Amedeo

Mark, a copule of quick notes. I don't think the soviet tanks are undemodelled (and I play rhe Red Army 90& of the times). The armour model is probably the best ever done on a commercial wargame. The KV is an awesome beast against almost everything the german can throw against it in 1941. If you play with the right troop qualities you'll see the results your asking for. (Possibly there's a problem with the relative frequency of front turret hits on the T-34, see this thread ) Regarding the T-34 vs StuG-III issue: well, it's known that the German AFVs armed with the long barrel 75mm guns were very effective against T-34 tanks, even at 1000m and more. For what concernes NKVD blocking detachments, actually BFC planned to implement this but situation like those on the opening scenes of EatG movie turned out to be fictional. The action of NKVD in repressing the real or suspect cowardy was more indirect. In fact the only cases I know of, of blocking detachments shooting at retreating troops on the field, relate to regular army units that shot on their comrades (and you can do this also in the game, if you want). The starving of soldiers is out of the scope of tactical operations, but if you want you can simulate the reduced fighting ability with the fitness rating. Just my two cents. Regards, Amedeo P.S. I agree on the 'too much Iron crosses' issue, this is a symbol more related to the 1813-1918 Prussian Army, than to the Wehrmacht). In fact I'd prefer to see a Balkankreutz as unspotted unity marker, as it was in CMBO (and it would have no censorship problem since it's not a nazi symbol)

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If you look at the section drawings in Fig. 6 you'll notice that in fact it should probably be 120mm@60° for the upper hull and 100mm@30° for the lower hull. I think this is something that need to be addressed in a future patch. Regards, Amedeo

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You can also take a look at the various hull armour configurations for the IS-2 tank here . Regards, Amedeo

What about the 45mm canister rounds? (look at the picture here ) Amedeo

I was a bit puzzled by the front hull armour values in CMBB for late war variants of the IS-2 tank. For example the IS-2 Model 1944 is stated to have the hupper hull plate 105mm think, angled 60° from vertical and the lower plate 127mm thick angled 30° from vertical. Looking at the actual armour arrangements for the front hull you'll notice that the reverse is true, i.e it's the thicker upper plate to be more sloped Moreover, it seems that the early IS-2 Model 1944 in the game has a sligtly higher ROF than earlier and later models. This could be due to the adoption of a drop breech in the D-25 gun, but is this is taken into consideration, it should be also considered for the ISU-122S and later IS-2 models. Comments? Amedeo [ October 19, 2002, 12:49 PM: Message edited by: Amedeo ]

There has been in the past some perplexity regarding how some supposedly impregnable Ueber-tanks were actually destroyed at short combat ranges by frontal turret penetrations. I'm especially referring to the Tiger II in CMBO and the T-34-76 in CMBB. The armour penetration model seems to be accurate enough yet someone still thinks that those kills happen in the game more frequently than historical reports would lead us to belive. One of the explication proposed about this issue was that the geometrical model used to compute the angle of impact and hit location on AFVs was not dependent on the particular tank involved (save for overall size). A solution could be to give a special "narrow front turret" bonus to some tanks that have a very small front turret/mantlet area, thus allowing for a large portion of hits that would have otherwise striked on the actual turret front to hit at angle the sloped turret sides. If you look from the front a model of the T-34 with hexagonal turret, or a Tiger II, you'll surely notice that this suggestion is not too far fetched. If CMBB rightly introduced special treatment of single tank features to increase realism (e.g. Tiger mantlet and Panther's random flawed glacis) why do not address also this issue? Opinions? Amedeo [Edited the thread name with a 'juicier' title ] [ October 19, 2002, 03:50 PM: Message edited by: Amedeo ]

In fact the IS-2 was designed as an heavy breakthrough tank i.e. a tank whose main goal was to make gaps in German defences to let exploitation groups to go through. Thus its main adversaries were infatry based, hence the decision to arm it with the powerful 122mm gun and to make it frontally immone to the 7,5cm PaK that was the standard AT weapon of german infantry units late in the war. The 122mm gun turned also to be a great AT weapon and the front hull of late wersions was immune even to point blank hits from the dreadful 88L71, but this doesn't mean that the IS was conceived as a "Tiger hunter". The turret front was basically defeatable at all practcal combat ranges by the guns mounted on the big cats, thus it's not a very good idea to start an head to head firefight with Tigers and Panthers at close-medium range, simply because their higher ROF will usually allow them to pierce through your turret before you can score an hit. In fact German reports stated that the IS accepted frontal duels with Tigers only at long range 2000m and more and only when numerical superiority was present. Regards, Amedeo

I might agree with this, anyway I simply wanted to point out that someone seemed to think that firing individual weapons while mounted should have been more than a desperate measures' affair for the Panzergrenadier. In fact the problem of what the soldiers did in face of strange or seemingly masochistic regulation is puzzling (the issue of soviet tankers expected to fight always buttoned up comes to mind). Regards, Amedeo

Perhaps they actually weren't, but according to the regulations they should have been "trained to fight from the armored halftrack at the halt and while in motion with the board MG, MG in the antiaircraft mount, machine pistols, rifles and grenades ". This quote can be found in this book. Regards, Amedeo

This topic is VERY interesting. In fact I myself started a topic about the influence of Soviet tank technology and doctrine on fighting unbuttoned. You can find it here . Regards, Amedeo

Thanks for the reply! Could I know the actual DOIs used in CMBB (a screenshot with the penetration values would also be much appreciated, but I know that now I'm asking for too much ) Regards, Amedeo

Can someone that already has the game tell me if in CMBB 100mm, 122mm and 152mm APBC rounds are available for the soviet side at some date, or the games rules out their use for all the GPW period? According to the 'new features' page on BFC site, the 152mm should switch to APBC in April 1944, 122mm in August and 100mm never. Is this still valid or did they changed the DOI in the final release? Regards, Amedeo

Hmmm... IIRC on the 'Tankers' discussion group it was pointed out that there was a soviet manual that depicted a BR-471B round with the date Jan. 1945. But this only means that _by_ January the round was in production. Actually it could have been produced even earlier. Of course this doesn't prove nothing per se. But it would be foolish for the Soviets not to produce in large quantities a round that was already designed and tested and found so badly needed after the early '44 combat experience. Regards, Amedeo P.S. Anyway BFC said that in CMBB the 122mm APCB should have been available by late 1944. Can anyone confirm this?

Are you using the IS-2 tanks armed with the AP or APBC 122mm round? This might be the reason for the worse performance against the Panther with respect to the Tiger. The 122mm BR-471B APBC round should be available from late '44 and its blunt nose will assure defeat of the higly sloped Panther glacis out to 1500m or so. Could you tell us how/whether this is modelled in CMBB? Regards, Amedeo

In the book "Tank vs. Tank" there's an account of an engagement between Egyptian IS-3s and Israeli M-48s durung the six days war. At long ranges the IS-3 were more than a match for enemy tanks, at shorter ranges factors like slow turrets and low ROF were usually dooming for those heavies. Amedeo

They cannot be from any of the Axis minors, since they're fighting against Germans, their base is red and they're in the midst of a string of unspotted 'red star' symbols. So the question remains. I do not think they're cossacs since their tunic dosen't resemble any particular cossacs' garment I've seen, moreover they seems to be wearing a simple pilotka and not some strange fur cap. Perhaps they're airborne troops with some sort of obscure jumping overall? Amedeo

The spelling is not too off mark, but the problem is that he's the wrong person! The high soviet officer killed by ukrainian nationalists was Vatutin. Regards, Amedeo

I noticed that FO's are represented, in the game, by the same soldier figure that's used for heavy weapons teams. Wouldn't it be better to use the model that's used for Platoon HQ's, i.e. is a man with a junior officer uniform, instead of the current "corporal outlook"? Amedeo

Foreigner, the regulations I was talking about were the 1944 ones. BTW the 1-3km figure varied because it should take into account the peculiarities of the local enemy defences, so it could not be, after all, in contradiction with the veterans' accounts you were referring to. My point was, however, that this, wasn't done in a so widespread and efficient manner to suggest that in CMBB the modelling of buttoning/unbuttoning could be realistically the same for both Soviet and German AFVs. For what concernes the 'memorial' evidence, I also read some memories that implicitly or explicitly referred to the habit of having the TC unbutton in some instances, for better visibility and coordination during combat, and this was done by Soviet crews as early as the Spanish Civil War. But in the same memories, e.g. by D. Loza, you'll also find that in closed terrain they always fought not only buttoned up, but also with hatches locked. BTW I also remember having read (sorry, couldn't find the exact reference at the moment) that in the end stages of the war it became common to fight with hatches closed but not locked, supposedly to compensate the overpressure effect that hollow charges warhead (one of the most common threats from infantry in the 44-45 period) would create in the crew compatment in case of a penetration, and also to allow friendly soldiers to rescue wounded crewmen that would otherwise be condemned to a slow death, being severely wounded in a burning tank and unable to unlock the hatches from the inside. For what concernes the pictorial evidence, I never claimed that AAMGs were not intended to be used by an unbuttoned TC, nor that they were not expediently used also againt ground targets (BTW AAMGs were comparatively rare on Red Army tanks, save for some late war AFVs and Lend Lease vehicles). But for each such photo, one can find ten photos showing soviet tanks in combat situations (i.e. non clearly in the assembly area, or road march or anyway with people calmly strolling around) moving to contact completely buttoned up. Finally, one should also consider that, as I previously said, technical improvements (both war and postwar) never seriously tried address the situational awarness of the TC assuming that it would have to fight unbuttoned. After the Spanish experience, in which the poor vision devices of Soviet made tanks, often made tankes combat unbuttoned, taking heavy casualties in the process, the problems were, supposedly, resolved introducing new all around vision periscopes. Tanks like T-26, T-28 etc. had special 'signal' ports to allow commanders to use flags and flares without unbuttoning (with abysmally bad results, I presume). Turret hatches were almost always designed to provide cover when dismounting rather than to improve and facilitate forward or all-around visibility. There are several references in Zaloga's works about the practical impossibility for an early T-34 TC to lead his tank with his head out, the way the Germans did: you have to nearly sit on the turret roof to be able to clearly see forward, extremly exposing yourself to enemy fire and, perhaps having also to unplug the internal communication device jack to avoid being strangled in the process, not to mention that this operation should have benn very time consuiming to do, not allowing a quick pop-up, pop-down when in combat. Regards to everyone, Amedeo

As I said the point is that now your tank might decide autonomosly to unbutton if they think opportune... so my digital soldiers will hinder me to play according to the regulations I do not dispute the fact that command and spotting penalties for buttoned up tanks are more than substantiated by the fact. I was only wondering whether the current systems can model in a realistic manner the way soviet tankers fought. Regards, Amedeo P.S. I do know for sure that there were some points in the regulations that were normally disregarded, but I still wonder whether we can assume that fighting unbuttoned was so common for _soviet_ crews. The fact is that the majority of combat photos or footage I've seen shows buttoned up tanks. Moreover both the 1944 new regulations and the postwar ones, continued to stress the importance of fighting with the crew buttoned up. Likewise crew training was (and is, AFAIK) in conducted in that sense. So, if the vetetarns learned to fight in this way, and it was considered 'better', why didn't the postwar regulations, training and vehicle design take this into account as it was done for a lot of other 'lessons learned' of the war period?

A few additional considerations: The soviet regulations for tank units stated that the AFVs should be in the maximum combat readiness state (that includes all hatches closed) at a distance between 1 to 3km from the enemy first line (the actual distance depends on the terrain and the strenght of the enemy defences). This would imply that soviet AFVs should remain buttoned up in 90% of the typical CM situations. For AFVs not provided with radio receivers signals were provided from command vehicles in the form of flags and/or flares. Soviet tank hatches were typically ill suited to be used for battlefield observations. In fact this is true not only for 1940 vintage T-34 but also for modern MBTs. Summing up I think that a couple of changes to the game engines could be useful to better simulate the above factors: 1. Soviet TCs should change from buttoned/unbuttoned only after express gamer's command (as it was in CMBO). The AI should keep all soviet tanks permanently buttoned up (save for command tanks). 2. The ability of non-command tanks to follow orders should be function not, mainly, of _their_ un-buttoned status, but of the buttoned status of their command tank (after all it was the commander that needed to occasionally pop up to use flags or flares, the subordinate units were expected to observe this while being buttoned up) Regards, Amedeo

How will CMBB keep into account the fact that the soviet tankers were expected to fight buttoned up according to their combat regulations? I still had no occasion to observe the units' behaviour in very deep detail playing the demo, but it seems that it's vital for soviet crews to remain unbuttoned as long as possible, mainly for C&C reasons. Isn't there the risk that current game mechanics will force players to use unistorical tactics just to be able to move their tanks? Comments are welcome. Amedeo

It goes without saying Amedeo