Vanir Ausf B

Yes, keep on fighting, Russians! You will win eventually! Trust me. BTW, did anyone notice that the band leader is sporting a Hitler-stache?

My assumption is that the hide command does for vehicles exactly what the manual says it does: reduces the range at which the enemy can obtain a noise contact. But my experience has been that I never get noise contacts on vehicles unless they are moving anyway, so I question of utility of a hide order for them.

Why is this in the Shock Force forum? I have to wonder at Hendrix's concluding comment that: He says he wrote this "with the deliberate intention of being provocative and taking a contrarian point of view" so I assume he realizes that he is taking some seriously questionable positions for the sake of stirring the pot. Nevertheless he did make that statement. It's widely accepted that the Germans would have been better served by taking a more defensive stance post-Kursk, but to suggest they would have or could have won the war by doing so is an extraordinary claim. He downplays Germany's materiel and manpower disadvantage by saying "the fact that by 1943 and 44 the Russians were running out of hordes, and the Allied material superiority wasn't always that superior" while in fact the Soviet strategic force ratio advantage increased from 1943 to 1944 and the Allied landings in Normandy stacked the overall numbers even further. The implication that Germany would have been better served by a more rigidly top-down command structure seems odd given that the person at the top of the command structure was Adolf Hitler. I suspect the German armies needed more operational independence, not more. IIRC Manstein was fired by Hitler because of his vocal and public argument for the adoption of a mobile defense.

Note the difference with 57mm AP. I wonder which will be used in CMFI?

I don't think so. From what I have read APCR did not become available until October of 1943 at the earliest. The question isn't can the 57mm penetrate the Tiger frontally. It can through the hull at short to medium ranges, and sometimes through the turret in its presently slightly-gimped condition. The issue is that in the base game it is only available as a towed AT gun. That is fine on the defense but it will be a challenge to use them offensively, or try the old smoke-and-flank with your Shermans.

John, The first complete penetration was at a range of 800 yards, at an angle of impact of 30 degrees from normal, through homogeneous armor 82-mm (approximately 3 1/3 inches) thick. What part of the Tiger's armor is 82mm thick?

If you don't hide them. And if they are not spotted first as a result of not being hidden. Then yes, it works great.

Through the side.

In QBs. If rarity is used. And even then, the way rarity works in CM you can typically buy at least one of anything unless it's a small game. I do hope BFC adjusts the point values in QBs to reflect that a Tiger I in 1943 was relatively at least as powerful a weapon as a King Tiger in mid-late 1944. Not really. I was aware the 6 pdr could penetrate from the side. It can from the front sometimes. That's why I mentioned the US 57mm previously, although I suspect CM may give it slightly less penetration than the British version due to the burster cap in the same way it does 75mm.

That is somehow not reassuring In reality the Tiger had a marked tendency to break down when attempting to climb the long steep hills typical of Italy. In fact, once the Germans learned to keep them out of off-shore battery range the Allies discovered that the best way to take out the Tigers was to force them to move. They did this by simply concentrating their attacks where ever the Tigers were not. The Germans attempted to counter this in turn by dispersing the Tigers across the front, which was contrary to the official German doctrine.

The Tiger tank is going to be a terror in this game, even if they don't fix the turret armor (and I hope they do). It looks like the US will have nothing capable of penetrating it frontally except maybe the towed 57mm gun, and I'm not sure about even that.

Good plan!

How much system RAM and video RAM does your comp have?

AFAIK the OOM crashes were caused by the game running out of usable system RAM. I suspect that polygons and normal maps are stored in video RAM.

It so happens I asked Steve this question and he essentially said that SOPs aren't in the game because when he played TacOps he never bothered with using the SOPs. Kinda blew my mind.

You can use the company HQ as a substitute platoon HQ as long as it's the units' own company HQ and not from a different company. I've read somewhere, maybe in the manual, that the higher HQs don't work as well as platoon HQs when used that way but I don't know what the difference is.

Doesn't anyone miss the Gebirgsjäger? I see the Fallguys getting all the love but I miss the Gerbils.

I think the small size of most CMBN maps is certainly a factor. The engagement cited in the OP was at 100 meters. My own experience is that at ranges over 500 meters, generally, AT guns are rarely spotted after the first shot and can aften take several turns to spot. Also, at those ranges you don't have to worry about crew members shooting rifles at the tank commanders, which I suspect they really should not be doing anyways even at short range. As someone else mentioned, the primary purpose of an AT gun is to take out the tank. Once that is accomplished the commander and the rest of the crew can be dealt with much more easily. As far as tanks spotting, I wonder how much moving degrades the spotting ability of tanks and whether speed and terrain are factored in. I have no personal experience, but I have read that when moving at faster than a crawl over rough terrain it is extremely difficult to see anything out of the vision blocks because of being jostled around.

That's great. Now if we could please get something capable of shooting back at the planes...

CMBO is the only game it was in. The Ambush command functioned differently than a covered arc. When an enemy unit neared the ambush marker the friendly unit would automatically un-hide, even if the enemy unit had not been spotted. On the one hand this was unrealistic, but on the other hand it got around the fact that hiding units are terrible at spotting and will sometime let enemy units walk right up to them. It made ambushes easier to pull off.

I don't think the armored covered arc will necessarily make any difference. IIRC all that the ACA does is prevent firing at non-armored targets. It does not restrict which weapons are fired at armored targets. At least I don't remember it doing that in CMx1

+1 I've been wishing for that to come back ever since they took it out in CMBB.

There were far more total hits on the mantlet than on the front turret, so the total number of penetrations may have been the same ( I did not add them up) but as a percentage penetrations of the front turret were far more likely than on the mantlet. If you add in the instances of armor spalling it's orders of magnitude difference. So no, I don't think this is a possible explanation. According to Rexford's book the Tiger mantlet should resist equal to about 130mm RHA by itself, on average. Of course the thinner edges of the mantlet have the 100mm think front turret armor behind it.

Save game file. http://www.2shared.com/file/6F6m0i0m/gunnery2000_cromwell_500_Tiger.html

Good catch on test 4. Edited. No screen shots (but I could make some). However I do have all the save game files if you want them. I could bundle them up and post them if you like, but it's late so it will have to be sometime tomorrow.