Andrew H.

The demo is just awesome! Remember how in Squad Leader the scenarios were sometimes so well designed that the whole game would come down to hand to hand fighting in the victory location on the last phase of the last turn? I had a very similar experience playing German in "closing the pocket". ***Possible spoilers*** The main objective in this scenario is to occupy the "command post" - a building in a small village. You can achieve this objective by taking the building, or buy occupying a small strip (10-20 meters in size) outside the building. This is made difficult by the fact that the building is in the middle of other buildings that obscure each other such that it is difficult to advance. I.e., while your troops are in a building, they can suppress other buildings with LOS to them - but when they move in the open on the way to taking another building, they will come into LOS of an unsuppressed unit that they didn't have LOS to while in the first building (and in the case of my troops, will be sent fleeing back into the first building). It seems *very* realistic. So there are five minutes left in the game. I've destroyed all of the US tanks and TDs, at the cost of one immobilized Panther with a non-functioning cannon (but working coax and otherwise in a good location) and two destroyed Marders. I've plastered the town with arty and area fire from my Panthers so that many buildings have been destroyed. But the ground is also pockmarked with craters, giving the defenders additional cover. However, my infantry is also in bad shape; my first platoon and one squad of my second have been shot to pieces, and the two almost full strength squads won't really advance in the face of any fire (this might be a global morale thing). I am only able to advance into the village at all by bringing up my mobile Panther (and then an armored car) and by firing at the defenders at almost point blank range. Two consecutive turns of trying to move my good squads into the VL fail, as a spattering of shots sends them howling back to safety. With two minutes left, I realize that I could move my AC to the yard of the VL building. I attempt to do so and the AC *bogs* in a crater 5 meters outside the green VL! The next turn it is immobilized...and the game goes into overtime! And that's basically how it ends - my weakened troops won't push into the building...and there's no room for my Panther to get to the VL since the one path is blocked by the AC (and I'm worried about losing my Panther). I did consider having the AC crew bail out into the VL, but I was afraid that they would be shot up. Game ended with a tactical German victory (primarily due to the US tank/TD losses)...but I don't think that the Germans will be leaving the pocket. The biggest shock for me has been the AI's use of arty; it's *really* good. Arty is what decimated most of my attacking troops; it also killed most of the supporting troops on the heights, immobilized my Panther, and destroyed two Marders and an AC. You can no longer park overwatching units in one place if the enemy has arty...after two minutes, they'll start dropping it on you. To use my Marders effectively, I had to creep them up the slope, let them shoot for a turn, and then back them back down out of LOS. (However, I can report that, unlike in the absolute spotting CM1 days, Marders *can* be effective). Awesome job. I can't wait for the full game - I'm really interested in how QBs will work. :-)

I don't think this is right - it seems like my halftracks were destroyed by MG fire all the time. (Well, maybe not all the time, but it certainly wasn't "very rare").

What is the arrow pointing to on the tank on the lower left? A peephole? A blowgun mount?

The messiah will be released when he is ready.

Nah, Shock Force isn't canon.

Guderian? Goebbels? Gold?

And "your" mentality led to the war CMBN simulates. Or maybe we should stay on topic and not attack the mentality of an entire country whose banking crisis, in any event, was not caused by people buying computer games on the internet.

Whose helmet mod is that?

Play the demo. I liked the mechanics of SF quite a bit; I just never got into the period or the asymmetrical nature of the warfare.

What I kind of miss, oddly enough, are the updates we used to get as the game was mailed out across the US and people came home from work. I.e., "It's in Ohio!" "It's in Chicago!" "Still not in Texas, dammit!" Of course, I want the game right away...

Just because you can't blow up bridges doesn't mean you can't blow up cement factories. And if the flowing cement from the factory happens to catch some tigers trying to cross a ditch - all the better. But I really want to be able to blow up dams and flood the fields - maybe the water level would increase by 2" per turn or something.

Actually, I think this is backwards. TDs, as such, were fine units and were often highly effective against enemy tanks. I'd much rather be in an M-10 facing a Tiger than in an M-4 - the slightly thinner armor on the TD won't make much difference. The problem with the TD doctrine is not with the TDs; it's with the *tanks.* TD doctrine said that TDs would fight tanks, and tanks would fight infantry. And as infantry fighters, tanks didn't need a gun that could take out a tank. Consequently, you have thousands of Shermans with the often ineffective 75mm gun, since the TD's with the 76's and 90's will take care of the tanks. This, obviously, didn't work in practice...but the flaw lay with the tanks' armament, not with the TD's.

I noticed that in the tank info boxes, the German tanks are listed as "destroyed," whereas the US tanks are described as "knocked out." Is there a reason for the difference?

I don't think that there was very much aiming going on in normal tank encounters: it was just too hard to hit the target in the first place, much less to estimate the range exactly enough to hit a particular part of the tank. Look at the Tigerfibel - it devotes 10 pages to estimating the range, calculating the size of the target, adjusting for the barrel being to the side of the optics, describing where to shoot HE, describing how to bracket a target...but there's no discussion on how to aim for the turret vs. the hull. There's even a discussion about how it's better to overestimate the range than to underestimate it (and about how the gunner can't estimate the range himself). Now maybe in a prepared position where you have aiming stakes and boresighted weapons you might be able to hit a particular part of the tank right as it crosses the aiming stake...but I don't that this was that common at all.

Maybe there should be a steam animation.

I think that this could be advantageous in certain circumstances, but there are three (at least) potential flaws with this approach: 1. It makes the tank a bigger target. Tanks tend to be longer than they are wide, and by angling the tank's hull, it becomes a wider target. Meaning that some shots that would have missed wide will instead hit the tank. (Since most misses seem to be vertical misses due to range estimation errors, this may not be that important of an issue, however). 2. It exposes the tank's side hull armor, although at an angle. The side hulls of most tanks are thinner and not as sharply angled as the front. Whether this is a problem depends on the particular thickness and vertical angle of the side hull; it is probably only really an issue in tanks where the side hulls are substantially thinner than the front. 3. It makes flanking easier. If a tank is situated at a 45 degree angle to the target, it will be easier for the target to get a side shot at the tank (better than the one it already has) because the target won't have to travel as far to flank. (Although this is obviously dependent on distance - it's a lot harder to flank a Tiger firing from a range of 1500 meters than a Tiger firing at a range of 300 meters). Related to this is the issue of multiple targets, where turning the hull at 45 degrees to one target probably will give the others a more advantageous angle than they would otherwise have.

Go Colts!!

I'm a big fan of early war, but starting with Bagration would probably be easier for non-grogs than dealing with T-26s and BT-7s vs. Pz. IIs and 35ts.

Actually, they probably told him "The Sherman tank is as good as any tank in the German army."

A GERMAN drink!

Finns are necessary. Other axis minors would be nice. But what I'm really looking forward to seeing are partisans!

Johan Kleinbeeren is dead. He fell on his head.

I've had a couple of Jav misses vs. moving targets recently; I assumed that was realistic because the targets were moving...

Of course if Hitler had gone to a full war economy in '39 rather than after Stalingrad, things might have looked different, too. For that matter, he could have really confused things by declaring war on Japan in '41!

The old chestnut about victors writing the history might have been true in the ancient world - but there are a *huge* number of German books written on the WWII. Many of which we recognize now pretty clearly glossed over certain issues... And I'm sure that there have been far more books written in the US about Vietnam than by the VN themselves.