JasonC
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Posts posted by JasonC
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IanL - I'd say roughly 90% of threads around here consist of new or old players making legitimate comments about aspects of the game that could be improved, then for their pains getting abused and insulted at length by experienced players who do nothing to improve it, nor for that matter to improve the neighborhood. That BTS occasionally listens anyway is entirely to their credit. If the peanut gallery decided, we'd all still have the CMBO cartoonishly invulnerable infantry we started with 15 years ago.
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JonS - of course it is a corner case. If I have an M1919 MMG and I need to set it up on a building, I probably can and will use a window mount if I have to get into action quickly. Would it be better to loophole the wall for a perfect, better protected firing position? Sure, but I just won't do it if I don't have the time.
The MG is going to be in action rapidly. If, after that, the crew can improve the position then they will. At any break in the action, the siting of the MMG may improve.
But the place not having a convenient pool table 14 feet from the rear window at just the right angle to cover a certain street is not going to let a German company waltz down that street unmolested. They might find it easier to molest me back using a window mounting, but then again they may be too busy getting out of the street and scrambling for cover themselves to give me much trouble on that score.
As for the (dense?) remarks about my 50 cal example, I cited it earlier as a typical example of how much one person can do in that period of time, not because it is the exact steps all 6 men of the MG team will be doing when an MG sets up in a building. All of them busy and moving with a purpose and accomplishing things. 2 guys can be assembling a moved MMG or HMG in well under the cited time, while another sets up the ammo operation and 2 others prepare the position and the team NCO sights what he wants covered and gives directions and so forth. 30 seconds is a lot of time, and 12 hands is a lot of hands.
As I also mentioned before, what we actually got done in 2 minutes with a team of 6 was prepare a large howitzer for indirect fire. And no, I'm not citing that because I think you are setting aiming stakes or shooting azimuths inside the room when setting up an MMG, but as a sign of how much a military team working together actually gets done in 2 minutes. Routinely.
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c3k - I understand the hypothetical about a room without any good set up location and so forth, but I regard it as a corner case, and I don't think it should be the rule for e.g. using a US M1919 from a house. It just didn't take minutes to do that, and in the game it does.
As for what the training standard time I reported was for, it is an artillery MOS skill to deploy a disassembled 50 caliber machinegun to either a tripod or a vehicle mount. The typical task starts with a tripod, barrel, and receiver as 3 separate pieces, along with the cradle-pintel attachment that goes under the receiver, a wrench, and a box of belted 50 caliber ammuntion. All are arranged reasonably close to the location where the trainee is suppose to set up the gun. Then the task is (ground mount) -
Place the tripod and stamp down its "feet" into the ground;
Screw the barrel into the receiver and wrench it tight;
Attach the cradle-pintel to the underside of the receiver;
Lift the receiver assembly onto the tripod and lock it down;
Check that the gun is on "safe" or rotate it to safe if it wasn't;
Open the feed tray cover; grab and position the ammo belt, close the feed tray cover;
One pull to the charging handle with controlled return to pull the ammo in.
The gun is now in "condition 2", aka "half load". That completes the assembly drill.
To fire from condition 2 means one pull and release of the charging handle (full load, condition 1, round in the chamber), rotate the safety to the desired fire position (single or auto); align the sight and depress the spade grips for a half second burst. Repeat every 5 to 10 seconds depending on the rate of fire called for the shoot.
On a vehicle mount, the required items are on the 'track" (M109 SP 155mm e.g.) and you are climbing outside. No tripod, instead a pintel receiver on the vehicle. Ammo in a box attachment that has to be assembled onto the gun after it is seated. Same allowed time.
You aren't wrestling with furniture in that standard drill. But you are moving with a purpose and performing tasks you have done many times before, by the time you are being tested on it for time (and no missed steps, "calls out" for checks like the gun being on safe, etc). Missing any of those or going over on the time and you do it again. The individual parts are heavy, but the mechanical actions are simple though they do need to be done with some precision.
In the real deal, you get a team to do some of these things, but any one man being able to do it in 30 seconds is required of everyone in the battery.
There have been enough situations in the field artillery's history where that was important, in order to protect the battery position from enemy close attack, that people train to that standard.
Just putting in context what we are actually talking about doing within 30 seconds...
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To IanL - the times I gave are training standards that I easily met, and so did 19 yearold hillbillies from Georgia with an IQ somewhere south of 90. Not even remotely hard. The best sergeants in my unit could routinely do such things in half those times. No, it isn't running with 2 LMGs or any such nonsense. That you think it hyperbole just shows you've never actually done any of these things, which I suspect is also true of the programmers and designers, and the reason for the practical timing "misses" that CaptHawkeye and I are trying to tell you about. Here's a tip - listening to people who've actually done something about how much time an action takes beats pulling it out of your --- hat.
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Michael E, IanL - speaking from personal experience, 2 minutes is enough time to set up not a tripod MG inside a house, but to lay a SP 155mm howitzer from march order to ready to fire. In less than 30 seconds, I can set up a 50 caliber machinegun - single handed.
The time these things take in CM is just ridiculous, and has no relationship to how long things actually take in combat.
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Cuirassier - Yes I did, thanks for the correction. I was thinking in particular of his books on Kursk and Normandy.
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CaptHawkeye - seconded...
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Kevin - yes on P-47s, their standard mission was armed recce as dive bombers. British Typhoons the same. Those had large bomb loads for single engine fighters and were rugged vs ground fire. In a way, those straddled the roles the Russians split between their large, heavy, slow single engine ground attack IL-2s and their smaller, lighter true fighters, and mostly had the best of both. The cannon firepower of the IL-2 was superior, but it was also a lot less survivable vs aircraft and was lost much more rapidly than the faster western types.
As for P-38s, they initially tried to use them as long range bomber escorts, but they could not hold their own vs German single engine fighters. Outclassed in maneuverability. They were even more outclasses in that department by light Japanese fighters, but worked fine in the Pacific anyway because they were vastly superior "energy", speed and vertical move, fighters, and tactics were developed to exploit that. But over the fast German types they didn't have that asymmetric edge, so they weren't successful as air superiority fighters in Europe.
Instead they did do some armed recce, escorted mediums over shorter ranged targets e.g. in France, where German fighter intercept was less common. Also used some for airfield attack in fighter sweeps. But they really just weren't a successful type in Europe, nothing like the major role they had in the Pacific theater. When P-51s arrived, most of the P-38 formations switchec over to them (a couple to P-47s). A few did photo recon missions to the end of the war, something their range, speed, ceiling, etc made them well suited for, but not many of those were needed.
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Russian air power in the summer of 1944 was large and well organized and effective. Most of its missions hit targets farther from the front lines than CM depicts, but significant portions of that air power could impact the front line fighting. The types that would be seen doing that, though, were the IL-2s and fighters acting as fighter bombers.
The other major types the Russians were still using in strength were medium bombers conducting night missions against towns, railyards, depots and the like, including by then aging DB-3s which were too slow to use as day bombers in 1944, if there was any chance of interception which generally there was. Those generally carried about 6 250 lb bombs apiece, occasionally some 500 lb types in the mix, and normally in group strength or more. Night bombing had navigation errors large enough that anything smaller than a town was a poor target. They made up for it by dropping hundreds of bombs at a time at large general areas where they expected there to be objects of value to the Germans. Think roughly of a US B-25 (though not as well armed for MG defense) or a German He-111.
Then large numbers of Pe-2 medium bombers, used either as dive bombers or "glide" bombing after diving from altitude, fast enough to avoid many intercepts and used on road columns, trains, military units in know positions, plus the same sort of larger targets the night bombers went after - but normally not in close contact with friendly troops. They dropped 4-6 250 lb bombs apiece while attacking in squadron strength or higher, meaning anything from 50 to 200 sizable bombs impacting a pretty large area, even with dive bombing accuracy from each plane (since they wouldn't all push over at the same point target etc). A very large 8 inch artillery mission is about the size of it, and not something you wanted to send in within 400 yards of friendlies. Think faster Ju-88s roughly.
Then the IL-2s were the other main type delivering large volumes of ordnance, both light bombs and rockets, plus cannon strafing. They were daylight, low level attackers. Their main mission was "armed recce", meaning rove over the countryside on the German side of the lines and attack any target of opportunity, especially vehicles, road columns, and the like. Relatively rarely they would hit something in actual contact with Russian ground forces, though there were enough of them that would happen some of the time. These were the canonical Russian ground attack bomber, with no real equivalent in the other air forces of the day.
The fighters normal mission was air superiority to protect all of the above, and the suppress German airfields if they were in range. They would frequently be without any bomb load, and if they engaged ground targets it would be by strafing and in the armed recce, target of opportunity manner. Some went out with bombs to supplement the other ground attack stuff when little German fighter opposition was expected, just to make use of the planes when their main job was accomplished in that theater, for the moment. They were more valuable for air superiority, though, and their tonnage carried was modest compared to the previous types, which collectively outnumbered them as well. So their overall contribution to ground attack was marginal. Still, in small numbers and mostly strafing, they could and did attack German forces close to friendlies, so depicting them in CM makes sense. In capabilities. they were pretty much all close to a German Me-109.
It really isn't necessary to show every type of fighter, because they were all similar in their air to ground load out and such. Some types had a few more 20mm cannons than others, some had a bit more MG ammo, but only minor differences on that score.
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Mathew Cooper's "the German Army", Jason Pipes and his Feldgrau website, Ketterling's various books on specific campaigns with good OOBs - those would be my source suggestions. FWIW.
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Jagdpanthers were not in time for Bagration in the east. Fighting in Poland in the fall was their first use in the theater. Brummbars had an early batch at Kursk but most were lost by the fall 1943 fighting at the latest. Only a few small units after that had them, they were never an item of normal equipment, always in their own heavy assault gun units. The offensive line cracking role they were intended for also just didn't come up. There was one small unit of them in the west for the Bulge I believe.
As for German infantry types, there were divisional differences and battalion differences. The Jaeger designation was for light infantry divisions, originally intended as basically forest units akin to Gebirgsjaegers as mountain light infantry. They had a smaller 6 battalion organization from the beginning, which the rest of the Heer infantry migrated to. They originally had lighter artillery and fewer heavy divisional attachments, less in the way of motorization, and were expected to get jobs in tougher terrain than normal infantry.
But in practice there was little difference between a normal Heer infantry division, or from mid 1944 on a Volksgrenadier division, and a Jaeger division, than those original plans suggest.m the Heer divisions were remarkably non uniform themselves. And the Jaegers tended to get full artillery complements if expected to fight in the line, as most were. Really, the Jaegers were distinct only through the end of 1942, getting mountain infantry jobs and the like through that offensive period. Once the Germans were on the defensive, they got whatever part if the line needed another infantry division and weren't used any differently.
Fusiliers, on the other hand, was in practice a battalion level designation, sometimes a regiment, never a division. It was frequently used interchangably with "grenadier" at the regiment level, with no actual difference in the units. That just let the division refer to their two regiments as "the grenadier regiment" or "the fusilier regiment".
But the most common use was to designate a divisional leg infantry recon battalion as the fusilier battalion, the only one in the division in those cases. As such they were outside a regimental organization, and therefore had fewer heavy weapons and attachments. They were a seventh purely light infantry battalion in those cases. They could be given advanced and rear guard duties when the division changed its frontage, were easier to truck lift (not permanently, but as a ond time move e.g.) or sometimes to supply with bicycles as an area reserve, and the like. The equipment difference that mattered for that wasn't small arms, it was not having any infantry gun or PAK companies attached and potentially weighing the leg infantry down.
These designations were ways of having a unit lighter than regular line infantry, in other words. Not a way of having more elite or shock troops or anything like that.
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Are we talking about the game or real life? Moving guns in the game is much, much slower than it is to move them in real life.
I've repositioned my share of 105mm howitzers (very easy) and even 155mm howitzers (giant guns, whole crews needed to move them), in real life, and even the largest are faster than the light guns in the game. Light guns with a reasonable gun shield, over clear ground or road surfaces, urban areas etc, especially handy. Something the size of a German 75mm PAK is a bigger deal and takes more men to move, but it doesn't get glacially slow, it just takes more muscle and there are fewer moves that are feasible (in terms of maneuvering, turns, terrain crossed, etc). They can still be moved at a walking pace.
The game rates seemed to be more appropriate for a "world's strongest man" tractor pull of an 18 wheeler. Yes there is also some extra time to lay the gun at the end, and to move the ammo operation and so forth, but sub minute times for the largest guns, and the ammo ops and such can be done in parallel if there are enough hands in the battery.
Gun rotation is similarly glacial in the game, compared to reality. None of it shows any real familiarity with using towed guns.
In the game, they mostly have to be treated as static defensive weapon systems. They can be picked up and dropped by prime movers if they are completely out of enemy LOS, after the ones in it have moved off or been killed e.g., but that's about it. Then they need to be dropped out of LOS and LOF as well. They work from their new locations only if the enemy comes to them. I had some "luck" in CMBB pushing lighter ATGs into LOS in bodies of continuous cover like light woods, but not in CMx2. (The ground cover tile just isn't sufficient protection).
FWIW.
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IanL - "used to hex games where if your unit has LOS to the enemy your unit can see the enemy and can fire on the enemy"
Ever played Jim Day's "Panzer"? Hex games have come a long way. Let's just say that perception of them is a bit out of date...
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Board wargames can design for effect and get this sort of thing right pretty effortlessly. The spotting rules in Jim Day's Panzer from GMT, for example, work extremely well, well enough that I've been "porting" them to older game systems that didn't include the right effects or give them the right strengths. And yes board wargames are easier to "patch" - Panzer needs some "area fire" options are previous contacts, for example, that have been lost in the meantime because one side or other went prone, and similar.
As usual, the engineering approach that promises greater realism from bottom up modeling instead, doesn't actually deliver on that promise until it is nearly perfect in its handling of every relevant factor. Get the photon interception stuff perfect (we aren't there with CM, as several posters above have pointed out, the issue being "transparent" concealment) and you still have to get the camouflage and object detection stuff perfect too, or you get worse not better realism than was available with a simpler "design for effect" approach.
I understand why CM is committed to the bottom up method, and that's fine. It just carries with it a commitment to fix every issue anyone notices, and not to "plead" the endlessness of those fixes as a reason not to do any of them. If you don't want endless fixes to get every piece right, you should stick with design for effect. If you want engineering realism bottom up, then every time someone finds another issue, it has to be improved. Don't expect to get off that treadmill soon.
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Michael - in 1945, sure. But there aren't any for a year and a half, when there are SU-152s. Just saying...
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Ts4Ever - first on early used of Sturmgewehr's, complete agreement.
But second on gun obsessed Americans, I can assure you it is in no way limited to any "underclasses".
Guns aren't cheap, and neither is blowing $100 an hour worth of ammo at the range...
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Consider Wicky's picture. Yes light penetrates some distance into the trees, with wide gaps between the physical obstacles of the trunks, and no higher foliage to speak of.
But look across the field at the distant treeline on the next hill over. Scan along it. How deep can you really see into that treeline?
It isn't a matter of physically blocking every photon. It is a matter of the human eye being hopelessly unable to pick up any shape in that solid, high, blocking line, down in the shadow under the canopy. The eye focuses involuntarily on the lines of high contrast. We have actual edge detection cells on our retina. What you actually see is a high contrast line across the top of the canopy, between canopy and sky. Plus another high contrast line along the base of the trees, where trees meet ground. Plus, less distinctly, a shadow line on the snow some distance in front of that ground line, wavering with the tree heights and undulations of the ground.
Between the skyline and the ground line you see a block of trees. Some individual lines of contrast are detectable in the tree shapes and foliage, but each is so like all the others in the mass that you get a texture signal, not really edge signals. You can detect smudges of interrupted white below the foliage line, from snow on the ground back inside the tree line. Together those can give you another faint line of the lower edge of the foliage, blurred across the multiple trees that define it and the angle of the ground relative to teh angle of the sightline.
But any distinct object on those interrupted snow patches below the foliage line? Nearly hopeless. If the trees weren't present, you would edge-detect such a shape as a hole in the field of uniform white of the snow on the ground. But within the trees, it is all interrupted by trees anyway, and in shadow. There is no high contrast to pick out the shape of an object against that field.
This is fundamentally a camouflage effect, not a physical LOS blockage effect. But it is very real. And it causes a sighting asymmetry - it is far far easier to see something out in that snow covered field than it is to see something inside the tree line from the field. Photons are intercepted or not, either way, so you might expect the LOS effect to be reciprocal and equal. But it isn't, not with the camouflage effect included.
If a tank were sticking out of that far tree line it would certainly be visible. But 10 or 20 yards back inside of it, not moving, and it would have great camouflage effect compared to the same out in the middle of the snow white field. The tank inside the treeline would see the one out in the field ages before the reverse happened.
Imagine trying to spot a tank painted bright hunters orange. That would depend only on physical LOS blockages. But actual tanks are not painted orange, they are painted in camouflage colors and patterns to make spotting them harder. Put one back 20 yards in a treeline across a field like that distant ridge, and they'd be effectively invisible until they moved or fired.
What the game seems to be underrating is this camouflage type effect. Otherwise put, the spotting routines pick up marginally "visible" targets far too rapidly and reliably, in the absence of the movement or fire that actually attracts the eye and enables us to pick out a particular shape at range in such uniform visual environments. The routine probabilities seem fine for large objects standing out against a skyline or a uniform field background of high contrast to the vehicle itself. But that situation is an outlier of best spotting chances on real battlefields, not the rule.
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Michael E - there is nothing wrong with the SU-152 or ISU-152 as an "animal killer" against earlier German heavy tanks, like Tiger Is and Panthers. It can reliably kill both out to 1200 meters, more with the right plate and aspect etc. That is a very useful trait in, e.g, mid 1943, when Russian AFVs with that characteristic are very scarce, or non-existent. It just doesn't have the chops to face a King Tiger. Little does.
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Womble - he is talking about A-19. The short howitzer doesn't have a chance in hell of damaging a King Tiger from the front, at any range. The side with HEAT maybe, the front not a chance, HE or plain AP not a chance. The King is a beast; the strongest guns of the war need close ranges to have any chance from the front. And then to the turret only or lower hull only - the glacis (150mm at 50 degrees) is just hopeless. Spalling maybe at close range, penetration - no.
The normal way is to use crossfire, because realistically it is crazy to take them on in the frontal arc. Even vs the sides, the higher end guns are needed; vanilla Russian 76mm or US 75mm are insufficient.
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GhostRider - those were just the development version sturmgewehrs, pretty much. Only 10,000 made. They wouldn't need to add a new item, just allow a rare trickle of them before the fielding date for the true mass production item later in the war. Basically it was just field trials to find any bugs and work them out.
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kevinkin - they were selected personal, and trained, but since they were formed in waves of 10 divisions at a time, they had first combats, they were not all veterans or something. Some performed well in their first engagements, but that doesn't mean they weren't green in the technical sense of unblooded and not yet experienced at WWII combat. They would have higher unit quality as an average than other new Russian divisions, sure. But they were not elite the way some veteran commando units are elite, in the sense of highly selected for expertise out of already highly accomplished veterans.
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Kevin - yes, Glantz's interest was clearly to inform US cold war officers, who would be steeped in the lore of US airborne history from WWII as a matter of course, what the Russians did with their own airborne during WWII. But the thing is, that interest just isn't remotely the same as knowing the institutional role and history of Russian airborne infantry formations in the whole war. If a historian of the German FJ covered Eben Ebel and Crete but never mentioned Cassino or the St. Lo campaign or the clearing the Scheldte fighting or the role of FJ divisions in the bulge or the HG Panzer division at Gela or in Italy, would they "get" what that branch of service did? They would not. Editing everything they ever did according to whether it involved a parachute amputates most of the history of the arm. Affairs of two battalions in early 1942 will get 40 pages because there was silk involved; actions of ten divisions a year or two later will get 3 sentences, if that, because none was.
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Amizauer is right (big surprise ?) - it is on the net, at the English translation version of Russian Battlefield, citing original Russian unit loss reports that where evaluated when deciding to uparmor the later models of the IS-2.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, there is scant real world evidence of 75L48 routinely KOing IS-2s from the front at over 1000 meters. But I have long since - lietrally years ago - reported test fights in which Panzer IVs beat even numbers of early IS-2s in CM. My standing advice in the matter - also literally years old but I'll reiterate it here, since this thread's IP noted the same issue and asked - is to use the late IS-2s exclusively, if you want historical levels of performance for the beasties. Works fine, those are modeled well, no issues remain using this solution.
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To be a bit more systematic than my last, and not go from memory...
Verified Russian side confirmed battlefield losses of JS-1s and early JS-2s with reported causes -
JS-1s
Losses to Panthers, 5 tanks at medium range.
Losses to 88 Flak, 2 tanks at medium range.
Single loss to a Tiger I at 1500-1800 meters, plate hit not specified.
Two lost to Tiger Is under 1000 meters, from ambush.
Two lost to a PAK-40 battery at 150-200 meters, 4 and 8 hits respectively.JS-2s
5 StuG hits to front armor at 1500-2000 meters - no damage.
1 StuG hit to flank from 600-700 meters - knocked out.
Tiger I hit at 1000-1100 meters to lower front hull - KO.
3 Tiger I hits to nose armor at 1000-1500 - no damage.
1 Tiger I hit to front-side armor from 400-500 meters - KO.
Tiger I hit at 400 meters to front hull armor. Penetrated, but recovered and repaired.
88 Flak to side from 500 meters into engine compartment, KOed.
Tiger I hit flank at 800-1000 meters, KOed.
Two side hits, caliber and range unspecified, KOed.
Turret hit plus engine side hit, caliber and range unspec, KOed.
StuG ambush at 800-1000 meters. First, turret ring hit no penetration.
Second, engine compartment hit, knocked out.
Something Very Wrong with LOS Through Trees
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
IanL - Right, you just focus on the abuse and insult and campaigning to never improve anything. Check.