JasonC
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Posts posted by JasonC
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Please me, because I am right about what CM is good at simulating.
Simple really...
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I'd love more scenarios with low quality troops. But above all I want scenarios with fewer troops - a lot fewer. Designers seem to think putting in as much variety and weight of metal is the route to popularity, and that "challenge" is the next most important thing. So they make hard monstrosities that are painful to play and cannot be finished in a sitting, then they congratulate themselves on how big, involved, and complex they are. Then they complain when we don't shower them with praise for their efforts.
Smaller, guys. Biggest single thing. CMx2 has gone more detailed than CMx1, scenario scale needs to move to match. Take whatever you were planning on doing and drop everything a full unit size (or two, for the giantists among you), and build that instead.
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As for the IS-2, multiple points. First, the basic hull armor and confusion over 100 vs 120 thickness is all due to the switch in the "not early" model, which dispensed with the 120mm thick but low slope top of the front hull, superstructure section, in favor of a uniform 100mm glacis fully sloped at 60 degrees. This is covered by Wikipedia with full diagrams and really shouldn't be any mystery. That also shows that the front turret not covered by the mantlet, but around it, is 100mm thick as well as round for angle.
Any pretence that they were aiming at 100mm protection for the whole front is thus toast at the outset. They accepted 100mm plus 30 degrees only for the lower hull, they accepted 100mm plus round for angle only for the turret edges. For the glacis they wanted 100mm thick *plus* full 60 degree slope, which more than doubles the effective thickness. They had found 120mm plus 20-30 degree slope inadequate on the early models. So clearly they were accepting 100mm only with slope and only on smaller parts of the front.
As for the sources for the 160mm figure for the max of the mantlet over turret front, it is given in (1) Zaloga, (2) by Denizen on the CMBB forums back when we had this conversation for CMBB, and (3) the tank diagram textbooks the latter cited then (you can track them down, this was ten years ago but they were definitive IMO).
How does it come about, physically? You have a 75mm mantlet plate lying on top of a 90mm turret face, but with some taper of the mantlet plate itself. The max physical thickness is 160mm. I have seen sources that rate the joint resistance as low as 130mm single plate. But it is certainly well above 100m flat. The turret front is *not* the weakest part of the tank.
I note also that in early CMBB modeling, German layered plates were consistently modeled as resisting more than single piece, which I among others argued was completely wrong, but helped give us the uber StuG. The same folks tried to give us JS-2s with flat 100mm front armor resistance, to the point where Panzer IVs were outscoring them in straight up fights at 800 to 1200 meters. This was too laughable a piece of German physics to survive the next few patches. The early IS-2s were left nerfed but the later ones became real heavy tanks, with little fanfare or admission that the German physics lobby had screwed the pooch.
But Denizen had it right from the get go, because he had excellent sources and no axes to grind. Unlike some others that BTS relied on at the time, rather too heavily.
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Amizaur re 1000 meters, um, I don't think that is so easy, unless the tank is moving fast throwing up dust, or firing with a nice big muzzle blast while you were watching, or similar. Anything stationary with any kind of camou pattern at 1000 meters is not at all easy to quickly pick out of the whole visual field, up to that distance. Evidence for those who don't spend a lot of time trying to shoot such distances -
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Amizaur - it isn't the magnification, that is a relatively minor issue. Quality of the glass makes is much easier to pick up targets out of the background, rapidly. Anyone who has used a $500 rifle scope vs a $50 rifle scope knows what I am talking about. They can have the same magnification and the same field of view, but the higher quality glass is simply much clearer, edges are vivid, where they are blurred and indistinct with lower quality glass. This mostly matters for picking up the target in the first place, not for adjusting shots. Motion is much less visible in a blurred field than in one with sharp outlines. When we speak of optics quality it is mostly this we are talking about, not differences in aiming reticles or magnification settings. I don't disagree with the comment that such things matter most in low light conditions or extreme ranges; that is correct.
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I suspect serious misunderstanding about the armor layout of the IS-2.
There are simply more regions and plates to track on it than on most vehicles, and more variations of type within the same vehicle designation.
The lower front hull, below the beak, is 100mm thick and sloped backward from the vertical at 30 degrees.
On early models, there is a highly sloped front deck up to a superstructure plate. The sloped deck is 72 degrees from the vertical and 70mm thick. It presents relatively little of the vertical surface to a flat shot, because the angle is so steep. Above that is a small superstructure section that is only 20 degrees from vertical, but that is 120mm thick.
Then for the turret front, there are curved sections above and below the mantlet that are 102mm thick and round, 30 to 45 degrees to most hits. The mantlet itself is significantly thicker, having a 75mm thick plate over the base turret armor. In the center of the mantlet there is no slope to speak of (5-10 degrees at most), but the armor is 160mm thick. That is post war Centurion territory, and more than a Churchill or a Sherman Jumbo (6 inches or 152mm for those). At the edges of the mantlet (rather than the turret) there is some slope and up to 75mm over 102mm. So 160mm is as weak as the mantlet portion gets, it is actually tougher toward the edges because the mantlet layer is thicker there.
In later models, the front hull above the beak becomes a single slope at 60 degrees from the vertical, instead of the 72 degree section then the 20 degree section. That glacis is 100mm thick, and at that angle immensely strong. It should resist like more than 8 inches of rolled plate and a long 88 should have trouble with it.
So a late model presents relatively few target areas for a German 74L48 round at medium range. Below the beak, 100mm at 30 degrees, the German gun can handle if close enough. But 100mm at 60 (the glacis) it doesn't have a prayer. 160mm in the center of the mantlet, it doesn't have a prayer. 102mm at the edges of the turret, it can easily face 45 degrees plus of slope and need quite close range to penetrate.
If the IS-2 is late model and partial hull down, the lower front hull plate is not exposed. Only the edges of the turret are vulnerable then, and only close and with a good hit location in terms of relatively low angle but off the mantlet. Square hits on the mantlet are going to bounce and square hits on the glacis aren't going to do a darn thing.
The Russians' own estimate was that a *Panther* needed to be within about 700 meters to be seriously dangerous to an IS-2, because it could drill the mantlet at that distance. But that is with a 75L70, with vastly more energy and penetration than a 75L48.
If you have an hull up, early model IS-2 at close range, then a StuG III should be reasonably capable against you. Center mantlet hits should still bounce off, but many of the other surfaces are vulnerable. Anything later, they should need smaller plates hit even close, and should be only randomly and occasionally effective (turret edge hits, "just so") at longer range.
Bottom line, the IS-2 (as long as not the early model) should feel like a completely dominant AFV vs a StuG from the front at medium range or longer, especially when partial hull down. The StuGs should not be able to approach a formation of them without being slaughtered.
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Gamer58 - Russian optics *are* German optics. The Russian optics facilities were all designed and built by Zeiss Corporation during the 1920s and early 1930s, when the two countries were closely cooperating, just as all the highly productive Russian tank factories were designed by American industrial engineers from Detroit, slightly later. Granted the quality control may have been higher in the German plants, giving better glass etc. But they were using German machinery designed by Germans and installed by them, for their precision optics, throughout.
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On the infiltration tactics point, yes the Russians got very good at them, yes they were similar across all armies. But successful infiltration in the second half of the war in the east was a larger scale thing that we are usually depicted with CM scenarios in which it depends on sending 2 men before the next 5 etc.
The units that infiltrated ranged from a recon platoon to an entire infantry battalion.
They did it at night, not during the day. Sometimes in the predawn ahead of an attack, at most, light wise.
They surveyed the infiltration site ahead of time for days, observing all they could of enemy locations and movements and sentries and OP routines etc.
German defensive systems used wide areas covered by obstacles and ranged fire from strongpoints, with the areas directly covered by the infantry strongpoints themselves only a modest portion of the line. There would be OPs and LPs ahead of the line, to be sure, but manned very thin. The whole defense scheme expected to call for fire from a strongpoint, out to 400 meters to 800 meters from MGs, 1-2 kilometers from 81mm mortars, and from 105mm howitzers in second line, covering 10 kilometers to either side. At night much of that ranged fire became blind barrage fire only called if a major intrusion was detected.
Night infiltration was all about avoiding any accurate barrage fire while passing through the obstacle areas, away from the infantry strongpoints themselves. That avoidance took the form of blinding LPs by taking them out by stealth, and getting through the resulting gap in listening coverage before the defenders knew about it, or worming between two LPs exploiting lax awareness or relief procedures etc.
Pathfinders would find the route, not enough of them to bring down a barrage and minimizing the risk of detection, and doing any blinding attacks on the LPs. Then platoons at a time would follow those routes in narrow columns, frequently literally holding on to the man in front to maintain orientation in the dark, or following a guide rope left by the path finder teams.
The whole goal was to get the formation clean through the enemy line before daybreak, *without* any fighting, or fighting anything larger than a few listening posts manned by single sentries or small fire teams, at most. By dawn, they wanted to be stationary inside the enemy defensive system, camou'ed and quiet.
Then in the mission was recon, the next night they'd move off into the enemy rear and hide out for days just observing, maybe trying to grab a prisoner for more intel just before sneaking back into their own lines.
If the mission was attack, they would reveal themselves by fire at surrounding enemy units as those moved, already dug in inside the enemy defensive scheme. The goal was to force the original defenders to withdraw through fire, or to attack dug in infantry themselves, just to clean out their defensive system. The main body back in the Russian lines would support all that by ranged fire, and if the Germans got too committed to attacking an infiltrated battalion, by direct frontal assault while they were busy with the infiltrated guys.
They picked bad terrain for all of the above. A marsh, deep woods interiors far from any roads. Any place the Germans could not afford to be thick on the ground, and were likely to discount as a lousy place to get through where nothing but infantry (or horse cavalry) was even able to move in the first place.
Infiltration tactics do not mean a village on the high road directly defended by a nearly equal enemy infantry force, in broad daylight, trying to sneak into or through them by using half squads instead of squads. Because that flat out doesn't work, and it is also operationally unnecessary. There are vastly better conditions available, and the whole point of such tactics is to use those better conditions, to pick the time and the place, to exploit having all the time in the world. If you can crawl through between dusk and dawn, it suffices - there is no rushing.
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On the AI aspects, some thoughts...
Almost all route finding in games uses some version of an algorithm called A* (pronounced "a star") that solves from both ends rejecting longer routes until it finds a path around any intervening obstacles, then runs with the first such route found. Normally only an actual movement cost or impossibility is incorporated into that - some routes are impossible and physical distance can be "weighted" by a local route cost, but that's it.
The way to hack danger avoidance into such route finding is to keep a separate "threat field" that records a perceived danger level for each spot of ground, just like a movement cost for each spot of ground, and adds that danger level to the movement costs when deciding which route to take. A sufficiently dangerous location - like a minefield - then looks just like impassible terrain. A* will do the rest and find a way around it.
This reduces the problem to having a quick, efficient, and realistic / useful way of calculating a threat field from known enemies or past events or both. A perfect version of that would get computationally intensive, because it is changing all the time as enemies move etc. But an imperfect version could be implemented without trying to get it perfect, and it would help A* find the tactically best routes, rather than just the "walk in the park" fast ones.
How? Well, start with dead bodies as a good indicator of danger. You don't need to see it coming - the player can do that - but it'd be a good idea to see what has already happened and is now an established tactical fact. You can add very recent fire near enough to know about - out to suppression radius only, I mean. So it MG fire suppresses everyone within 25 meters, then add that 25 meter suppression disk to the threat field. If it is close enough to be making people duck on the combat resolution side, you don't need to worry about whether they should know about it - they know about it.
That is probably plenty to start with. If you wanted to go a little further in the same direction you could add in some static terrain analysis, that doesn't adapt to enemies or sighting reports, but does consider spots that can see more of the board more dangerous than spots that can't see much. That's a vision field, just like you are calculating for LOS considerations. Shadows and low ground and cover interiors will look more attractive in that static map than their movement cost alone would indicate, and the middle of open fields a lot worse. The edges of open fields might look best - which is just fine, it gets you there quicker than slogging through the woods interior and it lets you break LOS faster etc.
No need to go to relative spotting or threat assessment - the player has to handle anything like that. But the basic pathfinding could know about (1) minefields (2) places where half the platoon just bought it (3) not to step through a door when half the squad got whacked as soon as they tried to (4) the middle of a 105mm barrage while it is landing, etc etc. You'd fix anything really broken, in other words.
And it doesn't require any fundamental change to the underlying route finding routine, just some "English" applied to the movement cost field supplied to that routine. The computationally hard bit - LOS field - can be done once for the map and is the same for both sides and never needs to be done again. The others - dead bodies and current fire - can be added to a static field when it happens, the body portion staying and the current fire portion only while it is landing.
Just some suggestions on how I'd attack it as a programmer, for whatever they may be worth.
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Lots and lots of much smaller scenarios for CM-RT and CM any western front.
Platoon on a side. 1-2 armored vehicles, maybe. That kind of scale. Scores to hundreds.
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JK and Michael - propaganda doesn't mean pro Hitler. The army has its own "line" on the whole war, in which blaming Hitler for everything that went wrong - and Goering, even - featured prominently, while the Heer was supposedly pure as the driven snow and committed solely to the good of Germany and virtue and puppies and all that. Meanwhile they were actually out machinegunning every Jew they could round up while drunk out of their minds, and stringing up every local man if anyone shot at a German within 50 miles. As for death and more death supposedly deviating from that line, um no, only American comic books think that whitewashing death and misery out of war is the way to praise it. Read Junger - the genre normally glorifies the psychological toughness that stands up to horror - while wallowing in that horror as much as any slasher movie; that is not ceasing to be propaganda it is itself propaganda, and is still peddling the line that the Landsers are virtuous and tough because of everything they went through, etc. They had to walk uphill to work both ways in a driving crapstorm of shrapnel at 4000 to 1 odds and got a turnip on Sundays; you need a heart of stone not to see that as praise and glorification.
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I agree with every word of what Sgt Joch wrote. I agree with not one word others in the thread wrote.
In particular, it was nit the resistance of surrounded Russian forces that mattered in 1941. Yes they continued to resist. But they also died and died rapidly, because artillery ammunition cannot be conjured into existence by an act of will, and infantry without artillery completely surrounded by infantry with artillery is just powerless. No, the difference in 1941 was made by entirely new formations outside of any encirclement fighting effectively, plus the German own goal of no replacement stream or real mobilization, plus German logistical unreality, fantasy in the place of planning, plus the German high command sacking every commander reacting sensibly to all of the above as supposedly defeatist, plus just plain epic sacrifice and determination on the part of the Russian line, despite the epic incompetence of their officers in that era.
Some of that may fit what the previous poster was trying to say, just with differences of emphasis. Fine. But it wasn't that the surrounded resisted so fiercely. They resisted, yes, it didn't matter because they were powerless. But new forces outside the pockets had been mobilized and replaced them - while the Germans screwed up everything but the operational handling and tactics. (I mean logistics and mobilization and realism and commanders sacked etc. When you fire a Guderian, a Rundstadt, and a von Bock all in a month or two, don't be surprised when disaster follows).
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wadepm - first the last, Russia had only twice the manpower of Germany. First to last, Russia had only equal industrial capacity to Germany. But it mobilized more men than that ratio, it sustained casualties above that ratio without any fall off in field strength from the end of 1942 to the end of the war, and it outproduced Germany in tanks by 2 to 1 from that equal industrial base. The Russians were flat out better than the Germans at force mobilization and they tried epically harder than the Germans did. That, not size or prewar population, was the main source of their edge in combat in the second half of the war. With an assist in the last year or so from the western allies, to be sure.
You don't take 4-5 to 1 losses from 2 times the base and win by numbers alone.
The big helpers were German own goals from arrogance in the first half of the war, very poor operational direction from Germany in the critical phases (fall 1942 campaign, and Kursk to and over the Dnepr - throughout which all the smart generals who got things right got sacked, while the pangloss yes-men remained), and then the aforementioned western allied assist in the final year.
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Raus is another proven storyteller. But yes, the denuded front - which he likes to pretend he invented or something - has been working against artillery prep fires since 1916. Kinda thought I covered that in my first post...
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kensal - sure that is easily the most famous passage on what the German generals wanted NATO to think the eastern front was like. But then the man relating it, von Mellenthin, is a proven liar who always left out every part of every operational history in which forces he commanded lost. He falsifies the dates of important engagements, he falsifies how far his formation got, what stopped them, etc. He plays up every tactical success endlessly as typical, then closes a chapter with a laconic "but the Russians had superior numbers and broke through somewhere else and we had to withdraw". If possible blaming it on allies or treason or on lack of realism in the higher command above him. Baron Munchausen had better tactics than his opponents too - he could scout out their positions riding a cannonball, and get back with his report by hopping a ride on one of the cannonballs fired back at his side by the enemy.
About the only parts of Mellenthin's description that are true are (1) that the Germans sometimes held fire to break an attack nearby rather than opening at long range and (2) that they relied on artillery to beat Russian infantry numbers.
The parts about relying on armor and counterattack are mostly nonsense, though - the Germans didn't have the tanks and their operational employment of their armor, from the early fall of 1942 clear to the end of the war, was abysmal. (Manstein's backhand is the only real exception, post 42). Tactically it was still the strongest part of their force, to be sure, and it did have a pretty good reaction time to a bleeding part of the front if it was available. But operationally it rarely was, because it was committed with too offensive a mission over and over and over.
As for the statement that "wherever a deep penetration occurred it was quickly patched up", and that counterattacks always won and saved anything in danger, meant to be taken as typical - it is just nonsense. As 2-3 days on one occasion it might be accurate - of the eastern front for 3 years, it is a joke. The Russians punched holes hundreds of miles wide and ran 400 miles into them - repeatedly.
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Excellent point MikeyD. Still, the Russians did lose something like 4-5 times as many men as the Germans in the war in the east, and were still regularly losing 3 to 1 after they had all the operational advantages and odds etc. They just weren't very careful or clever tactically. The Germans were good on defense, everyone encountered that. But the western Allies didn't lose 3-5 to 1 getting through them; the Russians did.
I submit a big part of that is that the Russians let the German defensive system work as designed, more than the western Allies did; their junior officers and whole command system just didn't adapt to it nearly as much. They are still trying super concentration of infantry on the attack sector, for example, when the defense is a 105mm barrage, not infantry opposite. (Some of their late war set-pieces succeed anyway, to be sure, because they get better at counterbattery, etc).
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Well first he's lying. So there is that. You say you don't think he'd make things up only because you don't know the genre - blood and guts and hardship are the window dressing to get you to believe the line. Its propaganda. But that said, yes the Germans had a good defensive system and the Russians were more boneheaded than most about running into it.
Here is my description of that system off another sight, in response to a somewhat similar question. Though the immediate context was whether board wargame designs can get this stuff right.
"Michael - it is worth discussing why the Germans used their thin front, depth, hiding firepower, local counterattack defense, and whether wargames actually capture the tactical reasons behind that system.
First, the system dates to the second half of WWI, as the principle of the denuded front. The primary point was to avoid enemy artillery firepower by depriving them of a massed infantry target in a predictable place in ready range of the attacker's artillery, which was assumed to be superior - that is why they were the attacker, operationally.
So, very first point - any game that fails to depict how losses to enemy artillery rise in nearly direct line with friendly force density is not going to get to first base. They won't see the primary motivation for going thin in the first place. Located enemy that is concentrated just loses outright to the King of Battle, the guns.
The second discovery was that a network of sheltered machineguns and planned artillery fire - the latter role in WWII frequently being played by reactive fires from low level mortars at company and battalion - was inherently stealthy. The attackers simply felt like they were pushing into air and region of general danger, coming from all points on the compass, but hard to locate and harder to penetrate by local concentration.
Why hard to penetrate by local concentration? Because the mortars are not defending their own position, but projecting fire 1-2 kilometers in every direction from multiple starting points. The MGs are crossing fire lanes with their neighbors, so that defense vs a close approach to gun B is actually provided by guns A and C 400 yards to either side, more than by fire coming from gun B itself. This means local concentration in front of gun B, which might be thought likely to silence gun B more rapidly, in fact has no such effect. They can't see or get to gun B unless somebody else first gets to or silences A and or C. Then if they do get to B, it doesn't help them - it helps somebody else opposite A and C, where B was firing.
Both mortars and sustained MG fire - and in WW II, large antipersonnel minefields as the third pillar of the German defense in depth - multiply their effectiveness as enemy target density rises.
Thus the sign of the contribution to combat effectiveness of local concentration by the attacker is reversed. That is the whole point of the defense in depth. Massing firepower wastes shells and at most takes out a few thinly spread, unlocated, hard targets manned by only handfuls of men. Massing manpower increases the effectiveness of every antipersonnel mine, every defender's 81mm mortar shells, every belt of MG ammo fired from a distant flank that the defense can muster.
Thus, second point, any operational combat resolution system that does not understand those relationships is going to get the effect of massing against such a defense, either in a firepower sense or an infantry numbers sense, completely wrong. Further, any system that gives perfect intel about enemy positions to both sides from the outset, and has no spotting rules to prevent easy engagement of distance enemies, is likewise going to get everything completely wrong.
The defense is made deep to use a portion of the numbers not needed due to the thinness along each bit of front, and also to increase the local variation the attack will hit. The point is that the attack is not to know ahead of time, as he decides to mass his infantry in sector B, whether doing so will just send a mass of men into a minefield, or under a mortar registration, or whether it will actually hit a manned portion of the defense.
Finally, the role of the instant local counterattack must be understood in the context of the attacker's available adaptations to that system of defense. The attacker is effectively invited to go thin himself, slow down, and cautiously pick his way forward, all spread out. That way he recons everywhere and presents no massed mortar targets. But by the same token, he is not dense anywhere, at least along his forward edge. At most he has higher density behind his advance screen, here or there.
It is in that context that an instant local counterattack by formations as small as one platoon take on their meaning. They are meant to trump the countermeasure of the enemy sending one half squad to check everything. The defenders are violently *varying* their own local density, in space and in time. The impact comes from the surprise of hitting an outlier of density, compared to what was expected.
They first set the average density in the basement. If the attackers respond to that fact by lowering their own local density and slowing down, then the defenders pick shots and concentrate there, higher than the attacker. The attacker is not expected to get the same advantages from a higher local density that the defense gets, because the attacker does not know where these knots of higher concentration are. In other words, the defense is manipulating a concentration *difference* that interacts with the basic *information* difference that offensive vs defensive stance involves.
Concentrated and known is a vulnerable mortar target and useless. Concentrated and unknown outmatches unconcentrated infantry.
Again, if the system can't simulate those relations, it cannot depict the defense system involved."
FWIW...
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JM has fired something like 4 or 5 million rounds in training and competition. No I am not exaggerating. Don't try this at home...
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Sgt Joch wrote "no one knows how effective HMGs/LMGs/SMGs/Rifles, etc. are in a combat situation." I call horsefeathers. Combat is not something that has never happened or occurs on the dark side of the moon. We know what happens in combat. (Many people here have been in combat themselves, many more have studied it professionally, etc). If you don't know something, ask, but don't pretend that nobody else does.
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No, German doctrine did not regard riflemen as unarmed nobodies. And it did not regard SMGs are superior weapons to rifles. It regarded rifles as much more serious weapons than SMGs, and regarded SMGs as short range close combat weapons only. They gave them to men expected to command and direct rather than to fight, who only expected to pull a trigger to defend their immediate area. Later in the war they use more of them, in large part to enable less trained troops and fewer bodies to do something, but they always regarded that as a stopgap measure for the untrained. They never considered the SMG a superior weapon to a rifle. They certainly considered a full MG a superior weapon to either and the basis of the firepower of the squad. And they developed the Sturmgewehr to have both abilities in one weapon.
The Germans issued something like 10 million K98s and only about 1.1 million MP40s, and 400k assault rifles late. 7 times as many rifles as SMGs did not reflect any belief in the superiority of SMGs as small arms - quite the contrary. Nor did Americans regard SMGs as superior - they gave them to rear area troops, vehicle drivers, and some special commandos who expected to fight in limited light conditions. The Russians issued lots of SMGs to some troops, but precisely to those meant to rely on the tanks they worked closely with for ranged fire, rather than those expected to provide their own defensive, ranged firepower themselves.
Nobody denies that MGs are superior to other infantry small arms. But nobody at the time thought that SMGs were universally superior to rifles. They thought of them as specialized assault weapons for CQB, low visibility conditions, and the like. That is all.
Current CM players do not rate their squad weapons that way. Instead they consider SMGs only marginally less effective than full MGs, with their limitations (only compared to MGs) seen as coming as much from their limited ammo (each) as from their limited range. They don't care at all about any limits on their accuracy or their penetration, because those just don't matter in CM combat.
CM players would consider it perfectly normal and sensible if every rifleman in a squad carried spare magazines for the squad's SMG gunners instead of more rifle ammo for themselves. Nobody in WWII would have considered that anything but crazy.
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c3k- answering your actual questions... At 100 yards, an SMG and a bolt rifle are about equally effective, given the same firing conditions. Inside that, the SMG is more effective and its edge grows as the range drops. Outside that, the rifle is more effective and its edge grows as the range increases. Of course it is rough, but that is the approximate crossover range for their effectiveness.
They also interact quite differently with stance. The SMG gains much less from a prone supported position than the rifle gains from it. The SMG gains much less from longer prep time between shots; the rifle loses more by "snap" shooting without a few seconds of aiming time.
The difference in accuracy with a rifle from stance is very large. Supported fire is accurate to about 3 times the range as unsupported.
The SMG requires a very large increase in user skill and experience to be effective at all beyond about 200 yards. The sights become nearly useless and the shooter must provide the equivalent of a ballistics trajectory calculation himself, at such distances. This falls to more like 150 yards for the slower muzzle velocity, heavier round versions like the Thompson.
The rifle remains flat shooting out to 200 to 250 yards with practically no operator skill required to compensate for range, or to estimate the range correctly. Out to 400-500 yards, reasonable skill and experience still allows effective fire, assuming a supported firing position and a stationary target. (Or a large enough one, come to that).
Back to tactical essences and why these things matter...
WWII armies equipped practically all their infantrymen with single shot rifles, and expected them to use those rifles for aimed fire at located enemies. The only other infantry weapon of comparable importance was the crew served MG, and between them those defined the WWII infantry battlefield.
There is a specific match up or tactical picture that single shot aimed rifle fire needs to be highly effective. If they get that match up, then they become highly effective. If they do not, then they are relatively ineffective and less than average effectiveness as a whole weapon system.
That match up is that the riflemen need to be stationary themselves, to have supported firing position if only from being prone, to have some minimal cover likewise, again with just being prone sufficient for this need in a pinch. They then need to be facing the direction where enemy infantry are located; they need the ability to physically see at least some of those enemy soldiers. They need those enemies to not be in heavy stone building or bunker cover, not to be in deep trenches or prepared sandbagged field fortifications. They need the enemy target to remain exposed for at least a minute so of time, and preferably for extended period, at ranges under 500 yards and preferably under 250 yards.
If a side commander can arrange that match up tactically, single shot aimed rifle fire will be highly effective. It will dominate engagements and whole areas in which initial lines of sight are 200 yards or longer. It will make enemy infantry maneuver within sight of the riflemen prohibitively expensive in lost men.
Now, of course the enemy strives to avoid that effective situation for enemy riflemen. Or to retaliate for it happening, by e.g. calling in 155s on riflemen that just got such an effective set up, or putting tanks on their flank with LOS to them and elevation enough to negate their prone position cover, or what have you.
But that match up is quite common, it is in no way exceptional, especially in infantry defensive postures. In fact it shapes the entire war, defining its characteristic scale, formations used, roles for other arms, etc.
A secondary version of the above occurs when the riflemen maneuver into positions that bring about a match up against a small portion of an enemy force. This is the most common offensive use of rifle infantry (closing to grenade range in limited visibility conditions is another, but doesn't depend on rifle capabilities). It is a passive aggressive sort of offense, not aimed at occupying enemy locations but merely at getting close enough to see them, then dropping into a defensive stance.
Over the war as a whole, rifle infantry was a less than average effectiveness weapon system. But not because there was anything ineffective about it *when* it got the tactical situation described above. In fact, the defense dominance that situation involves and describes, between rival rifle armed infantries, shapes the whole war.
When and if the aimed rifles get that match up, they are fired (suppression and cower does not stop them), they get hits (fear and excitement does not make the men miss), and the men hit go down and stay down (full rifle caliber ammo is not playing around).
Any lack of effectiveness of rifles as a weapon system in the WWII era came from the difficulty getting that match up or target picture, not from anything the rifles couldn't do once they got it.
That difficulty starts with the enemy simply avoiding getting that close, when he can. They use their own firepower to keep enemy riflemen farther away than all that. They use their heavy weapons to break up concentrations of enemy infantry that get close enough or threaten to.
Here is what they don't do. They don't figure the rifles will just miss and charge straight at them and overrun them, firing from the hip with their own small arms. They'd never make it. The French in red striped pants in 1914 tried that one out, and they lost a million men in about a month; so no, no elan and morale and enemy fear don't defeat rifle firepower.
CM will have the tactical relationship right if and when people reviewing their forces at set up time see all the guys with bolt rifles and think to themselves, "where can I set these up with 200 yards initial LOS, and get them into a stationary defensive stance there, with the enemy having to come at them or sit in front of them in view for a long-ish period?" Instead of "oh I have 4 LMGs, and 12 SMGs, and 48 unarmed nobodies carrying ammo".
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C3k - modern militaries can have accurate ranged fire when they need it for no opportunity cost. That wasn't true in WWII. Modern militaries still use bolt action rifles when long range accuracy is the only important mission parameter and there is no need to compromise.
And you didn't really answer the question. Is there any evidence that a bolt rifle, or 5 guys with them fir that matter, prone, can outshoot an equal number of SMGs at 150 yards, in CM? I submit the answer is no. The SMGs would be superior in CM. But they would not be superior in real life. Not even close. At that range, they are simply an inferior weapon, in real life, and the bolt rifle in its element would smoke the SMG half squad inside of fifteen seconds. Tops - it could easily be all over in five seconds.
And no we are not talking about CQB house clearing, or marching anything, or anything at 5 yards range. Absolutely an SMG is better in those situations. But it is not better in real life in the ranged fire situation I describe. The bolt rifles in that situation, in CM, are unlikely to do much of anything, certainly in a short span of time, either in terms of hits or suppression. Overall small arms lethality in CM is not too low. But in that situation, the small arms lethality of aimed rifle fire is very clearly too low.
I have explained why I think that is. Small arms effectiveness tuning has aimed at the overall effectiveness of whole forces, of mixed weapons. Revisits after detailed discussion have tuned MG fire specifically, in addition, and has gotten them about right. All good things. Rifles might even be as ineffective as CM depicts them, sometimes, e.g marching fire, stressed and standing unsupported fire. But a prone or braced bolt or semi auto rifle firing single aimed shots is a very deadly weapon. CM acknowledges as much by handling scope rifle marksman teams quite differently.
Supported aimed rifle fire needs the opposite of nerfing.
And we all know that our CM soldiers clump too tight and that makes burst fire more effective than it would be if the took natural intervals instead of being chained to narrow action spots.
I claim those two facts are behind the original poster's impression, that bolt rifles are practically unarmed in CM as it stands, so much so that he wants his men to chuck them at the first opportunity, to pick up a real weapon like a machine pistol.
Any game about WWII tactical combat that is leaving that impression is flat wrong about relative small arms effectiveness. Full stop.
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c3k - engineering literalism does not increase realism when four or five factors are modeled very accurately and two are not. It just encourages players to drive trucks through the remaining two factors, rewarding them with completely unrealistic outcomes.
You can do design for effect half way, you can't do engineering realism half way and leave the other half, and get anything like realism. You can patch the parts you haven't done realistically with design for effect subsystems. Or you can continue the engineering realism push and incorporate the two bits you left out, accurately. But there will generally be two more left to do.
In the present case, men can sit in front of aimed rifle fire with far too high a survivability. And a few submachineguns routinely get much higher kills per round expended than anyone could hope for in real combat.
You get both from trying to model fire bullet by bullet, but not modeling how men spread out and use all available cover in combat. You get both by modeling fire by an average dispersion of the angle of aim for all weapons, then letting the SMG "try" 6 times more often than the rifle gets to try - in other words because you modeled rate of fire carefully but only made a wild guess about accuracy. The SMG gets a boost from the part you were careful about, and the thing the rifle is much, much better at in real life doesn't come through because you couldn't model that as carefully, for lack of data or for any other reason.
If you gave me a choice between which end of a rifle range to stand on, where on one end you got an MP40 and 1 30 round mag, but had to fire standing unsupported - and at the other end, 150 yards away, you got a bolt action rifle with just one 5 round clip, but got to fire it prone supported, I'd take the rifle every day of the week and twice on payday. (And the rifle wouldn't even need the second bullet to win). In CM, everyone would take the reverse. The reason why is *not* realism.
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Sure, Charles knows the easiest way to implement something like this.
I will go further, or rather suggest a pure engineering literalism approach rather than design for effect approach. If the angle the aim of the weapon varies through is modeled individually for each weapon, then one can get the same separation of aimed vs. burst fire by tightened up the angle for the rifles. That way there is no retuning of the MGs, which seem good right now.
And we could take the occasion to accurately model in firing stance, which is easily the biggest determinant of accuracy with single shot rifles. By that I mean, the present relatively weak fire power of the bolt rifles may be basically correct for standing unsupported shots, at least for regulars. There are people who are really good at standing unsupported fire, who can get reasonably close - like within a factor of two - of their supported fire accuracy. But most can't - people's groups open up dramatically even at 50 and 100 yards, enough to miss at 100 vs a man sized target.
But prone supported, or firing from a trench or foxhole across a sandbag rest, or from a building with interior furniture rests or windowsill rest, and suddenly the single shot rifle gets vastly more accurate. As in every shot within 2 inches of the point of aim at 100 yards.
I am not saying single shot rifles deserve full firing range accuracy in combat. But it would be much more realistic, and reflect tactical realities better, and the role and power of aimed fire, if shooter stance directly impacted the angle of dispersion of the shots. Leaving unsupported fire about like it is now - maybe tightened a bit fir quality level with aimed fire weapons - the dispersion angle for supported stance single rifle shots could be cut in half, and we'd still be on the wide side.
What would the tactical effect of that look like? Leaving any troops exposed for extended periods within 200 yards of prone or otherwise supported riflemen would rapidly result in those exposed guys dropping. Marching rifle fire wouldn't get any better. But multiple rifles in position and unsuppressed, stationary, with supported firing stance - bad news.
Of course, the ease of implementing that one turns on whether they are currently using a global setting for determining the angle that fire gets randomized through, or ate assigning different dispersions to each weapon type. I hope the latter. If so, could readily handle to overly accurate pistols issue too - just give them a crappy average dispersion compared to long guns.
FWIW...
In Deadly Combat--How'd the Germans do what they did?
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
YankeeDog wrote "they'd be as likely to break a weapon as use it successfully"
I think you vastly overestimate the complexity of a Mosin Nagant and need to pick one up at the first opportunity. A trained man can certainly fire one more accurately. But a cocker spaniel couldn't break one.