Frunze

In CMBO I wouldn't have got any armor, but in CMBB the ranges are longer and fausts/shrecks are rarer and zooks/PIATs nonexistent. Just stay out of molotov/infantry flamethrower range... Flamingknives advice is good: fast turrets. Avoid StuGs and other turretless vehicles if possible. Flamethrower vehicles are good. Not sure about the halftracks and other thin stuff - ATRs will still work and will be even harder to spot at night. I chewed up a bunch of halftracks with 'em in one night battle.

Well, finally finished all my games. Thanks to Three-oh-Eight (Kettler's replacement) for moving the last one along quickly. [ April 12, 2003, 04:38 PM: Message edited by: Frunze ]

Or you can right-click on the waypoint, and the menu will come up.

It was very hard to use flamethrowers on offense in CMBO, but a little easier in CMBB. In games with dense terrain - lots of woods or cities - they can be useful. Or in night or fog. Don't put 'em out front until the enemy is well suppressed, and you have a covered route to get close. Also they're good against tanks, and Soviet infantry doesn't have much that is.

Good ideas. I'd add, if you're stopping a unit in the open as JasonC recommends doing in some circumstances, it may be a good idea to put them on hide. (Unless you want them to fire back.) They'll recover from suppression more quickly, and are less likely to start sneaking towards cover again and exhaust themselves. On the downside, they won't help with spotting as much.

Ideally, you have infantry well out in front of your armor. They'll get close enough to spot ATRs, or even run right over 'em, before the ATRs are close enough to be totally deadly to your armor. I'm playing a game right now where I've got nothing but light armor, and I'm getting nothing but sound contacts on the ATRs. So I'm using lots of area fire from some of my ACs and fast-moving others past 'em. It semi-works, and this is against a human opponent.

308, you want the highest game score you can get - that's part simple. Getting the highest game score can be complicated. Like if the defender has so far taken only a few casualties, and keeps the flags, you'll get only a few points - so if the defender keeps all of them, it'll be a 80 or 90-point totally lopsided win for the defender. So the attacker would actually get more points if there were more casualties, even if it was one - to - one or slightly in favor of the defender. Just as long as it's not a totally lopsided slaughter of the attacking forces. Redwolf explained this to me in the last tourney, when I offered him a ceasefire 'cause it didn't look like he was going to take any flags anyway. He rejected it 'cause I'd taken only a few casualties at that point, so the ceasefire would favor me. (I guess ceasefires might be against the rules anyway, but I didn't realize this at the time.) Turned out he was right to continue the attack - the game ended in his forces autosurrendering, which is bad, but he'd inflicted enough casualties on me that he still got more points than if he'd taken the ceasefire. (He saved the file, and after the game was over, we checked what would've happened. Just out of curiosity.) On the other hand, if he'd stopped the attack and retreated later, when he'd inflicted more casualties on me, and avoided the autosurrender, he might have done better yet. So the answer to your question, 308, might depend on how many casualties there have been so far, which side's suffered the most, and what your prospects are for inflicting casualties on your opponent if you continue the attack. Probably you shouldn't post all those details publicly, but you might have to take 'em into account when thinking about it.

If you have LOS to an enemy unit, they have LOS to you. If you don't have LOS to an enemy unit, they don't have LOS to you. As far as I know, this is something you can count on.

So, um, John Kettler, what's the news on your new computer? You said quite a while back that it would be any week now, right?

81mm is better, yeah, except for having a smaller ammo load, but I've broken squads with 50mm. Ask Cpl. Carrot. The quality of the troops being targeted may be a factor, of course, but easier suppression in CMBB can work for the attacker as well as the defender... Heavy-cal FOs are nice if you can get 'em, I agree, but they're not always affordable for the Soviets in the size battles I usually play, and the delays are long.

As Manchildstein says, you want HE. And even in an infantry-only game, you can have HE to blast your enemies out of their foxholes and trenches, sending them running in panic across open fields so your MGs can mow them down. Mortars, I'm telling you. A bunch of 'em, with big ammo loads. The Soviet 50mm is good that way, and cheap. Well, FOs are fine too, if you can identify platoon-or-bigger enemy groupings and wait for the delays. Scout to identify enemy units, use mortars together with squad fire from the nearest available cover to rout 'em out. Repeat until your scouts get through and verify there's nothing else waiting to ambush you there, then move your whole platoon up to that patch of cover. MGs deny the enemy maneuverability - sight 'em down lanes of open terrain so they can fire on anything trying to move from one part of the battlefield to another, fall back, counterattack, or whatever.

Having played in two of these tournaments so far, I can tell y'all that its a lot of fun. Good scenarios, good opponents.

I've finished all of mine except Christmas Battle against John Kettler...who has not yet started any of them due to his computer issues. I'm not saying that to argue for or against the deadline extension, just a report.

For gameplay purposes the color-coded stuff should give you some idea. E.g. the T-34s curved turret front is a lighter shade of green, so less well-protected than its hull front, esp with early models. It's sometimes enough to make me not want to go hull-down with 'em, but that's a dead horse. Probably the stuff internal to the program is far more complicated than anything they put in an info screen. Wouldn't surprise me if the code tracks where on the curved plate the shell hits, with different angles for the different parts...

In CMBO the German infantry had a definite close-range advantage - which is what you want to use infantry for anyway, close range. That's reversed in CMBB, with the Soviets having more SMGs even in their rifle squads.

Section 2-2: Debrecen vs. John L. - Turn 16 or so. The Beast vs Tero and Hosszupalyi vs Jeb - about turn 9 RGA vs. Sgt. Abell - Turn 3. Well, he's a replacement, got a late start. Christmas vs. John Kettler - not started. Y'all know the circumstances. I can wait, John, if you'll be able to move fast once you get your computer.

MORE SPOILERS | } | | | | | | | | | | | | I also think that if the Soviet player moves fast and aggressively the Hungarians and Germans have little chance. I won it blind PBEM on this basis. I don't think my tactics were gamey: I knew from the briefings that the city had been caught by surprise and that my best chance was to exploit this before reinforcements could arrive from across the river. If, historically, the Soviet commander didn't know this, it shouldn't be in the briefing. Also, I normally move fast in a meeting engagement, which is how this was described, and hey, lots of real-life strategists have said aggressiveness and speed are the key to victory. I didn't get a chance to ambush the reinforcements on the bridge, but just the fact that I was in the thick of the town gave my fast-turreted T-34/85s a great advantage over the Tigers and StuGs. I lost a couple tanks to fausts on the way in, sure, but it saved many casualties overall.

I think it's because the HQ is much harder to suppress.

Nevermind. [ January 18, 2003, 09:09 PM: Message edited by: Frunze ]

Yeah, MikeD, that's about how it worked out in practice.

Then again, maybe there's been less history written about them because they didn't have reporters and photographers accompanying their units, didn't generate as much military paperwork, and were less likely to write their memoirs...assuming they survived, how much formal education did most of them have? Because of all that, what sources would historians have to work from, assuming they wanted to write something on them? Plus all the reasons the East Front generally is obscure in the West.

I aim to Drang nach Westen - or however you say that pa-Russki. Pleased to see I'm Allies in 4 of the 5 scenarios. That's just random, right? Thanks if it ain't.

I find it a little hard to understand what your position ultimately is, Lt. Hortlund. For example: versus Did the Germans fail or not? And if you agree they failed, what's the disagreement? Are you arguing that both the Germans and the Soviets lost the battle, or that it was a draw? The defenders retained possession of the battlefield, which makes them the victors by conventional criteria. They suffered heavy casualties, true, but at most that would make it a Pyrrhic victory - "another victory like that and we are ruined." And I don't think you could even make that claim, since the casualties didn't ruin the Red Army.

One reason why maybe you couldn't give your squad another movement order: "Assault" can only be given by itself, not in combination with another movement order, and only with one waypoint. So once you give a unit an assault order, you can't give it another movement order until that movement is complete. Since it was a "follow vehicle" order, it wouldn't be complete until the bunker was dead. To give another movement order, you would've had to cancel the assault order first, either by "halt" in the menu or by hitting backspace.

Well, logically, Stalin should have realized war with Germany was coming. For the reasons Tero mentions - and also because Germany wouldn't have the internal political problems and military mutinies that Britain and France experienced during their interventions in the Russian Civil War. But from his actions during the Stalin-Hitler pact, it sometimes seems that he was such a moron he didn't see it. He brought the borders of the USSR and the Reich in contact along a broad front, pissed off every potential ally and neutral state, supplied the German military with raw materials, gave Germany the possibility of taking on one front at a time. He bought time, sure, but what did he do with it? He gained a little territory - which was lost very quickly anyway during Barbarossa. And then when Barbarossa came, he was in denial.