husky65

Paratroopers are no doubt the most handsome, intelligent, erudite, suave, sophisticated, highly trained and well equipped (personally and professionally) troops available - however they have major limitations that you seem unwilling to acknowledge. Their kit is good but they can't take much of it with them and can only count on the amount of food, water, ammunition, batteries, medical supplies, etc that they can carry with them - resupply is by no means assured. That means that as a force their staying power against any well supplied enemy is questionable.

Its not a myth, its fact, we swamped them, in the air, on land and at sea - the bomber offensive was just attritional warfare (BC aircrew had less chance of surviving the war than WW1 Tommies did), the 8th AF was used as clay pigeons to draw the luftwaffe up to be attrited by 'escorting' fighters (whose orders were to hunt the Luftwaffe, not protect the bombers). On land almost every opportunity to exploit was lost by the western allies whilst they waited for massive stocks of supplies to arrive, the Soviets were no better and simply bled the Germans white through attrition. A classic example is the 88 battery commander who was captured and when asked why, he stated that the Americans would drive a tank up the road towards his battery, he would blow it up and they would send another - he ran out of rounds before they ran out of tanks. At sea the U-boat offensive was ineffective because we built/procured shipping faster than the Germans could sink it. Its even more pronounced in the Pacific.

They held a salient 50 miles long, did not hold the one objective (Arnhem bridge) that made it worth holding and had both flanks exposed to German counter attack. Being within 50 miles of an objective in a place as small as Holland is not really a challenge, nor does it constitute holding a 50 mile area.

No you don't, airdropping supplies is one of the the most expensive ways to move supplies (before the Helo) - it is not practical to supply a corp or army that way (ask the Germans about Stalingrad), airdropping was not accurate, resulted in massive risk to tpt a/c and relied on an ability to hold your DZ, the DZ was a very high priority target for the defender to overrun. Paras are not supposed to hold for long, they can't carry the kit to make it feasible, no can they take much in the way of heavy weapons and anything dropped in a cargo container, door bundle etc is just as likely to be lost as found.

Just to put the French cowardice in perspective, it is worth noting that the French 'cowards' chose to fight the fascists (they were bad at it, but that was a result of decades of bad doctrine and an expectation of fighting WW1 again), the 'brave' Americans were bombed and torpedoed into the war for freedom. Not suggesting that PL is an American, but it amuses me to see Americans regularly putting the boot into 'cowardly' frogs.

Posted by Commi18 in another (deservedly locked) thread- re Paras not holding 50 mile areas - "does anyone remeber Arnhem and Bastogne (spell check). Arnhem the paratroopers lasted 72 days and bastogne for a few weeks. (however with armor support)" Yes, I do know a fair bit about Arnhem and they did not hold arnhem for 72 days - the bridge at Arnhem was actually held from 17 sept to 21 sept (rather closer to 72 hours than 72 days), which makes you badly ill informed, the bridge was aprox 50 miles behind enemy lines and you will note the combined efforts of almost every airborne soldier the allies possessed was unable to secure and hold a salient that long, let alone an area 50 miles across. Having dealt with the idea that Market Garden proves that Paras can secure a 50 mile area, we will move on to Bastogne. The 101st reinforced existing troops in place and did NOT have to jump into combat, so they were able to bring a great deal more ammo and equipment with them, they also did not scatter on arrival, nor did they take the normal percentage of jump casualties - they were employed as standard infantry. Having said that, they only secured an area of less than 5 (Five) miles across. You also got the amount of time Bastogne was held for wrong, 101 was moved in on 19 Dec, 22 Dec von Manteuffels forces surrounded Bastogne, 26 Dec Bastogne relieved by US 4th Armd Div. 101st and other units held for 4 days, not for a few weeks.

John Ellis in "Brute Force" covers it best, basically we outproduced the axis and swaped them with little finesse.

Thats fair enough as a personal 'house rule', but you have to remember that spending MPPs to transport units reflects building that capability to get the troops across rather than building something else. In reality its hard to pick what the Germans could have 'not built' to build invasion craft but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been done then and should be ruled out in SC.

The fact is that airborne units don't work on this scale (as seperate units), I think it is safe to assume that they are considered already factored in with army level attacks. Airborne units don't secure areas, they secure objectives and those sorts of objective are not in the game.

You need to take into account the fact that large chunks of your terrain are utterly unsuited to airdrops on the corp scale (even if you had enough airlift to do it) - what this means is that whilst in the game you put a corp in and it dominates a 50 mile area, in reality you will have a lot of widely seperated, poorly supplied, lightly armed troops with almost no offensive (and quite limited defensive)capability.

The above is basically correct, but there are a few other factors, the first is brought on by the turn length - basically after a para drop the unit cannot be attacked for a week to a month, historically reactions to paradrops were measured in hours at most. Its also worth noting that Paratroopers are used to sieze critical ground (bridges, GTI, airfields etc) not 50 mile areas - you can actually assume the existence of small Para operations in major (Army/Multi Army) operations if you like. The second issue is the transport issue, whilst the allies had an airborne army, they lacked the ability to transport it in one lift and the length of the game turns prevents the enemy from redeploying air assets to interdict the ongoing reinforcement/supply lifts, in essence the attacker gets a way easier ride than they should. [ July 23, 2002, 02:29 AM: Message edited by: husky65 ]

Gracious as ever I see..

Please, no paras - at this scale it just does not make sense. The area secured (1 'hex') is massive, the amount of transport a/c required to move even an (SC scale) corps in one lift is huge and because of the timescale of the game such a unit would have between 1 week and 1 month before it could be counter attacked - on that basis, Market Garden would have been a roaring success.

Read Matts post, and your apologies are accepted in advance.

I'll say, imagine having a building full of idiots on staff and having to pay them! I would sack them and get some professionals who have a clue.

When I used Win 95/98 over the years I reinstalled the OS about 50 times. Since I installed XP I've not needed to reinstall and in that time I replaced my Motherboard, CPU and RAM and only had to reset the HAL to make it work. XP is so superior to a Win 98/2K dual boot that it is amazing - XP isn't perfect, no OS is but 98 is really bad and dual booting a system adds unneccesary complication.

I know it applies to all vid cards in Win XP and Win2K, I think it applies to all versions of Windows.

The above is inaccurate, it is a Windows fault and not just restricted to nVidia cards, it applies to all video cards (you just hear about it more with nVidia cards because there are a lot more of them out there). I have an ATI Radeon 8500 and it needs a 3rd party add on to beat the Windows 60 hz problem.

Most games only run at 60hz, its a known windows issue (fault). Try downloading refreshlock, it will fix the problem for most videocards and is free. http://www.softnews.ro/public/cat/12/1/12-1-12.shtml

I run XP Pro and with both versions (gold and beta) of the demo it always rearranges my desktop icons. I just tried running the gold demo with compatibility mode (Win98/ME) set and it did not rearrange the icons. Give it a try, right click the desktop icon for SC and then click on properties, then the compatibility tab.