Sergei

Why people play wargames? -tactical and strategic games cultivate brains and improve logical thinking -great heroes have always been respected, even in the bible there are legendary war stories, and it's historically been considered the way of manful men to fight for their country -World War 2 was such a spectacular play, a battle between good and evil, and with endless numbers of battles with endless numbers of stories about them Now, I'd like to moralize a bit. I think some irrealistic wargames can give a totally wrong picture of what war is all about and thus slightly alter the way people think of war. Especially 3d doom/quake-like shooters can give false, glorified form to war, just as Rambo's and such in the field of movies. Tactical games like CM also have one interesting detail - you are a commander, and so you can order your men to charge into Hell without necessarily thinking that in real life you should be hanged for sacrificing them. Not like I wanted to burst into tears when a 105 mm barrage killed a squad of mine in a computer game, but that's the point. No sane person can be expected to react in the same way to a game and real life, but how do I know if all the Tarantino films etc. I've seen have made me more cynical and less caring, or even worse? Should I be worried about myself? What if I start thinking I'm an SS-Captain? Sieg heil.

Once in early stages of Operation Barbarossa, when Germans met KV-1, they were having very difficult time with it. None of their guns could penetrate it, they just had hit its track so it sat immobilized on a tactically important spot, blocking Germans advance for hours. Germans brought a FlaK 88 within range thinking they were unspotted, but then the KV's turret turned to their direction and destroyed the gun. I wonder if CMII can model that kind of operation...

I myself have served in crew of an old fashioned, 1950's legacy, recoilless AT gun. With the little peacetime exercise I had with it, I would like to bring a couple of issues we had trouble with. On sunny days the whole thing could get very hot, and after a couple of shots the breach was so hot that keeping a shell in the bore for a minute heated the explosive so much that the shell was guaranteed to fly higher than expected. In winter conditions there would be the other end, a cold shell could fall too short. Sometimes we had otherwise prime conditions but had to shoot several shots at the target without hitting it. Then the gunner noticed that the sight had tilted slightly, resulting in inaccuracy. He was a good gunner and usually hit with first or second shot, but he just had forgotten to check the sight. A human error! And the calibration could have shifted anyway. These kinds of things can't be properly modelled in a wargame, so it's not wrong to have some randomness in game to compensate.