Vanir Ausf B

The M4A4 is really just the original M4 with a different engine. It never got the modified front hull the later M4A3 models did.

The cheapness of the basic M4 Sherman is mostly because of it's crappy armor. It has cast armor rather than RHA and is also thinner up front compared to later models. The M4A3 (75) is 217 pts. Give it a 76mm gun and it's 243 pts, 10 pts more than a Pz IV. You just have to accept that the QB prices are broad approximations, not based on match-ups between specific units in specific circumstances. So yeah, a Stuart that costs 100 pts can penetrate the Pz IV's front turret at short to medium ranges. Does that mean a Pz IV should cost 100 pts? That's not how the system works. If I could wave my magic wand I'd increase the prices of uber tanks across the board but my wand has little magic in it unless something is crazily out of whack like the price of rocket artillery a few years back. Pz IV prices are not in that category.

I would recommend house rules for QBs to limit armor creep. They're pretty simple. Use Fionn's Armor Rules as a basis. For every vehicle you purchase from the Rule of 76 list you must purchase 2 or 3 from the Rule of 75 list. Or whatever ratio you please. I also like to set ground conditions to wet to make people think about putting too many of their eggs in one basket.

Nobody but Charles knows the exact formula, but Lethaface is correct that rarity* is accounted for separately and real world manufacturing price is no factor at all. *Rarity for any unit is in relation to other units in its own army, i.e. the rarity for a Tiger tank is it's proportion of the Wehrmacht's tank inventory only, not compared to the number of Shermans or T-34s.

The base M4 Sherman lacks a cupola and is more likely to bog than a Pz IV. Whether that justifies the price difference I'm not sure, but the purchase price does take into account more than gun and armor.

What was the weather and time of day?

It has been.

The reason there are many more inches of text about Russia is because Michael Kofman is a Russia expert. He literally writes about Russia for a living. Michael Kofman serves as Director of the Russia Studies Program at the CNA Corporation and a Fellow at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in the Russian armed forces, Russian military thought, and strategy. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/michael-kofman Why you would expect a Russian expert to write about China is beyond me. There are other people not named Michael Kofman who do write about China. A simple search on the War on the Rock website will bring up literally dozens of articles about China.

None taken...

I have to be careful because of the NDA. But essentially it's that units in real combat during WW2 did not provide a continuous play-by-play on the position and status of every single enemy unit they can see to every friendly unit they are in contact with. If they can actually see an enemy the enemy can at least potentially see them back, so getting on the radio to tell Lt. Scrub "you know that Panther that was parked next to the barn? It drove 120 meters to the southwest, stopped and killed 3 of my men. Thought you'd like to know" would usually not be a priority. If course that doesn't mean that sort of information was never shared in the heat of battle. A dismounted squad of Soviet tank riders that was just in LOS of a German tank is certainly going to tell the T-34 crew all about it when they mount back up. But the game doesn't do that. Personally I think the current model is too conservative to be of much use but that's just me.

This is actually not a bug. Units with information about a particular enemy unit will share that information with friendly units in C2 that have no information about that particular enemy unit, but once that happens the receiving unit will have to rely on it's own eyeballs to update position information as there is no continuous tracking and updating of position information via C2.

You are half right The Russian blog was referenced in this National Interest article.

https://zen.yandex.ru/media/gurkhan/2a82-pushka-est-i-pushki-net-5c4cb5e8c7776100ae885e79

Spotting checks are random and therefor can produce outlier events. The game's been out for a while now. We know this is not how things usually work.

The Germans were loath to add any weight to the turret since it was already heavier than the traverse mechanism was designed to handle. From a post-war French report: "The turret traverse drive is not strong enough to either turn the turret or hold it in place when the Panther is on an incline of more than 20 degrees."

They tried to. https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2-germany-panzer-panther-ausf-f/ TL;DR: After a year of development the first redesign got rejected. The second redesign was accepted and set to go into production in early 1945 as the Panther F, but it was too late.

In 1976 the US Army estimated the first shot hit probability for a Soviet RPG-7. Panzerschrecks and Bazookas were fairly accurate weapons. The US Ordinance manual lists the dispersion for the M6A3 Bazooka rocket as 6 mils, which comes out to about 1.6 meters at 300 yards (274 meters), so accuracy was dependent on the operator. Real world combat accuracy is anyone's guess, but the in-game results don't strike me as unbelievable.

https://combatmission.fandom.com/wiki/House_Rules

I was making a general statement, not referencing any particular example. Some Soviet troop have AT grenades, some don't and the ones that do have limited numbers.

Frankly, the ability of infantry to close assault still-mobile tanks without any anti-tank weaponry is not particularly realistic under any circumstance. It was hardly ever done in reality.

Confirmed and reported.

Well after testing this it looks like there is a fair degree of randomness. I actually thought it may be a bug since I kept getting extreme cold if I saved the map in the editor and then went straight into the QB menu, but always got cool temps otherwise. Then I got a few cool temps after saving in the editor which blew my theory up. I never did get "cold", which is odd. At this point I can't tell if there is a bug or if it's just randomness. I'd have to generate a much larger number of QBs to be statistically significant.

What was the weather?

The default setting in the editor can be overridden by weather conditions, ground conditions and possibly date.