dieseltaylor

And to me! Thanks. One day I might even do a scenario ....

Elmar that is brilliantly funny. Thanks. Great cure for depression : )

Very interesting. This caught my eye - a warts and all battle book http://www.101airborneww2.com/books.html

Great stuff to read. Thanks. As you know I have doubts on the game engines ability to reflect real life in bocage fighting. Reading the anecdotes confirms my belief : ) However if a scenario were done it would seem to me that using very reduced units and teams and snipers could give the more the feeling of man on man combat. Having said that I would personally find the game exceedingly tedious to play given the very large number of units and the terrain. Also BF scenery does not model very well for house fighting, church spires, or the bocage in general.

CAn I beta ? Please, pretty please BTW hanging on to old computers for special games is no hardship.

Doh! Gates.Now you mention it it does seem more obvious. I hope you got the Google map. I have calculated the big trapezoidal wood with sides of 400,446,467,and 477 metres. A smallish field 46*110 metres

I agree JK that it is tricky but compared to poxy assault boats .... I would tend to use half tracks and A/c's so everything would be up-gunned but also up-armoured so the relationship is probably intact. I like the trucks idea and I think it would play to the games strength, motorised units, better than an infantry raid. Also the time frame would be pretty much 1 to 1 in terms of action to minute rather than the accelerated blood letting normally seen. So airfield centrally placed in large large map and the raiders can come from any direction : ) Sounds doable with night or smoke to counter uberness. Furthermore Franko's Iron MAn rules might really work with limited units to play with. : )

Steve a] I have no doubt they were used and in certain areas would have been very effective. My problem is I suppose the common view that they were THE battle winning invention. Over-hyped I suppose is what I mean. : ) Also the fact there is bocage and serious bocage with no distinction made for the difficulties of the two. Unless one has seen firsthand the ten foot embankments with all the gubbins growing in there and simply think of a hedge as something people grow to separate their garden from neighbours you cannot appreciate the scale. b] CM's attempt sort of adds salt to the wound. If a "realistic" game gives that kind of tank power then the story is even more exaggerated. Given how much play is made of tanks being able to ride-up hedges but not wishing to expose the belly armour it was denying the Germans the tactical choice whether to risk it that made it all a mockery. ** Harry - thanks enormously for the map. I am not quite sure what the grid scale is and whether the contour lines are French derived and in metres rather than feet. I assume all the little measure marks are the actual hedge heights in feet ..? Ranging from the solitary 5' to about 18' therefore Great map. I am sure there were no large fields there : ) With scale I can calculate a few but await your confirmation as what WW2 scale they were using. Is it an annotated French map worked over ... Super stuff though and I am very impressed with the MAC set-up also. Very slick.

Luck. Other than that you do not attack Tigers with T34's Some people believe the 76mm is undermodelled in its performance. Battle reports do show Tigers shrugging of multiple hits in real life but CMBB seems to take it to extremes. I am sure someone will turn up and quote examples : )

Thanks again Harry So the victory reported was against a German screening force. Its funny how leaving out bits can so alter the importance of a story. Not suggesting you were being selective as you were quoting what was writ but that accounts in general do not always give the fullest picture. BTW I do think the stonk and advance was clever - having thought further the absence of infantry and the introduction of German mines may have made it a not so good idea - subject of course to the artillery barrage not being heavy enough to detonate sufficient. BTW do you agree with my field sizes work?

I think the thread showed something like a couple or a few men killed. I don't recall vehicle damage. The tests were thorough enough to support the conclusion.

Thanks Harry, Where did that come from? My gut feeling is that this would have been light bocage rather than the anywhere else. So if I locat the sector .... It seems to me the key was the selection of the terrain and the very important artillery bombardment to beat the Germans up prior to being stomped. A very cunning plan. The Press claims for the plow[plough] do seem over the top. Certainly BF's interpretation seems bizarre and given its unsatisfactory implementation probably should have been left out of the game. Of course skilled designers have found away around it by avoiding tall hedges in later scenarios or using trees to even up the game.

I am carrying on a parallel discussion at Band of Brothers and someone quoted this: The important thing here is that apparently that most fields fell into the 50-75 acre size which given the 640 acres to the square mile sounds reasonable number of say 10 fields to the square mile. It does not work so well if the contention of 500 fields to the square mile is also true. This would give an average figure of 1.6 acres to each field. For comparison apparently the modern English field averages 12 hectares or 30 acres and that is after 60 years of grubbing out hedges and mechanisation. Therefore I have a suspicion that the the figures first quoted are wrong - or I am : ) So the US football field seems right about mathematically averaged fields. Photo-recon photos do show a maze of fields and sizes in 1944 but unfortunately I do not have a scale to use on the photos. Incidentally in March the IFAB:

JasonC - theory fine, shortage of explosives was a concern. Also it did rather do away with the surprise element as you inserted your charges into the bank - well there could be a surprise stonk by the Germans. I think it is covered in one of the sources above from JK. Edit : I might aswell quote Zaloga A hedge every 75 metres. Curiously if you multiply that out as 75*75 it gives you a field of slightly over an acre - 1.16 to be a tad more accurate. [ April 08, 2008, 10:36 AM: Message edited by: dieseltaylor ]

Thanks JK - I will work my way through those links, of which over half are new to me. Interestingly nobody mentions the downside of digging into a slope that you wish to climb : ) - so far that is. In CMAK of course the removed hedges do not permit troops to scamper through or halftracks to drive through .... Definitely a bodgey job.

CMAK is superior to my way of thinking as you can have more balanced forces throughout the war in terms of tanks and counters. From the players point of view bogging is far less common. Ditto cowering. With the desert etc as another playing field and credible US and Commonwealth forces a nice range of weapons are available.

As you know I have strong belief the various devices stuck on the front of tanks in Normandy so they could swan through the bocage are primarily war time spin. The devices existed and did a grand show for the Press and Generals at a selected venue but in actual use against the real bocage? I have read various accounts of the problems with them such as: a] damage to the tank [ramming a tank into a mound of earth held together by roots could be painful to the crew and to the tank - how many times do you think you can do that in a day] b] the small fields* did not give room to accelerate [tiny would be more accurate compared to modern agricultural practice] c] ditto the mud/damp left tanks trying to gain good grip Now I have read first hand accounts, probably two or three, over the last decade or two and I would dearly love to find them again and publish the excerpts more widely. I cannot offer rewards currently : ( I am conscious that veterans are dying off also so if any of you are in contact with any vets who may know ...... Lastly for those who have never studied it you will find that contrary to any logic that the light tanks like the Honey swan through hedges in CM faster than the heavy tanks. And of course the German heavy tanks are too weedy to climb over or through any hedge a Honey/Stuart/m8 can negotiate in 20 seconds. I blame the inadequate German propaganda and tactics. : ) [ April 07, 2008, 01:25 PM: Message edited by: dieseltaylor ]

I know the Franch have to double up on words but what do you call a viola as in the stringed instrument? Or the flower? I have looked and is it pensee, and alto?

Anything with assault boats I have problems with as debarking may be OK but trying to re-embark and skedaddle is a nightmare. You could look at Popski's Private Army or the LRDG/SAS for doable land based scenarios. My gut feeling is that with uber-spotting a lot of these will breakdown as surprise is always a factor in the raids success. I can think of two ways about it. a: use smoke from mortars to cloud the battlefield b: night c: have multiple targets and allow the attacker to nominate None of these I fear will be entirely successful but may make it better. In BoB we have had two raid scenarios and one was quite good but not I think published by GAJ. I beleive that the CM series was designed primarily for armour with infantry a secondary and less well modelled support to the game - therefore - infantry based games are not favourite. You might look at a recon based scenario where by its nature there are many vehicles and fluid linesand with maps 4km wide there could be lots f fun.

Assuming your Panther crew knows where the shot came from ..... which it probably doesn't might make it leery of continuing into new territory. Edit : Misspelling of leery

Its times like these when buying a PanzerJaeger based on the IV series with the super 75mm reaps big dividends as they are routinely identified by your opponent as a common Stug : )

As this subject has come up I am currently playing a relative noobie and the concept of deliberately driving units off had never crossed his mind. In fact he thought it would be impossible. I vaguely remember someone suggesting it was unsporting - a view I disagreed with quite strongly. It was found that you could create a few men casualties by firing at the exit point on the turn or following turn - I cannot quite recall the detail. Smart and undocumented design!

VL - I was being ironic. Have played a couple of Italian games on huge. hilly maps and we are recording kills at 1000+ on armour. A pleasant change from all these tiny scenarios where small maps make for short distances for all the firing and movement and angles are constrained heavily. It is interesting when you have kilometre wide flanks from any flag. Players really can exercise the kind of thought that is indicated in pounding the Tiger detailed above.

Notice the short ranges in Europe --- 2400yds! Good item. Thanks JK

http://www.the-proving-grounds.com/ Nope , not last night nor this morning. : )