gunnergoz

Yes, but if the supposed statistics about how often troops actually fired their weapons is to be believed, maybe not all of our pixeltruppen would be adding to the firefight. Supposedly, according to one postwar study by General S.L.A. Marshall, only a fraction of GI's fired their weapons in anger once in combat. IIRC Marshall's credibility became suspect when it was discovered that he did not actually interview as many GI's as he'd claimed. Since he was the one who planted the seeds of the passive GI idea, I'm not sure of what the current credible data is on the subject, at least for WW2 GI's. I suspect our modern troops are much more intensely trained and disciplined with the "muscle memory" necessary to ensure they are pulling the trigger when the opportunity presents itself. Anyone out there with good data on how many WW2 GI's were actually firing their weapons?

Line of sight is not the same as line of fire. The gun may be pointed at the building but that does not mean it is going to be targeted there - it can be swiveled around if the player chooses one of those targets in the foliage. The crew can certainly see in directions other than what the gun is pointing at. The other possibility is that the image portrays a view with extreme zoom. That foreshortens the foreground and it is possible that when you zoom out, the building will be more off to the side. But either way, you are correct that the gun is not pointing directly at either of the targets of interest.

It looks to me like you have two battalions' weapon companies worth of 81mm mortars trying to report to one battalion HQ. If you are in a QB it could be that when you selected your force you did not place the extra mortars under the Primary battalion CO and thus they would have no means to report to him or to his subordinate weapons company commander. The game just sees them as independent units. Just guessing, but that's what it seems to me. If that's the case, I'd try redoing the QB and directly assigning the extra mortar platoon to the original weapons company CO.

I wonder what veteran WW2 tankers would say about this? Not that many are left today, bless 'em. I'd bet they'd bust a gut laughing about it. But losing your tank was a pretty traumatic event, I'll bet, even if you all survived, which was clearly not always the case. If you got out with nothing more than a concussion, you were probably lucky. And you had just lost the only home you'd known since you landed on the beach. The feeling of suddenly being naked without a couple of inches of steel around you must have been very disconcerting too. Their training was to return to the rear to draw a new tank and I suspect that most of them did that as soon as they were up to it. But if they were cornered, they did have weapons with them and were trained to use them...even the .30 cal machine guns were subject to being taken off and used for dismounted defense if necessary and IIRC, most tanks had a tripod for just that possibility.

Don't hold me to this but I have the impression that a lot of the desertion problems arose from either combat troops failing to return from leaves granted them, from escapees from the replacement depots, or from rear-echelon types who took advantage of their proximity to the big cities go underground for a while. For most GI's already on the front line, there was not much opportunity to go anywhere but towards the enemy. If you were wounded, you were pretty much in the hospital area until either returned to your unit or sent to a repple depple. It's not to say that front line troops did not ever desert, but I suspect the most likely to desert were those with easier access to the big cities in the rear areas.

Only the ones with chewing tobaccy dripping from their mouths. The rest of us are latte swigging city pukes.

OK, that in part explains your thinking, since I'm mostly playing scenarios. I have started the Devils Descent campaign (very good BTW) and am now seeing what you are talking about. Playing CMN I tend to be so mission oriented that I overlook these human concerns...quite the opposite of how I am in real life.

I was puzzled about that in a different scenario too. If I recall correctly BFC has explained that tree leaves are not as dense in game terms as they seem to be graphically on your monitor to you. It has to do with computer limitations on displaying the tree foliage realistically. So while you may not be able to see the enemy, your pixeltruppen evidently can, through gaps in the foliage that you do not know about.

I've looked at the 1942 manuals for Infantry Regiment and Battalion and noticed that the mortars were supposed to be deployed within voice or visual contact range of the spotter. I think this may pre-date the widespread issuance of the handi-talkie radio, which was certainly available in Normandy, but that is how many of these units were originally trained to operate - with the mortars in very close proximity to the guys they were supporting. I suppose this would be particularly true in the case of the 60mm since they were spread even further down the chain of command than the 81's and thus were closer to the fighting, if not smack in the middle of it. Question for you guys: with the Parachute infantry, do you pool the platoon 60mm mortars in one place and control them together as a mini-battery for the company CO or keep them with their individual platoons for the platoon leaders to run?

OK, thanks. I just posted (and subsequently deleted) the question on the known issues thread, not knowing of your comment here. If they are looking at it, that's great. It is not a game killer by any means but it does sort of destroy the suspension of disbelief when it happens consecutively and often in the same scenario.

Thanks. I thought that playing RT might be more lend itself more to the sort of in-the-moment immersion that you describe but clearly in your case it does not since you play WEGO as I do. I have to be honest and say that I seldom take the time to treat the wounded but now I'm beginning to think I'm cheating myself of another way to make the game feel even more realistic. I'm not an RT fan at all normally, but the lack of replay killed it conclusively for me in this game.

Yes, I've seen bumping issues come up with tanks in bocage roads too. They start to veer too close for some reason and then have trouble swiveling out of it. With a bridge it would obviously be worse in real life (since bocage can give a little but bridge abutments don't usually,) however the game engine really doesn't seem to know the difference when it comes to object avoidance. Still, its one of the smartest AI's I've ever seen for managing vehicle pathfinding under complex situations.

I would think some of it has to do with how high the bocage is at that point. In the game, a given section of bocage is by default pretty uniform looking but in real life, it was not always uniformly high or thick. It had...character, for lack of a better word, that the game can't capture, as good as it is otherwise.

Lemuel - out of curiosity do you play WEGO or RT?

War almost over = wonderful incentive to live and not be the last tanker KIA. Some veteran GI's got really superstitious, paranoid and cautious in the final months of the war, for with the end of the war in sight, some hope of living through the war began to take form in the minds of guys who might previously have become fatalistic about their own survival. Of course there were many field extemporaneous upgrades during the war made in an attempt to reinforce an AFV's survivability, but I find the photo of the Sherman above especially poignant. It seems a very human reaction to double up armor like that in the face of all those fearsome late war German AT weapons, especially knowing that the end of the war might be finally be in sight. If I was a tanker and knew I wasn't getting an M26 anytime soon, I might just try to make my own Sherman Jumbo. If an entire AD was in favor of letting the troops do it, all the better. Too many good men had died already.

I've noticed that as long as there is nothing ahead of the tank once it gets on the bridge (i.e. on the other side between the tank and its movement end indicator) the tanks get across OK...unless they get distracted by enemy targets or they are fired upon. Then all bets are off because the AI goes into reactive behavior that does not seem to recall it is on a bridge and can't easily maneuver in any direction it likes. Apart from the under fire situation, the other times I've had problems with bridges are few. One jeep crew that I gave a facing order to (meaning for the end of the move) insisted upon trying to face the jeep in that direction in the middle of the transit...looked like a DUI weaving all over the road and bridge. Also if traffic piles up on the far side of the bridge, the AI may try to work an alternative route for the vehicle on the bridge, again without considering that it is on a bridge at the time. I'm not saying this answers all questions or that there is not some other bug here, but this is what I've seen so far.

"bogage?" More like boggage. (Actually it's bocage but I like your twist on it.)

If you ask me a potential explanation for the differences in tank write-offs is some type of discrepancy in the paperwork, either over-reporting or under-reporting, depending upon what was to be gained, or even just p!ss poor reporting. The army is and was a bureaucracy and bureaucracies do have a tendency to justify their own existence. Not to mention that there were then (and are now) plenty of "inventive" ordnance and supply officers/NCO's out there who will bend rules when it suits them. I can't prove it but it just seems a possibility that the figures turned in for the 3rd AD just didn't add up because they weren't meant to. I also read that most of the individual tank records were destroyed after the war, which is unfortunate if it is true, since serious study of the records might have revealed something the unit records are not telling us. Just my two bit WAG, mind you but I was raised in the post WW2 army around supply sergeants and I know my chickens...

No, it seems to be the case in some scenarios that bailed crews continue the aggressive mindset that they were programmed for when mounted. *******spoiler alert****** I am in the middle of Huzzar and my scout teams managed to annihilate the German spahwagen recon detachment but the dismounted German crewmen are individually attacking my M5's and M8's, armed with a pistol against a crew with MG's and 37mm HE. Bravery is one thing but this is true fanaticism...one M8 crew racked up 5 such kills within about 7-8 minutes of one-man kamikaze charges. I've seen it happen elsewhere so it is not confined to this scenario. It looks like the crews continue on their way to the German objective zones, dismounted or not, and they doggedly attack any Yanks who get in their way.

Welcome to the herd.

[quote=Lets_All_Fight;1278767I wish I could convince myself that I actually need an iPad.

Thank you Jason; you're preaching to the choir though. I'd mentioned the Israeli use of Shermans several entries before in this same thread, noting that the Israelis had no disdain for the "death trap" that some posters here like to call the Sherman (much to my intense frustration.) So I'm not the one here who needs reminding of the Sherman's value, quite the opposite. Everything you write is true...I suspect you and I read many of the same books.

No question that the M6 was a poor design, more of a heavy support tank than an AT tank and certainly no Tiger equivalent. And yes, it was probably a good decision to leave them behind. My point is that there was precious little else the army's "deciders" were willing to do to move things forward, beyond coming up with dead ends like the M6. They just did not see the tank as having an AT role. By 1944, their errors were becoming obvious. Fortunately, some with more vision than these guys prevailed and the M26 was the result. Regarding the divisional losses, I'd never picked up on the 3rd AD being so lopsided compared to the 2nd. That is curious and I can't for the life of me figure out why that would be. Bad leadership? Only if they insisted upon using their assets wrong and I'd never heard anything bad about Gen. Rose in that respect.

More likely they'd go off to find the nearest Calvados stash. That, or look for souvenirs. Later, when the front moved forward many did disappear...in Paris. At one point the army figured it probably had something like 10,000 deserters in the rear areas (called ComZ - Communications Zone), many of them looking for whoopie in Gay Paree and living by selling cigarettes and GI gasoline on the black market.

"Completely demoralized" may be overstating the case a bit IMO. The army was certainly somewhat demoralized after the war but it was more because it did not know how to cope with the idea of a nuclear battlefield, than anything to do with tank performance. As you say, the army (along with the navy and everyone else) was hearing all the air force trumpeting about how it was the new war winner. The best the army could come up with was the 280mm atomic cannon, which just did not have the PR glamor of the new B36 bomber for instance. And the secretary of defense at the time was George C. Marshall, hardly a man to put the army down, but he too was with difficulty trying to understand where the army fit into this new nuclear battlefield, with little success. I think tank design was more accurately starved for funds than moribund for lack of ideas. The army had been jolted by the new Soviet tanks being fielded, most notably the JS-III but there just weren't funds to field and develop new American tanks postwar and the army had to settle for upgrading the M26 a bit into the very similar M46, followed by the M47 with a stereoscopic rangefinder. And yes, the old M4, along with the M26 and M46 ended up doing the fighting in Korea...and fortunately for us, did not encounter any JS-III's.