LongLeftFlank
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Posts posted by LongLeftFlank
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I've noticed in CMSF that Area Fire by infantry has a "dither" built in, so that the various bursts strike around the target spot, not just exactly on it -- some over, some under, depending on relative elevations.
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Steve, thanks for the responses. I appreciate your perspectives. And wood bunkers may be fit for purpose.
Harry, someone else is going to need to run treeburst tests. My test was focused on the protective qualities of having units in wood bunkers as opposed to sitting in open foxholes and trenches.
Re blast effect of medium mortars, ISTR that the blast effects of the standard frag round were so diffuse that the tail of the round would remain sitting intact at or near the impact point.
Also, didn't the Germans have a "bouncing bomb" where the round hit, a small second charge in the nose jumped it into the air and then the main charge detonated?
ISTR we had a bunch of experienced mortarmen on this board at one point....
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And there's no oil either. Syria's wealth has been historically rooted in it being a crossroads for trade and secondarily derived from agriculture in the coastal areas.
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That sounds realistic for 81mm mortar impact.
If you have a C-17 full of 81mm mortar rounds crashing there.
Hmm. So why wasn't this kind of concentrated mortar fire used to breach the bocage for tanks? Problem solved! Sgt. Cullin, go home.
I am no expert, but I always thought the entire design of mortar shells, from the high trajectory, to the explosive filling, to the casing, to the fuzing, was optimized to spread tiny chunks of flesh-shredding metal across as large a radius as possible. As distinct from throwing up gigantic clods of shattered earth and burying the enemy dead or alive in his holes, like traditional shells.
I mean, the blast overpressure wouldn't be zero by any means, but dismembering a 500 year old earthen embankment filled with rocks and held together by gnarled vines and tree roots? Seems like that would take all day and even then you wouldn't be sure of success since the rounds would impact on the surface and diffuse their blast widely, like they were designed to do.
Is there some kind of penetrating round for medium mortars that I'm not aware of?
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You're talking about fortification belts that took months to prepare. Given enough time the Germans could have done similar things in Normandy, but instead they never managed to set up a solid defensive line that lasted more than a few days or weeks (in some spots). And all the while the Allies hammered them, causing casualties and tactical loss of ground. In fact, it could be said that the German's obsession with counter attacking precluded them from setting up an effective defensive line in France once they realized they couldn't push them back into the sea. Though I doubt such a defensive line would have held long anyway.
You're confusing standard defensive tactics with "hardened" defenses. When situations allowed new defensive lines could be created quickly, but they were basically there to blunt the tip of the breakthrough force long enough to conduct a counter attack. German doctrine stressed that such counter attacks had to happen within hours, days at the latest. Not the sort of timeframe for creating on-the-fly hardened positions.
Two issues here. First, the Germans were pretty much always in contact with the Allies from the time of the landings until they were routed from France. While lines on the maps stayed steady for days, the tactical positions often did not. And when the Germans did have a chance to seriously dig in, that's when the set piece battles were mounted with massed artillery. The sorts of battles we don't simulate.
Second, I think you underestimate the resources needed to provide meaningful overhead cover for battalion sized forces. And by meaningful I mean something that's actually got a chance of making a difference. The best thing simple overhead protection does is prevent things like chunks of wood, rocks, earth, buildings, pavement, etc. from injuring the soldiers. This is something we can abstract.
I don't disagree with you that it would be better to have than to not have, but I do disagree with your assumptions that it has much bearing on CM scale battles. In some ways this reminds me of the arguments that we had in CMx1 that we didn't simulate logs, sandbags, extra tracks, mattresses, etc. stuck to the sides of tanks. Some said "they did it, therefore it matters" and we disagreed.
It's amazing how much opinion counts for interpretation of historical accounts.
Sophistry and evasion again, Steve. You keep pretending I'm insisting on the Siegfried line -- just as you did when we had this exact same argument in CMSF days. And I'm a hard core infantry player -- I could care less about mattresses on tanks. That has precisely nothing to do with what we're discussing here (i.e. sophistry).
When the Allied attack has petered out for the day and the Yanks have gone to ground under a steady rain of mortar fire and sniping, the Germans keep a thin screen of infantry in unimproved scrapes just out of sight of his guns. Behind that screen, out of sight and under cover of darkness, the rest of the battered unit is digging like mad -- OPs first for the all-important mortars, followed by machine gun nests and rifle pits. If the Amis start shelling, the landser jump in the holes, then get busy again the moment it lifts. They don't all need boards or logs for roofing -- a bunch of saplings and tree branches holding up 2-3 layers of sandbags sitting on a 2 foot wide slit trench is enough to soak up most shell splinters. If a big shell lands within a meter or two, yeah, you're dead and buried (MIA) regardless, but garden variety mortars whose blast force is not enormous and diffused widely by design (see my post above) aren't going to do much more than pepper the sandbags even if they land quite close by.
By midnight, several layers of these new defensive positions are complete and ready to take up the next day's fight. These aren't continuous WWI style trench lines with pakfronts -- in the bocage they're more of a checkerboard, with undefended field bracketed by artillery and snipers. Some landser rest fitfully in their holes while others continue working, clearing fields of fire for the MGs, laying mines.
WWII infantry of all nations dug these positions. Daily. And roofed them over for reasons that had nothing to do with the weather. This was part and parcel of infantry warfare. It's fundamental, unless you want a game that does only meeting engagements and tank dominated shoot-em-ups. In which case, why choose Normandy for a venue?
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So did you do a test run with it?
How much indirect fire take the soldiers in there compared to regular single trench or foxhole?
I built a position and then proceeded to POINT target the visible sandbags HEAVY - MAXIMUM with 4 x 81mm mortars. They rained nonstop hell for 2-1/2 minutes.
The HMG team whose fighting position is behind the sandbags is safely squirreled away in the wooden bunker, where they remained unscathed for the entire bombardment.
For comparison I put a 3 man observer team HIDING in the trench behind. They were wiped out within the first minute even though they were 2 squares away from the target. The cement bunker in the background is empty. I also stuck a kubel driver behind sandbags opposite that bunker -- he perished too.
So now that the bombardment has lifted, the MG team is free to.... uhh, wait a minute. The wedge-shaped section of bocage has all but vanished. Was this historical, for concentrated mortar fire to clear a huge gap in bocage like this? Long Tom shells that plow into the earth before detonating, maybe I can see that. But medium mortars, whose fuzes are designed to maximize fragmentation above ground, not muffle it in the dirt?
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Search the CMBN forum for keyword "CoPlay" and you will see that this is extensively desired but hard for BFC to pull off. That said, they'd like to add it eventually. But I think Steve said it's unlikely to be in the CMBN family.
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So did you meet the big Japanese dude with the bowler hat? And was Pussy Galore all that?
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Interesting. Is it possible the extra large HMG team ( 6) is to blame as the individuals reposition themselves to the new FACE command? Perhaps make this unit splittable?
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Trying to be constructive and seeing what can be done with this capable game engine, I came up with the following "hardened" German squad position built into a hedgerow
The infantry fighting position is a sandbag wall and immediately behind it is a wedge-shaped (===V===) chunk of bocage, creating 2 access points. Behind the hedgerow is a trench leading to a wooden bunker that is sunk 2 meters below the default level, adding to its shell resistance. The bunker is basically a dugout since the firing slit has no LOS to anything. Once the American barrage lifts, the landser can emerge and move to their firing position. If the Amis take the forward position, the Germans can resist from the trench.
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Of course that was the ideal. I don't doubt it wasn't completely alien to Normandy. But remember, the Germans never intended to fight in this terrain. They were supposed to defeat the Allies on the beaches or make quick work out of them soon after. That didn't happen. Which means, for the most part, the positions they did have were of the hasty type. To effectively cover the amount of fighting positions they made over the course of the campaign would have required forests worth of trees for overhead cover. And the tools and time to process them into useable materials.
Again, for sure this sort of hardening did happen, but usually those were the areas that were wiped out by massive artillery strikes prior to an attack.
I don't agree with that conclusion. Most of the pictures of positions I've seen are either superficial scrapes in the ground or narrow 1-2 man pits with no overhead cover.
Steve, I am respectfully calling sophistry on the above statements.
If you couldn't find a workable way to program in overhead cover for entrenchments but have it on your future to do list, please just come out and say so [EDIT: you did at the end, kind of]. We love the game and will forgive you.
But trying to rationalize away such a ubiquitous feature of WWII, and especially the bocage battles as you have above is.... simply unworthy of you.
WWII infantry (whose training still derived in large part from the lessons of WWI) were instructed -- and needed very little prompting -- to dig holes to protect themselves from firepower, especially artillery. Faced with the prospect of massive enemy firepower, they don't throw up their hands in despair as you suggest above, they just dig deeper. That's the only tool they have, and guess what? it works, well, even against horrific bombardments! There are virtually no instances (none in fact that I am aware of) of German prepared positions being "wiped out by massive artillery strikes prior to an attack" -- but maybe you can cite some for me.
The Wehrmacht, especially, had had ~18 months of ferocious defensive fighting against numerically and FP superior opponents in Russia and Italy in which to become masters at preparing multiple belts of well-camouflaged and hardened defensive positions, backed by pakfronts and artillery; this was true of all first line units and didn't require specialized engineers. The German ability to seal off enemy breakthroughs with battered forces, using a combination of limited counterattacks and harassing fire, accompanied by ultra-rapid creation of new fortified lines, continued to astonish and frustrate their enemies all the way to the end of the war.
When already in contact with the enemy, it's simply shallow scrapes as you suggest. Given some LOS cover, or cover of darkness, they dig deeper holes and trenches, and sandbag the firing ports. And when given 12-24 hours to prepare a position without being directly observed, at minimum the OPs and key MG positions are roofed and sandbagged over (you don't need "forests" -- just a lattice of saplings with sandbags or plain old dirt on top) and fields of fire are cleared. With some help from Pioneers, AT gun pits and sniper positions start getting roofed over as well, and mines and wire show up.
Now I for one greatly appreciate the effort BFC put in to provide FOW entrenchments for CMBN, in spite of the considerable programming difficulties. And I'm willing to accept that overhead cover for non-vehicles and non-buildings is not straightforward to model as it sounds.
But the lack of "hardened positions" other than bunkers -- including both entrenchments and buildings -- remains a significant missing feature and cannot be waved away as peripheral on any of the grounds you have cited.
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Looks very authentic, but also looks like it needs about twice as many trees -- as you say though, that's going to seriously impair playability. As a compromise, maybe fill a number of those central fields with Calvados orchards to cut down on the long range LOS opportunities and force the Kittehs to fight close quarters.....
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+1 to the point regarding "broad zones" for a single AI Group. The destination each unit will move to in each order is chosen randomly, so if your zones are set up as "phase lines", you're going to get a lot of units moving laterally across the front, exposing themselves to enemy fire much more than they have to.
You're better off setting up "clusters" of destinations, some squares based on good cover and others based on good fields of fire. Or if you must use phase lines, have the units come together in one order then move apart the next. Of course, that creates nice concentrated targets for artillery so you do not want them to cluster for very long.
I've personally never had good results (in CMSF) from combining infantry and AFVs in a single AI Group. YMMV.
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"Biography of a Battalion" James A. Huston (Battalion OPs Officer)
3rd Battalion, 134th Infantry Regiment, 35th Division
"The Clay Pigeons of St Lo" Glover S. Johns Jr (Battalion Commander)
1st Battalion, 115th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division
Thanks for the refs, but while these units were definitely deployed in the area, AFAIK they weren't involved in the heavy fighting in the map area I'm building out (see OP). The 119th was the unit relieved by 137th on June 10th, which then carried the assault forward to the St Hebert road. The 134th, another 35th ID regiment, was in a heavy fight further to the east.
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Try boosting the height of the sunken portions several metres -- even higher than the abutments. The water remains at the default height but eventually you'll get a height where the pilings emerge.
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Look at this. Ever since the XP-64 came out, they're just not in demand.
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I admire detailed mapmakers immensely, I am a great fan of maps in any form. I take it that rail icons have a very unsubtle choice of curves which is a shame. Is it likely BF will introduce new items to the editor in the future.
Yeah, ran into that problem already with the tactically important rail line (plus cuts and embankments) running from La Meauffe south along the Vire. It has to take a number of 45 degree bends instead of the historically accurate curves. I guess we'll live.
The large highway come out a lot more flexible and realistic looking but there just aren't many autobahns in Normandy.
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La Meauffe features prominently on my Le Carillon master map. Looks like you've captured the essential feel nicely. Well done!
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I thought the manual was very nicely done myself -- I own a number of period US Army field manuals and they look very much like this.
And to me, the steelbox seems to cover the basics -- attractive, protects the DVDs. I suppose though that if you were expecting the Band of Brothers ration tin, you might legitimately feel let down, given the hype (and the video). Sorry you feel that way.
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Bunkers -- in the sense of 2-man hole roofed over with logs/branches/planks and a layer or two of sandbags -- are completely appropriate to Normandy, or anywhere else where infantry have an hour, a spade and a hatchet. They should give good protection against nearly any mortar stonk short of a direct hit. Not that the boys inside won't be impacted by the overpressure or stray fragments...
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I've labeled it "Vein's Gloomy terrain" and am planning to use it in all scenarios where the sun isn't shining. Thanks for this!
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Hi
Perhaps could help
you could print map and pics, usefull
Merci beaucoup! The IGN map was très utile, as it gives benchmark altitudes in metres by location.
À bientôt....
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US 6-8 scenario mini-campaign featuring the awful baptism of fire of 137th Infantry, July 11-14: see the "Carillon Nose" thread for details.
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There was a slight bug in CMSF where if a unit crossed a Low Wall that was adjacent to a High Wall, the figures would instead go around and "through" the High Wall and lose a step of Condition for each man who did this. So that a rifle team would be EXHAUSTED by the end of the maneuver. Don't know if that's still the case in CMBN, and no idea if that has anything to do with your issue.
Why are onboard mortars so fantastically inaccurate?
in Combat Mission Battle for Normandy
Posted
Not as easy as all that. Not all spotting positions were church steeples. There are gentle hills.
Also, the Germans were VERY methodical at registering TRPs on likely spots like crossroads, bridges and gullies/draws, or even former positions of their own now likely to be occupied by the enemy. They could then blast them periodically with interdiction fire, or when FOs heard movement (vehicles) in the area. This doesn't require a direct LOS.