YankeeDog

You need to exit your units. The way "Exit Zone" scenarios work is that any units eligible for Exit that do NOT exit by the end of the scenario are considered casualties and therefore will probably provide points to your enemy (assuming the enemy victory conditions include a casualty points condition, which they usually do). The AT Guns do not carry forward to future missions, so once you start to pull pack it's best to abandon them and save the crews. There are two ways to win the Turnbull's Stand mission: (1) Give the Germans a bloody nose without taking too many casualties yourself, and get most of your survivors off the map before the end, or (2) actually cause enough casualties to the Germans to force a global surrender. A global surrender will negate Exit Zone condition. This would be extremely difficult but is probably possible. As to your specific situation, it sounds like you have definitely caused enough damage to the Germans, and preserved enough of your force, to win handily if you pull back and exit now. It does not sound to me like you are likely to be able to actually force a surrender as this generally requires achieving 75%+ casualties on the enemy force.

As far as I know there are no special stealth abilities for sniper teams, but AFAIK they are the only non-HQ, non-FO small team that has optics -- all sniper teams have a scoped rifle, and many carry binos (some don't; it depends on nationality and formation). This gives sniper teams much better spotting ability at distance than e.g. a 2-man scout team split off of a rifle squad and makes them ideal for forward observation duties.

To be 100% sure where the "true" gaps are, use Yankeedog's Sure-Fire Gap-Finder Method (Patent Pending): - Hit ALT + [ a few times to lower detail level to the lowest level. - Hit "5" to zoom out to view level 5. - At this detail level and distance, bocage is rendered as a 2-D wall, and gaps are blatantly obvious. "False" gaps do not appear at all. Note them. - Revert your view and details level to whatever you prefer for gameplay. I do this at the start of all battles on maps with bocage.

Oh, I use them as snipers eventually. Just not for the whole battle. Part of what I like about using sniper teams as OPs is that as long as they don't shoot, you can actually put a sniper team in fairly poor cover and under most conditions and they won't get spotted until the enemy is very close. This allows you to gain observation from places the enemy doesn't expect. Everybody assumes the heavily forested treeline on top of the ridge in enemy territory is occupied, but players often barely give the small patch of brush in the middle of the open field a second look.

A note regarding heavy ammo and weapons loads: For practical gameplay purposes, IME as long as units are moving through mostly open and flat terrain, the fatigue differences between a lightly loaded and a heavily loaded unit are marginal. Where it becomes noticeable is when you order units to slog their way through difficult terrain like marsh, heavy woods, etc. You can actually see the difference within a rifle squad if you split the teams -- the more heavily laden SAW team will fatigue faster than the rifle team(s).

It probably depends on how you use them. I tend to be pretty careful with them as I find the intel I get from them as stealthy OPs at least as valuable as any kills they rack up. So I tend to put them on a short cover arc to start, and then have them open up selectively when there are attractive targets. This probably keeps the typical ammo burn of my sniper teams relatively low.

Since Vanilla U.S. Rifle Squads lack a belt-fed SAW, I find that their ROF just isn't high enough to burn through their rifle caliber ammo all that quickly. If I have ammo in abundance, I might give each squad up to an additional 500, but in a meeting engagement or attack situation where my rifle squads are probably going to be spending a lot of their time moving rather than shooting, often I don't bother. .45 ACP is a different story; I usually load my squads with as much SMG ammo as I can. SMG ammo goes fast in close-range fights. .45 ACP is relatively rare in vehicles and caches, so it usually ends up being just an additional ~50/squad, but I'll load them up to 300+/SMG if I have it. I try to keep my Plt. HQs out of firefights, but if it's available, I like to give HQ teams an extra 50-100 M1 Car. The carbines actually have a higher ROF than the Garand, and if a Plt. HQ does get caught in a firefight, that 75 rnds./Carbine is only enough for 3-4 turns of shooting. Rarely bother. They shoot slowly; I can't remember the last time I had a sniper team run out.

I think we're in agreement -- 1st person accounts are invaluable and provide important perspective. It's just important to remember that human perception and memory have their limitations, so you shouldn't assume a 1st person account is forensically correct; even "honest" ones often contain factual inaccuracies. But they're definitely worth reading, as long as you keep the correct critical mindset.

OK; I'll bite: The most important factor for the success of any German offensive in the Summer of 1943 on the East Front was a realistic master strategic and operational vision based upon objective assessments of enemy and own force capabilities. Needless to say, Gefreiter with the funny mustache in overall charge failed miserably in this regard.

Depends. 1st person accounts are great for some things, but not others. The good ones definitely give you a "sense of what it was really like," but in the "detailed information" department, they can sometimes be flat-out wrong. For example, in American GI accounts of Normandy, it often seems like every German gun was an 88 and every German Tank was a Tiger or Panther. In fact, both 88s and the Heavy Cats were rare in Normandy, especially in the American sector. I'm sure many GIs thought they were getting shot at by 88s and Tigers. But a good number of those thinking so were definitely wrong. Kill stats is another example. Whether you're talking about fighter pilots, tank commanders, or machine gunners, claimed kill stats in 1st person accounts are usually way off verified enemy losses. To get the fullest picture possible, you really need a broad spectrum of sources. Definitely take a good sampling of 1st person accounts, but don't take them as gospel and cross-reference them with the information you can get from official unit histories and the like.

Small arms, not necessarily. I have read multiple accounts of Soviet tankers with riders on board unbuttoning after to discover that one or more of the riders had been hit while they were buttoned up, with the crew inside having no idea they ever came under fire. It stands to reason that in at least some of these incidents, a round or two must have hit the armor. Tanks on the move are f'n loud and I can believe a round or two pinging off the armor might be missed in all the racket from the engine, tracks, etc. Repeated and concentrated strikes as from an MG burst, probably not. But a few rifle round hits could easily be missed, I think.

IRL what a tank crew would do in a situation like this is back away from the break in the wall, and then move up again from a different angle so that the gunsight and muzzle have LOS/LOF to the desired target area. But the Unit AI in CM doesn't know how to do this, and unfortunately it would probably be extremely difficult to program the AI to execute this kind of maneuver correctly. So we have the abstraction that the gun barrel and rotate through the wall. If we didn't, the Tiger crew would just sit there dumbly letting itself get shot at until the player intervened, which might be quite a while if the event happens at the beginning of a 1-minute turn. And in the case of a computer player unit, the positioning might never be corrected. What we have now is not ideal, but one the whole I think it's better than the alternative.

It's "Bated breath", technically. To "bate" something means to reduce, hold back, or blunt. For example, a "bated blade" means a sword or similar weapon that has been dulled for use in training or friendly competition. These days, the word is fairly archaic outside of the saying "bated breath" which curiously continues to be in fairly common even though otherwise usage has mostly died out. EDIT: Ninja'd by Womble...

I dunno... sometimes, I see things that make me wonder if HE does seem too lethal. Then again, last night I blew ~ 50 x 81mm rounds (2 separate point target, 2 tube, heavy, short missions), 12 x 60mm mortar rounds (direct lay targeted), and 6 x 75mm HE tank gun rounds on a single AT gun (behind bocage, but not dug in), and still failed to kill it. Suppressed it for quite a while, and I'm sure a few of the crew are dead, but as of now, it's still shooting back. In general, my HE seems to be nerfed. My opponent's always seems to be uber.

Lethality and suppression radius for mortar rounds and other ordnance in the game is closely modeled on real world data, so the easiest thing to do is just google and read up on stats. Here's a handy graphic chart for mortar round lethal radius. It's actually for modern ordnance, but the lethal radius of mortar bombs has improved only slightly since WWII -- the post-WWII improvements in mortar ordnance have mostly been in the the areas of fusing (e.g., radio proximity fuses), range, and accuracy.

Funny; there have been a lot of complaints here about how the spotting ability of Russian tanks is too uber... IME , assuming similar type of vehicle and conditions, the differences between Russian and German spotting AFV spotting capabilities, if any, are fairly subtle. However, the T-34/76 is definitely subpar in the spotting department and I have always assumed that this has more to do with a the 4-man crew than any issue with the optics per se. It's also important to be specific about which model of T-34/76 you're dealing with. IIRC, some models of the T-34/76 do not have a commander's cupola, but some do. Cupola (or lack thereof) definitely has a strong effect on spotting when buttoned.

The problem in CMx1 in this type of tactical situation was the opposite; if a unit could get LOS/LOF to any given point in CMx1, then *all* soldiers in that unit were automatically assumed to have LOS/LOF to that point, and firepower was calculated accordingly. Of course, this isn't always true. Certain types of terrain, buildings being a very good example, limit on the number of eyes & muzzles that can can fire along a given vector. That is, a 12-man squad in a building might well not be able to fire all weapons down a certain street, because all 12 men can't simultaneously use the 1 or 2 windows of the building that look out upon that street. Additionally, a unit like an HMG in a building in CMx1 could very quickly change its direction of fire. For example. an HMG in a building in CMx1 could fire down the street to the North, and then rapidly turn around and fire its next burst 15 seconds later down the street on the opposite side of the building to the South. For course, it doesn't really work this way IRL because the MG can only be set up on one window at a time; in order to change fire vectors like this, it would have to move within the building and set up on a new window, something that would almost certainly take more than 15 seconds. CMx2's higher fidelity system solves these problems, putting more realistic restrictions on how units can apply firepower and change direction of engagement. Tracking the specific position of every soldier in a unit means that the game can track which weapons exactly are able to fire along any given vector, and how long it takes soldiers to reposition in order to fire in a new direction. But I'll be the first to acknowledge that with the higher fidelity has come additional complexities, and there is definitely still room for improvement in CMx2. Two steps forward, one step back. But forward progress, nevertheless.

Yes; I have read that passage and found it quite curious as it goes against a lot of other things I have read regarding bocage and breaching charges in general. 2x 24 lb. charges set above the ground at an 8 ft interval will certainly create a nice, large gap in the shrubbery and trees on top of the bocage, but relatively small charges detonated above the ground like that won't really do anything to the earth & stone embankment. A charge really has to be buried in the ground in order to move earth. And from what I've read, the trees & bushes were only part of the problem for vehicles crossing bocage -- the embankment of the bocage was often steep enough that vehicles had trouble getting over it without hanging up. My SWAG is that the above-ground charge technique described in Doubler is legitimate, but could actually only be used where the embankment was relatively low and/or not as steep; in these areas, removing the trees and heavier bushes on top was probably enough for a tank to get through. But in places where the embankment was higher and/or steeper, buried charges probably had to be used to excavate the top of the embankment and create a breach that a vehicle could reliably cross. The latter would, of course, require much more prep work. Buried charges were definitely used at times -- see Emrys' description of the so-called "Salad Fork" device above, which was specifically developed to speed up the time it took to set buried charges into the bocage. This gets into another issue, which is that bocage in CMBN is a relatively uniform thing. There is some variation -- in the game you can have low bocage, high bocage, and small and large gaps. But in actual fact, it there would probably be much wider variance. In areas where the bocage was relatively low and eask, it might well be fairly easily breached with a small, quickly set charge. Other areas of the bocage might be very strong indeed and require large, buried charges to breach.

Can't entirely agree on this one. Some uses of demo charges, such as bridge demolition, are indeed well out of CM's scope. But others are not. For example, the bangalore torpedo was specifically designed to be able to be used quickly and effectively in combat to breach minor obstacles such as wire, or to force into fortifications like bunkers to take them out, and bangalores were certainly used in the ETO. I do agree, though, that use of demo charges to breach bocage is much to fast and easy in CMBN; breaching an earthen embankment like bocage with a demo charge is actually fairly difficult and takes a fair amount of prep. At the least, it should take much longer. But use of demos to breach man-made walls, not so much; a simple breach ring breach charge can be set and detonated fairly quickly. This process is probably a bit too fast in CM, but not by much. Part of the issue is that demo charges in CM is fairly abstract and "one size fits all" when in fact different types of charges are used for different purposes. But the game is "Combat Mission" and not "Demolition Mission", so some abstraction is necessary.

Another way to think about it: In CM, how often to you actually have a unit that is not already in a foxhole or a trench sitting around doing absolutely nothing for at least ten minutes? On alert, hands on weapons and looking out for enemy doesn't count as "nothing." Keeping to cover in order to avoid being spotted by the enemy also doesn't count as "nothing." The unit has to be genuinely idle, not protecting a sector, not on-call for overwatch or fire support, and at a low risk of being spotted and taken under fire. Additionally, we're only concerned with units in a location where they might eventually come under fire; entrenching in a safe rear area where there is no chance of incoming fire is of no relevance to the game. If you frequently find yourself with units in this kind of situation, then a in-game dig in function might be relevant to your games. If not, then it's not really important.

Oh, I don't doubt that soldiers of the 125th Scottish and indeed any other unit with a modicum of training and common sense dug in whenever they had half a chance. I'm just extremely skeptical that said digging in would generally happen within the very limited bounds of a CM scenario, even larger, longer scenarios which can run 2 hrs.+ CM scenarios generally start with attack jump-off, and are designed to end about the time the attacker should seize the objective(s), if he does well. Digging in would generally happen immediately after this.

The problem is that it would not be realistic to simply assume units are digging in whenever they are stationary. Digging in increases a unit's signature -- digging means moving around and making noise which is going to make it easier for the enemy to spot you. Digging in also decreases a unit's situational awareness -- a soldier can't keep an eye on yonder bushes very well while digging. Finally, digging its tiring so units digging for any length of time should become fatigued. So it's not correct for unit to ALWAYS dig in when they stop -- sometimes (in fact, probably usually in the context of a CM battle), they should stay still, quiet, and alert for the enemy rather than setting down their weapons and pulling out the entrenching tools. To implement any kind of in-game entrenching function, there would really need to be a "dig in" command under which a unit would gradually gain improved cover and concealment, at the cost of all of the aforementioned factors. Overall, if such a feature were in the game, I suspect players would actually use it only very infrequently, generally preferring to keep their units quiet, alert, and rested rather digging holes. And since it would probably be fairly difficult to design, code, and implement, I don't see such a feature being added any time soon.

If you can dig a 170cm x 80cm x 20 cm slit in typical NWE soil using just an entrenching tool in ten minutes while (a) staying low to the ground so you don't get shot by a sniper, ( keeping an eye out for any approaching enemy, and © not completely exhausting yourself, then my hat is off to you. I have tried similar back in my younger days when I was benching over 200 lbs. and running 20+ miles a week, and I certainly couldn't come close to that mark. Maybe I could have done it with a real shovel, standing full height and without regard to exposure. But not under combat conditions with combat kit tools.

You are vastly underestimating the amount of time and effort it takes to dig even the barest minimum basic slit trench with the kinds of tools a WWII infantryman carried into battle. At least tens of minutes in the softest, easiest-to-dig terrain, and goes up from there as the soils gets harder and rockier. And yes, I have tried; I used to have a WWII-era entrenching tool that I got from an army surplus store. It's better than digging with your bare hands, but not by much. You also have to consider that digging at any reasonable rate would involve putting down weapons, standing up (and therefore becoming much more exposed and easily spotted), and a reduction of situational awareness (hard to dig and spot approaching enemy at the same time). There should also be a fatigue penalty for digging any length of time. Is it totally inapplicable to CM? No; I can imagine situations in larger, longer CM battles where certain units might be stationary in a relatively safe area long enough to dig in to some extent. But it would be a pretty rare event in CM battles, and therefore in my opinion not worth the coding and debug time to add as a game feature for the foreseeable future.

It's worth remembering that the vast majority of WWII soldiers were not professional warfighters, but rather men who had been e.g., farmers, stock clerks, bus drivers just a few months before entering combat. They might have been taught the technical difference between a mag and a clip in basic, but that doesn't mean they considered the distinction particularly important and honored it in their word usage. If you read actual period interviews, you'll find all sorts of technically incorrect terminology spoken by GIs. I have definitely heard "I emptied the entire clip into him," or "I loaded a fresh clip," when referring to a Thompson, even though the weapon technically uses a detachable magazine rather than a clip.