Vanir Ausf B

Because that's the way it worked in reality? FM18-21, page 32: Usually alternate positions should not be occupied under fire or when enemy fire is imminent ... It is clear that when enemy forces were near, such movements were expected to be done under cover of darkness or smoke. ... FM18-21 page 70: Also, when one of his attacks fails, he is likely to make another attack over the same ground, profiting by the knowledge gained during the first attack. Therefore, whenever possible, a gun crew that has disclosed its primary position should move to an alternate position at the first opportunity. Often the movement cannot be made until dark because the towed gun is very vulnerable during movement. Such movements can be executed during daytime lulls only when the enemy is unable to bring direct or observed indirect fire upon the position. Movements to alternate and supplementary positions and withdrawals are facilitated by the use of smoke. Smoke laid on the enemy is more effective than a screen placed in front of your own guns. Therefore, when smoke shells are available, the enemy positions should be screened. I don't see a problem with that. Shoot 'n' Scoot is a tank tactic, not a towed AT gun tactic. AT guns relied on cover, concealment, fire discipline and mass of fire to survive. Not so much on mobility. "It soon became apparent that a single antitank gun, or a cluster of them operating independently, was quickly discovered and knocked out. For this reason a new method was developed, which the German panzer troops called the Pakfront. Groups of guns up to a total of ten were put under the command of one man, who was responsible for concentrating their fire on a single target. Groups of antitank guns were thus welded into one unit, the groups were organized in depth and strewn all over the defended area. The idea was to draw the attacking armor into a web of enfilade fire. Fire discipline was of the first importance, and to open fire too early was the gravest mistake that could be made." http://www.isegoria.net/2011/07/armored-tactics-during-citadel/

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IIRC there were structural problems with the Brigades. They were all teeth and no tail, meaning they lacked much of the support personnel found in the divisions such as maintenance. Also, IIRC they lacked dedicated reconnaissance units. Consequently the Panthers blundered into one ambush after another.

The distance between partial and fully hull down positions is almost never very far.

It would be nice if AT guns could reverse so they didn't have to do 180 ° turns to hook up to a prime mover. With regards to movement speed, terrain is everything. What allows teams of men to move large AT guns is momentum. The hard part is getting the thing going, but once it's moving keeping it moving isn't difficult as long as nothing breaks the momentum. But if you are moving over broken or -- worst of all-- muddy ground you'll never get much momentum. My impression is that large AT guns did not move around much during battles. Between battles, sure, but once they were in place and camoed-up they usually stayed there until the attack was beaten off or they were destroyed. Maybe small AT guns were different.

To find partial hull down positions? Noooo. Why on earth would I But if you would like to, say, test the spotting time of the Jagdpanther vs the Sherman 76 at 1200 meters that would save me about 6 hours

The rule of thumb is that if the outgoing target line is grey the tank is completely hull down. If is it blue then it is not. This should be true of any tank in which the driver and bow gunner see forward through roof-mounted periscopes.

I have done some very limited testing of spotting moving vs stationary tanks and I can echo Sgt Joch's comments to the effect that movement seems to trump all other factors in importance. But what I don't know for sure is to what extent speed makes a difference. My testing suggested that speed makes no difference in how easily a moving tank is spotted, but may make some difference in how much the moving tank's spotting is degraded.

Actually, it's not clear if that is a good idea. Being completely hull down may be preferable to being completely exposed if the cover benefit outweighs the spotting penalty. But that has not been established to be true, to my knowledge. What my testing suggests is that there is a sweet spot that maximizes cover while incurring no spotting penalty, which is when the tank is mostly but not completely hull down. I would recommend people only get low enough to where the top of the hull barely clears the obstacle.

Officers have better spotting than enlisted men?

What about the differing effects of hot and cold weather on Allied and German optics? Is that still there in some way? I'm slightly disappointed. Gamey and arbitrary as it may have been it did have a basis in reality. Oh, well. That also shoots down my theory explaining the unusually bad Panther spotting. Steve, it warms my heart to know you care First of all let me say that with regards to the specific example I gave, I actually agree with you. That is just min/maxing of QB points. You (or Charles?) have done a pretty good job on the QB point values. They are, generally speaking, fairly representative of battlefield utility so the opportunities to gain significant advantage are few. And in the few instances of major discrepancies *cough* US rockets *cough* house rules can take care of it. I don't do much min/maxing. Honest There are far more important considerations than point values when deciding on force structure and you hit upon one of them: circumstance. If you know what type of terrain and weather you will be fighting in before you pick your forces (and there seems to be no way of keeping that information hidden) then you absolutely can gain significant benefit from knowing the technical characteristics of vehicles as they relate to your particular circumstances. One example: Let's say you are the attacker in a QB and you have selected random weather and got rain. Since you are on the attack you know your forces are going to move around a lot. So you naturally give strong preference to vehicles with good soft-ground performance to minimize bogging chances in the mud. Historically the Panther was one of if not the best tank of WW2 in that category. So you take some Panthers, congratulating yourself on your in-depth knowledge of WW2 armor. Problem: Panthers in CMx2 actually are not particularly good in mud. In fact, they are no better than early to mid-model Sherman tanks, which were so bad the US went to considerable effort to improve them in that area. Thankfully, in the case of off-road performance there already is a rating for vehicles in the UI so you should be forewarned. But the point is if that value were hidden you would probably think all your bogged Panthers were just bad luck. That's why we nee- ah, I mean "want" detailed information (I know you hate the N-word ). Because how we expect things to work in the game and how they actually do are not always the same. And even if they are we may be totally clueless how they worked in real life and could use the education. But aside from that I don't think we are far apart in our positions. You have said repeatedly that you want us to have more information and that is music to my ears. I'm content see what the future holds. :cool:

Well then I don't know what you're on about. The ends to the means is simply to have hull down status affect spotting as is should (however that may be). And that the optics of various vehicles are working as intended. That's all.

That's fine. Rest assured there are other people who do understand the significance. That is why beta testers are investigating the issue.

Mostly correct. I'm up to episode 7 and I noticed that in some of the '41 battles the Panzer IVs are long barreled 75s.

Testing the effects of hull down is simply a means towards the end of gaining a better understanding of how spotting works, as well as empowering players to make informed tactical decisions as opposed to relying on assumptions. Consistency in results is not necessary to measure meaningful differences. High variance simply puts those differences in perspective. If the standard deviation is much larger than the average difference between two test groups that doesn't mean the difference isn't real or doesn't matter, it just means that sheer dumb luck is the larger of the two factors.

All allied optics were give a single generic rating for quality ("mediocre") and magnification. German optics were not. I didn't see any German optics rated as mediocre. Some of them had more narrow fields of view in exchange for higher magnification. But the gist of it looks to me that IF the vehicle crew was of at least the required experience level and IF the vehicle was not used in situations outside of what the optics were designed for (i.e. Jadgpanther in a knife fight) then the German optics were always considered be better than Allied optics in the same situation, with the notable exception of hot weather. That's what I mean by special treatment. If they weren't special they would have been rated as mediocre like all the rest. Are Allied optics still generic in CMBN? I'm guessing not, but that would be an assumption. And you know what happens when you assume This reminds me of something I forgot to ask in my last post. In practical terms what does this mean, exactly. It looks to me like you are saying that German optics performance is still influence by crew quality to a greater extent than Allied optics. Is that correct? And some German vehicles are still more sensitive to crew quality than others. Am I still warm? I'm just trying to envision how this works. You're getting hung up on semantics. "Need", "want", "would be nice". Insert whatever qualifier you like. I've made it clear that the game isn't broken. I don't feel the need to belabor the point. As for intuitive players being the aces of the CM multiplayer scene, I could see that being the case in real time play. I am doubtful it is true in PBEM. But I am probably biased given that I am not a particularly intuitive player and my PBEM record is... not bad Steve, never try to out-analyze an analytical player If I am playing Germans and going for quantity over quality, I am looking at that old CMBB manual and noticing that early model Panther optics are much less sensitive to crew quality (green required) than late model Panthers (veteran required). So the Panther D it would be. If I'm going for quality then the G starts to look more attractive. That sounds like a new year's resolution

I'm not sure what your definition of "very few" is, and I have not kept a forum post tally, but it has been my impression that a CMx1-style unit stats window has been one of the more popular requests. Do you feel that the CM audience now is more of a casual beer and pretzels crowd compared to 10 years ago or more of a hard core sim bunch? It's not clear to me from your statements which way you think it has shifted. I do think from reading the forum over the last few years that there is a general feeling among old CMx1 players that CMx2 is more challenging to play, an assessment I don't disagree with. I understand that, particularly with regards to the in-game stuff. But if you're going to write a 200 page manual a couple of pages dedicated to the ins and outs of how optics are modeled in the game won't send you into chapter 11. Or if it does you were doomed anyways No, that's not how it worked. But just because real combat tends to be a confusing affair doesn't mean that the ideal wargame should aim to sow a commensurate level of confusion in the player. In a similar vein it has been said that war is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror, but I doubt anyone would want to play a wargame that lived up to that standard No one is claiming that the game is unplayable, just that knowing more about how it works would provide a richer experience. I don't agree that there has been almost no complaints about how or why things work. As I am writing this there is a thread on the front page asking why he can't get his on-board mortars to fire. On that subject alone I have seen many questions. Be be more exact, the player's questions were answered through about 8 hours of testing on my part. I would much rather have been able to say "refer to page X in your CMBN manual". Yes, quotes can be dug up to support almost any position under the sun. The difference being in this case I think they are exactly right. German optics were of a higher level of quality and sophistication up until the end of the war. And I can back that up with a lot more than a few quotes if needs be. But I will reiterate my previous point that this did not translate into a significant tactical advantage in every situation. In fact there are any number of situations in which it would make no difference at all. A King Tiger sitting in a field 100 meters away can be spotted through a beer bottle as well as a Zeiss sight. And it's great to learn some of this stuff. But you are not always available to play 20 questions, and the only reason I even thought to ask specifically about it is because I happened to read a 10 year old game manual. It shouldn't be this hard. Eh, "generally the best out there across the board" is pretty much what I've been saying they were all along. And of course they were given special treatment. They were the only nationality to be broken down into multiple categories rather than assigned a generic value. I'm glad to hear you're looking into the Panther spotting. But this is a good example of why these sorts of things need to be spelled out to the player in detail. Requiring gunners to be of a certain proficiency to take advantage of the German Mili–radian sight is quite realistic. But without knowing how CMBN models that I don't know how concerned I need to be about that factor if choosing forces in a QB or designing a scenario. I would bet that most CM players know very little about gunnery optics to begin with, which brings up another point: that most CM players are history buffs to some extent and look to CM as an opportunity to learn something new about WW2. Hiding information from the player frustrates that.

First of all, Steve, I just want to say that I appreciate you taking time to discuss this. Even if I disagree with most of what you are saying I'm going to answer your comments somewhat out of order for reasons that will become apparent. The game would only be unplayable if the information is forced on the player or somehow made mandatory. I don't recall anyone complaining back in the CMx1 days that the data window interfered with gameplay, or that the more detailed game mechanics information in the manual (more on that later) blew their minds. While this is undoubtedly true in general I'm pretty sure they would know quite a lot about the particular tank they were using. But this is really besides the point. Wargames are a sub-genre of strategy games, and part of the fun of strategy games is making decisions, seeing the results of those decisions and then applying the lessons learned in the hopes of making better decisions in the future. But in order to interpret results we need to understand the rules of the game. Otherwise we don't know if our failures are due to tactical mistakes, bad luck, or assumptions about game mechanics that may not be accurate. So yes, real tank crews know much less about opposing tanks than us wargamers, and I am sure many of them died having no idea why. That is one reason real wars are typically less fun than wargames Well, sure. Because a Panther has a much more powerful gun and better armor. But not every German tank has a clear-cut armor/gun advantage over every Allied tank. In the other now-locked hull down thread one player, who is not a newbie at all, was openly mystified that in a large all armor battle on a big map his Panzer IVs were getting spotted first at long range by opposing Shermans on a consistent basis. He had assumed that German optics would give his tanks a spotting advantage at long range and intuitively played to that advantage. He didn't know if his poor results were due to bad luck or incorrect assumptions about game mechanics. It turns out that it was probably both of those things, but it took hours of testing to answer the question. Technically, I did not make any blanket statements about superior German optics. I quoted several people with first-hand experience in the matter who were making blanket statements about superior German optics I became curious about this, dug out my old CMBB manual, and found the section on "Gunney Optics". Yes, there is an entire section explaining how gunnery optics function in that game, nearly two pages long. By contrast, I just did a word search on "optics" in the CMBN manual, the Commonwealth manual, the Market-Garden manual, the 2.11 engine manual, and there is virtually nothing about optics in any of them aside from brief mentioning in a few unit descriptions. I have to say, reading this for the first time in 10 years has been a revelation. I've forgotten a lot. I'm going to quote most of it and comment on parts. I'm sure you still have a copy still kicking around somewhere, but not everyone reading this does. Ok Steve, I admit it: you were right, I was wrong. Savor it This is really an amazing level of detail, especially in a 10-year old game. I would be thrilled if the same fidelity to realism is present in CMBN. Too bad we have no way of knowing. Ah, so the German optics actually did get special treatment, even after the peer reviewed study (and who "peer reviewed" it anyways? John Tiller, Gary Grigsby and Norm Koger? ) Interesting. Anybody else noticing a pattern here? Hold on a sec. Were we not just discussing a test I did that featured Panther A late tanks that exhibited relatively poor spotting performance that has so far gone unexplained? Why, yes, I think we were. All of the tanks in that test had Regular crews. Is it possible that, like in CMx1, German armored vehicles require crews to be of a certain experience level to take advantage of their advanced optics, and suffer penalties when they fall short?* If that is the case it sounds like something that may be kinda-sorta important to know. Or these days does that fall under the category of "minutia" that is "no longer important"? *Which would be impressively realistic, by-the-way.

So are sights used for spotting or are they not used for spotting? My test results suggest "not", at least not in that circumstance. It is true that sights have as much or more effect on gunnery than on spotting. In fact some of the characteristics of German sights have nothing at all to do with spotting and everything to do with increasing first shot accuracy. Do they do that in the game? There is no way to know without being told since I don't believe it is possible to test it in a way that differentiates between accuracy due to sights and accuracy from characteristics of the gun. IIRC, in the CMx1 games sights were modeled as only affecting spotting so I have been under the assumption that the same is true in CMx2 absent any indication to the contrary. I suppose my philosophy is more the opposite. I think the player should be given every bit of information that could possibly be useful, which he can then take or leave as much of it as he wishes. I would no more expect the player to use his units intuitively as I would a real life tank commander to be told to not sweat the details, but fight the tank intuitively. Because in the game the player more-or-less is the tank commander. That would be good. One problem with playing intuitively is that it assumes the players' intuition matches reality as it is presented in the game. When there is a mismatch the player is left puzzling over results that don't make sense to him. I own that book and recommend it. But I don't like Zaloga's blanket characterization. "Better" at what, exactly. Everything? It may well have been of benefit to situational awareness while moving (and it was while moving that Zaloga meant the German gunner was "blind"), although when I recently posed that question to a former Sherman 76 gunner he threw cold water on the notion. The Sherman did have a much quicker target hand-off from the commander to the gunner, which may have been in part due to the secondary gunner's periscope sight on the Sherman but was probably more because of the ability of the Sherman tank commander to override the turret power traverse controls, a feature German tanks lacked.

... which it does.

Hmm, I may have to spend some time with the search engine to refresh my memory But I was not aware that the BFC position is that they were irrelevant (if indeed that is what you mean). I think that would be unfortunate. While I would not be in favor of any sort of across the board German optics bonus in all situations I think they did make a difference in some circumstances. Interviews with participants in the festivities suggest they did not feel the differences were irrelevant at all. German tank sights are definitely superior to American sights. These, combined with the flat trajectory of the guns, give great accuracy. -- Brigadier General J. H. Collier, 2nd US Armored Division The matter of tank gun sights has caused us much concern. I have looked through and worked with sights in German Mk V and VI tanks as well as our own. I find that the German sight has more magnifying power and clearness than our own, which is a big advantage to a gunner. -- Lt. Col. Wilson M. Hawkins, 3rd Battalion, 67th Armored Regiment "We always noted the high quality of the Zeiss gun-sight optics. They maintained that high quality till the end of the war. We had nothing like that. The gun-sights themselves were more convenient than ours. We had a triangle in the crosshairs and hairlines left and right. They had corrections for wind, distance, and so on." -- V.P. Bryukhov, as quoted in T-34 In action Apparently I was not as clear about the test parameters as I thought. The larger size of the Panther tank was not a factor in this test since none of the tanks were timed while spotting Panthers. All tanks were timed while spotting Sherman 76s exclusively, including the Sherman 76 itself. If we assume for the sake of argument that there was no significant difference in the quality of German and Allied optics we are still left with the fact that there are significant differences in the sights on the Sherman 76, Panzer IV and Panther A. Gunner's sights Sherman 76 M71D telescopic sight. 5x magnification, 13° FOV M4A1 periscope with a built-in M47A2 telescope. 1.44 X magnification, 9° FOV Panzer IV H T.Z.F.5f telescopic sight. 2.5x magnification, 25° FOV Panther A late T.Z.F.12a articulated telescopic sight. Selectable dual magnification. 2.5x with 28° FOV or 5x with 14° FOV So it does not appear that the physical differences between the Sherman and Panzer IV sights make any significant difference in long range spotting between the two. The Panther's sight seems to make it slightly worse for some reason. Or perhaps there is some other cause of the Panther's problem, but given the tightly controlled test conditions I don't know what that could be. In any event, we have been told that sights are "fully modeled" in the game. But the question I have is: fully modeled to do what, exactly? I suppose that depends on whether or not you feel that knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the units under your command is useful. Knowing if a particular type of tank is unusually good or bad at spotting in certain circumstances may influence what tactics are used. I think that sort of knowledge is very useful.

Finished the Panther, Sherman and Pz IV long range spotting testing. All tests were done spotting Sherman M4A3w Sherman 76 (early) tanks. Range 1200 meters. All tanks in the open (not hull down). All tanks buttoned. Data points: Panther A late:320 M4A3w Sherman 76 early: 300 Panzer IV H late: 300 Average spotting times in seconds M4A3w Sherman 76 early: 127.8 Panzer IV H late: 128.5 Panther A late: 139.7 Well, so much for the much-heralded German optics The Sherman and Panzer IV are practically equal. The Panther is worse than both by a small but probably statistically significant margin (74% likelihood t-test, 64% Kolmogorov-Smirnov).

I don't think vehicles make an audible noise when not spotted, unless they are firing.

BTW, I will hopefully have some test results by early Friday morning. The Panther testing is (probably) done. I have not entered all the data into the spreadsheet yet, but the second 100 spot times have mean of 139.5 seconds, only .4 seconds different than the first 100 I posted.

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