Vanir Ausf B

That could be a concern on a few of the largest ones. Most of the master maps are not really all that huge. Nijmegen City MM is 5.5 km², Nijmegen West is 3.4 km² and Nijmegen Road Bridge is less than 1 km². The other master maps are around 6, give or take a km². I haven't even looked at the RT master maps, but from comments I've read I expect they may be somewhat larger, particularly given their rural environment which hits the hardware more gently than urban landscapes.

I'm not entirely opposed to the idea, I'm just not sure if the extra effort involved is worth it. I'm hoping that at some point BFC allows force adjustment for BOTH sides in a QB instead of just the one at present. You could then do something very close to a 20,000 pt game (over 17,000 in a ME) without any third party involvement.

Not remotely true, in my experience.

The former. I haven't done any formal survey, but my impression of those monster-size custom games is that people will only buy a certain amount of infantry no matter how many points you given them to spend, so most of the extra goes into tanks -- often with very high quality crews -- and the resulting battles are armor-heavy slugfests. That's not really my cup of tea. EDITED to add: there is also the fact that even with the new performance optimizations I'm sure it will still be possible to push the game to OOM failure on Windows machines.

It's like kicking an ant pile. They all come out growling and showing their teeth. I'm not sure how realistic it is, but my experience is that assaulting bunkers can be quite costly. You need several teams, one to assault and one or more standing by to cover the assaulters. But what is worse is if they don't come running out. My worst experience was a time when one enemy soldier stayed in the bunker after it was destroyed, shooting out at my guys who would no longer use explosives since it was officially "destroyed".

I would, and one of my goals is to play a huge QB on each of the master maps... after CMBN is updated to engine 3.0and I upgrade from my 4 year old laptop.

Thirded! _______

Yeah, I get that sometimes. If by "brown field" you mean the plowed fields, what you are seeing are moire patterns. As far as I am aware there is no way to get rig of them.

I'm not aware of any German all-SMG squads. The closest thing to that would be Sturmgrenadiers, which are armed entirely with MP44s.

I have tested US 60mm mortars against men prone in an open field. Casualties were over twice as high as predicted in US FM 7-90. http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?p=1400299&highlight=60mm#post1400299

And that is how the Allies won the war: gamey Jeep rushes.

Yep. I'm currently playtesting a mission in one of the CMRT campaigns that is on a map over 6 square kilometers in area, with about a battalion each of infantry and tanks on one side. Every time I've checked system memory CMRT has been using just over 1 GB. Frame rates are playable on Improved/Best with shadows on. And I'm playing on a 4-year old laptop

I have often wished there was an SOP setting you could toggle that would instruct the TacAI for a particular vehicle to favor machine guns over HE for soft targets it does not consider an imminent threat.

I have a suspicion that the HEAT round may have been used as the typical "ready round" given that it is good against both hard and soft targets (albeit not ideal for either). The armor penetration of 75mm HEAT was lower than that of the APCBC round at ranges less than 900-1000 meters or so. EDIT: Yes, the battalion was in the East during this time. This particular unit did have 1 PzIIIN.

Ammunition expenditure of Panzer Battalion 116, Panzer Grenadier Division 16, July 1 1943 - January 31 1944 4687 75mm KwK 40 L/48 HE 1798 75mm KwK 40 L/48 AP 1237 75mm KwK 40 L/48 HEAT 99 75mm KwK 37 L/24 HEAT 39 75mm KwK 37 L/24 HE 5700 50mm KwK 39 L/60 HE 2845 50mm KwK 39 L/60 AP 219,140 machine gun rounds

German doctrine was to keep hitting an enemy tank until it burned so that it couldn't be recovered and repaired. Soviet tanks, at least, typically do have larger HE loads than AP, often around 2 to 1. Their assault guns are even more HE oriented, perhaps in part because they have no machine guns.

No. Most late war armor piercing ammo (German, Soviet and U.S.) was APHE with a high explosive burster charge. The size of this charge varied but IIRC was typically around that of a hand grenade. Presently, the lethality of this burster charge is over-modeled in the game, at least on rounds that ricochet. The exception to this was the British, who did use solid shot almost exclusivity.

You might lose a pair of binoculars I suspect you are correct in seeking to preserve squad firepower over the squad leader. Maybe if he was a +2 I may think twice. But in that case I'd just lead with a different squad. I use 2-man scouts so I don't have to make this choice.

I look at time limits as difficulty modifiers, made necessary by the fact that even with triggers the AI is fairly stupid compared to a competent human player, coupled with the fact that people expect scenarios to have a certain level of challenge, while in reality many battle/firefights are lopsided affairs. So if you give the player more time then you have to compensate by upping the quality and/or quantity of the opposition, which can be as unrealistic as time limits. Same here. If I fail because I ran out of time I don't lose any sleep over it.

Well, yes. It's a memoir, and a fair amount of it is indeed about the small details of a soldier's life. If you don't find such things interesting then long sections of the book are a waste. But to be fair, there are other details more pertaining to Combat Mission type events. German tanks racing through the streets of a Polish town without a care while Bessonov's company has no anti-tank weaponry. An IS-2 destroying 2 Stugs with a single shot. German tank gunners holding fire on T-34s until the tank riders mounted. How Germans defended against SMG troops, ect.

Are you saying it is poorly written, which is not in dispute, or that it is not factual?

Tank Rider is a rambling, sometimes incoherent memoir obviously written by someone attempting to remember events decades after they occurred. Nevertheless, I found it interesting in that is gives glimpses into the nature of tactical combat on the East front at the lowest level, while most East front books in English seem to focus more on the operational and strategic picture. For that reason alone I thought it worthwhile.

Well, that is almost certainly a bug. The key question is, do you have a save game file?

"v2.12 Features: * German halftrack gunners lowered to a more accurate protective stance"

I would prefer that units on Hunt + CA ignore enemy outside the arc, unless fired upon. It would make Hunt more useful in more situations.