Andrew H.

I agree, although Bil may be reluctant to drive his vehicles into an occupied urban area to demonstrate how vulnerable they have become.

Don't forget milk-swilling geriatric detective Barnaby Jones

I love that the first Market Garden beta has a big fight in it around a *windmill*! And that it involves a *Wirbelwind!*

Nice video. But needs a love interest to get the female viewers.

Remember, everyone has heard of the charge of the light brigade. Almost no one has heard of the charge of the heavy brigade.

IOW, airpower won the war for the Allies because it kept the flaks pointing up...

Actually, Fuel Packs might add some interesting realism to the game - "No, I don't want a platoon of Tigers - I can't afford the fuel. Give me a platoon of Pz III's instead - they'll run all day on one Fuel Pack!"

But this is where the focus on tactical wargames distorts what war is really about. The great accomplishment of the Soviets lay *precisely* in getting those odds over the Germans. That didn't happen by accident; the USSR didn't have 12 times the population of Germany, and its economic output wasn't greater than that Germany. So while the Germans are fiddling around with unimportant crap - "How can we build a tank to take on the T-34?", the Allies are asking the real war winning questions, like "How can we build 50,000 tanks, 100,000 planes, and 200,000 trucks". The US Army had something like 1000 airplanes in May 1940. After the fall of France, Roosevelt asked the right question ("How can we build 50,000 airplanes a year?" and not the German question ("How can we build a plane better than the Bf 109?")

One of the changes I'd like to see doesn't deal with the gameplay as much as it does with the QB selector. The way it works now, you can select the conditions of the battle, such as time of day, weather, and terrain, *or* you can set these to random. What I'd like to be able to do is choose random but exclude certain conditions. IOW, If I set up a QB, I might like terrain to be random *except* I don't want it to chose "city". Hills, forest, rough, village, town, I don't care - just not city. Or if I were planning a tank battle, maybe I woudn't want city or forest. Likewise, I don't care if I fight at dawn, dusk, or midday, but I might not want to fight at night. And maybe I'm okay fighting in most weather conditions, but I want to exclude deep mud.

This, basically. "Sarge is hit! Quick, grab his Thompson!" - didn't happen, as far as I have ever read.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if CMx2 already had all (or almost all) of the tools to model 1941 Soviet troops and tanks; there is a profound difference between playing the US and playing the Italians in 1943. Even with tanks - play with green tanks and keep them buttoned up and they have a hard time spotting *anything*. But it's also important to remember that the Soviets weren't really like the Italians - they did tend to fight pretty hard, and they didn't readily surrender. They carried out attacks which failed not due to the troops giving up as much as through the attack being somewhat inept. (And the ineptness was partially due to bad leadership, but also partially due to the fact that the training and equipment of the troops at that time did not usually permit good inter-branch cooperation, and the absence of lower level leaders often meant you had larger (and clumsier) maneuver elements than would have been true in the German army. But it's also important to remember that 90% of the Soviet tanks were not T-34s or KVs; they were T-26s and BT-7s and other tanks that were, overall, quite inferior to the Pz III's, IV's, and even 38(t)'s fielded by the Germans. T-34s and KVs were, of course, a different story...but I think that some historical successes against these tanks could be duplicated due to the tanks (presumably) weak spotting ability in CM terms, allowing weaker German tanks to evade, or flank, or allowing AT guns to be set up. (The more common way of dealing with large number of these tanks - bypassing them and waiting for them to run out of gas - is outside CM's scope. (It's also important to remember that German initiative in Barbarossa meant that the Germans generally had numerical superiority where and when they attacked).

"Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves?" Although he may have another quote in mind...

I don't like StuGs in most QBs. I don't have a problem with them being turretless, but the fact that the STuG only has the "hatch MG" often ends up being a problem, particularly as the commander has to be exposed to fire it. This isn't an issue in tank heavy fights, of course.

I don't think that this is very realistic: tankers could usually tell if they got a penetration because they could see what they were looking at, usually with magnification. There were also (often? always?) tracers in the shells that would let them know if something bounced off. If you read reports, tankers usually know if they got a penetration or not. It might be more realistic if the marker that shows when a tank is knocked were disabled - particularly in those cases where you get a penetration, the crew dismounts, but the tank is actually fine and the crew can remount once their morale recovers.

Dikes and dams that can be breached during the game and will gradually flood the map if not plugged by engineers!

1. Put your AT guns in trees, but not at the edge of the trees. They should be one (or more if you still have LOS) actions spots back. 2. They should also not be in a location where a lot of units will have LOS to them - reverse slopes or behind other cover is good. As (2) implies, they also tend to not work well in the main line of defense. But they can work pretty well to protect flanks. So if I'm tasked with defending a village near the middle of the map, I might put a couple of AT guns near edge of the map closest to me, not visible from the enemy start line or even main approach to the village. The goal is not to assist in the main defense of the village, but to prevent the attacker from sending tanks or infantry on a long hook to envelop the village from a side. In this context, facing isolated enemy units, they tend to work pretty well.

Also, to a Panther, 100 mm of armor is just the same as 23 mm of armor...

Last night I was rocking 45K/s, with an estimated download time of 9 hours... But at least it was ready this morning.

I'm a big fan of probes, too; I think that ratio gives a pretty well balanced scenario where the attacker can be burned if he is careless.

Ewww...did you extensive physical training include massive tongue stretching? And what if lashing them up and down with your tongue *makes them* impatient and frisky?

That kind of wouldn't surprise me - it is, if you think about it, kind of funny that *Sicily* is the main game and *Italy* the module.

I think that's mostly right, in general: Americans don't want to eat something's face, and we don't want to eat the other end necessarily either, and well, of course not the organs. But there are lots of exceptions, and if you go to a specialty shop in a larger area, you can get pretty much anything you want - the butcher shop I went to last weekend had just made a big "black" bologna, for example. (Also, blood is usually not popular either...)

Good idea! Wedge formation: the Elefant at the center; one Brummbar on each side and slightly further back, and then the Pz IVs farther back on the flanks. And then *boom* - the Wedgie of Death goes right between the tits!

I think it's fair to say that the US had troops in WWII who would definitely have met the definition of conscripts. But they were salted in with more experienced troops - I also think it's fair to say that the US didn't have any companies made up entirely of conscripts, and probably not any platoons. Here's a former artilleryman's recollection of being used as infantry at Bastogne.

Some people prefer barmaids...and some people prefer chickens. Not that there's anything wrong with that. On the actual topic, such as it is, the equation used to calculate the estimated release date (ERD) also needs to factor in the facts that: (1) the game is available for pre-order; and (2) beta testers are doing Gustav Line AARs even as we speak.