dieseltaylor

.....and possibly with PBEM for the tiny minority who insist on playing fellow humans around the globe. : )

Erik Good research. I had great trouble with a RoW game calculating how the points worked : ) One thing I did not find out was whether there was a difference in elite lorries getting off as opposed to conscript lorries .....

"So take a chill pill and realize you aren't the only foce in the universe and accept the fact that other people should get a shot at something they want to see, not just you." Steve !!! Hohum! Its fine by me that BFC get a break from WWII. I am disappointed, and have never had any urge to play modern hypothetical so will be very happy to fill in on Les Grognards for a couple of years.

So presumably manually putting in a fast move, V arc, and a reverse, would have been a safer bet?

I am a little disappointed that the sneak has been rumbled and broadcast as useful : ( I did so enjoy thinking my troops were better trained than JC's!

Very interesting thread and excellent posts. The whole what-if for the Second World War seems to have a vary solid base to start from.!

roqf77 ino u hve dyslexai but ur spelling seems good now but i still do not understand the lack of capitals i realise its easier for u to write but it is harder for everyone else to read whilst i could ignore everything you write it does make the thread less easy to read and uy domakesome gud points

Many accounts of the Second World War record units becoming isolated as the wires were cut by shell fire - or infiltrators. Summoning of reserves, supporting artillery etc. hten became tricky : ) Keeping your comms. operating was vital and a enormous amount of effort went into it. Obviously as the war went on radios for infantry become available but were restricted in range and ruggedness. Also ,depending on the army, what level they came down to.

I can see that it is possible to have French, US, British and NZ troops against the Italian/Germans. However as this is very ahistoric I would not recommend at any time mixing nationalities. It certainly happened during the war but on very rare occasions. Most players will throw a wobbly if you were to spring it upon them as a surprise.

Have you a manual?

Finally sussed how to get Paypal working for me when sending to cgoz. Thats a relief : ) GJK a piece of cake.

But you only joined the forum in May! : ) I had actually forgotten about that problem it is so long since I played CMBB with an attack defense! It is worth reading the tips etc. as there are lots of little nuggets hidden away. I respect the fact that the more you play the more you learn and theoretically the better you play. Are little pixeltruppen may not get bonuses for experience but we sure do : )

As it is designed as against AI, Allies then German, I imagine it is unbalanced for human play. I am going to start as the Allies today so if you want to play along we can see in the end how well our respective ideas panned out. Obviously it will not necessarily prove much as luck can ruin the best of plans : )

I agree with your points Jason. This preference of mine for big maps with floaty flanks does allow for positions to be gained without the head-on for the flag which can never be anything but bloody. The thread has made me ponder a little more on the ways to make players and the game more realistic. For kick offs if Battalion and Company leaders units are written off then to my mind the global morale should go off the scale. So to if the platoon leader cops it the unit morale precludes anything other than self defence for the squads until re-officered - or at least significant minutes delay to the platoon. Troops could drop levels Veteran to Regular etc to simulate the fact that it is probably the fighters of the outfit who are more likely to cop it and those who are left are more conscious of staying alive and therefore cautious. Say by thirds of a platoon. Whether the percentage of troops left alive to started can be factored in .... And what is highly amusing are those threads discussing whether retreating off-board is gamey - guaranteed to increase bloodshed if you do not! Funnily enough actually I have only done retreating off comparatively rarely which is probably me worryibg about global morale : (

I do not think anyone really disagrees with JC on the downtime and ineffectiveness of soldiers, weapons systems in RL , on average, but it is the extension of this to almost deny any aces , any exceptional happening , as an anomaly to be ignored or scorned again and again and again. So we have RL incidents to put against his general grumble and it is irksome after so many years. The fact that I am apparently an oddity in that I do not press attacks when I do not think they succeed so I find the CM games not necessarily hugely bloody. So is the answer that the games lethality is correct but it is the way people play it, and the winner takes all approach, small maps,the inability or unwillingness of some people to retreat, that provides the blood baths. Not to say that for precisely some of these reasons that bloodbaths did ocur in RL as the CMAK Companion shows several times over. A German tank group attacking British ATG's in a grove may seem incredibly dramatic but the ATG's were not able to run away so fought till the end ---- I would say that that episode happening in CM would seem very natural and true to RL. Yes it is exceptional but that we chose to fight exceptional battles again and again is fine with me. Perhaps CMX2 will provide some opportunities to tweak the way the game plays? However I undersatnd that within CMAK the global morale in Probes is quite fragile and might already answer the bloodiness complaint - however I know of no one who has played a Probe battle.

No AA again I suppose Tsk!

Actually on the wargaming front I have actually played Sid Meiers Gettysburg with a random scenarios and had battles with the dead amounting to a handful for each side. I think it is a tribute to the game, and to the Generals. that realising what can be accomplished by your troops in the time allotted/position to be taken/ makes stupid assaults a nono. I also fought CM's with very light casualties where the position is such that further attacks are suicidal as the position to be gained is not worth the candle. I am not sure if this is a function of playing on large and huge maps were manouvre allows you to gain local superiority despite having nominally equal forces. It can easily be that the actual fighting revolves around a single point with relatively few troops fight over what they believe will be the game winning flag. Overall losses tend to be small. For those that play CM on small and medium maps were weapons can be used to cover vast sectors of the field then, unsurprisingly, low casualties and the ability to win areas by movement go out the window. Finally if you look at CM battles as the tip of the spear jobs then high casualties may be reasonable. But for pities sake do not spread them over what the division did that day. If there is a big call for more realism to root out the pernicious lie of exciting battle sperhaps we can have a catering Corps module in CMX2 where we can do providing food etc under intermittent fire with mod-on recipes : )

"On the subject of 20% losses at Gettysburg and somebody thinking those are high, try playing a 3 day op in CM and see if you can manage to get 70% of both sides combined to walk off the field alive afterward. These guys fought in close order at ranges down to point blank, 150,000 of them on a tiny field, and fired at each other for days. And most of them didn't have a scratch. " I am bemused . .. I thought we agreed that most people do not fight but stand around waiting for sonmething to happen whilst a few units get really chewed up. So how come its now "150,000 of them on a tiny field, and firing at each other for days" I wish you would be consistent in whether everyone is involved for days, or that most are doing not a lot for days. I think it unfair for you to argue both points to suit your viewpoint.

Yet again JasonC believes his macro view is the only realistic view of warfare and that it translates to all action whereas all the points about the tip of the spear being where the action happens appears to pass him by. CM publish a nice little book about the CMAK arena full of the unlikeliest incidents, including non-lethal incidents that should have been lethal. They all happened so what is JC's beef about us alluding to them. We all know that warfare was chaos, and that only a few troops were experten, logistics were important, artillery was a killer etc. Nobody has problems with that it just seems that JC wants us to ignore what happened on the front line - or at least subsume it into what the entire division, army or front did that day/ month /year/course of the war. The FAA was brilliant at Taranto. In my time scale of one day thye look brilliant to me. I suspect that JC can prove conclusively that for all the men /aircraft/ fuel and weapons used during the war they were less effective than ..... whatever. It is immaterial to my mind what they did over the war, they did do on that one day is sufficient reason to model/play an action on. As for this http://www.civilwarhome.com/lossesmeaning.htm does show the winners losses at Gettysburg at about 20%. I would call that fairly heavy given that the losses were no doubt spread over comparatively few divisions of the entire Army. So I have JC's explanation as to how ineffective the weapons/tactics were at Gettysburg but end up with 20% casualties - makes you wonder how they managed it. Probably a statistical aberration : )

Regarding aircraft carriers - I think some credit might be given to the designers that sea conditions in the Atlantic/North Sea would not be conducive to storing aircraft on deck. Even openings below deck could give problems to aircraft storage and weather effects. Given the proximity to land that the carriers were to routinely to operate then armoured decks really became a necessity. It would have been nice if they had been bigger and better but for the time very acceptable.

JC "dt - 26 Stukas perhaps, but 60 bombers overall - there were He-111s too. And she made port despite the damage. Not only that, but she was repeatedly raided while in drydock - (Malta was raided 58 times in one month). And yet repaired enough to put to sea and make it to Alexandria under her own power. Was fully repaired and served later in the Pacific." I posted because of the accuracy of the Stukas - perhaps you chose to miss that point : ).And I can confirm to you without fogging up the point of the post that Malta received many more bombs by number and weight than London during the war.

I suggest some look at the Flak gun thread I started last month! Only idiots play without buying some flak when planes are available.

"German Ju 87 Stuka aircraft of St.G 2 made their first raid on 10th January 1941 when they attacked and damaged HMS Illustrious, which limped into Valetta's Grand Harbour after six hits from well-aimed 500 kg bombs. (The carrier's aircraft had been lured away by Italian SM 79 aircraft of 32nd Stormo, allowing the 26 Stukas attacking flight access to the aircraft carrier). Than attacked the Illustrious with many near misses again in the Grand Harbour but with great destruction to the buildings in the nearby villages. " Not a bad strike rate for the Stuka's ?

I would imagine the impetus for carrier strike pilots to do a good job would be helped by the knowledge that success was enormously important to the war effort. Ground targets are there tomorrow and not as of great importance. Twenty, forty dead planes for a dead carrier is good results. The Skua accuracy report is very interesting - 8 out of 8 in a test on a light cruiser. Admittedly low stress but it seems to me - given Taranto - that FAA pilots always seemed to go target first and then if we survive lets try and get home.

"In fact, the same CEPs can provide a reasonable ball-park figure for an IL-2 or Stuka." I am just a little cautious about this phrase, it may well be true but we do know that the Ju87G had a very different mode of operation to that of the allied Fb's. As an aside I understood that the Stuka was THE dive bomber of WW2 in terms of accuracy and I assume it was sufficiently different from other bombers that extrapolation of performances to it or from it would have been rash.