Andrew H.

I've done several battles where I've attacked with Greens vs. Veteran troops, and what's interesting about doing that is that the best way I've found to attack with inexperienced troops is similar to Gustav's way of defending: use two waves. The first wave will not be enough to take your objective, but you can cause some casualties and, ideally, cause the Vets to run low on ammunition. Sometimes you can use artillery to good effect, if you decide ahead of time that you won't try to take the VL with your first wave and instead hit it with artillery. Often, that's where the enemy will be. (And green arty is better than conscript, although it's not exactly flexible). Only after your first wave is completely exhausted should you bring up the second wave; a fresh wave is often enough to overcome the worn out veterans. But you have to be careful -- a fresh vet platoon, perhaps with an MG, can, in an ideal situation, completely devastate a green company. This happens if you advance too quickly and your greens get caught in close range firefights, pinned, and then shot up at leisure. Maybe with conscripts you could use *three* waves.

While I'm not sure exactly how he meant the comparision, I think Lewis' comparison of the T-34 to a StuG with a turret is a useful way of thinking of the tank. Not because the T-34 was designed the way the StuG was (as Skipper points out, the Soviets produced their own self-propelled artillery), but because in CM 2, there will likely be some similarity between playing a T-34 vs. early war Germans and playing a self-propelled gun vs. the Allies in CMBO now. Although I think really it would be more like playing a Jgpz IV L/70 vs. the US equipped with Sherman 75's now. Jgpz IV has a devastating gun and lots of frontal armor. But it also has a low rate of fire and is vulnerable to being flanked. With a lot of caveats, this would be a T-34 in Spring '42, when the MkIII's with the long 50's were just becoming available. If the T-34s/Jgpz IVs are positioned correctly, they can ambush the opposing force and devastate the attackers while being subject to very little risk of damage from their front aspect. But if they are not in a useful ambush position, or they have to shift positions, they become vulnerable to flank shots at meaningful ranges. Obviously, you have to do some fiddling to get things right -- as slow as the T-34's turret might rotate, it will still be faster than rotating the entire tank. On the other hand, C&C restrictions would probably make early war T-34's react more slowly to unexpected flanking attempts. But the burden is squarely on the German player to make the flanking move/discomfit the Sov. player in the first place. If the German charges headlong into the T-34, he dies. If the Sov. player figures out where/how the German player might attempt a flanking move, and covers that area, the German is also in bad shape. Sounds like a lot of fun, as both players try to maximize the strengths of their tanks and minimize the weaknesses.

While, as I've posted in other threads, I'm disappointed that there is a "system" that puts so much emphasis on purchasing correctly (the area that historical commanders had the least control over), I'm pleased that the "system" is not so powerful that it prevents good players from beating bad players.

To return to the topic, as it were, there are numerous documented cases of Mad Tank disease in CM. The most common symptom appears to be firing smoke instead of HE at infantry, but there are a wealth of other symptoms, such as ignoring other tanks and targeting infantry, rapidly switching between targets, and, in extreme cases, backing toward the enemy. MTD is almost always fatal.

I want to second Banshee's point about it being harder to defend village-type terrain. I can think of two main reasons for this, although there might be more. The primary advantage that I find villages give the attacker is that they negate the defenders' - for lack of a better word - foxhole advantage. That is, as soon as the attacker can get a toe-hold in the village, it's almost always over for the defender because now the attacker's cover is as good as the defenders', and there are a lot more attackers. I recognize, of course, that the attacker does have to reach the village in the first place, but I tend to find that the losses he suffers doing so are not so grievous as to prevent him from winning once he has captured part of the building. The second reason that villages hamper the defender is that they tend to constrain at least part of the defenders' set-up (unless the map is so felicitous that the defender can completely ignore the presence of the building). In part, the defender has to form a defense around the building to keep the attacker from using it for cover. Also, buildings block line of sight, which is bad for a defender, in most cases, so the defender will have to set up in a way to maximize his line of sight despite the buildings. Compare this with an attack in a rural/farm terrain type. Because there is no village that the defender must prevent the attacker from getting, the defender can choose a better defensive layout. Often, this layout can be more spread out than it would be defending a village, which reduces the effectiveness of the attacker's artillery. Plus, the advantage of the defender having foxholes vs. the attacker not having foxholes is significant. For example, two squads plus a HMG (in a wheatfield, say) can do a disproportionate amount of damage to an attacking company, while being almost immune to arty below 105mm. Occasionally, I've found that this set up can make the company almost unfit for further fighting -- one way to do this is have the HMG and one squad near the front of the wheatfield, where they can use long range fire against the advancing attackers. The second squad is kept farther back in the wheatfield (maybe 50m back or so), hidden, where he usually remains unspotted. Often the company will spend several turns shooting at the two units it can see, trying to suppress them; usually this requires heavy weapons. All the while the attacker takes its own casualties. Finally, the two units are suppressed and the attacker moves up a couple of squads, or maybe a platoon, to assault the suppressed units. Unfortunately, as soon as the advancing units get close to the suppressed units, the hidden unit farther back in the wheatfield opens up on them at close range, at best causing severe casualties, but almost always sending them retreating back to where they attacked from. Now the attacking company has to suppress *three* units before it can attack. The advantage of this set up, of course, is that the defender can have numerous small strongpoints like this across the board, each of which requires a certain amount of concentration for the attacker to take. But even if the attacker goes by the book and stuns the defenders with 150mm arty before mopping up with the company, theoretically taking few losses, the defender is still in a much better situation than he would be in in the village. First of all, the attacker has used a valuable 150mm firemission and has only affected two squads plus a HMG; typical losses to a defender in the village would be higher because troops are closer together. Second, the attacker does not, by dint of capturing the wheatfield, have cover equal to that of the defender -- he only has three foxholes to put his company in, and, assuming some intelligence on the part of the defender, the next strongpoint will now be able to open fire on the company sitting with no cover in the wheatfield. It *is* harder for the defender to shift units in more open battles, unless the hills are placed just so. Nevertheless, for the reasons listed above, I find it much easier to defend when I don't have to be the village people. (Edit) I would also recommend the "probe" type attack to people not interested in doing MEs all the time. IMO, it's more interesting than the straightforward attack, and is also, IMO, a better representation of the most common types of actions in CM's time scale. [ 04-13-2001: Message edited by: Andrew Hedges ]

I've always been a StuG fan, too. It was the most numerous German AFV, after all.

Although it's true that the computer sometimes picks weird forces, that looks like a pretty fair set up to me; in fact, it seems like the US might have an advantage, even, with two companies of combat engineers, plus 4 Hellcats, plus a Jackson TD. Speaking very generally, it seems like the Hellcats, working as a platoon, should be able to easily destroy all German AFV's but the Panther, and if the Hellcats work with the Jackson, they should be able to take out the Panther with no difficulty.

I don't think this has much to do with nazis; it's a Bundeswehr manual from December 1963.

Most of my CM MG experiences have been similar to those experiments posted by Ron. They show that MGs are plenty powerful weapons when used correctly (ideally, with interlocking fields of fire, etc.). I think the firepower is pretty much exactly right, and I think that the suppression level of the troops in the open is modelled about right, too. Now it may be that there needs to be some tweaking to reflect firelanes, which would allow more than one squad to be subject to be subject to a MGs FP -- but I don't think that the firepower itself should be any stronger. In fact, IIRC, ASL had firelanes, and MG FP was halved for MG's forming firelanes. I don't think that CM should halve the FP of MGs forming FLs, though. Although the decision to set up a FL would probably preclude shooting at other targets unless there was imminent danger of being overrun. But none of this really relates to a platoon assaulting a MG, since that MG can't set up a FL to stop that platoon, and (presumably), the platoon is not attacking single file.

I'd say 100 is about right, assuming (a big assumption, and one that's probably wrong) that other prices stay about the same. I reached the 100 number in a different way, though; an M4 costs 117 or so, IIRC, and a T-34 isn't as good as a Sherman b/c of the 2 man turret, amount of ammo carried, and some other reliability issues one hears about. Putting the T-34 at about 100 b/c of its performance vis-a-vis an M4 also has the advantage of allowing us to see how much a T-34 would cost vs. MkIVs, Panthers, etc. But, IIRC doesn't a Puma cost 99 pts or so? Wouldn't that suggest that a MkIII with the long 50 (i.e., same gun as the Puma) might cost more, which would make that tank more costly than a T-34? Which, counterintuitive as it seems, may turn out to be proper pricing based on 3-man turret, rotation speed, accuracy, etc. But I think I'd rather have a T-34. :cool:

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Panzer Leader: I would like to see any comment with the following phrases disallowed when arguing a point on this board: ..."Wouldn't be able to handle the processing power"... ..."micromanagement"... ..."gamey"... ..."ahistorical"... ..."outside the scope of the game"... <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Abolished? Abolished!?? These phrases should be required! Every time someone wants to suggest a new feature for CM, he should be required to first prove that the new feature is within the scope of CM, is historical, won't be gamey, won't lead to micromanagement, and can be implemented by regular computers likely to be owned by CM players.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Claymore: Question for the Bonus Round: Should massive casualties sustained to nearby friendly units add stress to that unit? Consider a sliding scale where Green troops are influenced more than more veteran troops. Likewise, non-fatal, non-casualty inducing hits...should they also cause penalties for stress? (Think Goodwood in 06/44) Cheers Murray nothingemial<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Probably not, although it depends on what your definition of "nearby" is. I would suspect that, in most cases, units would not know what causualties nearby units suffered, since (1) the troops are probably prone in all the dips, etc. that even open ground has; and (2) even if they saw another trooper go down, they would probably have a hard time telling whether the troops sustained massive casualties or just went to ground. I know that, in the Bulge, anyway, routing troops tended not to have much effect on troops that they routed past.

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Hilhil45: I never really cared for the eastern front. The russians just can't be as fun as the rest. In CMBO you can play french,US, bristish, canada, and germany. On the eastern front there was only the russians and germany.....But it will be fun to try the seige of lenigrad. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE> Oh, but there's a lot of variation, even assuming the Finns, Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Cossacks, Spanish, etc. are not in game. Germans vs. Russians in 1941 is completely different from Germans v. Russians in '43, and that is completely diffferent from Ger v. Rus 1945. By contrast, US v. Germans is about the same in 44 or 45 -- there are differences, but they are tiny. The new posting thing is okay, although logging in and the colors are annoying. The smilies are convenient, though