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Andrew H.

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Posts posted by Andrew H.

    The relative effectiveness of the allied and axis armies in the ETO

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    I'm not sure I buy that the Soviets were all that great. For Bagration, they outnumbered the Germans 12:1 in guns, 10:1 in tanks/assault guns, 9:1 in aircraft and 5:1 in manpower. Give me those ratios in a quick battle :).

    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?")

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    New features/feature ideas for CM for the next few years thread

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    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.

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    Let's do this thing

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    Its just not a good enough excuse to pick up a weapon because its 'cool', to throw down your government issued big-bullet rifle and pick up a machine pistol with half the range and inability to pierce buildings. The folding stock M1 carbine is a 'cool' weapon too but nobody's thinking about tossing aside his M1 Garand for one.

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

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    New features/feature ideas for CM for the next few years thread

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    What you're asking for re: C2 problems also is already represented; Italian vehicles with no radios are noticeably worse at spotting things than the US ones with a) better vision arrangements and B) hints via C2 as to where to look. Bil v GaJ showed that poor vision arrangements (I'm looking at you, buttoned M10) are largely faithfully modelled (to GaJ's cost), so cheap-ass early T-34s may suffer from similar problems. Maybe the disadvantages need tuning a little, but they're there.

    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).

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    FoW, 'Please, sir, I want some more".

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    That is incorrect. Currently we have the option of either showing friendly & enemy hit text or neither. I wish to have the option for only friendly to better maintain FoW.

    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.

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    Infantry need some advice.

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    In comparison to the old CM, it seems much more difficult to protect infantry from tanks and arty. It is hard to believe that I can't move infantry into rubble. Basically, if your opponent has a large tank force, it just pays for him to systematically rubble buildings, even if empty, to deny the coverage to the infantry and force them to move in the open. Also, is just does not seem like reverse slopes offer much protection for infantry or AT guns.

    Any tips for protecting my units? What is the best terrain for them and the best way to move in fight when faced with a lot of heavy ordinance?

    Aside from bocage. What is the best way to conceal AT guns? I try to hide them in terrain but they seem to get spotted a great deal before firing a shot.

    Also, is it just me or do MGs never jam in CM2?

    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.

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    ALLIED : Gustav Line BETA AAR Round Two - Eye of the Elefant

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    Yes, they were. But it had nothing to do with its armor. Speed, my man, Speed. They were the formula one's of the battlefield and moved fast enough that if they were flanking a german tank, the German gunners had problems with their turrets rotating too slow or with getting the correct lead on the enemy armor since they were not use to seeing that type of speed.

    You cannot kill WHAT YOU CANNOT HIT.

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

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    4 to 6 weeks

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    I've also had extensive physical training and if someone sat across from me and saw me in person I might well want to lash them up and down with my tongue before they get inpatient and frisky.

    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?

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    Gustav Consommé Ready?

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    'Pologies. It's a common perception over here (fed, of course, by Duh Meedja) that Americans in general don't eat much offal or "secondary" cuts (skirt, neck, tail, and I suppose cheeks :) etc.), or at least the non-prime cuts get turned into ground meat. Is that a misrepresentation, or are you a discerning exception to the general rule?

    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...)

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    Gustav Line Beta AAR Round Two PEANUT GALLERY

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    Considering his formidable armor I'm very surprised that Bill hasn't quickly advanced his tanks as a bloc, absorbed a few blows to the front then picked off the enemy as they made their presence known. He's utilizing his Elephant as though it was a StuG. Creeping forward then retreating at danger. Normally I'd be behind this sort of tactic but dude, 200mm bow armor and an 88! Mike Tyson doesn't run away from a scuffle! :D

    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!

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    What does "Conscript" mean in CM terms?

    in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy

    Posted

    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.

    After we were there for a day or two, the 101st Airborne Division took charge of us, organizing us into groups. They told us what we had to do and where we had to go. We became infantrymen instead of artillerymen.

    Our roadblock was the second of three lines of defense. The 101st guys with their tanks were in front of us -- they were clever boys, the real fighters. Behind us was a field with artillery that fired over us.

    It was a pretty good unit on our roadblock, 75 to 100 guys. Some were 101st guys, and there were some Army engineers and stragglers from other units mixed in there, too. We all had M-1 rifles, and some had carbines. But we had cooks and bakers who hadn't fired a gun in years.

    We spent four or five days at the roadblock in the cold and snow. We were off to the side of the road and had trees, stone walls and foxholes for protection.

    The Germans shelled us to soften us up and made several runs at us. They would first run into the 101st guys farther out. And the gunners behind us would fire their howitzers to the point where they were told to slacken off because we didn't have that much ammo.

    We could see the Germans and their tanks. We'd crouch down, hold fast and hope they'd get stopped before they got to us.

    That was crunch time -- fear and anxiety time. But they never quite got up to us at the roadblock.

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    Doing the math for release dates

    in Combat Mission Fortress Italy

    Posted

    Personally, I prefer to toss a handfull of chicken bones into the air and observe the pattern they make on the ground over the word of a barmaid any day.

    Michael

    Some people prefer barmaids...and some people prefer chickens. Not that there's anything wrong with that. :D

    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.

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