ASL Veteran

The descriptions of German infantry tactics during Nordwind mostly consist of a lot of human wave attacks by the Volksgrenadier units involved some of whom were apparently intoxicated during the attack. The veteran Nord Mountain division performed much better and was an effective unit during the fighting so I would say that the experience and effectiveness could be described as uneven. Nord was mostly intact though from sitting in northern Finland for most of the war and so they would probably be an exception rather than the norm. American units also had uneven performances at times, although I think for the most part the American units seemed to outperform their German counterparts in general. The veteran American divisions in particular did very well almost across the board. Most of the lesser performances could probably be directed at the various green regiments that were deployed in theater and hastily attached to other divisions rather than having a unified command structure. I suppose the relatively inexperienced twelfth armored division laid a big fat egg too.

The Germans in Hot Time in Hatten get about 20 mortars and 6 150 Infantry Guns. They just become available as part of the reinforcements that are listed so the two tubes is just what you get at start. Hot Time In Hatten is in the Alsace region and was part of Nordwind not the Bulge and the German units involved in that operation were mostly scratch units that didn't have much in the way of standard TO&Es or heavy artillery. Nebelwerfers, from a scenario perspective, are also a bit limiting since they are primarily an area saturation weapon and so their usefulness or applicability are fairly limited. They just aren't a weapon that is typically going to be used for on call strikes on precision targets which is what a player is primarily going to be using when playing. Artillery in general terms is probably much more accurate in game than it would have been at the time for a variety of reasons that have been discussed and so the Nebelwerfer in game would benefit greatly from that extra accuracy. The main thing about rocket artillery in the game is that they don't sound any different than normal artillery which is disappointing to me since I remember with some fondness the weird space rocket sounds in CM1 when Nebelwerfers were used.

I'll take a wild stab at that, possibly in your opinion rhetorical, question. Coding time and effort as compared to possible financial reward? If you look through the forums you might notice a few old threads where various individuals proposed to BFC that they would take on the task of creating the framework to perform the exact task that you are casually tossing out there. BFC told them to go ahead and go for it with their blessing and support. These efforts even got their own official threads in the appropriate forums. Although the task was attacked with optimism and enthusiasm their efforts failed. BFC has enough on its plate that diving into such a task was not deemed worthwhile and with the failure of the third party efforts, well here we are.

You can make a claim that whatever scenario you are referencing is historically inaccurate from a weapon and equipment perspective, but that's only because the scenario designer chose to create a scenario with the unit in question. If the unit in question was not portrayed within the context of a specific scenario then the historical inaccuracy debate about the equipment used by any specific unit likewise disappears. Therefore in order to achieve the level of 'historical accuracy' that you want any scenarios depicting units that used non standard German weaponry would have to remain unmade thus preserving the 'historical accuracy' of the equipment being used. All you achieve through that is to limit the scenario possibilities that players can enjoy because all of that non standard equipment was not going to be included and was never planned for inclusion. If you want to point the finger of 'historical inaccuracy' at anyone then the finger would be pointed at whomever designed and created a particular scenario and not the game itself. By your definition of historical accuracy the game is perfectly fine so long as the units being portrayed in scenarios were issued standard weapons and equipment. My reference to the 461st Infantry Division was not a specific one, but rather to be read as 'random German infantry division picked out of a hat'. Many, perhaps most, German Panzer Division TO&Es have quite a bit of variation between them, but most of those differences can't be portrayed within the game. Scenario designers just do the best they can with what's available in the game. The alternative is that you would get less varied content because in order to meet your standards many scenarios would remain unmade. It is also a tall ask for every scenario designer to be so familiar with any particular unit being portrayed that they would know how many French machine guns that specific unit employed. It's one thing if you pick up a book about a specific division and that book has every weapon listed, but if you are designing scenarios you have to design scenarios across many different units, locations, and situations and in most cases just knowing what battalion was involved in a particular battle or even where everyone was actually located on a map is nearly impossible. Try creating a scenario about a Soviet attack in Poland and then tell us all how easy it is to identify even a specific division that may possibly have been involved in a particular battalion sized battle let alone what model machine guns any particular squad might be carrying. Scenario research is hit and miss at times. Sometimes you get lucky and have first hand accounts and good maps and sometimes you have to wing it and make a few assumptions. You have picked up a book with detailed information about a specific unit and you are extrapolating inaccuracies from that. A scenario designer might read about an engagement that sounds interesting and then try to locate the battle on a map and try to figure out exactly who was there. Your method might work if you only want to make scenarios about that specific unit in the book you have, but if you want to broaden your horizons you have to go into territory where the information isn't quite so precise or even available under any context.

The second line infantry divisions in question would have had either MG34s or more likely captured Czech, French, Polish, Belgian, older German models from WW1 and other machine guns of various types that were used by various German forces throughout the war. I don't think he means that the entire division had only two machine guns of any type. Possibly even more commonly used would be various captured French and other types of rifles. Of course, CMBN does not include any of that for a variety of reasons. Sure, it would be nice to have the full catalog of various German small arms but in the grand scheme of things BFC has to weigh whether or not the art for a new weapon model and coding for various sized magazines for each of the hundreds of various smalls arms is really worth the time and effort because the 461st reserve infantry division had Maxim machine guns instead of MG42s. That isn't a question of 'historical accuracy' but rather a question of inclusion or exclusion. The game isn't historically inaccurate because the German sledge mounted MG08 isn't included in the game. It's just not included in the game that's all. Not even counting the captured weapons, the German MGs used by various units would include the MG13, MG38, MG30, MG15, MG08, MG08/15, MG34, MG42, and the MG151/15. The Czech built ZB vz/26, ZB vz/30, ZB vz/53, and ZB vz/60 were also used by second line units and SS foreign volunteers. The list could go on and on, but really what difference does it make in the game overall and how impactful would it be? There isn't even a way to specify certain weapon mixes in squads in the editor so even if all these weapons were in the game there is no way to specifically set a squad to have a certain desired weapon mix so whatever weapon mix you would get would effectively be random. The game doesn't know whether the unit you are portraying is a first line infantry division or a second line infantry division. The game only knows you are selecting a German infantry unit. How historically accurate would that be to have ZB vz/26s showing up in first line infantry squads?

Yeah, but CMSF2 doesn't introduce any new vehicle models since those were already done with the initial release. There are probably some new textures and maybe some TO&E tweaks but other than the actual game code there isn't much else that needs to be added or altered. Anything that involves a new vehicle with an associated new TO&E and artwork would probably be, from a non code perspective, more work than updating CMSF2. Virtually none of the appropriate British or even American lend lease vehicles are already done for 1940 through 1942 and there would probably be many new Axis vehicles as well.

My guess would be theoretically you could have as many modules as you wanted to create. The only caveat being that every module would have to fit within the target time frame and region for that game family. You aren't going to get an 'early war module' slapped onto CMBN for example. There would be way too much new artwork and TO&E related stuff to put into a module. There may also be special situations where specific coding would be required (like one man turrets) and the majority of that kind of stuff is held in the base game and not the module. For example, the commonwealth module has commonwealth soldiers in it, but who would they fight against? Most of their opponents come from either the base game or other modules so if you created a module for early war French they would have nobody to fight against if you simply married it to CMBN. The modules also have to interact with both each other and the base game and so a theoretical 'early war module' would have to interact with all the 1944 stuff. Sure, the date ranges would be there and you wouldn't see the later war stuff if you hadn't selected that time frame, but the module would have to interact with them regardless so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to slap a module onto a base game where none of the artwork, vehicles, TO&E, and any special coding that might be required needs to interact. It would be pointless to do that. It makes much more sense to create a game 'family' where the things that are contained within that game 'family' are going to interact with each other and that's currently how it works.

Just one waypoint was placed 100 meters to the south ninety degrees from the current position? I had a completely different image in my head from the initial description rather than what I'm seeing in the pictures. What it looks like to me is the tank takes the most direct path to get to the road and intends to follow the road the rest of the way before leaving the road to reach the waypoint you placed. The tank appears to crash through the corner of a hedge and go around the corner of a destroyed building to reach the road which is the path of least resistance. My guess is that the tank made an attempt to avoid crashing through the hedge and that it was the hedge that caused the tank to travel towards the road initially, but that the tank was unable to avoid the corner of the hedge and plowed through it instead where the tank bogged. No, I'm pretty confident that it wasn't the train tracks that caused the path alteration, but rather the hedge since vehicles tend to avoid walls, hedges, and fences to greater or lesser degrees depending upon the vehicle. The tank crossed the tracks just fine. If the tank was avoiding the tracks then it would have travelled straight west until it reached the road and then turned south, but that's clearly not what happened. If you placed a waypoint just beyond the hedge followed by another one 100 meters further down then I'm pretty sure the tank would have crashed through the hedge as intended. Incidentally the tracks are not on a paved surface, although it appears that perhaps it might possibly be gravel. You can see the terrain difference where the paved road intersects with the tracks. It is possible to place a pavement or gravel tile beneath both a road and a track tile, but it is impossible to place both a road and track tile in the same action spot. I just wanted to add that the image I had from the first post was that of a tank driving down a paved road and upon reaching some tracks, rather than crossing the tracks and continuing down the road the tank veered off to parts unknown which would be extremely odd behavior.

In game the tracks should just slow movement down with a small chance of bog as I recall. Whether the vehicle crosses the tracks or not I suppose would depend upon the layout of the tracks. If the tracks went all the way from one end of the map to the other with no break then I can't see why the vehicle would choose a different path since it would be impossible to avoid crossing the tracks. If the tracks ended or turned near where you were trying to cross them I suppose the AI might choose to go around the tracks instead of over them. Without a screen shot or at a minimum the name of the map if a QB or scenario title there really is no way to know one way or another what was going on with the situation being described. It does sound odd or out of the ordinary though. Perhaps there is some odd or prohibited terrain along the path chosen that is in the vicinity of the proposed crossing point that is affecting the movement path rather than the exact point where the path crosses the tracks and so the tracks might not be causing the path alteration but rather something else nearby might be instead.

I actually did some initial research on a possible Remagen scenario. I just wanted to see about the terrain the who and the what so nothing detailed. That tunnel at the end of the bridge immediately became a point of difficulty for the scenario since the tunnel entrance is so close to the bridge. It would complicate things a lot since the Germans had positions up on the heights above so it would be difficult to exclude the mountain all together.

I think it's more of a case of stuff added later and not back loaded to previous titles / not relevant or appropriate to other titles that came after.

The number of different walls and fences varies by title. There were, I think, about three different kinds of wooden fence in Red Thunder.

If you are in a recon vehicle and you find that you are using your weapon then you are probably either performing a task that your unit wasn't designed to perform or you were caught by surprise. I would think that in the case of the Stuart Recon if you are using your .50 cal then you probably screwed up. I'm talking in the real life use of the vehicle not the in game use. There were situations, especially with German recon units, where recon units were pressed into front line service, but in those cases the vehicles were typically left out of harms way as much as possible while the recon troops themselves would be used as basic foot infantry. A recon vehicle would more typically be positioned somewhere that a vehicle commander could use his binoculars to scan the terrain for information and in many cases that scanning would probably be done on foot with the vehicle in a concealed spot nearby. I have run across several personal accounts of WW2 type recon although it would probably take a lot of digging for me to find the relevant passages since I don't remember exactly where I read them in many cases.

Either 'The Blitz' or 'A Few Good Men' would be good sites for finding opponents. I think they both have ladder games, but you can have casual games at both sites as well. If someone wants a ladder game they will usually specify that they want a ladder game when looking for an opponent.

SS executed Canadian troops at Ardenne Abbey on June 6 or 7 in 1944 and of course there was the little incident during the Battle of the Bulge. The title of my scenario 'Surrender Invites Death' comes from a quote by a Canadian officer who basically told his troops that surrendering to the SS amounted to an invitation to suffer a premature death at their hands. So yeah, the western Allies regarded SS troops as different than other troops, although probably not to the extent as was normal on the Eastern Front. Certainly not all SS were executed on sight, but it wouldn't be surprising for SS to be executed by Western Allied troops.

Fair enough. The size of the force makes the incident come off a little better, however Brad Pitt seems to feel that he can do what he did in the presence of soldiers he doesn't know without any fear of punishment and that implies that it is both common and consequence free throughout the entire US Army as a whole. If the infantry weren't in the scene then that would mitigate the institutional aspect of it for me. They could have done the same thing with just the tank crew and maybe an infantryman or two present and it would have gotten the point across. Adding the infantry platoon isn't necessary in the scene in my opinion and it is that aspect that made me stop watching the movie not the execution itself. Well, that and the thing with the women which I had trouble watching. You stack both of those together and I was like 'okay, I'm done - nothing of value to see here.'

I don't remember exactly how many guys were there, but I seem to recall Brad Pitt being in charge of a battlegroup or task force of some sort which is typically going to be about a battalion in size. So I'm accounting to what I would expect would be the size of the task force since there would be those standing in the immediate vicinity and then there would be others nearby out of the camera's view. If it was just two platoons in the entire task force then I think it would be a bit more palatable, but once again I think it was poorly done.

The problem is in the scale and who is present. What if Major Winters from Band of Brothers was in command of the infantry and Brad Pitt was doing his thing? How do you think Major Winters would react? I think he would react poorly. That's the thing - Brad Pitt doesn't know any of those infantry guys and yet he feels comfortable enough in those unfamiliar surroundings to force the new guy to execute a prisoner in front of everyone.

Yes, but in SPR the difference is in the scale. Captain Miller only has about a squad of men with him when these things take place. The Czech guys are what I would describe as 'heat of the moment' type of things. The radar site is the closest approximation to the AT gun in Fury but the scene in Fury has an entire battalion standing around. It is much easier to do something with just a squad of men around that you know and have fought with for years rather than an entire battalion of guys you don't even know. Presumably there might be one officer in a battalion who might think that maybe the guy has something of value to tell the S2 rather than simply putting a bullet in him. Brad Pitt doesn't know any of those infantrymen who he is in the task force with so how would he know if there were any Colonels or Captains who might not appreciate what he was doing? He would be taking a risk - perhaps a small one but a risk nevertheless that someone might make a big deal out of it. The group dynamic in SPR is done much better than the dynamic in Fury. Fury comes across as ham fisted and disrespectful. Yes, I also know that the scene was the vehicle to develop the new guy, but there are other ways of doing it.

The problem for me with the AT gun scene is not necessarily that prisoners were shot and killed by individual soldiers. I'm sure that happened. I'm sure American soldiers did it on occasion in the heat of the moment. Perhaps even fully controlled German prisoners may have been executed by American soldiers in instances where they weren't certain of being able to move them off to POW camps. Certainly in the Pacific so many Japanese soldiers were hiding grenades and other things that it was probably difficult to trust any Japanese soldier who was attempting to surrender since it was a rarity and when it did happen there was a high probability of being tricked. SS soldiers who surrendered or were captured would frequently act like arrogant jerks from what I have read and so I'm sure if someone was giving you attitude that it would be a lot easier to pull the trigger. The problem for me with that scene is this - prisoners have intelligence value. Units send patrols out to capture prisoners as their main objective so commanders know the value of prisoners. Brad Pitt is not the only officer present during this attack or the aftermath. Where was the infantry company commander? Was the infantry a battalion sized group? I don't remember. If so where was the infantry battalion commander? Where were all the other company commanders and platoon commanders? That's the problem for me. The scene appears to portray Brad Pitt executing a German soldier with the full cooperation of every single American soldier who happens to be standing around after the attack. That changes the execution portrayal from one of 'well that's just war and people do things that are unsavory' to one of 'well that's war and American soldiers institutionally executed enemy soldiers attempting to surrender." If Brad Pitt's character simply shot the guy and everyone else sort of looked around and thought - what just happened? Well that's one thing. That's not how the scene went as I remember it. The entire American task force was basically standing around watching with approval as Brad Pitt executes a German soldier. If the German soldier was in the SS then perhaps it would be a little more believable / understandable but because it is just a random dude who isn't a fanatic it makes no sense (at least I don't remember him as being in the SS - if he was then my opinion might change although I still probably wouldn't like it). Commanders understand the intelligence value that prisoners have and for Brad Pitt to go through that whole scene without a single officer from the other units present at least making an effort to talk him out of his execution during his long diatribe with the prisoner seems more like an attack on the US Army as an institution than the portrayal of a soldier who had been desensitized by war. After the scene with the women and the scene with the AT gun I basically couldn't watch it any more and had to turn it off. They had some stuff with shooting Germans attempting to surrender in Band of Brothers and there was some of that in Saving Private Ryan too and they manage to pull that off okay. This movie takes it to an extreme though.

A couple of points about when vehicles enter a new waypoint location. If the designer places a rectangular block of say - eight wide by four deep - then the vehicles will normally tend to distribute themselves evenly throughout the painted block. However, there are occasions when, for some unknown reason, the AI will attempt to place two or more vehicles onto the same block and there is absolutely nothing that the designer can do about it. This is most frustrating when you want the vehicles to unload troops at a specific waypoint. When this behavior occurs the first vehicle to arrive will occupy the spot and then the subsequent vehicle (usually it is only one other vehicle when this happens, although more than one can do this on rare occasions) will stop next to the location it wants to occupy. The vehicle that is attempting to enter the occupied location will then sort of .... move in place a bit and turn ever so slightly which prevents troops from unloading since the vehicle never fully 'stops'. It does this until the vehicles move to the next waypoint. Sometimes this can be a side effect of a waypoint that has been painted too small, although it can also happen with a waypoint of any size so when it does happen there really is nothing the designer can do about it other than keep repainting the waypoint until it doesn't happen during testing. I don't know for certain what is going on in the image, but it could either be the game or the designer. Once again, unless the designer chooses to join the thread or someone looks at the scenario file itself we won't know what's going on in this particular scenario. The different vehicle facings do suggest that either the waypoint is too small or the AI vehicles are attempting to occupy the same spot since they would normally all be facing the same direction (the next waypoint or a spotted enemy) Keep in mind that the when the designer puts in the AI plan he has no idea where the player will be with his forces at any given point in time. Triggers help some, but if the player does something completely unanticipated the AI will not react to what the player is doing since the designer is essentially creating a plan to fight an opponent while completely blind as to what the player is doing. Imagine fighting a scenario by laying out all your plans before the scenario starts and then not adjusting or altering anything no matter what happens during the course of the battle. That's how an AI plan is created.

Without knowing what the designer's intent was it is difficult to figure out why these vehicles are sitting where they are sitting. My guess from looking at them is that the designer probably didn't expect the player to have LOS to that location at this point in time in the scenario. I would also guess that perhaps they might be a reinforcement group that appears at that spot as opposed to somewhere near a map edge and that they are scheduled to move somewhere at some future point in time - either by trigger or by time. Judging from their facing one of two things is going on. Either, as a reinforcement group or as an initial force, the designer neglected to position and face them and it wasn't caught during testing (I don't know if this scenario came with the game or if it is additional community content) or this particular AI group's next waypoint is located in the direction that they are facing and they are waiting for a trigger or point in time before they proceed. If this waypoint is not their initial waypoint then AI troops will face in the direction of their next waypoint although that was somewhat recently changed and additional tools were added so that the designer could face vehicles and even have them use reverse. I haven't created anything in a while though so I don't remember exactly when those improvements were added.

I can't imagine a situation in 1945 where the Western Allies actually push Soviet forces back and drive on Warsaw. With the scale of the forces arrayed against each other for both sides the most likely outcome in my opinion, for several months, would be a sort of shifting stalemate until one side or the other wore down enough to make a difference. I doubt if the soldiers of either side would have had very much enthusiasm for fighting an entirely new war against a dangerous and veteran foe. I think most soldiers from both sides were probably ready to go home happy that they survived as long as they did.

The Soviets had a demonstrated advantage in the jet department as was shown in Korea, although the US adapted fairly quickly once they realized the disadvantage. Pershing / Super Pershing and T54 would be interesting.