Vanir Ausf B

Death machine from hell. Think Tiger I in CMFI, or KV-1 in early war CMBB. Yeah, that dominant :eek:

This is an early (narrow mantlet) IS-2 captured by the Germans with the measured armor thicknesses conveniently stenciled on the tank.

I would say so, and more importantly WW II Ballistics says so. Based on the diagrams I have seen the characterization of the areas over 100mm being "only local" is not accurate.

No, they do not. However, they will not get any spotting information from units outside the platoon unless in close proximity.

Specifically, they are in the Panzer Grenadier Battalion (panzer brigade). This formation is only available in September.

True. Not really. C2 is mostly irrelevant for calling indirect fire. This has been suggested a few hundred times before The problem with removing control from the player is that in Combat Mission the player isn't playing the roll of some higher level commander; he is assumed to be the leader of every unit at the same time. It also introduces other realism issues, such as the fact that units under AI control would simply sit in place while in reality units out of C2 don't lose their ability to perform their mission or otherwise act independently.

I was recently scanning through radio stations and happened on a NPR station that was playing classical music. I felt a moment of wonder as I realized it was the theme music used for CMBB.

There is no such thing as Combat Mission game without WeGo

Good catch. Reported.

There may be some abstraction here. In reality, buildings under fire would usually not catastrophically collapse all at once as in a controlled demolition. They do that in the game, but perhaps casualties are deliberately lowered in recognition of that being unrealistic.

Tiger mantlet thickness ranges from 90mm around the edges to 150mm in other places, but the thinner areas are backed by the 100mm-thick front turret armor. Effective thickness should be about 135mm on average, although the areas surrounding the machine gun port and gunner's sight would be more like 110mm due to edge effects. It is unknown what thickness Combat Mission assumes, but if it is 135mm then Soviet 85mm APBC should be able to penetrate out to around 300 meters, APCR out to 600m or so.

How does a person for whom 10 bucks is a fortune afford a computer to wargame on in the first place?

Reminds me of an amusing blog post I read recently http://richg42.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html (talking about AMD): "A complete hodgepodge, inconsistent performance, very buggy, inconsistent regression testing, dysfunctional driver threading that is completely outside of the dev's official control. Unfortunately this vendor's GPU is pretty much standard and is quite capable hardware wise, so you can't ignore these guys even though as an organization they are idiots with software"

I have not tested this, but my own experience plus comments from others does suggest that trees do not provide much concealment from aircraft. They should, of course, but the point is that when playing scenarios with air support present I assume all units to be effectively out in the open at all times.

That was not a bug.

As sburke pointed out in another thread, the very large majority of vehicles in CMBN will also be in the Bulge game...

I don't know for sure, but I am assuming that the hull down spotting disadvantage bugs are fixed in the 3.0 upgrade.

"Totenkopf" refers specifically to the 3rd SS Panzergrenadier division. I suspect they were driving east at the time

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=115070

I'm pretty sure it is supposed to work that way although I've never really tested it. It does seem that you can acquire a lot of ammo before it makes a noticeable difference. If you are very curious it would be fairly easy to test. Set up a scenario with a truck and 2 sniper teams at 50% headcount. Have one sniper acquire the entire truck contents then have him race the other sniper at Quick speed.

They move slower and fatigue faster.

I find the caparison's with the Tiger interesting because it and the Panther have very different strengths and weaknesses, but neither is clearly better than the other. As you say, the Tiger has better side armor. The Tiger also has better front turret armor (although there appears to be some game engine limitations that result in it not being quite as good as it should be). But the Panther has better front hull armor, which is where more shots hit than any other area. The Panther's gun also has better penetration, although it's a little weaker against soft targets. I like the Tiger for it's pure sexiness, but if I were playing a QB and really just cared about winning I would take the Panther over the Tiger. I don't think of the Sherman 76 or T-34/85 as being in the same class as the Panther. Head to head the Panther can kill them much more reliably than the other way around. The 17 pdr helps, but even it can't normally penetrate the Panther upper hull (assuming unflawed armor). But despite that, if someone wanted to tie Panther availability to Sherman 76 or T-34/85 I would probably agree to it. The Jagdpanther is another hard vehicle to classify. It weighs the same as a Panther tank, but I would call it a heavy because it has an even better gun and armor combination at the cost of no turret, and really crappy spotting

I put "heavies" in quotes because for CM it's more about classifying capability than size. A Panther weighs much less than a Tiger I, but in most combat situations is just as capable if not more so. It's true that the Germans classified the Panther as a medium tank because that was its intended role on the battlefield, but in terms of size/weight it was a heavy tank by any other nation's standards. At 45 tonnes it is only a tonne lighter than the IS-2 and is heavier than both the Churchill and the T-26 Pershing -- all three of which were classified as heavy tanks by the Allies. A Panther outweighs the T-34/85 and Sherman 76 by about 11 tonnes.

In addition to those listed above, most H2H QB rules place some limits on the amount and type of armor purchased so that not every game turns into the Battle of Prokhorovka. There's no one standard, but some common rules are limiting total points spent on armor to 30% of the total with "armor" generally defined as fully tracked vehicles with some Commonwealth troop carriers (Bren carrier, Kangaroos) exempted. Fionn's Rules are still used, or some will limit "heavy" tank (KT, Panther, ect.) purchases to 1 per every 3 medium or light tank. I also like to cap artillery size at 155mm.

Expanding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy