gunnergoz

Sorry I was unclear. What I intended was to say that rattled is closer in meaning to shaken than it is to broken. And yes, it should be in the manual but clearly is not, I searched for it too. The word is illustrated only, in the interface section, but not explained.

Perhaps "rattled" = "shaken?" IIRC I've seen such troops recover, whereas broken ones do not.

Cratering is in part dependent upon soils and ground conditions. In real life, anyway.

"Captain, I think maybe you dropped something back there when you heard me zipping my jacket and dove into that ditch yelling 'MG42's Hit the Dirt, men!'."

OK, I'll stand down from General Quarters. Thanks for the clarification. I figured there was some fudging going on.

Were you watching the mortar fire each round or only counting the rounds that you could see land? I've seen a lot of rounds go astray and ammo count goes with them. OTOH, You could have a point about smoke missions. Give the mortar a point target and since one round may suffice to obscure that point, the mortar calls off the rest of the fire mission itself. Why it would ignore that it still has WP round remaining is a puzzle but perhaps the game restricts artillery assets to only one shoot of smoke and assumes all are used up in that shoot. If I shoot a smoke mission, I generally make a linear target and tell the firing unit to fire "heavy" so it uses up all the smoke. I do that because, as I mentioned, I suspect the game only allows one smoke mission per artillery unit. I'm sure more will be revealed as time goes by and we learn more about the game and its underlying mechanics and assumptions.

D:EATG ??? Enemy at the Gates? Hollywood as source? Don't make me laugh. Or am I misunderstanding the reference?

Sheesh, its like whack-a-mole.

I'm not reading propaganda. I'm speaking based upon my own observations of the people. I'm admittedly no expert on Russia, having only traveled to Ukraine. But I have spent years in the company of Russians and Ukrainians, sometimes in their own land. I can tell you that this culture defies our Western attempts to put ourselves in their shoes. They were not then, and are not now, like us in the West and we underestimate them at our peril. Their culture pressures men into taking extraordinary risks and doing sometimes foolish things to prove their manhood. It was as so then and still is now. In these countries, people watch each other closely and are quick to judge based upon what behaviors they see. They are much less interested in being "different" or "unique" than we are in the West. Conformity is bred into them if for no other reason than survival. In those times (and still today) to stand out is to risk having your head cut off. Better to conform, follow the others and die a man, than to live and be branded a coward, your family shunned (or arrested and sent to a camp) and all death benefits taken. You use the phrase "German defence (sic)" which does not do justice to the fact that, to ordinary Soviet people of the day, the Germans were not "defenders of Germany" they were INVADERS of MOTHER RUSSIA. Right here is a source of the people's outrage which is not to be underestimated. Yes, they had been mistreated by their own political leaders and often abused and starved by the Soviet ruling elite. But in the end, when all you have is very little - your land, your kin and your soul - you fight like hell just for that. Centuries of living in serfdom and poverty made these peoples very fatalistic and yet also resilient. Yes, also compliant and often uncomplaining (in public) too but not unthinking sheep. They had to think of their family and of their legacy; any man among them who would turn tail and run would be branded a coward for life and even assuming he survived the war, somehow, he would return home to find himself rejected by his friends and family, unable to marry and even to find work. And that is even before the KGB gets ahold of him. So, lacking alternatives, most of them fought, bravely if they could, grimly if they could not muster anything else. As my Ukrainian wife says when she faces a disagreeable task "I do it because I MUST." So, we may agree to disagree on this, but I maintain that Soviet soldiers in this time frame had many defects, but lack of motivation to fight was hardly one of them.

I think you are referring to the legendary "Calvadostruppen" which at times invaded both sides. They typically arose from Norman farmers' winecellars and lurched around the countryside looking for those French mamsell's that their pappy mentioned from the Great War.

The M21 mortar carrier is already in the game, but it serves only as a taxi at present and the mortar must be dismounted to fire. Personally, I'd like to see the Dodge 3/4 and 1 1/2 ton trucks in the game too, at some point. And of course the AA for both sides. We all have our fave's!

Here's a thread where this is answered, but in brief, neither of the topics you ask about are being looked at. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=95267&highlight=commonwealth+module This thread is generally informative too: http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?p=1216135&highlight=Family#post1216135

Presumably, BFC did their customary superior homework and looked at the arrival dates on the continent of tank battalions (with 105 M4's) and SP artillery battalions (with M7's) to get a baseline for relative rarity. What is still not clear to me is whether the fact that M7's were not intrinsically front line AFV's was considered in calculating their rarity, compared to M4/105's which were front line AFV's.

Not to divert the thread, but I felt I had to respond to this comment. It is to me unfair to generalize about the Soviets by lumping them all in the "poorly motivated" category. I'd say the one consistent positive trait that many Soviet soldiers had, was probably motivation. Other things...fitness, experience, training, leadership, were often sucky, no doubt and especially in the first half of the war. But motivation was not usually their problem. If they were not fighting for each other, for the Motherland or for their families, they might be fighting for no other reason that there was no alternative, given the KGB troops right behind them. One other thing (and just my opinion): Russians are, by and large, pretty hardy, fatalistic, pragmatic and romantic, all at the same time. The men were (and still are) expected to be manly, macho, stoic, brave and determined. Social pressures in the society to conform to these stereotypes were very strong and remain so to this day. The peasant levies of those days were used to privation and minimal resources to survive upon. All these factors made Red Army soldiers a pretty tough bunch individually, but many other factors (which I won't go into now) often badly deteriorated their collective combat efficiency.

Line of sight is unfortunately not the same as line of fire. Your Schreck gunner may not have had LOF even though his partner had LOS. I too have been frustrated by this sort of thing: in one scenario I had a US anti-tank gun all ready and covering a street from behind a nearby home, covered arc and all. I confirmed LOS for the crew but did not think to check LOF for the gun. When a Panther drove by well within the arc of fire, the ATG did not fire and the tank passed out of its LOF and LOS. I credit the game for doing a great job of simulating difficult situations that sometimes frustrate me intensely.

Do a search or look back a few threads pages and you will find that more vehicles will be coming in future modules. Which ones? I'm guessing the most common ones and maybe a few of the ones most clamored for by forum members.

I could see how players that spend a lot of time in other games (RTS, shooters, etc) could get crossed up by any new game that defies what they now consider "conventional" interface routines. Maybe the UI bothers me less because I haven't spent a lot of time on RTS games and frankly have not played the original CM1 for a long time. It is much easier when you don't have to break old habits and only have to develop new ones.

Given their resources as an indie developer, I think their priorities are evident...programming stability, historical fidelity, solid game play, attention to detail. The interface seems to have taken back seat but usually gets brought up to speed after a while. I like their priorities since the commercial (mainstream) game developers cannot be counted to support games the way this team does.

Is it just me or does it seem that 90% of the books "for men" out there today are all formulaic tripe...handsome rogue protagonist, sexy exotic female sidekick, chambers of doom, ancient texts, byzantine puzzles, temple booby traps, global conspiracies, hints of alien technology, Templars and pre-historic lost cultures. There, I just wrote my first one! I used to read this stuff but it lost its charm when I figured out I was being sold the same old snake oil with a different cover.

Classic. "What do you mean you left the fording kit at the bivouac?"

Rarity in the game aside, if one is more inclined to put together QB's that are somewhat credible, during this period it would have been more likely to find a Sherman 105 on the front lines than an M7. The reason I say that is that the tank battalions all had a few Sherman 105's while all the M7's were assigned to SP artillery battalions. The tank battalions were on the front lines, the artillery battalions were generally well back in the rear. Only in situations like the Bulge, where artillery assets were sometimes the front lines, would have seen M7's likely to be subject to direct fire scenarios. This is not to say that an isolated incident did not happen here or there, I'm talking about what happened most of the time. I did read up on the Marine use of the M7 and it seems that 12 each were in the two Marine divisions on Okinawa. How they got "defrocked" chassis is another question but one source I found commented how his father (who served on Marine M3 Half track 75mm GMC's) found the 105 less desirable than the 75 due to the flatter trajectory of the 75mm, which was felt to be more useful against Japanese cave bunkers. Just goes to show that conditions dictate what is the best weapon, not necessarily caliber and weight of shell.

The Priest was primarily a form of mobile artillery, used in the indirect role and in direct fire fairly rarely. It needed a large crew in part because someone had to set fuzes and run back and forth for more ammo from the caisson trailer...onboard ammo was used only as a last resort from what I've read. I've never heard of priests being used to carry marines in the Pacific. Actually, I don't think many M7's reached the Pacific...one or two battalions at most, if that many. Mostly they were allocated to the armored divisions (which were all in the ETO) and some to army/corps artillery. The only "defrocked priests" I've heard of were used by the Brits and perhaps some by Canadians in the ETO. The Brits had at least 90 of them surplus after the N African campaign since they did not want to use the 105 howitzer (preferring their own 25 pdr and mounting some of them into what became the Sexton, sort of like an M7 but based upon a Canadian Ram chassis, which in turn was the Canadian version of the M4 tank.) I suspect a lot of those redundant, gunless priests were later turned into infantry carriers as were most of the Ram tanks. Given my drothers, for direct fire I'd select a Sherman 105 - better armor, enclosed turret, etc.

Baneman - not to dispute your results, but consider that bocage provides both cover and concealment, whereas trenches provide only cover. If the game models bocage correctly, there will be some times when the shooter behind bocage is harder to locate,pin down and hit than a shooter sticking his upper body out of a trench. This would mean that, given equal numbers and over time, shooters behind bocage get the upper hand no matter what else happens.

It's amazing what cr@p is out there. I recently quit a supposed WW2 novel less than 10 pages into it when the main character rode a "land rover" to the airfield where his "tiny" Mosquito fighter awaited him. I was pissed to have mis-spent the $7 or so the book cost me on such...drivel.

Can't we keep these questions all in one thread? Why aren't people using the search function? If people would search for and read the similar topic threads that already exist, many of these questions would be answered.