Vanir Ausf B

I always just walk my troops through marked mines. I've yet to have one blow up.

Yes. Finally. On a per-bullet basis only machine guns are more lethal. The only changes made to small arms was that they have a somewhat higher rate of fire at short range, and are better at targeting soft-skinned vehicles. Oh, and they do cause more suppression.

Looks like an IS-3 to your right.

This is, by far, the simplest way to do it. Group all your on board assets together and park any radio-equipped vehicle in the middle of them (within 20 meters). Every HQ and FO on the map will be able to call them in, even ones out of C2 (which is not realistic but that's how it works).

I'm currently reading Tank Rider by Evgeni Bessonov, who was an platoon leader in an SMG company 1943-45. His description of typical German defenses are exactly as you describe. In addition, based on that book it appears that if the heavy weapons failed to stop the Soviets then as soon as the Soviet troops got within effective SMG range the Germans would typically retreat to form a new defensive line further back rather than stand and fight it out in close quarters. There were exceptions, of course.

I'm sorry to hear about you dad. And your mother. I lost my own mother to cancer. I went ahead and grabbed the damaged version. The map is a beaut.

I would be surprised if it was in the manual. BFC seems quite adverse these days to providing exact numbers for game mechanics. It's probably from The most important post in the history of the forums.

Something I would be much more interested in seeing removed is the tendency for men in units that have their current waypoint adjusted while moving will turn around and run back the way they came for a short distance.

Hi. Are you still planning on releasing this? I'm just wondering if I should wait for it or just download the battle damaged version.

http://www.battlefront.com/community/showthread.php?t=97507 Required reading.

What you're seeing there is just bad TacAI behavior, with the hull and turret rotation working at cross purposes. Fixing that would not be controversial.

That brings up an interesting question: why have a turret? They add complexity, cost and vulnerability to a AVF. In game, a Panther takes 7-8 seconds to rotate its turret 90°, a Tiger tank takes twice that long.

She has taste.

Turret down tanks (i.e. the commander has LOS but the gunner does not) do not get a grey line.

I was just referring to the "no line of sight" message but used inexact syntax. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that AFVs function similar to other crew-served weapons such as AT guns and machine guns in that it is not possible to target something the gunner has no LOS to.

When I say pivot in place I mean literally in place as they do in the game, not locking one track then swinging the tank around on that track. AFVs with neutral or regenerative steering can move the tracks on each side of the vehicle in opposite directions. AFAIK the Chruchhill was the first tank to have this feature. All German Big Cats had it. Off the top of my head I'm not aware off any other WW2-era tanks that did.

Also keep in mind that because all vehicles in CM can pivot in place, which in reality only AFVs with neutral steer-capable transmissions could do, tanks are able to turn in places that should not even be possible, such as narrow streets.

That tanks turn slower in CM than in real life is not really debatable, nor is the fact unknown to BFC. Keep in mind that most of these videos show tanks turning while in motion, which tends to be quicker than while at a stop. The driver can anticipate the turn ahead of time to select the proper gear, the engine is already at high RPM and the forward momentum helps start the turn quickly. Compare that to a situation where the commander of a Stug spots an enemy bazooka team off to the side of his motionless vehicle. First he has to issue an order to the driver over the internal intercom system to turn the vehicle in that direction. Assuming the driver is ready to react immediately to this unexpected order he may still have to shift gears. All of this would probably take less time than tanks can turn in CM now and perhaps there is room for some adjustment, but making them turn exactly as fast as real life without making other adjustments in the game would not be a good idea.

This has come up before. Tank turning speeds are deliberately nerfed to compensate for their super-fast reaction times. Think about how it would look if a tank spotted your bazooka team off to the side then whipped around 90 degrees in 3 seconds to blow them away. Ideally, reaction times would be explicitly and accurately modeled so that turning speed could be as well. Turning speed is not the same for all vehicles in the game. Compare a Panther to a Sherman.

AFAIK if the gunner does not have LOS, the target line will say LOS blocked, NOT a grey line. A grey line on a hull down tank simply means the driver and radio operator have no LOS. That is to be expected on a fully hull down tank. The main gun and coax MG should be able to fire. Visually, there does not appear to be anything obstructing it from doing so. I think this is a bug.

Could be, although I don't remember seeing the exact range mentioned. But that is a Panther G (early), which in CMBN is the first Panther model on which the "glacis armor has occasional manufacturing flaws", to quote the manual. If we assume CMx2 models Panther armor flaws similar to how it was in CMx1 then the glacis would be 85% quality, which would resist Soviet 85mm APBC equivalent to 144.5mm at vertical. (170 x .85). Again, we don't know the exact range, but it looked to be under 300 meters. 85mm APBC penetrates 133mm of RHA at 250 meters. A penetration/resistance ratio of .92 (133/144.5) gives a penetration percentage of either 2% (US test data) or 13% (Soviet test data). It's anyone's guess what CM uses, and there could have been a small elevation difference which the highly sloped Panther glacis is very sensitive to, and I'm assuming the glacis is 82mm thick without knowing what CM calls it. But yeah, it's probably possible against a late model Panther, albeit still quite a lucky shot.

What I meant was that it seems to work best if the covered arc and movement is already set when the enemy unit is spotted. However, I've done some testing and the behavior is unfortunately not as consistent as I had previously thought. Sometimes the tank will rotate, sometime it doesn't. Sometimes it will rotate only a little, sometimes a lot. I'm not sure why. This may have changed in the last patch.

My somewhat limited experience is that when the hit text and the decal don't match it's the decal that is wrong. But that may not be always true. I'll to some quick testing next week to make sure the penetration/armor values are on the up and up.

One caveat that I forgot to mention, is that IIRC the paused movement order needs to be present prior to the tank starting to rotate to the target. If you give the paused movement order and a target order at the same time the hull will rotate.

How about the Stug IV?