Tarquelne

I still don't get that.Awhile ago someone brought up the point that a PBEM, who can easily take a long time on each turn, can "squeeze" the maximum effectivness out of his troops. He's not working as hard over a given amount of time as the TCIPer, sure, but he'll probably be harder to beat than someone taking, for example, 5 min. each turn. If his opponent does the same then, all other things being equal, he _must_ "squeeze" his troops to win. Such maximization requires skill. Not the _same_ skill as useing troops effectively under a time limit, but skill nonetheless. I've seen nothing to indicate that the PBEMer is demonstrating _less_ skill. So, operating under time-pressure is harder than not operating under time-pressure... well, OK... but that doesn't automatically make the TCP/IPer _better_ at the game, just better at taking turns quickly. If you want to assert "TCP/IP players are better at games in which large amounts of time can be spent taking each turn - ie, most TCIP games - than PBEMers who commonly use large amounts of time when taking each turn." I don't think anyone would argue with you, even those who worked thier way all the way to the end of the sentence. But it's a trivial point. The only argument I liked toward "TCIP superiorty" was the one based on how much experience TCIPer gets vrs. the experience of a PBEMer. The arugment is, basically, TCIP games take less time, so TCIP gamers have more experience. That makes sense, though we should say "TCIP gamers will tend to have more experience." I don't know just how all PBEMs play - PBEM games can be almost as fast as TCIP games. However, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't play timed TCIP games or PBEM games: In a timed TCIP game movie-watching time after the first run through is counted against your orders phase, right? But in a PBEM game the player can watch trough the movie as often as the player wants, right? So: A PBEM might be learning much more from each game than a TCIPer, since TCIP games do generally have a time limit. (Even if the timed turned function isn't used, I suspect that most TCIP opponents don't want to have to wait around.) The PBEMer can take more time to really see how CMBO works, and so learns more each game. Overall, I think other factors (a player's inherent "knack" for the game, native intelligence, and desire/ability to learn) overshadow the TCIP/PBEM issue. If there is a difference I doubt it's at all significant.

MG42 speculation: Much of what's been written here makes me think that a highly trained/experienced MGer might be able to take advantage of the very high ROF of the MG42, and minimize it's disadvantages. So for the "best trained army in the world", as _early war_ W. is sometimes characterized, the MG42 (or MG34, of course) might have been a very good choice. Especially if they did use the riflemen to support the MG, and not the other way around. If your squad LMG is more for keeping the enemy's heads down and in the same place the high ROF would often be wasted... A targeted rifle squad isn't going to try to slip into the "gaps" resulting from a ROF of only 600 rpm rather than 1200. But I'm guessing that a highly skilled MG42er could use his weapon's short-but-potent bursts to both suppress and kill. At least, if I were manufacturing MG42s, that's what I'd tell the Army. "You _do_ have the best trained soliders in the world, don't you?" [ August 10, 2002, 11:35 PM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

On ULTRA vrs. agent info: I've read (not that I remember where) that information gained via ULTRA (or other signals work) was almost always better than information gained or leaked. ULTRA was generally more up to date, reflecting what the Germans were really doing or thinking, not what was being planned or considered. Trustworthiness is a big part of judging information quality. The Allies trusted ULTRA far more than they trusted info gathered via spies or leaks: 1) The British had been badly burned by a German counter-intel operation at the opening of the war, and were thus "twice shy" of trusting anything volunteered by a German source. 2) The British knew they had effectively "turned" a bunch of German agents in Britain. (After the war the discovered they probably got 'em all.) The Germans were not anywhere near as successful with counter-intel - that op. refered to above may have been thier biggest success of the war. But the Brits. couldn't know that, and thus had to worry about misinformation and traps. 3) The German Resistance, and many German would-by spies claimed a multitude of contacts very high up in the German Army. This was usually true, but the British understandably found it hard to believe. Overall, ULTRA was just easier, safer, and more reliable than conventional spying.

Mammoth, huh? I'd assumed it wasn't healthy, but didn't know it was that bad. Thanks. I'll go do some reading...

How often did Army artillery officers reach the highest levels of command compared to officers in the Inf., Armor, etc.? I understand it was pretty common among the Allied (or maybe just American or British) forces, due to the importance attached to artillery support and an artilleryman's strong logistics background. (True?)

But do you disagree that'd smallarms quality (or, at least, _percieved_ quality) would have a significant effect on morale? (That's what L. was addressing - morale. I was somewhat puzzled to see "I disagree... casualties...") I'd be very suprised if it didn't. As a rifleman I think I'd be _really_ happy if I believed my squad's rifles and LMG was better than the other guys. I'll probably get killed or harmed by artillery - but there's not a whole lot I can do about that. What I do have a great deal of say in, however, is the exchange of fire with my counterparts in the opposing army. HOTO, I'd also be very surprised if anyone was able to come anywhere near to quanitying the effect. And, swinging back around to something vaugly on topic, and something I've been wondering about: I've read that mortar fire caused more casualties than even the big-gun artillery over the entire run of the war. True? Is so, how much of that came from a platoon's or company's "on map" mortars? W. Allied armies had many co. or lower level mortars, right? Were the Germans missing a trick? (Maybe JasonC will be attracted if a bridge metaphor is used.) Hey! His post appeared _above_ mine as soon as the page re-loaded after I pressed Submit. I'm awesome! [ August 09, 2002, 01:43 AM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

Keep in mind that CMBO scenarios are, statistically speaking, highly unrealistic. Most are "balanced" - each side has a good chance of winning, and I think that was considerably more rare in RL than in CMBO. The turn limit is a big part of creating that balance for many of the scenarios. Also: If, as the ambient sounds imply, you're fighting a small part of a much larger action going on around you, then you can really screw things up by taking to long. It's not just a matter of the enemy getting more troops, or scheduled "phase through" - if you take too long you'll bend the line of battle out of shape. If you're doing well on the attack but run out of time you can assume you take your objectives - but late, and thus get sneered at by your CO, while your opponent is awared a metal for his valient defense. If you're defending and the attacker doesn't quite break you before the time runs out then you get the metal. As a game CMBO isn't just concerned with the simulated historical outcome but judging how well each player performs. Turn limits are a powerful and easy way to gauge player performance - it's not just whether you hold the hill or not, but how long you can hold it.

Sounds like a good unidentified weakness for MD's list. (And I like that it's specific enough to sidestep completely the opertiv/strategic question.) I'd put "innovative early war" strategies as a strength, but "inability to change strategies" (or maybe "orientation") as a weakness. Any other examples of this in other areas? If the Luft. counts as "German Army": The bombing campaigns perhaps? I get the impression that they were worth the effort early on, but later campaigns were either too costly or ill concieved, if not both. While the Allied - toward the end, at least - learned from experience and lauchned more effective attacks. (Of course, having huge air fleets helped.) And if that's true (the part about the Luft.) is this simply another example of same disease effecting the tank corp - the "cult of the offensive" (thank you Jason, for restraining yourself from actually using that phrase. ) Speaking of the Luft.: How about the "Army's" division between Heer, SS, Luft., whatever? How much/often did it impair the force's effectiveness. A weakness or not? I don't remember if this was brought up or not yet, but: Scratch forces. At one point SAiN (the book upon which I'm basing the entirety of my expertise, remember?) mentions the German Army was very good about throwing quickly together scratch forces. True? [ August 08, 2002, 10:43 PM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

I'm too lazy to double click on the demo installer, and certainly too lazy to do a search, but I'm hopeing one of you kind souls will answer this question - hopefully it's a simple one: What targets are avialble when strategic bombing? Can you specifically target facilities for a specific industry? "Strategic resource" locations (like the Polesti oil fields/refineries)? Housing? Sub pens? Wolf's Lair?

I don't know why you seem to be missing the frequent appearance of the word "Mortain" in my posts. I didn't say I don't accept what you've written (other than not-accepting that MORTAIN fits the pattern you've drawn). I just wanted to point out that there were gaps in your argument, and I hoped for further examples, and for you to fill out some of the gaps in your account.... ...which you did. (Reading "rapidly" as "rapidly, and without considering other options.") Just remember "they" is a very vauge word. You do mean "Influencial officers of the W. who weren't in thier position due to Hitler's "cronyism"", right? I know that Hitler's influence on the W. was real, but I think "How would the German Army have fought without Hitler?" to be an interesting question, and one with some usefullness for MD's questions. Sounds like we're drifing back to the "How do we seperate Hitler from the W?" question... ...or maybe not. I'll assume his speriors didn't owe thier position to the rise of the Nazi party, and didn't have Hitler breathing down _thier_ necks in turn.

JasonC: Ok. I'll accept what you say as true. However, you don't specificly address Mortain, which is the only battle I was writing of. My information is that the counter attack at Mortain was very much Hitler's baby. His idea, he freed up the forces, he "sold" the idea to Kluge, who quite possibly gave in with little argument because: a) He knew it'd be useless. (The concieved of battle had parrellels to the German victory at Liege in WWI, and Hitler, we know, was supersiticious. Kluge was already listening for the Gestapo at his door. Also: Frequency matters. For example: You give two examples, if those are the only times it ever happened then I don't think they'd indicate an actual bais in the Army. Also, any SS attack might be of dubious value in establishing the tendency in the Army. You might be right, of course, but it isn't as simple as seeing if a foolish below-OKW attack ever happened. There's a difference between doctrine being "attack with insufficent armor force" and "use your armor to attack." Though the the latter could certainly lead to the former. The question is: Did most of the army officers (or at least, the ones who really mattered) consistently advocate attack with insufficent armored force, and why. Just because it was thier doctrine? [ August 08, 2002, 03:14 PM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

(I don't know about Arracourt, but someone dropped "Six Armies in Normandy" (John Keegan) on my head last week, and it would place Mortain (and Failse) in the "Hitler interfering" catagory. According to Keegan Kluge was considering a limited counter attack to help disengage, but Hitler pressed for a full scale annhiliate the enemy counter attack. (One of the reasons the book offers for Kluge's quick agreement is that the most famous of the bomb plots had exploded not long before, and Kluge's loyalty was being questioned.)) [ August 07, 2002, 11:54 PM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

IMO: Sometimes, sometimes not. First, consider there to be a great big "IIRC" in front of most of my remarks. Re-arming Germany was certainly a major item on Hitler's agenda. However, he to a large extent left the Wehrmacht alone, at least in the early days. There was a low level of Hitler centric cronyism - officers were primarily products of Wehrmacht training, not Nazi indoctronation or Nazi training. The basic theories were developed and backed by others, including a number of Army officers. I think Hitler's main contribution was a great deal of confidence in Army's ability to win an offensive. Early in the war this made him look brilliant. He was, I submit, merely lucky, in that his conception of the German Army _happened_ to fit the current situation. Later on the situation changed, but Hitler's ideas didn't. Welcome to the club. We shouldn't let it slow us down! Only with great care, I think. Focus attention on officers who probably would have held thier position without Hitler, and how they conducted operations that, as far as we know, didn't incorporate advice from Hitler. (Rommell in NA? I know Hitler yammered at him alot, but I seem to remember that R. went his own way pretty often.) If Hitler alone (or nearly alone) was responsibile for such "pushing" then that's fine. We can then conclude that the early Wehrmacht wasn't as aggressive as Hitler. (Who was?) Hopefully a grog will come along and feed us the info on the W's plans to invade France, the LCs, Poland and Russia. The Army had plans to invade all of those, I beleive, except maybe Russia. For MD's questions, I don't think we do, since we're not trying to compare the effectivness of the two armies. How "tough" the situation the Army faced at any given time matters, but I don't think it matters why the Soviets were in a good or bad position. Remember, MD's trying to judge not Germany, or the USSR, but only the German Army. If you just want to look at the overall effectivness, the results, then all the contributing factors don't matter. MD seems to want to look more closely than that, however. If a poor officer issues some bad orders to his riflemen and the men lose a battle the group involved certainly wasn't effective. But if you want to judge the effectivness of just the riflemen then you should discount the effect of the officer's orders as much as possible. Likewise, since Hitler wasn't a product of the Army it's usefull to try to discover when he caused the Army to do something, and when the Army did it independant of Hitler. Sure, in the same way one might argue that the existance of so many Panzer Divisions is to Hitler's credit, not the Army, because without Hitler's backing Guderian's ideas wouldn't have been realized. Yeah, I agree. At least for us. I'm sure we havn't read all there is avialble on the issue. Taking a slightly different tack, I wonder if we could compare the W-SS with the W to get some insight on Nazi or Hitleresque tactics vrs. W. tactics. I agree with that for the most part... though the long term planning was very often completely out of the army's hands. Hitler (don't forget that blanket "IIRC") made a point of keeping most of his generals uninformed about the Big Picture. That was supposed to be very much belong to him. I think it'd be more accurate to give "Germany" as a whole the A for effort and the D for long range planning. Though I'd give it an "F". Too much "magical thinking" about Russia and the US. (Here's hopeing this helps put the thread back on topic more than it causes digression. Ah, it probably doesn't, sorry MD.) [ August 07, 2002, 07:41 PM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

I opened the topic because I wondered how such a simple question could generate so many posts. Now I know.

Maybe it'd help to list the weaknesses. I only know the obvious ones: "The Russians have 500 divisions, we don't. The Russians have many American trucks, we don't. The Russians have thick winter coats, we don't. We have socks." Hmm... one weakness was certainly Hitler. Several officers recognized this, and there were attempts to "rectify" the weakness. Engima - certainly a weakness they didn't know about. I guess that really just goes under "Intelligence", which has already been discussed. I don't know what they did about it, though. If Russian intelligence relied on partisans then the anti-partisan operations would be a move to rectify the weakness. The fact that most of the citizens in the area occupied hated their guts didn't help at all. Did the Army do anything to, ah, soothe the Russian people? This could easily be something they couldn't have done anything about. "Hello, madame, I'm Major Siekel. Funny weather yesterday, wasn't it? Heh." "Good afternoon, Major. I wouldn't know. The SS shot my family and I spent the whole day in church." I've read that at least one Heer officer wrote that he believed increasing the severity/number of anti-partisan operations did more harm than good - could easily have been the only one, though. Where did anti-partisan operations originate? With the Army, or another (probably Nazi) body? I'd really like to hear of some unrecognized weaknesses.

1) I'd thought this was mentioned, but I didn't find anything when I looked through the thread to get the details... so: IIRC, the German army made much more of an effort than the other major armies of sending wounded back to their home unit (this is after the wounded are feeling better, you understand), and also of drawing replacements from a formation's "home" area. Speaking of home areas, I wonder if there's anyone here interested in the GD? Question: Did the German army make the most of rebuilding broken formations around a "cadre" of experienced soldiers? IIRC, the German army was known for this, but I'm not at all certain I'm remembering correctly. 2) I believe we should be carefull about thinking of France, Poland, the BEF or the Low Countries as "weak." In 1939-40 I know that many thought France, at least, was quite strong. That the Germans used a method of defeating it's early foes so very, very quickly is something that should be seen as an example of the Army's great skill*, not it's enemies' frailty. It's easy to look back and see that the LC's great fortresses, for example, weren't really usefull in "20th century warfare", but it was the German army that figured it out and demonstrated it. (Arguably in 2 wars, come to think of it.) A suggestion: 3) Please keep in mind that the topic's questions are about the German Army, not Germany in general. In some posts I havn't been able to tell if the author was really speaking just about the performance of the Army, or about the combination of the Army and Hitler (he exerted a huge amount of control and influence over the army, but I wouldn't consider him "of" the Army) or other unpleasent strategic realities outside the Army's control. (Did the Heer have a pre-Hitler (but post Pz Division) plan for an invasion of Russia? If so, what was it like? Hopeing it wasn't similar to Hitlers...)

I think it's more accurate to say "Computer games will always be one _part_ of real life." It's not like online gameing (or offline gaming) is some dreamland that we go to only when we sleep and is not connected to anyone else, or the rest of our lives. Unless you're a hermit (as I imagine many CM players to be) the way you spend your time can easily effect other people, for good or ill. It doesn't matter whether you're playing soccer or CM, or working on the cure for cancer. I think the advice on being upfront about the demands on your time excellent. Even if it's a computer game CM is still something you Really Do, and so its part of your Real Life, and requires Real Time. You really are telepathic, MD? As far as I can tell, JonS simply didn't address that point. The passage you quoted was not at all about Grisha's perceptions, but yours. It's easy to intrepret your statement as an very strong claim that Fionn did indeed act in the manner that Treeburst stated. And he does address "the point" in the rest of his message. I think JonS simply tried to confirm that you want to stand behind Treeburst's claim without qualification, or if you seemed so "matter of fact" about what happened merely because the accusation itself is a matter of fact. [ August 05, 2002, 11:21 AM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

I just came across a picture of about a dozen men near a mortar. About half are standing right next to it, about half are ten or so feet away. One of the men is doing something with the mortar, and everyone else is holding hands over ears.

You're running out of cork hats? They talk to you? BTW, I suggest you add an explanatory statement to the _other_ topic. And, perhaps, change the origional post to something like "I am a moron." [ July 26, 2002, 12:50 AM: Message edited by: Tarqulene ]

We should ignore any posts made by Mr. Spkr and those of his ilk between the release of CMBB and whenever they actually get their hands on a copy. I don't expect to see any posts in that period. However, if one of them escapes his restraints we shouldn't hold thier mad ravings against 'em.

We should ignore any posts made by Mr. Spkr and those of his ilk between the release of CMBB and whenever they actually get their hands on a copy. I don't expect to see any posts in that period. However, if one of them escapes his restraints we shouldn't hold thier mad ravings against 'em.

In case you haven't seen it: There's a thread that discusses how a scenario can be designed to help the AI attack. Or maybe it was just a tip on flag placement. Try another search, if you wish.

Then it's all YOUR fault, whiner. I don't suppose there's a Panther you didn't notice behind them? Unless someone is using psionic powers - which is unlikely, as I know it isn't me, and the rest of you are dim bulbs - or you've found a previously undiscovered bug (also somewhat unlikely) there's got to be a "logical", but not necessarily smart, reason for the unit's behavior. Look at the terrain again and your orders, or send me the saved game file. If you wish, I'll pretend to have figured it out but not be willing to tell you. This way you don't have to worry about it being a bug or psionics. Don't underestimate peace of mind.

Because you send them to me. I thought you were doing it on purpose. ? I'll probably be out of town for a few days, btw. Your e-mails will be forwarded, but I won't get a chance to read them, most likely. I have your cat.

Bumper to bumper next to each other? Other units around? They might be trying to get out of each others way. Esp. if one decided that it needed to back up a bit. Think about what happens when you have a group of units all trying to use the save pavement during road movement. This, btw, also happens in Operation Flashpoint. I just got the game, trying out the second mission, and get run over and crushed by a Patton tank, I think. (I wasn't able to get a look at it's liscence plate.)