is only of marginal interest to you, and the graphics are the make or break, it may not be the best choice. As PDF said - the graphics are unchanged between the demo and the game, although individual items can be modded. Not the fundamental character of the trees though. Hope that helps.

Has the demented Minnesotan ever put up a list or a picture of cards received? I would like to see how my tasteful offering fitted in with the no doubt horrific and abysmal examples of tasteless dimwittedness offered for his perusal by the assembled twats here.

Doing a fair bit of reading on how the Wehrmacht and the Red Army went about the business of breaking through the enemy's frontline, to get to 'the green fields beyond', I am coming to the (fairly obvious) conclusions that both did things very differently, and that only one side really learned during the war, namely the Red Army. The Wehrmacht seems to have tried to use the same old same old when attacking in 1945 that they had used in 1941. A (probably far too simplistic) way to look at the Wehrmacht attacking is that it used it's elite Panzer and motorised (later Panzergrenadier) divisions as the spearhead of the attack. It aimed to rip a hole into the enemy's frontline, and then pour through it creating mayhem in the enemy's rear. Infantry would follow on, but would be fundamentally not mobile enough to keep up. The attacking force is a very unbalanced, tank-heavy force that relies on the inital shock. If this shock does not occur, the attack is doomed to fail. Parallels to Keegan's analysis of the cavalry charge in 'The Face of Battle' are intentional. Later in the war, the Red Army understood that the immovable object beats the unrelenting force. The Wehrmacht approach is fairly unsophisticated, and relies on concentration of force and an absence of a defense in depth, because the spearhead force and the exploitation force are identical. Therefore, if the defense is wearing your spearhead down, you will not have anything left to exploit with. See Kursk. Once you bog down in the defenses that Kip has described in this thread, there is little you can do, as the attackers at Stargard and Lake Balaton found out. The persistence of this approach could be connected to the failure of the Wehrmacht to keep its infantry divisions in a state that allowed their use as an attacking formation. It is also likely that the Wehrmacht was simply very bad at institutional learning. Contrast this with the Red Army way of doing things, starting really post-Kursk in operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev. The initial breakthrough is achieved by an all-arms army, properly reinforced with heavy breakthrough tanks, SP guns, engineer, artillery and air assets, to achieve a balanced combined arms force. This was more infantry heavy than the German force would have been. More importantly, in the wings would wait a more unbalanced Tank Army, that was geared up for exploitation and rapid movement, once the all arms army had broken through the tactical defenses. This could deliver a speed of movement that would wreak havoc with the Wehrmacht defense operations, and (in an assessment by a German staff officer) from summer 1944 was operating inside the Wehrmacht decision-making cycle. I.e. the Wehrmacht reacted to the previous action of the Red Army, not the current one, at any given time. The tank army in this approach was only to be committed once the breakthrough was secured, although some commanders (notably Konev) inserted it in the final stages of the breakthrough, when the all-arms army was ground up to a point that it had difficulties making headway. Interestingly, Konev feels the need to defend this handling in his memoirs, and ISTR Zhukov's memoirs criticise this approach. We all know which approach was the more successful one, and the question to me is whether the Wehrmacht was either incapable of adapting to the changed battlefields of 1943/4, or whether it had simply deprived itself of the ability to do something about it by wasting and neglecting its infantry divisions to the point where they were incapable of the offense, and barely capable of defending if not backed up by armour?

Busboy, I am not sure what you are on about. Here's the ticket - you were wrong. Some people pointed that out. Simple as that. I don't think anyone wanted to 'bruise your ego' through that, or get themselves all excited about how smart they are. If you go into a discussion you are not serious about, and that is the impression I get by now, if you don't mind me saying so, you will have to accept on this board that some people come along who are: a) serious about it and will point out flaws in arguments by others who participate in the discussion If you don't want that or can not cope with that, maybe you should not start a discussion, or withdraw from it when your mistakes are shown up? I really don't care about your ego one way or the other, but I do care about history and getting sources correct. That may appear anal to some people, but I am a trained social scientist (as much training as one gets for that ), so it is important to me. It is also the only way how you can learn more by participating in a discussion. The alternative is to read for yourself. Now coming back to Rommel - 'Infanterie greift an' is dealing with small-unit pure infantry tactics. As the name says. It is based on Rommel's experience as a small unit commander in France, Italy and Romania in the Great War. I have not read it through completely, but I think it is a bit helpful to CM. Maybe the Sharp books dealing with combat manuals will be more helpful though?

Well, the Germans had a much better incentive to get on top of the anti-tank problem than the Soviets. I think it made sense in Real Life™.

Could you two please find something else to play? Marbles maybe, if that is not too much of an intellectual challenge? I feel all yucky thinking you fuddle around with my superb creations. Cargo Culture lives again, who would have thought...

I have heard little, but that little was uniformly bad. A case treated at length that I have is recounted by CO 114th PzGrenRgt Col. Zollenkopf, happened 28/29 Dec 42. On their flank a LW Field Division was posted. Its GOC was a General of the home AA troops, no experience either in ground combat or Russia. Same for the regimental and battalion commanders. The Soviets must have figured it out, and attacked the division. The GOC refused to believe he was being attacked and accuses the soldiers of PiBtl 57 (who reported loss of contact to the LW unit on its flank, as well as receiving fire from LW positions, and Russian language shouts and orders from LW positions) of panic-mongering. Then comms ceased. K6 (motorcycle BN of 6. PD) sends a company to investigate. Finds the divisional CP raided, the whole staff shot. The whole LW division overrun. Remnants that make it to KG Zollenkopf ask to be adopted. Apparently it was well-equipped with weapons, but had zero idea of fieldcraft and how to guard a position. All sounds pretty damning to me.

Funnily, I came across it when trying to figure out when/if the Wehrmacht moved to a 6 batallion organisation for its infantry divisions...

Mistake on my part, I would assume... If it is the 1941 scenario. My apologies.

Indeed, that is where we disagree completely. To me it is a 'feature' - thanks for making that clearer than I did.

All, thanks a lot for the feedback. Keep it coming!

Also - all of Berli's CD scenarios are now open for review at the Depot! Hint, hint!

Between Haupt and Ericksson you should have the action covered reasonably well. Haupt will be better for the Germans (he goes down to BN level at times), than Ericksson will be for the Soviets.