JasonC
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Posts posted by JasonC
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They got a little over 4000 Shermans all told. That's comparable to the number of Panthers used on the eastern front. Not as common as T-34s, but not a rare item. By late war several entire Guards Mechanized Corps were equipped with them.
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womble - perhaps, but no one actually cares about the fish in a barrel scenario because it doesn't happen (except on Mythbusters, I suppose). We need a more realistic set of tests, focused not on any MP40 vs PPsH difference, but just on PPsH vs plausible reality.
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Poesel - sure, but it immediately suggests a rather different test, to see whether the per bullet accuracy of SMG fire under more realistic and typical conditions is appreciably too high.
The reason for the primary concern in the thread and its predecessor, after all, is that some have the subjective impression that PPsH armed, Russian SMG infantry just seems too effective or too deadly or too hard to fight. If SMG per shot accuracy is systematically too high by a factor of 2-3, even if both sides benefit from it in their SMG modeling, that subjective impression would be correct, and its cause would be identified. That people noticed it first for Russians only would reflect how common it is in typical CM games to run into a "hot" SMG squad or half squad at the relevant range etc. But that would just be how it was noticed. The thing noticed might instead just be an overmodeling of average accuracy with an SMG.
To tell, we'd need to do some tests under more realistic firing conditions. 50, 100, 150 meter targets, in a wheatfield / little over, in light woods, wooden building, and woods foxhole cover (that's 12 cases), able to fire back but with few automatic weapons. Count outgoing ammo expenditure and hits on the other side. If we find that such high hit rates per bullet are reasonable / low at longer ranges and better cover, and only really deadly at the short ranges and open-ish cases, no problem. If instead we find a systematically too high ability to wipe out enemy platoons before running dry, then we confirm the subjective impression and isolate its cause.
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Doug Phresh - Shermans equipped full tank brigades. In some cases whole tank corps, but never below the level of a brigade.
Valentines replaced light tanks - T-70s - but normally were fielded as full tank regiments.
Occasional mixes with leftover T-70s (when a unit was rebuilt to TOE strength e.g., using LL Valentines), and could appear alongside T-34s with a TOE called for a mix of light and medium tanks.
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JoMC67 - a lower power scope at 50 meters has no problem hitting accurately. If the target moves rapidly, it can get harder to track it, that's about it. (The field of view being narrow and such). Even that can be handled by just tracking the target with both eyes open. None of the scopes use by the powers in WWII went beyond 4x magnification, and some were as low as 1.5 or 2.5, which wouldn't even have a serious field of view problem at 50-75 yards.
As for the overall effect of 5-6 bullets per hit with the SMG vs 2 to 2-5 bullets per hit with the scoped semi auto rifle, it is the former and the ratio that are problematic. Yes it is hard to miss with a short burst at that range, but not appreciably harder than missing an aimed shot.
Note that with the PPsH, it is 15-16 rounds per second. The lower rate of fire MP40 is more like 8 rounds a second. I'd be expecting to see more like one hit per 10-20 fired, and the lower of those only with a really massed, hard to miss target, and only at true point blank range.
Keep in mind that the average *MG42* behind Omaha beach hit about 25 men *with its entire ammo load*, when silenced weapons are included in the total. (Some hit early that got few, some living long and getting more, but averaging out to that - or significantly less). The ranges were longer than this, but the weapon superior, the target huge, etc. And they didn't have 60 seconds, they had 4 hours. Long enough to throw anything they had, that is.
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GhostRider - I mostly agree with all of that. Air helps, but can be overrated in WWII conditions. (In modern times with smart weapons and godlike shaped charge tech, it is a different story, and air control dominates more absolutely). The big thing is less air than overall operational scale stuff, inlcluding logistics, numbers, yes air, also initiative and better moves on the map in a "big chess" sense, etc. i'd add that doctrine also mattered, and the German doctrine on armor was too one side, offensive oriented, and as a result used armor rather wastefully on defense.
Should those factors ensure that the US would outscore the Germans in the west? Yes, and they do, against headwinds of stance and tank quality at the high end. Is this just because all the armor was facing the British, not the Americans? No. Yes, early in Normandy there was a concentration that way, as high as 2 to 1 but not everything to nothing. But even over the Normandy to Falaise fight as a whole, that evens out. The US faces as much armor as the Brits did by the time it is over, with some benefit from facing it later or puecemeal, perhaps. The Germans shift Lehr to the US front in early July, 2SS and 17SS are there throughout, the IDs and FJ add several StuG formations. Then the Germans try to stop the Cobra breakout with 116th Panzer, 2nd Panzer (long on the quieter part of the US front and the US UK seam), and the whole Mortain force. If you add it up, you get maybe 1250 AFVs on the British front and 1000 on the US front, with some "switch hitting", shifted to the US part and getting killed there.
US tank losses in Normandy are way below British ones etc.
Then after that period, the weight of armor in the west is heavily against the US for most of the rest of the war. The Lorraine fighting consumes about 500 German AFVs - from the Panzer brigades mostly, some from south of France and Italy forces transferred to the west wall, etc. The two other German armor concentrations in the west in that period are vs Market Garden, which can be counted as anti British,mand around Aachen, mostly anti US. Byt both are smaller than the force sent to and rapidly lost in Lorraine.
The next really big German armor wave is the bulge, which gets out of the hundreds into the thousand plus range, all anti US. Then in January, Alsace follows that up with another high hundreds wave, also anti US. (With some French help, actually, also true of a bit of the southern Lorraine fighting. The French destroy one of the Panzer brigades themselves in a day and a half, fir example). Another late last gasp concentration in the low hundreds tries to seal off the Remagen bridgehead ans fails - against the US. That one does have parallels in the UK sector, but the big Bulge and Alsace attempts do not.
Full campaign, the Germans throw a lot more of their western armor against US forces than against UK forces. And the US loses only around 3000 mediums in the entire campaign. If you include light tanks and such, you can run up the lost US AFV count, but German tanks aren't causing most those. In cause of loss terms, in fact, they get around but probably a bit less than half US tank losses, with infantry AT getting an increasing portion in the late war (German armor gone, war entering Germany, AT weapons flooding to the front faster than they can be used etc). The lowly German teller mine was a serious cause of loss, too - they planted millions of the things. The usual non battle losses are there in the US fleet as in the German, etc. US TDs probably outscore the most - less than 1000 of them lost, and they are the leading cause of German tank losses in their big and little offensives, from Lehr in Normandy in July, to the bulge and Alsace.
As for sources, mostly the US army green books for campagns and times the US faced German armor. Can't trust then fir German loss claims, but those have a certain simplicity to them, taken in the large. In the sense that very little survives, in terms of German armor, in any of these fights. Half the armor committed to the bulge lives through it, maybe. Otherwise, committed equal lost for the Germans, for 90% plus, on the time scale of the full battles. In Lorraine, when a German general goes over to the defensive with only 30 runners left out of around 500 committed to date in the sector, he gets a reprimand for lack of offensive spirit!
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Sgt Joch - sure it does. Way more fun than clay pigeon shoots of 10 T-34/76s banzai charging 4 elite Tiger Is. More challenging, too - on both sides.
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MikeyD - right direction, but more magnitude required. A realistic use mix to show what the T-34 did would be a battalion of them with riders against an infantry company with 2 heavy PAK in prepared positions. Then that one again. Then two more, but the Germans have neither PAK nor prepared positions. Then another like that but the Germans get 3 StuGs. Then a sixth in which the Germans get a company of Pz IVs plus panzergrenadiers - and the Russians get the rest of their tank *brigade* as reinforcements because they are up against so much. The seventh fight can finally feature Panthers and be otherwise like the previous.
T-34 battalion vs. Panther company is a cherry picked best case for the Germans, happening 15% of the time or less. Heavies were only a third of the German AFV fleets and mobile formations that had any armor at all were a third or less of theiir army.
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First, I don't understand the test conditions. You appear to be leaving out relevant parameters. Is this finite firing time? How long? What range? You say the Russians fired 75% of their ammo - OK, why did they stop? You stopped the test? At some time limit? How long? The Germans fired 50% of their ammo - same firing tine, I assume?
Next point - you give starting ammo but not ending ammo. I assume around 140 for the Russians, if they used 75% of 566. I assume around 335 for the Germans, if they use 50% of 672.
10% higher per shot accuracy may not reflect grenades, but could easily instead be the effective range compared to the weapon muzzle velocity. Higher velocity bullets with a longer effective range shoot flatter, making a target marginally closer in bullet drop terms. I'd exoect some edge to the PPsH from that, and from the better stock / stabler platform etc, though close enough range it wouldn't matter.
What I see here is just a higher cyclic rate weapon throwing its ammo faster, more so than straighter. If you continue to dry with both forces, I'd expect inflicted losses to be very close. The German ammo load is 7 mags per shooter, the Russian load is 3 large drums or 6 stick mags. Saying the firing time is the same per mag isn't terribly relevant when one team has more mags to run through, and the other has a gun that simply throws more bullets per second when the trigger is down. You should instead take the total ammo expended, divide it by shooters (3), then divide again by the cyclic fire rate to get total trigger-seconds. Both will be below your test time, but the Russian higher cyclic rate effect will be clear. Even holding the trigger down less total time, they threw more rounds.
All I see here...
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GhostRider - the Germans were outscored in the west by the Americans, despite having a better tank mix. They made up for it with lousy doctrine, a bad operational situation, and recklessly over aggressive handling of what armor they had. The Panther should have been a terror vs Shermans in the west, but in practice the Germans attacked with them, and that was quite sufficient to neutralize all their advantages and get them all killed, with little to show for it.
As for the KT, it wasn't remotely effective as a full weapon system at the operational level. Tactically a terror when actually running, certainly. There is nothing to show for that, though, in the whole operational history of the war. It is useful to ask why. Doing so will reveal its lack of numbers, low readiness, pathetic mobility in practice, etc. You will find plenty of own-side unit claims to contradict this, but not confirmation from the opponents who faced them. The own side accounts will depict never losing, always being effective, then mysteriously being blown up by their own crews for never explained reasons. Meanwhile the enemy will occasional register their presence in one or two short passages, handfuls at a time, with results never beyond a tactical scale lasting half a day at most. Not signs of an effective weapon system...
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I recall a conversation with a playtester heavily involved in CM just as CMBB was being released, discussing the T-34 vs the Panzer III long (50L60). He thought "the T-34 is a piece of crap" and that the Panzer III should and would smoke it like a cheap cigar, all day. He was hopelessly wrong, and that opinion falsifies the whole history of the war in the east.
Tanks are meant to accomplish a concrete combat task, which isn't cuddling the driver's backside. The T-34, warts and all, pretty much won WWII. Does that mean it was a superior tank, one for one, to the Panther, say? Of course not. It does mean that it was as good or better, in practice, as all other common main battle tanks of the war, and that properly used it fulfilled all the tactical and operational functions a main battle tank needed to perform in that war. When revisionists try to tell us otherwise, they are engaged in an attempt to get us to believe them instead of our lying eyes, and its just hopeless. T-26s wouldn't have retaken European Russia from the Germans in 30 months of high intensity combat. T-34s did. Not "could have", not "had some potential", DID. And no amount of spin can detract from that.
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Scripting what the attacker is supposed to do is bad scenario design. The designer has to set some incentives and then get out of the way, and let the players command their own forces. Change that too much and (1) people won't play it and (2) there is no reason why they should, because they can't explore command possibilities and plans and such. The designer winds up playing the game, not the players, who are just his puppets. Bad, all the way around.
Unless you are telling the players "here's your force and here's your mission; your plan is entirely up to you; good luck", you are doing them a disservice. Whenever a designer is instead thinking "first they will go to here, and then they will need to deal with that, and then..." he needs to pause, rethink, and get the heck out of the players' chairs.
Expecting the attacker to stop because he has hit such strong defenders, then, has the problem that there isn't any particular reason those strong defenders have to stand on defense. Or defend from way back. It might work with a literally scripted (or passively brain dead) AI on one side, but not with rival human players. They are always going to make full use of whatever you give them and you can't stop them. They can always choose to have that use be an aggressive one, if they can get it to work - and you can't stop them.
What needs tweaking is just the way abstraction influences the scenario by cutting it off from the war around it. That is what good global morale rules and proper VCs and the right map size and force to space ratio can all mitigate. They can't eliminate the issue entirely - there is always a real war going on left and right of the map that the players won't have to pay any attention to, unrealistically so.
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Sublime - trenches were standard in seige warfare from the invention of cannons onward. They were used in field battles in the "age of reason" - in a few cases in the 30 years war, in plenty of the fighting in Holland and Belgium during the long Dutch revolt and in the later wars of the French, etc. Musket men before the invention of the bayonet made extensive use of barriers, low mounds, and trenches to protect themselves from enemy melee troops and cavalry, in addition to the famous mix with pikemen and such. Field fortifications to hold artillery - redoubts and such - were frequently used in the Napoleonic wars, though never as extensive at the whole battlefield. Long before any of that, the Romans had made a point of extensive use of the spade, though the trenches they dug were obstacles (akin to modern anti tank ditches, just directed at cavalry) and worked with ramparts made of the earth moved in emptying them. Really, the practice isn't new. Modern firepower - especially high explosive shell from breech loading artillery - made it more vital than ever to survive on the battlefield, but that's really about it.
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womble - doesn't work. The enemy just wants to push the other guy into the -10000 point range. Nothing purely competitive will serve, because what is overmodeled is the mutual willingness to mash the rival forces together. There needs to be a threat that one's forces simply refuse to do what you are trying to get them to do, *regardless* of what you have succeeded in doing to the other side. VCs cannot accomplish that asymmetry, because in VCs, my wins are your losses and your losses are my wins, zero sum fashion. The mutual willingness of our pixeltruppen to die for we player martinets, however, is not a symmetric thing, but can instead afflict both of us. Yes I can still try to strategically use some effect from forcing you to that level faster. But it is still a constraint I must operate under, that I cannot make irrelevant merely by hurting you more in the meantime.
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CaptHawkeye - no I don't think the necessary global morale effects are already in the game.
As for victory, nobody I know who plays CM - any version - with any seriousness pays much attention to its VCs afterward, always preferringnto assess for themselves how they did. It isn't that they don't respond to designer incentives, they do. They just also don't remotely believe them, and think they are a load of crap, pretty uniformly.
I agree that battlefiekds are a bit "overpopulated", but the bigger thing is that players believe - and the game gives them no reason to think or act otherwise - that all forces they can touch are available to get killed on this specific mission in the next 20 minutes. Setting a loss tolerance VC doesn't even begin to change that. Not being allowed to continue the mission if you get more than a third of your force killed, would. Couple that to presenting a bit more of the field than you woukd otherwise, and with more, spread out and some easily reached terrain objectives, and suddenly it starts making sense to have one subformation that has a support role, and to only uold over here, and probe over there, and to limit the balls out death or glory push to just these guys and this piece of the map.
Which is much more accurate, in terms of presenting this little corner of the war in its rest of the war context, than the cage fight death match we usually see, these days...
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GhostRider - that source is tendentious horsefeathers, to put it charitably. Straw man argumentation, believing German fairy tales, slipshod relative loss reasoning without actual imputation of causes of loss, ignoring the whole operational history of the second half of the war, etc. the Germans won WWII in the east and handily defeated the dumb Russians, clearly, everyone knows that.n that's about the quality of the "reasoning", and of the miss.
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Don't spend lots of time scouting. Don't bother to fix and flank, except with tank forces, who can do it at speed. But also don't just run infantry at the enemy or ignore casualties. That isn't Russian doctrine or how it actually worked, it is just a cartoon slander of their methods spread by the Germans, whomthought it made them defending against it sound all clever and also heroic for braving it etc. (A rather incoherent set of spin objectives, incidentally, but that is an aside).
The first idea is that any definite plan pushed will be faster than slow recon pull. The next is that the process of destroying the enemy really isn't that complicated - it is a matter of laying your ship alongside the enemy, as Nelson put it before Trafalgar. Meaning close aggressively with the enemy, brave what he can dish out to dish out as much as you can yourself, and trust in your strength to destroy him before he destroys you.
But that isn't a headlong charge. Above all, it isn't about movement in the first place, it is about firepower and punishment dealt.
The first infantry wave is fixing, but doesn't have to do it everywhere, or care too much about finding the enemy. Walking over your chosen route of advance will either penetrate the enemy and break up his defense, or he'll find you, and reveal himself stopping that. Let him. Then blow the living crap out of everything that reveals itself, with all your firepower arms. Tanks, mortars, artillery support - call down the wrath of God to avenge the first wave. All the first wave itself needs to do in the meantime is hit the dirt, take what cover they can, and rally as best they can. They did their part drawing the enemy's fire. Don't press. It isn't a race. Save as many of them as possible, by blasting the guys shooting at them and skulking them out of sight.
Then send the second wave. Not a new idea. Not a fancy razzle dazzle end around head fake double reverse. Send them at the spots your artillery and other fire support just blasted into the lower atmosphere, while the dust is still moving upward. They may occupy the places so blasted. Or they may draw fire from a new set of shooters, and repeat the experience of the first wave. You don't really care which. There is no rushing. You have all week. Everyone will get a turn before you are done, every bit of fire support you have will chew on something, and the enemy will need to shoot you all down and still have something left. If they don't, it may be in the bottom half of the clock that they start crumbling. Waves that have been out of the leading role are rallying the while, shooting back. You don't care how long it takes, but not because any of it is tentative or any part of the clock is quiet. Reuse the rallied early waves as fourth and fifth attacks. The whole point is to outlast them, to have the last rallied wave standing. Inexorable is the watchword.
Each wave doesn't bunch up. It isn't trying to run the enemy off his feet in one go. You only expose what it takes to make a serious threat to enemy position if he doesn't open up with a major line of battle. The ideal size of one wave is a numerical match for the defenders on the same frontage. You don't want to give them denser targets that make all their weapons more effective. Instead you want them to face trying to hold off the third wave with empty magazines and surrounded by blasted friends, worked over repeatedly by all your fire support.
They won't stand. Lean hard enough into them, back off for nothing, make no mistakes, and use every weapon in your force for its proper target - and they will go down. Trust your combined strength, believe it, press home and make it so.
No captain can go far wrong who lays his ship alongside one of the enemy.
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Rokko - it isn't just production figures; it assumes a loss rate that is proportional across types, same rate for each type (rate as a percentage of those of that type out by then and still alive). There are definite idealizations in that - the newer types had lower loss rates, in part by some still being in pipelines / kept out of battle, while older types had more mechanical "falling out" from wear and tear etc, so their real loss rate as a percentage would increase with their age, etc. But it is a solid first approximation.
It is saying that T-34/76 was 60% of the tank fleet at the start of 1944, with the T-34/85 not yet part of that fleet. The rest are lights, LL, SUs, etc. By mid 1944, T-34/76 are just below 50% of the fleet and T-34/85s are up to just under 20%, but the former still heavily outnumber the latter. It shows them crossing, at about 33-35% each, in September 1944. By the end of the year, the T-34/76s are down to 20% of the fleet, the T-34/85s are up to a bit over 40%, so they would outnumber the 76s by 2 to 1 or slightly more, at the start of 1945. The T-34/85s almost reach 50% of the fleet by the end of the war (April 1945 actually), with the 76s down to 10% of the fleet by then.
Note that both types combined are running 60-70% of the whole tank force. The percentage of heavier types and SUs is rising in the late war (though a fair portion of the SUs are lighter SU-76s - all Russian light tank production switched over to those by the last year or so of the war), LL is declining slightly, and the fleet total itself is rising perhaps 50% in the final year, as the loss rate falls (especially so in 1945) while production stays high.
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womble - making victory possible for both sides, or equally likely for both sides, is to me an afterthought. It is much more important for the VCs to give the players the right incentives to try this or push for that or refrain from something else, than it is that they have equal chances of winning if they do so. Bad incentives break scenarios. More likely winners on one side or the other do not - they just counsel playing more scenarios of varied type to experience all sorts of situations.
In my CMx1 scenario "Crossing Guards", which featured a dozen German tanks and one recon infantry platoon against a Russian rifle company with a single 45mm ATG, the VCs included exit of all the German tanks, while their infantry and supporting weapons etc had no exit requirement. This made victory turn on whether the Germans blew through the Russian position *fast enough* to exit more than half of their tanks. In CMx1 exit VCs, leaving a tank that was supposed to exit on the board was as bad as getting it killed. The Germans knew their VC and would push and could readily fight through and exit. The Russians had an incentive to skulk away from the tanks, delay them if possible and kill any the gun could get, but try not to get their whole force killed in the process. If, afterward, they could fight their way back to the few on board flags, and mess up any German infantry left to hold them (very small numbers provided to the German side), they could improve their performance. They'd still likely lose, because the strong German force was likely to mess up their infantry and exit alive. But they had things to try, realistic ones, that did not include "get everyone killed".
Just an example...
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Realistic does not mean huge. Realistic does not require special conditions of five times as much clock time. Green units, 30-50% more time, and less symmetric forces can all improve realism, but none is strictly required (you can have 2 out of 3 e.g.).
As for loss tolerance, the game model issue is that rally is rather too rapid and too complete (which greens do help with, incidentally). Another approach to that I will describe below.
There is also a scenario design issue of designers frequently putting too much into terrain objectives that are all controlled at start by one side - or similar effects with exit conditions - which basically force a push for complete victory. The better design for loss realism is to have a moderate amount of points for terrain objectives compared to those potentially available from knock out points, and then in addition to spread the terrain objectives around, some being quite easy for the attacker to reach and hold. So that a normal, probing or tentative attack outcome would split the terrain objective points, with perhaps the attacker getting 200 of them and the defender 300 or 400. Not 500-600 to nothing, unless the attacker takes the entire field.
There is another way to enforce realistic loss tolerance levels by using global morale. It requires the players to adopt the system and abide by it, rather than any change to the game engine or scenario design (though the scenario design should specify the details). Each side is given a global morale level that is its "continue the mission" or "critical" level. If the side's global morale is below its critical level at the start of an orders phase, that side must click the "cease fire" option. Notice, either side *may* choose to prepare for cease fire, as usual - this global morale just sets an additional "must". If the defender thinks he is winning, he might voluntarily choose it each turn. If he then drives the attacker's global morale below its critical level, the attacker will be forced to choose "ceasefire" as well, the two will match up, and the scenario will end, then and there. This represents a combat broken off, with the attacker ceasing his efforts to try again later or somewhere else or using different tactics or forces, or the defender retreating from the position.
This gives a much more realistic way of fighting, in the sense that the force must be kept tolerably intact, in reasonable morale state etc, or it simply will not continue the mission. If the opponent doesn't want to let it break off, this still won't end the fight early - the other side just won't have picked "cease fire" in that case, and the combat continues. If both sides are ragged out, however, the fight *won't* continue. So no fighting to the last man on each side, ammo exhausted, trading haymakers at 4 meters with the last dismounted tank crews, etc.
As for how to make more realistic scenarios, when I was designing actively for CM1 I took inspiration from operational wargames I was playing at the same time. I would just log local battles to simulate (at greatly reduced, merely "representative" scale, of course) from the combats that occurred in the operational game. Those tend to be rather lopsided and to feature combined arms relationships that are not symmetric or ideal. So e.g. sometimes a full company of German tanks with a few recon infantry on motorcycles attack a pure rifle infantry defense, that has nothing more than a single 45mm ATG as AT weapon, and in open farmland terrain. On another occasion, such a German force might be called upon to attack through a dense forest along a narrow secondary road, against prepared defenses including mines. Very different tactical task, that.
The point is precisely to avoid any one formula as supposedly "typical", to say to heck with "play balance", and instead just make lots of varied situations that feature only this long suit against that one, in this type of terrain problem or another. Both sides need to assess what they can actual accomplish in the situation in front of them - which may be only "die gloriously", lol.
FWIW.
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CarlWAW wrote in relevant part about "incredible effectivity and accuracy of Soviet SMG units compared to all others". I simply don't see this. The PPsH is a marginally more effective SMG than other SMGs, certainly, but it performs about like all other automatic weapons in most CM scale combats, if the range is short enough for SMGs to be effective. (Full LMGs outperform at longer range etc). The rest is just an impression created by there being plenty of them, both in full SMG squads and the 3-4 per squad in other Russian infantry types.
Then he asks "How do you remove insurgents or infantry from a house or from woods without the use of heavy weapons?" Why "without the use of heavy weapons?" The actual answer to the question how one removes infantry from a (stone) house is "use heavy weapons". (Vs a merely wood house you can just fire at them with full MGs and such, and will hit them).
The actual answer to the question of how one removes infantry from woods is "use artillery, and follow up the barrage with your own infantry, before the enemy can recover from the barrage". Those are the specific combined arms counters to defending infantry in such terrain. Asking how to do it without the proper tool is like asking how to defeat tanks without anti tank weapons, or how to deal with enemy aircraft without AA weapons.
Large-ish HE is the anti good cover weapon. It is as essential to the combined arms "kit" as anti tank weapons, and nobody expects to defeat tanks without any anti tank weapons. They just expect any effective combine arms formation to include some sort of antitank weaponry, because it is crippled without such a capability. There is a reason medium mortars were part of the "kit" of every infantry company in WW II - because woods and foxhole cover are everywhere, but ordinary infantry formations need to be able to attack them - which takes HE prep. There is also a reason stone buildings are considered strong positions - because the tanks or other direct fire HE weapons that counter them aren't quite as common as medium mortars.
Nowhere is it written that good infantry defending in stone buildings "should" be readily defeatable with nothing but normal infantry squads, if only they eat their wheaties or something. No, they shouldn't be. It takes the proper weapon to defeat such positions at any acceptable cost in friendly casualties.
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Sublime - trenches in seige warfare are much older than that. Trench warfare just saw the methods of seige applied by whole maneuver force armies across much longer frontages, instead of only using them to invest specific stronghold points. Which was as much a function of the increasing size of armies - mobilized and supplied by richer states and railroad logistics - as anything in weapon technology specifically.
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Small arms fixation, rather silly. 70% plus of all casualties are caused by artillery fire, including the common medium mortars, but heavily dominated by divisional artillery, where all the fire control and ammunition supply was concentrated. Of casualties caused by bullets, machineguns are by far the leading cause, both infantry crew served and vehicle mounted. Maybe 1 in 6 battlefield casualties were caused by all smaller arms combined, and perhaps less. Those split between close range fire at broken enemies or very rapidly decided knife fights, and long range fire making up in time-extent what it lacked in specific lethality. Meaning rifles taking isolated potshots for *hours* on end, whenever a target briefly exposed itself.
CM players try to use infantry as an arm of decision in its own right, accepting very heavy casualties to mash like on like and trade with similar enemies, at ranges down to point blank. That did happen occasionally in the actual war, of course, but always as a sign of a fearsome stuff up in the chain of plans and maneuvering and combined arms application.
Normally SMGs don't kill many infantrymen because normally friendly infantrymen spend very little time within 50 meters of the enemy. Artillery and mortars and tanks and such all plaster him at 500 to 1000 yards. Then MGs, modestly supplemented by aimed rifle fire, mostly keeps him from getting within 200 yards - the MGs rather more effective in the 250 to 500 yard range envelope and the rifles and such kicking in from 250 down to 100 - with few ever getting that close.
When infantry does get that close to the enemy it is after the heavier stuff has seriously messed him up, to finish him off or force him to retreat or to take prisoners. Sometimes it has to threaten that to reveal the defenders by the threat of close approach in far superior numbers - then it mostly gets stopped as described in the previous, and the friendly heavy stuff finds something to "chew on" and goes to work. In all of which, infantry are targets far more than direct threats, and their firepower mostly defensive, suppressing their opposite numbers long before they can close.
Armies went to intermediate rather than full power cartridges after WWII because they had found that infantry only has to deal with the 300 yard and under range, because heavier stuff in the combined arms toolbox completely dominates all fighting at longer ranges. Everyone with a carbine caliber weapon capable of full automatic fire gave all the benefits of SMGs without their limited range drawbacks, while being fully capable out to the 300 yard mark, beyond which small arms fire was tactically irrelevant.
To get a realistic sense of these things in CM, you just have to play realistic scenarios that make full use of the combined arms "kit", and that reflect the "never fight fair" lopsidedness of real combat. When instead you artificially force everything to be a short range, even odds, infantry dominated encounter, and in lots of cover, you won't get historically realistic outcomes or importance of different weapons. You've cherry picked the occasions for automatic small arms carried by each man, to shine.
Fight in open steppe terrain and see how important SMGs are. Give the attacking side 12 tubes of 105mm artillery with 100 rounds per gun and see how important SMGs are. Give one side an SMG infantry company and the other side a Panzer IVG company and see how important the SMGs are. That war as a whole was not even knife-fights inside 100 yards between evenly matched infantry companies. When it was - some city fighting e.g. - infantry loss rates were astronomical and SMGs were highly prized. That just wasn't the whole war.
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womble - it isn't the 180 degree bit that is a limitation. Its priority and readiness for specific threats.
An ATG is deployed in a half sided "keyhole" set up that blocks LOS to the western half of the compass. Its assigned fire sector ranges from due north, 0 degrees, to 120 degrees. There is no danger from anything left / west of 0 because LOS blockages cover that area. The gun expects an enemy AFV to break cover - coming over a ridgeline, say - at about 20 degrees right of north, so it wants its covered arc to be centered there. It still wants to cover its assigned sector, if the enemy tank doesn't crest the hill.
A face command could be used, with no arc, at the 20 degree bearing. On the plus side this gives correct orientation to the highest value, biggest threat. On the other hand, without an armored arc, the ATG might open fire at *infantry* at 100 degree orientation, in its field of view. It would then be facing very much the wrong way if the enemy tank crests, would not be able to traverse back in time, and would likely die to this "distraction tag team".
So we want an armored arc, for target type discrimination. If a 120 degree armored covered arc is used over the whole sector 0 to 120, the gun will be oriented 40 degrees to the right of the likely cresting enemy tank. That isn't quite as dangerous as the previous, but may still be enough to lose it the first shot advantage in a dual with the tank.
So we want the armored arc to be centered on the 20 degree orientation. If we use an arc with that orientation that is limited the gun's actual planned left-limited field of fire, it would only be 40 degrees wide, from 0 to 40 degrees. This leaves the gun vulnerable to any other armored vehicle in the rightward 2/3rds of its assigned sector.
So we can use the max 180 degree arc, but orient its center on 20 degrees. This would "waste" the leftmost 70 degrees of the covered arc on ground the gun can't actually see and doesn't need to cover (or scan visually, etc), and cover all but the last 10 degrees on the right. But it does leave that 10 degree sliver at the right of the gun's desired arc uncovered. And if there are any actual peepholes on the mostly obstructed left half of the compass, true wackiness could ensue, as the gun might traverse left chasing a fleeting glimpse of an enemy halftrack through a bunch of trees, and leave itself out of position for its actual intended target.
Using an arc narrower than 180 but wider than 40, centered on the 20 degree direction, is as good as we can do, trading off lost coverage on the right side of the intended field of fire, for less arc in which the wacky distraction in completely unintended areas can happen.
But why do we face these constraints? There is nothing remotely inconsistent in wanting the gun to (1) face the 20 degree direction (2) only engage armor and (3) rotate vs an armored target of opportunity, only, exclusively in the arc 0 to 120 degrees. The reason we can't do that is the designers didn't understand we'd want to, and made all of the face influencing orders mutually exclusive. In tactical reality they are not mutually exclusive.
This isn't a big issue, in the sense that normally one can get a performance close to what one wants. But every time one has to compromise and gets "burned" by the Tac AI then doing the dumb thing one was forced to tell it to do, it still grates.
FWIW.
Soviet SMGs II
in Combat Mission Red Thunder
Posted
We know for typical cover, which mostly means good cover, and for longish ranges, 100 to 150 meters, that they could fire off a whole ammo load to hit one person opposite, or worse. How do we know this? Because people lived through WWII. And because common good cover forms were effective, and SMG armed infantry bothered to close to shorter ranges, including down to grenade range. There would have been no reason to do so if every man who walked onto the field could just kill the enemy where they stood, at range and in cover, by just holding down a trigger. Ammo wasn't scarce - aberage rounds fired per hit ran as high as 50,000, of course including lots ofbwasteful MG fire from vehicle mounted MGs hosing terrain and such. Not a figure to take seriously fir CM fire, but it shows they had the bullets. If one man with the load he carried onto the field could always hit a man opposite, they'd all be down inside of three days.
In a typical CM scale combat, an infantry squad should hit more than its own numbers only if they had particularly good targets - close range, open ground, not firing back broken troops, some combination of those things. You won't get that average outcome if every SMG in the squad hits 5 men by the time it is dry, firing at its effective range and into normal amounts of cover.