YankeeDog

This was changed, I thought for CMBN 2.2x, but definitely for CMRT 3.0; sniper team escorts now only open fire at very close range or under duress. In a current game, I have two Russian sniper teams that have been happily plinking away at a bunch of Germans in a trench ~250m away for more than 5 minutes, and the spotters (armed with rifles) haven't fired a single shot. Reducing the teams to one man might increase stealth, but it also halves the number of eyes available for spotting. I don't have much trouble keeping my 2-man sniper teams concealed, so even if they don't have binos I'll take the extra pair of eyes, thank you very much. As for both soldiers in a Russian sniper team typically having scoped rifles, color me skeptical. Maybe for for high-end recon/spetznaz sniper teams, but if the run-of-the-mill platoon and company-level sniper teams had this additional glass, it would further increase the amounts of optical glass in Russian infantry units to far above what Soviet wartime production levels suggest was possible -- See JasonC's post above.

Good point; it wasn't my intention to be snooty; fighting in dense, good cover terrain is indeed an interesting tactical problem. What I was trying to say in a rather roundabout way is that I think people often look at scenarios where they are, say, attacking across a map with lots of dense woods, and assume they need to "clear the whole forest" of all enemy presence, when actually this isn't a requirement to win the scenario at all. The proper thing to do in any dense terrain (e.g., woods, urban) is choose the critical routes and pieces of terrain you must control to achieve the objectives, and leave the enemy elsewhere to rot. Once you control the critical terrain, any remaining enemy have the choice of either staying where they are, in which case they become irrelevant, or coming out to engage, in which case you can fight them on your terms.

Trust me, I playtested it. [spoilerS, AGAIN, FOR AUGUSTOW] If you go for, and then defend the objectives, in the process you will be presented with the opportunity to kill more than enough Russians to get plenty of casualty points and *also* get a good chunk of, if not all, the enemy condition points (note that some of the condition points are actually awarded for good condition of your force, so not sending your infantry off on wild chases through the woods will actually help you retain these "friendly condition" points by keeping your infantry relatively sound and not burning all of your ammo). I also think you have a mis-impression of the scenario premise. So-called "mop-up" operations to completely eliminate an area of enemy stragglers, isolated teams, etc., are slow, tedious affairs and largely out of the scope of CM, usually requiring many hours and even days. What you're really being asked to do in Augustow Plague Boil is break Soviet forces in the area by (a) seizing the critical terrain, and ( forcing the Soviets off of their good defensive positions, and (d) causing enough damage to the enemy force that it loses cohesion and is no longer able to fight as a unified force. "Mop up" would come after all of this, and if you get too obsessed with chasing down every single team of Russian infantry you see in the woods in this scenario, you will lose. Kill the enemy you need to in order to achieve the objectives (which is actually quite a lot). Once you've done this, if you see easy opportunities to kill more Russians, by all means take them. But keep your eyes on the objectives and don't get drawn into the enemy's fight. Another way to look at it would be how things would be scored if the Russian player simply gave up the fight, moving all his forces deep into the woods and conceding the terrain objectives to the German player. By my tally, in this case the German player would win by 1500-500, a pretty handy victory. Any additional points the German player gets by achieving a good casualty ratio is just gravy.

[spoilerS: AUGUSTOW PLAGUE BOIL] Now, this is where a close reading of the scenario victory conditions is important. Only 1/3 of the possible points available to the German side in Augustow are for Soviet casualties; 1/3 are terrain objectives and 1/3 are friendly/enemy condition points. Further, most of the Soviet forces are arrayed near the edge of the roads and open areas of the map, and/or in areas of the the forest that are less dense and can be traversed by vehicles. Overall, I'd estimate at least 75% of the Soviet force is in locations where you can bring vehicle weapons fire to bear on them, if you read the map carefully. So you don't need to run around trying to hunt down Soviet SMG infantry deep inside the woods to win that scenario. In fact, considering how vehicle-heavy and infantry-light the German force is, attempting to force an infantry-only fight very good way to lose that scenario...

Manpack flamethrowers have very short range. For example, The Russian ones only reach ~32m. So usually, the FT team is going to get spotted and shot before it gets close enough to an actively resisting enemy to do any useful work. Occasionally, you might get lucky, but I wouldn't plan on it as a tactic. Vehicle flamethrowers are a different matter. But if the woods are thin enough to allow vehicle passage and a target line out to ~100m, and you have any vehicle with either a FT or decent HE, you really don't have a problem. JasonC has is right: Don't clear the depths of heavy woods unless you absolutely have to, and if you have to, only clear as much as you absolutely need to in order to accomplish your objective. Infantry deep inside woods is very difficult to root out, but they also can't project fire power beyond the woods unless they move up to the edge, in which case you can bring ranged firepower to bear upon them.

Need, no. But remember that snipers are usually deployed as a 2-man team, shooter and spotter. If the spotter has his own set of optics, he's going to be much better at helping to spot and ID targets, spot fall of shot for corrections, etc. Binos are generally superior to monocular optics for the purposes of spotting (rather than targeting) because they give you a wider field of view, cause less eye fatigue, and provide better depth perception. Just ask any hunter or wildlife photographer. You don't wander around trying to spot stuff through your rifle scope or telephoto camera lens; you use binos for spotting and ID, and then switch to the rifle/camera once you know where it is and what you're looking at. In modern sniper teams, the spotter generally carries a high-power spotting scope as well as a decent pair of binos.

Personally, I have no freakin' idea whether the Soviets had enough binos to give a pair to every sniper team. Official TOE and what actually happened in the field are often two different things, and in any event the TOE sources I have don't go down to that level of granularity. It's tricky because the Red Army deployed a LOT of snipers, more than any other WWII combatant, at various levels of the TOE. I would not assume it's a given that the sniper teams organic at the platoon level were necessarily as well equipped as the Company level ones, or those attached to more specialized recon/infiltration units. And it is worth noting that since Sniper teams are more common in Soviet TOE than any other nationality yet depicted in CMx2 WWII, *if* every Soviet sniper team had bios, this would mean that the Soviets were able to provide substantially more glass optics to their low-level infantry units than any other nationality, including the generally lavishly equipped Americans -- for starters, 5 binos/rifle platoon, plus a rifle scope in every platoon. Did this actually happen? Especially by mid-1944, and in the better-equipped units like Guards formations, it wouldn't totally surprise me. But I also suspect BFC did what they did for a reason, and they Steve may have good reason to conjecture that the average Red Army rifle platoon was not so lavishly equipped, regardless of what the TOE says.

That's not wrong, at least as a one-time thing. Assuming no armor flaws (which should be the case at least some of the time), Panther Front Glacis definitely *can* bounce A-19 122mm APBC. Definitely not always, but sometimes. More likely if engagement aspect is not flat-on so there's so some effective horizontal armor slope, or the Panther is sitting on a higher elevation or a reverse slope that gives a few additional degrees to the effective vertical armor slope. Armor penetration is highly variable, IRL and also in CM. You need a large sample size under controlled conditions before you can really make any useful judgements regarding a specific armor vs gun matchup.

It's a very different game from CMBB, different mechanics, different UI... it's hard to compare. It's the same core game engine as CMSF, but there have been some pretty huge improvements to the game engine since 1.0 came out with CMSF in 2007. Even within CMSF, the difference between the 1.0 release code and the terminal 1.32 is pretty huge... Obviously, are also some pretty huge differences between modern combat and WWII combat. Engagements between M1 Abrams and T-72s simply do not play out like engagements between Panthers and T-34s. I advise you to wait until the demo comes out and then give it a try before you buy. Shouldn't be too long. While you're waiting you could download and give the CMBN and CMFI demos a try. There have some further improvements to the game engine with CMRT, but besides the obvious presence of Russians rather than Americans and Brits, the differences between CMRT and the most recent versions of CMBN/CMFI are modest in the grand scheme of things. Everybody has their personal favorite of the games, which generally has more to do with theatre preference than any technical difference in the game engines between titles, so I don't think my "personal ranking" of the titles is going to be of much use to you. I like CMRT best, but this probably has more to do with my stronger interest in the East Front than anything else. The other thing to be aware of is that the WWII CMx2 titles get updated to the current-state-of the art game engine as new iterations come out. So expect BFC to offer an "Engine Upgrade" to CMBN and CMFI that will bring them up to to CMRT's standard (v3.0 of the engine) within a month or two for something like $10. This is a significant difference compared to the way things worked with the CMx1 family; once CMBO was done, the code was locked and improvements that came with CMBB and CMAK did not filter back to this title. This is no longer the case with CMx2.

Absolutely, but remember it has to give up all that horizontal acceleration advantage if it wants to climb quickly. The Bearcat can have one or the other; it can use its superior power-weight ratio to accelerate and get out ahead of the Mustang (at least for a while, until the Mustang's slightly superior level flight top speed allows it to catch up), or it can use it to get above the Mustang. It can't do both simultaneously; altitude costs airspeed. Tactically, the latter is the better choice.

That's not going to work because he can't get ahead of the Mustang and get set up to make a first pass from the Mustang's 10:00 that quickly. Remember, the Bearcat's advantage is in vertical speed, not horizontal. So if the two start rolling down the runway at the same time, the Bearcat jumps off the deck faster, and starts climbing quickly, but his horizontal speed is still not faster than the Mustang's; he's just doing it in the air in a steep climb while the Mustang is still rolling along the runway. So he's above and if anything slightly behind the Mustang. At this point, he might be able to nose over and make a quick snap pass from the rear quarter just as the Mustang is pulling off the tarmac, but he's got to be careful because he's still pretty low to the ground and has low airspeed; he has poor energy. So he's going to need to pull up quickly to re-establish altitude, which will destroy his gun solution. No way he sets himself up for a second pass before the Mustang is airborne, wheels up, and flaps retracted. The Mustang is no Bearcat, but it's got a lot of power and without a bomb load it can still get off the deck pretty quickly.

The story is doubtless tall-tale hyperbole; I don't believe "2 firing passes" for a second. But it is true the Bearcat out-climbed a P-51, and not just by a little bit -- by about 1,300 ft./min! The Bearcat could jump off the deck in 115 ft. and reach 10,000 ft. in 94 seconds, a performance record that stood well into the Jet age. So the Bearcat would indeed be well off the runway and several hundred feet in the air before the Mustang even got its wheels off the ground. Not enough to "make 2 firing passes", but enough to easily put itself in the catbird seat, at 6 O'Clock high on the Mustang before the Mustang even had its wheels up. It was a specialized interceptor, designed from the ground up to be able to jump off a carrier deck and get up to 20,000 ft.+ in a hurry so that it would have altitude advantage on incoming enemy bombers. Not as good a multi-role airframe as the Corsair, but probably the best piston-engine Naval interceptor to be see service in substantial numbers with any nationality, and IMHO a contender for best piston-engine interceptor ever built, period.

For the most part, I agree. But it's its important not to discount the advantages offered by the ease and simplicity of the Hellcat. Landing a plane on a carrier is really f'n hard, same in WWII as today. If you look up interviews with WWII Navy Aces, usually the first stat they bring up is the number of carrier landings they achieved. Only secondarily do they note many enemy planes they shot down. So anything that makes the pilot's job easier on landing is a good thing. And the Hellcat was most definitely easier to land. Eventually, they got the hang of landing the Corsair on the carrier decks, but it was never as easy on final approach as the Hellcat. If Corsairs, on average, shoot down a few more enemy planes, but lose a comparable number of additional airframes and pilots on bad landings, it's a wash from a logistical viewpoint. The Hellcat also has a reputation of being extremely easy to maintain and repair, which was important given the fast tempo and logistical constraints of carrier air ops. But it's definitely true that late war against the Kamikazes, when they needed an airframe that could get off the deck and up to altitude *fast*, they began to lean increasingly on the Corsair, which had a measurable advantage in top speed and climb rate. It also was superior in the ground attack role, being able to carry around twice the ordnance. And if the war had gone on another 6 months, I'm sure the Hellcat would have been almost completely supplanted by the Bearcat, which AFAIK actually had the fastest climb rate of any piston-engine plane of the war. That thing could climb like, well... a scared cat.

Oh... don't get me wrong, I loves me some Merlin. The Merlin is the girl who firmly meets your gaze, sidles up to you at the bar, puts her lips up to your ear, and instructs you to make passionate love to her all night long, after which you take her out for a brunch of omlettes and Bloody Marys. But the R-2800 is the girl you have no memory of picking up at the bar, who bitch-slaps you awake at 3am, grabs you by the chin and tells you to f*ck her again, and again, all morning until both of you are exhausted, at which point you go out for burgers and tequila shots. Personal preference which you prefer. As for the Daimler-Benz...she's the girl you lured away from the drunk football captain and screwed at the prom after-party. Pretty and nice memories, and a fun ride in that frisky, I'm-in-my-experimental-phase kind of way, but high maintenance and lacking the depths of passion that came with your later conquests.

Ahhhh,... there is nothing like the sound of an R-2600 or R-2800 starting up. Like a beast being released from hell. Man, you're making me nostalgic... my dad used to take me to lots of airshows when I was a kid... I didn't care much about the modern hardware; it was the old warbirds I always wanted to see.

No argument that if the USAAF had better foresight, they would have trained and equipped a few light attack squadrons; by the end of the war they had more fighter pilots than they knew what to do with... P-51s and P-47s manned by fighter jocks put through a crash course in ground attack did OK in the light attack role, but IMHO crews specifically trained as light attack crews in airframes built for the purpose would have done better. I wouldn't pick the Vultee to equip them, though. The Brits and Aussies managed to get some good use out of it, but it had some serious performance drawbacks. One of the most serious IMHO was very poor short field performance which is important in a light attack craft that is likely to be called upon to use improvised airstrips close to the front lines. Bomb load was middling at best as well -- both the SBD and the Helldiver could carry a larger ordnance load, the Helldiver considerably larger. And the Vultee wouldn't have worked for the Navy at all -- the aforementioned poor short takeoff performance made it supremely unsuited to carrier ops. The USAAF actually did contract for 900 of a land version of the Helldiver, which were designated A-25 Shrike, but they canceled the order after half of them had already been built and sent most of them to the Marines. The Helldiver had a bit of a checkered record with the Navy, but a lot of the issues the Navy had with the Helldiver were related to the fact it was rather difficult to land on a carrier deck, which of course wouldn't have been an issue in USAAF service; it actually would have made a much better land-based light attack airframe.

Big problem with the P-47 is that it was expensive as hell; it was the most expensive single-engine fighter of the war. But I do think it was very good, and certainly underappreciated. For overall jack-of-all-trades fighter-bomber, though, I'd put the F4U ahead of it. Especially the later war 4-hogs were faster, more agile, had slightly better range, could carry almost as much ordnance load, and could take off and land on short field or aircraft carriers to boot. Given interservice rivalries, though, the USAAF probably never would have even considered dropping the P-47 for the F-4U. Too bad.

It all depends. Fighter performance is highly complex. The P-47's performance also improved a lot over its service life as improvements were made to various components and in some contexts you actually could say a P-47 is more agile than a Fw-190 or Me-109. Beyond the excellent dive performance that is always cited, the P-47 did indeed have a very good roll rate which generally beat the roll rate of German fighters. But the big performance aspect of the P-47 that is often underappreciated is that its performance got better relative other designs at high altitude -- it actually had a better turn rate than an Me-109 or Fw-190 at altitudes above about 15,000 feet. So on escort missions, as long as the dogfight stayed up near the bombers, the P-47 pretty seriously outclassed the opposing German piston-engine designs. This is one reason why German fighters often tried to make slashing attacks through the bomber formations and then get away to lower altitude quickly -- the escorting American fighters had a pretty serious performance advantage at high altitude. If the Germans could draw the American pilots down to below 15,000 feet, they were better off. Late war, after the improved Curtiss paddle prop was added, the P-47 also outclimbed the Fw-190, even at low altitude. So for the late-war P-47s, against German piston-engine designs it was only the low altitude, low speed turning fights where they were at a disadvantage, and unless caught at a serious energy disadvantage, the P-47 could always refuse this fight by climbing away from it.

Fair enough. FWIW, I'm not sure the eventual outcome of the war was *completely* predetermined right from September, 1939. If you remove the guy with the funny moustache at the head of the whole fiasco, replace him with less pathologically insane head of state, but with similar expansionist ambitions, and then assume a wiser diplomatic strategy to complement Germany's early military successes, I do think there was an opportunity early on in the war (definitely before the USSR and USA entered) where Germany could have ended up with hegemony in Western Europe and a negotiated peace with the U.K. How long such a hypothetical "German Empire" would have been able to maintain this status quo is debatable... a while maybe, but probably not indefinitely. Conquered peoples have a way of rising up and casting off their Conquerors. It sometimes takes a few generations, but it usually happens, sooner or later... But yes the technical stuff is interesting, too. I used to love digging into the performance minutiae of various airfames. I was never very into flight sims, but I'd love a good new operational-level game that treated the air battle with the same attention to realism and detail as CM. There have been a few games on this subject that I've played like this over the years, but nothing that has really stuck with me like CM.

Not debating the quality of the airframes at all. The BF-109 was probably the best fighter airframe in the world in 1939 when the war broke out, and it's a mark of just how good it was that it was still pretty competitive in 1944. The Fw-190 was a match for anything the Allies had. Rather, I question the wisdom of Bodenplatte from a tactical viewpoint. The goal of Bodenplatte was to hit the forward Allied airfields hard enough to at least temporarily paralyze allied fighter and tac air operations, thereby providing German ground forces a window of time during which they could operate with reduced risk of interference from Allied Air Power. It failed miserably at this goal; the Bodenplatte sorties generally went in during the morning, and most of the Allied Tac Air missions scheduled for that same afternoon went off more or less as planned. The airfields hit were mostly able to re-establish operations within hours, and many of them barely experienced a hiccough. The Germans vastly underestimated the firepower it would take to actually put an airfield out of operation for any period of time. The Germans did manage to destroy quite a few airframes on the ground, and technically the exchange in airframes was in the Germans' favor: something like 3:5 or thereabouts; there is some debate as to the exact numbers as it depends a lot on how you tally the damaged but technically recoverable airframes. But since most of the German losses were in-air shoot downs over enemy territory, and most of the Allied losses were airframes parked on the ground, the exchange of pilots was vastly in the Allies' favor and this was much more important. It was, overall, a poorly thought out and poorly executed operation, a last gasp from the fatally wounded bird the Luftwaffe had become.

I guess, if by "pulled off" you mean "failed to accomplish any of their objectives and lost most of their remaining fighter strength."

Can't say as I agree with that assessment. Light & medium AA generally had to be deployed in multiple batteries covering an area have a good effect. Squadron-size low-level attacks on targets like airfields defended by literally dozens of light AA guns were often executed with just a few losses (sometimes even none) and a few more damaged. For Soviet 37mm AA, the ratio was roughly 1,000 shells fired per shoot down claimed (and I'm sure you agree claims would be much higher than actual kills). A little math about the number of shots a 37mm gun would be able to get in on a dive bomber (which actually only spends a fairly limited amount of time in the 37mm AA's range envelope), leads me to conclude that 4 x 37mm tubes would not be a particularly strong light AA defense. It would have some effect, to be sure, mostly in reducing accuracy of the attacking bombers than actually having a chance of shooting one down. So 4x 37mm "Ruin you whole day", no. If this were the case, Essex class carriers, with as many as 72 x Bofors tubes (not to mention scads of 20mm and 5-in.), would have been downright invincible to air attack completely without defending fighters, which they most definitely were not, even before the Kamikazes complicated the equation.

They didn't even have to run out of gas or ammo. On the defensive Panthers and Tigers did pretty well much of the time. But this is not all that surprising considering the advantages the defender has. On the offense, though, their only significant successes were against infantry defensive positions with only modest AT assets (e.g., early stages of the Battle of the Bulge). Even when gas and ammo were not an issue, they usually failed pretty spectacularly once they ran into Allied units with credible AT assets, on the East front or West -- Mortain, Arracourt, Lake Balaton.. the record of the "Heavy Cats" on the advance is not good.

Nice. But yeah... that would be a bug. Do you have a save game file? If so, please PM me and I will send you my email address so I can file a report.

An overly optimistic description of the general success of German counterattacks, at least in the second half of the war. They succeeded occasionally, but failed at least as often: Mortain, Arracourt, Operation Nordwind, Lake Balaton... I could go on.