Andrew H.

You laugh, but not having the correct stats and modelling for fish in the Space Lobsters of Doom would be just like giving tanks "hit points" in CM. Halibut are, of course, delicious...but they don't produce the cod liver oil without which interstellar travel is not possible.

Your Marder has lasted longer than mine usually do when I have to use them against infantry! And seems to have been pretty effective - IIRC, Marders only have about a dozen HE rounds, and I know they don't have a MG, so if it lasts another turn, you may be approaching the maximum possible anti-infantry effectiveness anyway. Of course it's going to be hard not having any AT assets...

Time grog!

It wouldn't have made any - the Germans had a lot more going against them than just gas shortages. While the KT can be almost invulnerable in an appropriate defensive position, in the bulge it was used to attack up narrow roads in a heavily wooded where it could be easily flanked and where it couldn't use its best asset (its gun) to advantage. The fact that if you sent a company 10 miles, half of the tanks would break down on the way wasn't a good thing, of course. Finally, consider the fact that even if you have as much gas as you need, you are going to have to resupply your tanks, and this resupply is done by trucks or at dumps, all of which are vulnerable to artillery and air attacks. But the history of the Tiger II, especially in the West, is mostly a history of them getting knocked out by flank shots or left behind by their crews when they broke down or their supplies were interdicted. I don't know of any instances where any Tiger II performed anything like the Tiger I did - I think 10 Tiger 1 commanders had over 100 kills, and 10-1 kill ratios were not uncommon for individual commanders of Tiger Is. There weren't any 100 kill Tiger II commanders, and as far as I can see the tank performed less well than the Tiger I.

I think the MG's role is to suppress enemy troops to either give something else time to kill them, or to suppress them so that your troops don't have to worry about them for a while. This works best at a distance where the enemy troops can't effectively shoot back (although good cover will reduce this distance). I've had battles where, as I was playing, I realized that the MGs were really the key to my success, and then was surprised to look at the end screen and see that they caused far fewer casualties than I would have expected given how important they were. (The .50 cal is qualitatively different, though - you really can blast people out of cover with it.)

If you look at police action shootings, you'll see that the overall accuracy rate is something like 15-20%, with the accuracy being ~30% under 3 yards; 10% 3-7 yards (the most common range), and ~5% at 7-15 yards. (The criminals overall have an accuracy rate of about 10%). These numbers are broadly similar for pistols and revolvers, although revolvers do seem to be slightly (1-2% more accurate). So I'm not at all surprised that two tanks both trying to shoot each other at the same time would miss.

This is interesting. But I think including tank losses from the time before the shrecks and fausts were fielded is going to understate the effectiveness of these weapons. I.e., the fact that the USSR lost 20,000 (?) during Barbarossa, none to shrecks or fausts, isn't relevant because there were none fielded. Of course, using losses after late '43 seems like it would still only raise the effectiveness of a particular weapon to 1 or 2%. Although that might mean that losses to shrecks and fausts would be more like 25-30%, which may be right, but which is way higher than I would have expected given the limitations of the weapons.

The Big Red One?

The men in that Sherman are entering medal of honor territory!

While the atomic bombs certainly brought an end to the war against the Japanese, it's important to keep in mind that the Japanese were basically already militarily defeated by the time the bombs were dropped; they just hadn't admitted it to themselves yet. I don't think that atomic bombs would have had the same war-winning effect against the victorious USSR as they did against the Japanese. For one thing, there is the problem of delivering the bombs - japan was virtually denuded of aircraft, but the USSR had tens of thousands of aircraft (I'm not sure how many, but they produced 40,000 in 1944 alone). I'm not sure you could get any bombers from the UK all the way to Moscow or Leningrad at all - but certainly you wouldn't want to risk your rare atomic bombs on that chance until you have much better odds of getting there alive. And trying to bomb factories in the Urals would be even more difficult. Meanwhile, the Red Army is sitting right across from you in Germany. Second, the USSR lost more than 600,000 people in the siege of Leningrad. Not that they want to get nuked - but the 60-80,000 people an early bomb could kill under ideal circumstances wasn't the worst thing that they'd seen. (And note that the Japanese were basically strolling about when the bombs were dropped; used to 1,000 bomber raids they didn't really pay attention to a lone bomber overhead. I wonder about the effectiveness of these bombs against people in bomb shelters in stone cities.)

Awesome! Oh, I'd hate it. Right. And I've yet to see a game that would simulate the not-uncommon event of a company getting lost while trying to find the start line and showing up two hours late. (In CM terms the game lasts 2 hours and you keep walking toward a VL that keeps moving away from you. And you never encounter any other units...) My mom would. She has a kind of competitive streak, too!

I think that armor is more powerful in CM than it should be. But there's not an easy way to fix this, since by far the biggest reason is the player's GodView . Infantry-armor cooperation was really hard, and the US spent most of '44 trying to get it right; they finally found that semi-permanently attaching independent tank battalions to an ID was the best way for the units to get used to each other. (And of course they installed phones so that the infantry and armor could communicate - and later radios, but not until '45 I think). And for a lot of important battles in '44, they *didn't* have it right - the tankers and infantry had different radios; to communicate, the infantry company commander had to radio division HQ, who would pass a message to the tank battalion's HQ, who would contact the company, who would contact the appropriate tank platoon commander and explain what was needed. But in CM, this communication is instant and telepathic, and even if a tank hasn't spotted an infantry unit, it can still know to area fire a random bit of forest halfway across the map. For this to work realistically, we would need a cooperative game with one person controlling the tanks and the other the infantry. If I, as the infantry commander, needed help, I should have to call my mom and describe what I need shot at. She would then call your mom and describe what I need done. Your mom would then call you with instructions on what to shoot. The GodView topic has been discussed to death lo these many years, and I agree that taking away too much control from the player leads to much worse situations than we have now. But I think it is the largest contributor. There should probably also be a lot more infantry-only battles. And more infantry-light battles...a tank battalion per ID means a tank company per regiment or a tank platoon per battalion; a lot of QBs seem to have more like a tank platoon per company. (And, yeah, maybe it's the lead company, etc....)

@OP: Instead of asking us which one to buy, you should choose randomly and then let the Forum tell you why you chose the wrong one!

That was my favorite!

We also need a "fix bayonets" and a "charge" command.

That's right, of course...but context took me there via Feldhaubitze...

I'm reading Zaloga's "Armored Thunderbolt: The US Army Sherman in WWII" (a great book for people who like 350 page books on the history of a tank...which I assume is everyone.) In any event, he points out that before the Schreck was developed in '43, a german infantry regiment had six AT guns capable of defeating the Sherman. Afterwards, they had the same six guns, plus 18 Schrecks, plus...a little later...hundreds of fausts.

While I generally agree with this, CMFI is making me revisit my ideas about buildings - so often on these maps you have the choice between being in the rocky, unforgiving open, behind a low wall, or in a nice stone building with thick walls. ****SPOILER***** After being trounced (by the AI!) in the first scenario "Beyond the Belice", I realized that the key was to grab the buildings and use them as strongpoints to shoot up the unprotected enemy infantry in the open. I "realized" this because it's what the AI did to me.

The carbine was more effective than the .45 or Thompson it replaced; I would call it successful when used as originally conceived. I think most of the WWII complaints about the carbine come from it being used as a Garand replacement by paratroopers. It's clearly not a Garand. (Although whether paratroopers would have been better off with Garands is not easy to answer; certainly some paratroopers took Garands anyway.)

Obviously when the space lobsters sent soldiers back in time to change Earth's history in the 20th century, some anachronisms were bound to show up. It is unavoidable. Even the powerful Claw Mind's knowledge of the distant past is limited by the data in its buttery memory banks. Its delicious buttery data banks... CMFI is just one battle in the larger space lobster campaign, after all.

I really like "Eisenhower's Lieutenants" for an overall strategic appreciation of the decisions that went into Overlord and beyond (like whether it would have made more sense for the US to be on the left and the UK on the right; and the reasons for choosing an attrition strategy). But my eyes glaze over when history goes to the next level down, where the XXXV Corps is doing X, while the LV Corp is doing Y, and the XXXXI Panzer Corps is doing Z...meanwhile, CCB of the 395th is doing A. It just kind of all blurs together because I don't know enough about the various corps for them to be anything other than a list with little context. An exception to this are most BotB histories, since the actions of platoons and companies really did have a huge effect in the first few days of the attack.

Sometimes you just have to dig into principal...

I love sliders and toggle switches. Preferably both.

It seems giving the bazooka to the AT gunners is the worst thing you can do with it. the problem is that the AT gunner is better off using the actual AT gun than the bazooka. But if the AT guns is knocked out - by mortars or direct fire or whatever - it seems likely that the guy with the bazooka will also be killed, or at least broken. So you'll almost never get to use the bazooka - either because the ATG is better, or because you're dead.

Well, it's hard to know what effect having seen a training film would have on GI's down in their foxholes while the MG-42 is fired overhead; I'm guessing not much... Still, the most dangerous thing that soldiers can do, generally, is to take cover and not return fire. (A problem with US troops in Normandy; maybe a problem with all untried troops). So by convincing them that they can shoot back effectively (even if not as effectively as they might think), the film is helping save lives overall. And the film is sophisticated in that way - sure, there are a lot of German bullets flying around...but they're not that accurate! And don't worry about shooting back; you'll be more accurate than they are. So it almost doesn't matter if the mg 42 is more accurate than depicted and the m1919 is less accurate: to survive you have to shoot back with what you have, since you won't be issued with a different MG.