YankeeDog

Other problem is that buildings, even when hit repeatedly by HE fire, don't necessarily always catastrophically collapse - sometimes, just one corner collapses, then another, etc. I suppose this is partially modeled by the variation in casualties when a building collapses. The other thing that could be improved is that I think the actual number of shots required to collapse a building would be a lot less predictable. Just a couple of 75mm shots in the right spot might collapse a small light building, On the other hand, several shots into the same collapsed corner of the building might do very little damage to the remaining structure - the rubble already created would absorb most of the explosive force and shrapnel. Right now, you can pretty much predict how many shots it will require to bring a building down if you do a little bit of research. I'd like to see a little more random variation. Minor sticking points for me. If the current number of shots required to bring down a building right now is looked at as an average, it doesn't seem far off to me. Cheers, YD [ May 15, 2002, 09:15 AM: Message edited by: YankeeDog ]

Yeah, Austin Bowie and I are still at it. Sorry for the delay - we've had rather incompatible schedules. Just after I get back home from a business trip, Austin gets swamped at work. . . We're moving along well now. Long and Short is approaching the endgame, and Crash Landing isn't too far behind.

The grenade throwing against tanks in CMBO represents an abstracted close assault on the tank - basically, infantry in very close proximity to the tank doing whatever they can to knock the tank out - sticking small arms in viewports, trying to force grenades down exhaust ports, etc. Without demo charges, rifle grenades or panzerfausts the chance of infantry close assault successfully knocking out the tank is very small, but it can happen. This is borne out by historical evidence - Saving Private Ryan-type desparation attacks on tanks work just often enough to make for inspiring reading. Most of the time they just get men killed.

Well, as someone who has certainly gotten a lot out of the current newbie tourney, I'd be happy to lend whatever assistance I can to the next round. Realistically, I'm probably better off helping with the administrative side of things - I have just started dabbling in scenario creation myself, so I'm probably still a ways away from being able to provide scenarios good enough to be used in the competitive setting. When and if it gets going, let me know and I'll help however I can. Cheers, YD

Yeah, wait for CM:BB to come out. In case you haven't already heard, there's going to be a "Seek hull down" command. Seriously, I sympathize. I often have the same problem. If you're going after an already spotted target, the method you describe above is the best way I know of to do it. Here's looking forward to elegant solutions. YD

I believe most, if not all, WWII era tanks had only a limited amount of their ammo stored in ready-racks where it was quickly accessible by the loader. The T-34's total of 9 rounds available in the ready racks may have been somewhat less than what other tanks had, but sooner or later any tank crew would have to move ammo up from the stowage bins to continue firing. If you're going to model ready-rack replenishment for the T-34, than to be fair I think you have to model it for all tanks. The T-34 may also have been at a disadvantage because, with one less crewmember than similar tanks, there would be less hands avaiable to move the shells. Ready rack replenishment might be tricky to model. I assume that the crew would replenish the racks any chance they got, so you'd have to make as decision as to just how 'unengaged' a tank would need to be (obviouly no rack replenishment while engaging an enemy tank, but what about while sitting on a ridge area firing into an enemy held town with no anti-armor threat in sight??), who does the work of moving the ammo (does the bow MG gunner help move the ammo? If so, the bow MG can't fire while the ready racks are being replenished) and how long it takes to replenish the racks. You also have to do research into just how many rounds of each type were usually stored in the racks. At the very least, the tank would have to be still, or at best travelling in a straight line on a nice flat road, for the racks to be replenished. I imagine that a good tank crew would take advantage of any lulls in action to replenish those racks (and clear out empty shell casings rolling around), and might change the types of rounds in the racks based on what it thought the most likely threat at any given moment was. Not that I wouldn't appreciate these additional realism features being added to the game, just pointing out that modeling things like ready racks and riding with rounds in the chamber would definitly add a considerable amount of complexity to the model and so there's good reason why we probably won't see them in CMBB. Here's looking forward to all of the arguments. . . um, I mean "discussions" we will have over the model rewrite. . . Cheers, YD

Well, I can't speak for all CM players, but I have difficulty seeing how this type of deployment could be seen as gamey. In fact, I have read an excellent first person account of a U.S. WWII vet who was a sharpshooter in the ETO. Much of what he describes in terms of the action he saw was basically ranging a little bit ahead of an advancing platoon to try to spot enemy positions. Another curious element of his story - he was issued a scoped Springfield rifle rather than a Garand, and his ammunition was red tracer ammo only. The idea was that when he saw an enemy position, he would fire off a couple of rounds so the rest of the platoon could see the tracers and therefore see where the enemy position was. Unfortunately, the old "tracers work both ways' rule came in to effect, and he usually found himself getting fired upon by every german within 500m when he loosed off those tracer rounds, so he traded in his Springfield for a Garand. He said the Garand worked just fine for sniping, but it wasn't as accurate a extreme ranges. I'm not exactly sure how CM could model the use of tracer rounds by sharpshooters to mark enemy positions, or how that would enter in to the whole gameyness debate. And, yes, both sides did send recon units forward with radios or wire sets to serve as forward OPs until CM gets rid of absolute spotting, though, trying to simulate these units is pretty much moot - right now, CM basically treats all units like they have radios and are in constant communication. I imagine that the whole relative vs. absolute spotting issue will be one of the major debates for the engine rewrite. There's already a lot of discussion about it going on here.

The reason why some consider the far forward deployment of sharpshooter as an OP to be gamey is that IRL, a unit like a sharpshooter in WWII would not have a radio or any other way of communicating what it saw in it's far forward position to other friendly units without trekking all the way back to friendly lines and relating the information verbally. Needless to say, this would take a long time. Basically, the gameyness issue here is an extension of the whole 'relative spotting' debate. Of course, sharpshooters aren't the only unit that presents this problem. Any far forward unit used as an OP that wouldn't have a radio could fall victim to the same gamey argument. I personally am a fan of the "if it's not agreed upon before the battle starts, it's not gamey" rule. There's just too much in the the way of tactics and units that could be seen as gamey. If you and your opponent don't specifically agree on a tactic's exclusion before you start.

I just got an Inspiron 8200. I've only had it for about two weeks, but so far in *&?!^) rocks. I spend over 100 days/year on the road, and having a mobile CM platform has been just great. No compatibility problems thus far with CM or any other game, for that matter. Great screen, good sound card. No complaints. Cheers, YD

Augustus - welcome to the game! In regards to your last question, I don't find most ACs especially useful in the anti-infantry role. With the possible exception of the 75mm-armed varieties (which, as noted above, are really a special case - they're really more of a light SP gun than an AC), they just don't have the HE punch to have a significant effect on infantry. Sometimes they can be handy, though, because they are very mobile and therefore can get where you need them very quickly. A few quick 37mm rounds from an M8 to supress an HMG team that's butchering your infantry can be much more useful than the 105mm rounds sitting in the lager of your priest that won't get there for two more turns. ACs are also much more vulnerable to infantry than heavier armour. This is especially true of Axis ACs, which can easily be taken out by the .50 HMG from the side or rear. In addition to the obvious shrecks and fausts, allied ACs have to worry about German on-board mortars because of their open turrets - I knocked out two Greyhounds with on-board 81mms in a recent PBEM. If you're looking for an AFV that is not a medium or heavy tank to use anti-infantry, there are some options. The first one that springs to mind is the Allied Stuart. True, it has the same 37mm gun as the Greyhound, but it has two more MGs than the 'hound, so it has substiantially more infantry supressing power. The fact that it's turret isn't open means it can stick around through light arty fire, too. The Pz II would be the closest thing to a Stuart on the Axis side (the Pz III isn't modeled in CMBO), but the Pz II is not as effective against infantry as the Stuart - for one thing, it has only one MG. The commonwealth has some fun cheap anti-infantry toys to play with like the MMG carrier - basically a lightly armored, mobile MG nest. fragile, but cheap. Properly used, it's high ammo load can do a lot of work - if you can keep it alive. As mentioned before, the Axis has 75mm ACs and Halftracks. These do fairly well at infantry supression considering their price, but low ammo load can be a problem. If MBTs are out of the question, the real kings of infantry supression are the SP guns - Priests, Sextons, Hummels and the like. They're not so cheap, though, and keeping them alive can be trickly - they're just as vulnerable as an AC without the speed to bug out fast when danger approaches. In terms of 'bang for the buck', though, they are a great bargain - you just have to be skilled (or lucky) to keep them alive long enough to use all that bang. Don't forget flame vehicles like the Wasp and the Flame version of the 251 HT, either. Again, they're fragile, but they're very useful in city fights where you need to dig infantry out of buildings. And I should also mention the German Flak vehicles - they're not especially cheap, but their high rate of fire can really mow infantry down. Many consider their use kind of gamey, though. Anyway, those are some of my ideas on the matter. I'm sure more experienced members here on the forum will have more ideas for you on the matter. Cheers, YD

Hard to say for sure, but it sound like this little problem is going to be fixed for CMBB with the addition of the "Shoot and Scoot" command. I haven't read any details about how exactly the command will work, but it's definitely in the game. If the new "Shoot and Scoot" command will allow you to, say, order a tank to scoot out from behind one building, stopping and pop off a shot, and then scoot forward to behind the next building (the most traditional sense of "Shoot and Scoot"), I don't see why the command wouldn't also allow you to tank drive up to the top of a ridge, pop off a shot and then reverse back down; you're just using a forward and a reverse command rather than two forward commands. Here's to hoping, anyway. Seems very reasonable to me, and I don't think a command that would implement like above would cause too much micromanaging. In fact, the current way that AFVs hunt up over a ridge seems rather unrealistic to me, especially for the "eggshells with sledgehammers" - i.e., Allied tank hunters. If I'm an Allied TC in an M10 and I hunt up over a ridge to see a platoon of panthers in the valley below me, at best I'm popping off 2-3 shots before I reverse back out of sight and save my @ss. Cheers, YD

Not necessarily my top priority, but not mentioned yet: Randomize ALL command delay & LOS numbers. And command delay for ALL orders. That is, command delay for a Veteran squad would average 13 seconds. Sometimes, it might be 14 or 15 seconds. Sometimes, it would only be 12 or 11 seconds. The same for LOS. Right now, if you play with the engine enough, you can figure out that LOS on on a foggy night across open ground is EXACTLY 51m. The same goes for any other conditions. I'd like to see it slightly randomized - sometimes the LOS would be a bit shorter, sometimes a bit longer. Fog and forests, after all, are not of a uniform density. I also don't see why targeting orders, for example, shouldn't have a command delay. Maybe not as long a delay as a movement order, but someone's got to get the message to the unit that is supposed to be firing at a specific target. Of course, the unit might fire on the unit of its own accord anyway. I think the above would help limit some ways that you can currently take advantage of the predictability of the game engine owing to it's consistency. If LOS and command delay had some variation built in to them, it would be harder to micromanage unit placement. Oh, and some sort of conditional 'area fire' order. Too often, I'll have an MG firing at a unit in a building and the targeted unit will go 'heads down' and I'll lose LOS to it. I'm then faced with a difficult conundrum: If I give the MG and area fire order at the building, if the unit pops it's head up again, the MG won't target it, so it's fire will be less effective. OTOH, if I leave the MG untargetted, I completely lose it's supressive capability, meaning that the unit may be able to sneak away. I think this could be done quite easily with the upcoming 'cover arc' command in CM:BB. If you could give a unit both an area fire and a cover arc command, then you could tell it "area fire at this building unless an enemy unit appears within this arc, then shift your fire to that unit". Strikes me as quite reasonable and doable. Cheers, YD

A curious little tidbit to add to this discussion on a slightly different, but related topic: For one of my military history classes in college, we read a first-person account of a US WWII vet. I wish I remembered the title, but I don't. Anyway, the author recounted how, when he was serving as a crewmember on a 57mm AT gun during the battle of the bulge, they would pre-set positions for the gun along a treeline. Each position would have shallow foxholes (I presume for the crew to hide in) and 5-6 rounds of ammo. The idea was that the crew would fire the available ammo at one location, then haul the gun through the woods as fast as possible (a good path to move the gun along was pre-scouted) to the next location. In theory, this would keep the Panzers from zeroing in on their location too much and allow them to get more shots off. So, I'm curious as to whether anyone else has heard of this tactic being used. I've never read of it anywhere else, but it makes sense. In CM terms, if this tactic were available I think it would make small (i.e., crew-movable) AT guns considerably more useful in some situations. What I'm envisioning in CM is some sort of system where the player could 'split' the ammo for a gun and leave caches in strategic places within a 2-3 turn haul from the guns' starting position. Presumably, the crew moving the gun without ammo would get some sort of 'speed bonus' as they could all help move the gun, rather than some of them having to haul the ammo. It also makes me wonder if a similar tactic was commonly used for other slow-moving support weapons like HMGs and mortars. A more flexible ammo system something like the one mentioned above could probably be adapted to model this tactic if it turns out that it was actually used.

1) Destroy or drive off any enemy units that are near the prisoners. This alone MIGHT do it, but usually not. 2) Get some units of yours near the prisoners. Once this happens, the prisoners will usually "escape" and come back under your command. As to whether it's worth it or not to try to liberate them, that depends on the game situation. Prisoners are worth a lot of points, so it might be worthwhile. I'd be careful of risking too much to recapture them, though. Cheers, YD

Note: It's usually a good idea to keep a unit of yours close to the prisoners while you're moving them. I find this to be a very good use for vehicle/gun crews or badly mauled squads that have little combat use. Ideally what you want to do is get them off your map edge - That way you'll get the points for capturing them, but you won't have to worry about them anymore. Prisoners can escape and revert to your opponent's command again, especially if you leave them unattended and your opponent manages to get a "good" unit of his near your prisoners. Escaped prisoners are worthelss from a combat viewpoint - they have no ammo - but you lose the double casualty points if you lose your prisoners. But yes, you can command prisoners just like you can any of your units. You can only move them, though, so getting them off the map can take a while. Cheers, YD

Sorry. You're SOL. You can't "Call" an airstrike in CM:BO. If you have one in your OOB, it will show up when it pleases, and shoot at what it wants. Sometimes, it doesn't even show up at all. Sometimes, it shows up and shoots at Tanks that have already been KOed (bad), or even friendlies (worse). It can even be driven off by AA fire before doing any damage if your opponent has a lot of AA assets. So air assets are pretty much a crap shoot in CM:BO. If you get lucky, those 500-lb. bombs can do a lot of damage very quickly. If you're unlucky, they don't even show up and those points are wasted. This is, incidentally, historically accurate. Coordination between tactical air assets and ground forces in the ETO was not very well organized. To my knowledge, the first coordinated system of communication and cooperation between tac air and front line troops was developed by the US Marines in the PTO late in the war - I think around the Phillipines invasion. The marines were the first to put forward air observers (actual pilots who were put in forward positions with radios to communicate with aircraft overhead) in the foxholes with front line troops. This innovation was largely out of necessity - moving artillery around Pacific islands' rough terrain was very difficult, so the Marines needed to find an alternative method of fire support. Cheers, YD

Good point. As I understand your thrust, then, ideally in CM:BB if a tank crew is green or maybe regular (would a conscript tank crew ever exist?? Maybe for the russians...) it might bail under air attack. Otherwise, it just sits tight and weathers the storm. It's hard to see where the 'nowhere to go' factor could come into play in a CM battle. Thanks again for some great stuff, YD

One other thought: If you do KO the 'cat with three squads around it, you're pretty much guaranteed killing or capturing the crew. That's a nice little icing on the cake as far as points are concerned.

Yeah, you can clear mines once they're detected. It requires a demo charge - basically this models "blowing" a path through the minefield. The acutal complete clearing of a minefiled (i.e., by sweeping with metal detectors and digging up all the mines) is not modeled - this would take much too much time to be relevant to a CM battle. What you can't do is issue a command to a unit (engineer or otherwise) to *search* for mines in a likely location, either with a metal detector, or by other means, such as probing the ground with knives, or just looking for signs of recent digging. I suppose a "search for mines" command would be of some use - sometimes the nature of a map means that you can make a good guess about where mines are likely to be. On the CM scale most of the time I think sending my engineering units wandering around the map looking for mines would be a waste of time and men. Searching for mines is a slow, painstaking process. If it's a matter of checking one critical intersection so my Panzers can roll through, sure. Otherwise, I'll just look for an alternate route. The booby trapping idea is interesting, but most of the WWII era booby traps I have read about were designed to catch souviner-seekers and patrols in unheld areas long after the firefight had moved on. I'm sure there were booby traps used by both sides that were designed to go off in an actual tactical situation, but I don't think it was very common. In any event, it would be easy to simulate such a booby trap using the current CM engine - all that would be required is the ability to place a minefield in a building. The effect would be basically the same as if the building had been trapped. Actually, I'm just assuming that you can't do this already. I've never seen it in a scenario, but I've also never actively tried to place a minefield in a building. And I agree that removing roadblocks is something that is beyond CM's scope 99% of the time. Maybe if you're playing a really long scenario it might be tactically feasible. Otherwise, I really doubt the time and resources could be brought to bear. Eventually, it might be interesting to give scenario designers two kinds of Roadblocks: "light" roadblocks designed to represent a couple of trees or similar hurriedly thrown over the road, and clearable by engineers with a demo charge (repesenting blowing the debris into smaller pieces and clearing the pieces by grunt power); and "heavy" roadblocks, representing a roadblock too substantial to be removed over the course of a single CM battle. Cheers, YD

I could be wrong about this, as this is a difficult thing to test for sure, but in my experience if your squads are already within 10m of the Hellcat, there's no need to move them any closer - remember that the 3-man squad graphic represents the approximate location of 8-12 men. If that graphic is less than 10m from the AFV, some of those men might literally be on top of it. There was a thread about this some time ago. While there was no definitive conclusion, the general consensus from the more experienced members of the forum was that once a squad was within 20m of an AFV, moving them any closer did not improve the chances of a close assault KO. I've never figured out the absolute maximum range for hand grenades, but it's well over 10m - I think around 40m. More experienced players than I have also previously stated on the forum that you have a substantially higher chance of knocking out an open-topped AFV than a fully armoured one. How much more I don't know. I personally have knocked out an open-topped AFV with grenades only once (it was a German HT), but then again it's not something I try to do very often. In that attack, the HT 'brewed up'. I've read of similar results from successful grenade attacks on the forum, so I'd guess that a grenade that makes it into the vehicle interior is very likely to completely KO the vehicle. This makes sense if you think about a grenade going off in a very enclosed space with lots of ammunition and fuel around. :eek: It's also worth noting that the M18 is a very weak anti-infantry platform. It's got one .50cal MG, and that's on an AA mount, so it can't be fired once it's buttoned. That leaves the Hellcat with one 76mm (which is not quite as good as the 75mm on a Sherman against infantry) to shoot at 3 different squads. Therefore, assuming he has no other assets in the area and your squads are well dispersed (an important thing to check!) he can only supress one squad at a time, leaving the other two free to chuck grenades with no annoying HE distractions. If your platoon has already fired off 3 fausts at the AFV, chances are they're already spotted. That means that the M18 is likely to get a couple of shells off at them whether or not you withdraw (unless it gets KOed first!!). If they're not spotted yet, which is possible, you might be able to just hide them and save their skins that way. The problem with this is that there's no way of knowing for sure if your squads haven't been spotted yet. If they've been fired upon or targetted, they've definitely been spotted. Otherwise, the best you can do is an educated guess. If you hide them when they're already spotted, the only effect will be that they'll stop firing (and throwing grenades) until the M18 gets it's turret rotated around and fires upon them. This is obviously of no benefit to you. As Silvio noted, that M18 is likely to bug out very quickly next turn, whether your opponent orders it to or not - in my experience, AFVs usually plot their *own* orders if they come under a strong close infantry assault. If you have mobile anti-armour assets, you might want to try to anticipate the direction that the M18 will try to withdraw and cover it with a gun or a shreck. The M18 will probably still be focusing it's attention on the assaulting platoon, so if you can bring another asset to bear it will probably get a couple of free shots. In the end, whether you should withdraw or assault is going to depend on your overall battle plan and situation - how badly you need that platoon for other missions, how dangerous that M18 is to your overall battle plan, etc. Most of the time I'd probably go for it and assault the Hellcat, though - it's worth a fair number of points, and you're not likely to take too many causalties from it's one gun if you fail. Plus, that Hellcat has to be important to his battle plan if he's pushing it forward so aggressively. Even delaying it by forcing it to take a different route might throw him off and give you an opening. And yes, target the AFV. The squads will probably do it anyway, but targetting it will ensure that they start chucking grenades at it right away. As noted above, I wouldn't move them any closer if they're already within 10m as this will just make them spend some of their effort moving instead of aiming and throwing grenades. Let us know how it turns out. Cheers, YD

Bastables - Thanks for a very informative post. The actual kill figures for aerial attack on AFVs I had heard elsewehere, but the Abandoned/Destroyed by crew figures are new to me, and quite surprising. It's especially notable that many of the abandoning crews were from already blooded units, and therefore presumably not raw recruits. One is tempted to say that the crews must have been abandoning for a good reason, and I guess this may have been true in some cases - the crews of tanks in a column that had had all of its fuel trucks destroyed by strafing attacks would probably be loathe to sit around in tanks with no fuel waiting for enemy infantry to catch up with them. At the same time, your data does seem to support the idea that there at least some of the abandonments were due to a somewhat irrational fear of air attack. I guess it just goes to show how the psychological the effect of some weapons can be just as important as the acutal physical effect. Now that vehicle crew morale is going to be a factor in CM:BB, I guess this would be the most important 'tweak' to the air attack model in CM to consider. I'd personally be very pissed off if my Tiger crew bailed out as a result of an air attack, but I have to admit that it might not be unrealistic, even if the attack was unlikely to actually physically damage or KO the tank. Cheers, YD

While the statement "landmines are not as powerful as a large bomb" is generally true, there are lots of different sizes of landmines. There's other issues, too - in the PTO and in Vietnam, it wasn't uncommon to improvise landmines using hand grenades, artillery shells, demo charges, or even aerial bombs. I've never read any accounts of this kind of improvisation being done in the ETO, but I would guess it was done at least to some extent - especially by the Germans towards the end of the war as supply lines crumbled and resources were short. Having been in close proximity to a modest size explosion (in my case, a handbag full of plastique - not far off a small landmine), I can also relate from experience that being near an explosion does funny things to your head - you don't see or hear quite right in the moments immediately after the explosion. I wouldn't trust anything my eyes saw for about 20 sec. after being in an explosion. Then again, we don't know how close the witness was to the halftrack explosions above - I'd be more inclined to take the 10ft. figure as accurate if he was far enough away to not be affected by the blast wave himself. There is also a physical reason why a less powerful landmine might throw a vehicle where a bomb exploding nearby might not. The fact that a landmine explodes directly under the vehicle means that the vehicle takes a lot more of the force of the explosion. Basically, the ground prevents the pressure wave created by the explosion from going anywhere but up and into the vehicle. The result is much more force applied (and damage caused) to the vehicle than would be cause by the same amount of explosive placed right next to the vehicle. When a bomb explodes right next to a vehicle, the pressure wave can go in many more directions, so the amount of the overall force that the vehicle absorbs is less. Nevertheless, I still suspect that a good sized aerial bomb could lift at least one tank up in the air a bit, or tip it over on it's side. I'm just guessing from the size of bomb craters that I've seen, but it seems that these bombs move an awful lot of dirt, so I don't see why they wouldn't be able to move a bunch of steel, too. Cheers, YD

In my experience, it is difficult to take prisoners until you have lowered your opponent's "Global Morale". This is the morale you see expressed as a percentage in the title bar below the player's flag. You'll never know your opponents' Global Morale, but you can guess at it given the situation. There are a number of things that affect Global Morale - I think the Manual gives a full run-down. Casualties and control of victory flags are two major factors. So, if you've managed to inflict a lot of casualites on your opponent, you control most or all of the VLs, and it's late in the game, try surrounding a unit so it has nowhere to run - this is when I usually get surrenders. An odd thing I've noticed - having too much firepower on a unit you'd like to surrender can be a bad thing - they usually die before they get a chance to surrender. Kinda bad 'cause if you manage to exit surrendered units off of your side of the map, you actually get more points than if you'd killed them.

Im quite sure PzKpfw IVh had 15mm top turret armor and 12mm on deck.</font>

This would mesh with my own experience in general (i.e., civilian) aviation. My guess is that, even in relatively flat terrain, a pilot is still going to pull out of a steep dive strafing run at closer to 500 meters unless he's flying a plane like a Stuka that has dive brakes to slow him down. I've never flown a high-performance aircraft like a P-51, though, so it's possible that the pull-out could be as low as 300 meters. As I noted in my original post on this thread, though, the airplane's own velocity gives it's MGs a little bit more kick, which would have the same effect as shortening the distance to the target as far as penetration is concerned. Nevertheless, as I noted above, the top of that PzIV turret is only 10mm thick - that's well within the penetration ability of a .50 cal, even taking in to account a range somewhat longer than 200m, and an angle less than 90 degress. While the top of the turret is not a huge surface area, it's a lot bigger than a 'lucky hit' target like an exhaust port. Thus the logic for my guess that tanks like the PzIV might be vulnerable to ".50s from above", but Panthers and Tigers probably aren't. As future iterations of CM portray more and more of the early war period, this question of .50cal penetration from strafing planes becomes more important. The .50 cal was the primary armament for most US fighters for the entire war, but as noted above, tank top armour changed considerably. There were no Panthers in the North African Desert; in 1943 the PzIV was the best medium tank the Germans had available to them. In fact, this issue may come in to play in CM:BB with the Russian 12.7mm. I don't know how the 12.7mm compares to the US .50 in penetration, though. Cheers, YD