gunnergoz

My version of the Fairy Tale is that there are no more "Could the Germans win the war threads." In ten years of hanging around here, this sort of stuff has gotten really, really old. Bah, Humbug. (Dodders off...)

No, those engaged in political leadership (both sides of the house) are in fact providing excellent customer service...to the corporations and financial institutions that funded their election campaigns.

I thought this was being looked at for the first patch, which is now out. So it wasn't?

One thing they do not seem to take into account is the fact that most warriors in those days were really heavily muscled and toned from a lifetime of rigorous exercise. Diet was different and nutrition spotty, although most knights came from wealthy families that ate better than the peasantry. I recently watched a documentary about supposed gladiator skeletons being examined in the UK and it was clear that these men were very heavily muscled. Melee warfare like this was probably some of the most physically demanding exertion ever experienced by warriors of any age. Most reenactors I've seen depicted don't have anywhere near that level of physical conditioning. Probably true of the volunteers in this study as well. Ideally they should have used special forces-caliber soldiers and olympic athletes for this trial - they are the only equivalents we have to the ancient warrior's physical prowess and stamina. (Even then, we have few modern warriors who are inured to riding horses for days on end (builds up the legs and thighs enormously) or who have had experience wielding swords and similar weapons for hours at a time in sustained combat.) But if you can handle daily combat in the Middle East with a 75 pound load (or more), you are no slouch, either. That's as close as we come today to what ancient warriors were conditioned to deal with.

Send BFC a few million $$ as an investor and I'm sure they could accommodate you.

We already have family courts, courts for the mentally incompetent, children's courts, drug courts, traffic courts, drunk/disorderly courts - why not a veterans' court?

The English Russia site itself is pretty innocuous from my own experience with it but I cannot comment on those other links in it since I don't use them - they are too obviously "come ons." The English Russia site is one I've referred people here in the past to since it has a lot of unusual Russian military and historical photos from time to time.

One more source for good measure:

I for one don't argue the Sherman was a superior tank to the Panther but I would argue that, with all its defects, it was wielded in a far more efficacious manner towards the Allied objective of winning the war, which made the Panther's superlatives relatively unimportant in the scheme of things. If we want to have a war in a test tube, the Panther's superiority counts for a great deal. Put it in the real world, in a real world war and the people that came up with it still lost. The Panther reminds me of a gorgeous woman who, for all her allure, seductiveness and beauty, simply cannot have children and so dooms her line to end with her.

So now the Allies are no better than the Germans. OK, at least I know where this is all going...the great Grey Morass of moral equivalency, where no one is better, no one is worse and nothing matters because it is all...relative. Whatever.

Fair dinkum, mate. (Mind, I haven't a clue what he just said but it all sounds very...Australopithecine. )

...just how effective the Nazi propaganda machine was, unless we are willing to take it head on and question it.

What I'm learning is that the side with the least destructive self-delusions usually ends up winning.

Yes, it worked out because overall, there were enough Shermans and TD's and air and artillery to take down the Panthers...but most of all there were good men willing to go into harms way in those same outclassed AFV's that they'd been led to believe were the world's finest. I think it is arrogant today to dismiss the emotions that Allied tankers must have felt going against the long 75 and the 88. They knew they had to fight quicker and smarter to beat them. Lots of them paid the ultimate sacrifice for doing their best. It is fine to smugly say we won and that's that, but to do so without a tip of the hat to the men that had to make that victory happen is to me just not right.

Actually, what US tanks were in Europe by 1944 was in most part dictated by the hide-bound generals at the Armor Branch and Army Ground Forces. Models superior to the Sherman could have been devised and components of them were ready, but there never was a big push from the leadership to get them into production. Army leadership too was lulled into believing the press propaganda about superior American weapons and equipment. When they finally realized that Panthers were the new German medium tank, and also began to feel the heat from journalists back home reporting on the deficiencies of the Sherman in armor and armament, these previously blinkered leaders all began to push for re-equipping the tank battalions with thousands of M26's with 90's and 105's but by then it was too late. Even the GI's initially fell for the rah-rah propaganda going round then, that the US was equipping them "with the finest equipment in the world", tanks included. The M4 held its own in North Africa and Tunisia but by the time the Italian campaign was in full swing, the US troops there were beginning to see some of the Sherman's shortcomings compared to the armor and armament of Panthers and Tigers. By the time of the Summer battles in France following D-Day, US troops had figured out that they needed something better, pronto. Although the US Army had specimens of the Tiger on hand by 1943 to study and shoot at, it still seemed to the army armor leadership that German tank design had culminated in the Pz IV and that the Tiger and Panther were nothing but specialized assault tanks that would be seldom encountered. Recall that the Soviets were not giving up much intel about what they were encountering on the battlefield, let alone what was problematic about it.

I take it you were smart enough not to check those out...right?

Vark- The postwar US Army was much in awe of the "Red Horde" and quite concerned with the question of whether they would have to confront the Red Army at some point in this new Cold War era. Several times, they nearly did come to blows. The US Army turned to the only people they knew and had close by with first hand experience fighting the Russians - captured German Generals. The accounts written by those generals in the late 40's and early 50's for the army all tend to, as you say, "economize on the truth" about how they were defeated by the Russians. They inflated the German victories and described their own defeats as the fault of these horde tactics. It was not until the 70's and 80's when new intel about the Red Army began to come out, that something closer to the truth about the Soviet's operational sophistication began to be grasped in the West. I'm far from an expert in the subject but I recall even then seeing the military literature shift from one of contemptuous dismissal to a grudging admiration and respect of the Soviets' wartime achievement.

For those interested: http://englishrussia.com/2011/06/22/the-russian-atomic-weapon-museum/

Can't it be said simply that the Sherman performed better for its intended role as a war-winner than did the Panther? Why compare the two directly when there is little purpose to it? They were both instruments of warfare, product of different times and different philosophies, made with different roles to fulfill. When they were tested in combat, one side had superior results given an overall better strategic, logistical and coalition warfare situation than the opposing side. In the East the Panther could not stop the advance of hordes of technically inferior T34's and in the West it similarly failed to stop the Allies from maneuvering their masses of outmoded Shermans to victory. IMO the Nazis fumbled away almost every technological edge they ever had with misuse or abuse on the battlefield. A fact for which I remain grateful.

Presumably where you keep the T-Rex's, eh?

True, but a low Panther/Sherman exchange rate could also be attributable to other factors, such as combined arms, TD's, tac air, artillery, smoke...all elements of the WW2 ETO battlefield that were force multipliers for the Allies. Add to that the previously discussed issues of Panther unreliability vs the Sherman's mechanical robustness, effects of national military doctrine, etc. All in all it is a pretty complex area of discussion and years later all we have is variously contrived sets of data which make it very hard today to reconstruct the facts with any accuracy.

All this is well and good but IMHO if they as a small independent developer have to allocate precious time and money on programming, I sure would prefer they spend it on gameplay-critical issues like Tac AI and interface improvements. OTOH, if one of you gents who is eager for such improvements has inherited a few $,$$$,$$$ and cares to donate - er, invest - it in BFC, I'm sure they'd be happy to discuss some arrangement with you.

BFC opted for this so units could be constructed realistically, from historical orders of battle, within existing chains of command. Call such attention to detail "silly" if you like but others appreciate the attention to detail.

Indeed, if I were to post some photos of combat casualties from the era from, say, the US Army Medical Corps study of combat wounds and wound ballistics, I'd probably get banned, so horrible are the actual wounds to look at. War is not a game, nor pretty, nor does what happens to humans in wartime look at all "fun" or "cool." One reason I keep such reference materials is to - very infrequently - remind me of why my interest in war is academic and in no way an endorsement of it in real life.

My WEGO game saves vary from 3MB to 30MB per 1 minute turn, depending upon the map and number of units. So assuming the worst, a 1 hour game save with my largest files would take up about 1.8 Gigs of HD space. I'm not even sure how they could save and replay such a thing if you consider that it is not simply a video but a full 3-D replay of every soldier, tank, tree and bullet. Good luck on this one.