Shosties

I would warn you against geting overly fixated on the town itself. There is the chance, if he's not as much of a "fool" as you think he is , that he will defend the town with a small force: perhaps with squads split into teams to make it look larger, maybe with some flamethrower teams in second row buildings to make for a HOT reception! :cool: This will allow him to form a mobile reserve group or two to station in cover some distance away from the town. With these he can counterattack you in the flanks or rear if all your attack columns are directed at, or are in, the town itself. This is not a pleasant experience, just ask a German Stalingrad veteran, that is if you can find one! Since it's a big map with a small town, it might pay to throw two attack columns wide about the town, cut it off from reinforcement, reorganize your forces and consolidate gains, scout out the places a reserve might be hiding, and THEN when you feel secure, commiting yourself to the assault. While you're securing your hold on the surrounding country and assembling the assault force to take the town, you can use this time to give the defenders there a taste of your arty. Hopefully you'll have plenty of turns in your battle to be so deliberate. [ July 24, 2002, 08:06 PM: Message edited by: Shosties4th ]

Isn't this a rather small battle to have a purely diversionary component? Wouldn't it be wiser to divide your force into N+1 packages, where N is the number of promising approach routes to the village. The last package, your reserve, is the strongest one, and it is committed once the most favorable route has been determined through making contact with the defense, reinforcing success rather than failure. The force packages that are sent up the less favorable routes act as your diversion, helping to tie your defender down. Basically, you stay flexible, not commiting to routes being either diversionary or a focus of effort from the very beginning.

There is some good debate generated in this thread regarding the relative cost of the Tiger vs. the Panther and the effectiveness of the American 76mm gun, but I think it drops short of addressing a fundamental question: just how effective was the M4 and it's variants for their time and place? Here are some "sub-questions" that I think should be addressed before tackling the grand 64 dollar question above... 1) Tigers were encountered in Tunisa, Sicily, and Italy, and Panthers as well in Italy before we landed in Normandy. I am not aware of there being an outcry from the field (from Americans at least) regarding any great inferiority of the early model M4(75) under these conditions. Was this a case of: going up against the buggy early production models? going up against them in too small numbers for their advantages to make any impact on Allied numerical superiority? Were the Tigers and Panthers mostly encountered by the British, who did route complaints up the chain-of-command which were to result in the Firefly upgrade? Were the American tankers that fought these earlier battles more proficient and able to play to the strengths of the M4? 2)While there appears to be some disagrement over the effectiveness of the 76mm gun, I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever that the 17-lber was the superior weapon. Why did we turn down offers to license build the 17-lber here in America? Was it a case of "not invented here"-syndrome or was the 76mm already "in the pipeline" in a big way(having been intended for the one TD the TD command really wanted: the M18) and as such, was considered to be too much of a diversion of production and logistical effort? and finally (whew!)... 3) Was the general sentiment later in the war by American tankers that, barring giving them the Pershing immediately in large numbers, the best thing would be: first, a better gun for the M4 than the 76mm (i.e. 90mm or 17-lber), and only second more armor? I think these are important questions to consider, and not just from a purely historical standpoint. If the Future Combat System comes to be, the U.S. Army will be going *back* to a AFV more like the old M4 than today's M1 Abrams, which clearly leans towards the model set forward by the "Ueberkatzen" (though with much improved tactical mobility at the price of even greater fuel consumption!). If our collective memory is overly harsh on the ole M4, then I can see that the FCS may not necessarily be the disaster some heavy MBT partisans are predicting it will be, providing they don't skimp on its firepower. Given it's combat weight of ~20 tons (as set out by the systems integrator, Boeing) all the technology they could possibily develop in time for it will not prevent them from skimping on protection in my opinion.

And I didn't even intend upon a double entendre on that quote from the series!!!

Why am I suddenly thinking of Sharpe's Rifles??? "Men are dirty, sir. Rifles are clean." I can see it now... Combat Mission:Peninsular Campaign, with the inevitable Sharpe's mods (including rather fetching Spanish partisans in low-cut bodices)

willbell, No problem. My thinking was that the dispersed nature of combat, the greater variety of arms, and more intricate tactics in WW2 placed a greater burden on the decision making ability of officers at the lower levels than in the past. I can see where you are coming from though, better communications offsets dispersion and greater mission complexity to a greater or lesser extent. Certainly, light infantry and cavalry in the pre-radio days were absolutely dependent upon the skills of the junior officer on the scene. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why many armies were reluctant for their importance to expand relative to the heavy, set piece, forces until Boney came along? I'd read that it was due to the aura of "uncivilized" fighting of small units dashing about taking advantage of cover, raiding, and such, as no one wanted a repeat of the Thirty Years War. Since light infantry gains in importance with the Napoleonic Wars, then I can see a strong case for your way of looking at it.

Thanks Sgt_Kelly, Michael, and Ozzy! Those are all excellent suggestions. I guess it pays to at least give each unit a moments thought as you work your way through your OOB (right to left, left to right, or from Gefechtsstreifen to Gefechtsstreifen [thanks for that compound word, Ozzy]) even if it's just waiting out that turn. Time to trot out the sig for it's premiere. Thumbs up or thumbs down? I think it is a classic!

Actually I do something of the sort you're suggesting now, willbell, along the lines of a (mini)task force concept, though probably not as sophisticated and as well executed. Yeah, you got what I was driving at. The complexity of the mission orders you could give to a particular officer under your command would depend upon his experience level and abilities. I'm curious, why do you think such an approach would be especially suited to a Napoleonic wargame? redwolf, thanks for this heads up, I'll check it out!

This is certainly the case! What I was proposing in the second portion of my original post would be a somewhat *different* game than CMBO with a more mission-orders approach ("Lt. So-So, I want you to take this village in a flanking movement") than "click-on-squad-to-go-to-this-bush" approach which is what I mean by "micromanaging" and being God-like or a puppeteer. I'm not being very clear. How's this? It's the effort to really give such detailed instructions that ensure good results (for that unit) that I think makes me tend to confine my focus to a select few units for each turn, which is not a good habit certainly, and which I want to break. Really every other wargame I know of makes you a supreme micromanager, the RICHNESS of CMBO is what makes this pop out at me so much. Maybe I should go back and just delete the last portion of that post as it really has nothing to do with Combat Mission proper! Sorry for muddying the waters! Redwolf, Amen! Timing is crucial! And such a order along those lines (advance so as to make LOS to this point) would be indeed be a help and I can imagine using it quite a bit. Indeed, it's opposite would be useful too (reverse until you break LOS with this point).

Sarge, I guess your recommendation boils down to playing larger games to force the issue! I may just be in too much of a hurry to end the orders phase so I can see the movie! I think I may also be overfocusing selectively on my armor because I am less familiar with infantry tactics. The richness of the game is such that playing it without rushing onesself takes longer than 2D hex games with the same number of separate units. Maybe I should just give myself a limit of number of turns played in a evening so I take things at a more leasurely pace. To clarify my first question, I am wondering how people go about playing this game such that they don't end up focusing too much attention on a select group of units where the action is fiercest to the detriment of the conduct of the whole battle. The second part of my post goes off on a tangent that came to my mind as I thinking about this problem of mine. Wouldn't it be just "simpler" to give broad outlines to units and let some sort of AI make the detailed decissions on which shrub to hind behind, what to shoot, etc. rather than have to play a God-like puppeteer to the whole force? I've seen some on this board complain that "sometimes my units don't do exactly what I order them!" To that sentiment I say, isn't that closer to real battle? Sorry if I'm being confusing, but then Niels Bohr once said "never speak more clearly than you can think"! [Off topic digression] Oh yeah, Sarge, you guessed correctly on my handle. I am aware of the circumstances surrounding the writing of his 7th. The 4th is an interesting piece that is not recorded as often, and is really impossible for me to describe now how it goes, I need to get more familiar with it. The unconventionl nature of the 4th and his opera, Lady MacBeth of Mtsenk District landed Dimitri in hot water with the Party. It is said Stalin himself suggested the headline "Muddle Instead of Music" for the scathing review printed in Pravda. The more classically heroic 5th was intended as his rehabilitation work, which suceeded wildly although you can't help but wonder how much irony there is behind it. A controversial biography of Shostakovich (Volkov's "Testament") has him remarking privately about the finale of the 5th: (paraphrasing roughly) "it is clapping and cheering at gun point, then being told to go home and be happy, or else." Lemme guess, your handle is a refernce to that old TV-series "Combat!", with Vic Morrow starring as Sgt. Saunders. [ July 21, 2002, 12:48 AM: Message edited by: Shosties4th ]

I often find my attention in any given orders phase tends to concentrate on wherever the "key action" is going on, and I end up underutilizing other forces. I'm wondering what tricks other people use to stay away from overfocus and stay patient and stick to their plan (unless they make a deliberate decision to alter it on the fly). Thinking about this made me realize just how strange it is to micromanage troops like we do in this game compared to what a commander above platoon level actually does in reality. I think it would neat variation on this type of game if you could role game/simulate what it would actually be like to be the officer-in-charge at an engagement, with limited knowledge of what was going on, issuing orders that may not be followed exactly or even correctly, being dependent upon those one step down on the chain of command, and answering to those a step up. Such a game would be less vulnerable to issues cropping up from "Borg spotting" and gamey tactics (units, particularly Americans , say, could outright refuse to follow suicidal orders that actually would work out or give some advantages due to the game mechanics). Just wondering what your thoughts on this would be, or if there might actually be a game like this out there.

In my opinion this a often stated sentiment that needs to be somewhat "conditioned" by a closer look at the state of the British and French armies in 1940. The British regulars (in the BEF, home, and abroad in "The Empire") were to my understanding completely motorized, unlike the bulk of the German army. The French 7th Army on the extreme left flank, adjacent to the BEF, was indended for a war of manuever, and the armored divisions kept in reserve possessed tanks like the Somua and Char B1 that outclassed every panzer available at the time. Unfortuantely, the supreme commander holed himself up in a chataeu near Paris to be close to his political supporters (as Raynaud was trying to have him dismissed) that lacked radio communication to the front! Many opportunities to react against the breakouts were lost by poor communications between the supreme command and the various armies, by shear bad luck (Biot dying in a car crash), and by outdated and bad generalship (Huntzinger's withdrawl widening Guderian's breach and his dismantling of a armored division to disperse amongst his infantry). The Allies were looking to fight a "modern" mechanized war in northern France, Belgium, and (on a contigency basis) Holland, but in their doctrine, training, and coordination they were outclassed. Ironically, a key here may have been Hitler's political support of Guderian and the panzer arm against some conservatism in the OKH. And then his chance happening upon Manstein at a field excerise, after his "sickle stroke" met with little favor from Brauchitsch. Many little historical accidents come together in an interesting (but tragic) fashion in 1939 and 1940.

PiggDogg, Thanks for taking a stab at what is probably a overly general question to ask and expect a clear and concise answer. Basically, what I've been wondering is what a leading element of a armored division's combat command from late '44 and early '45 would look like in composition, and wether it would generally be given the Task Force moniker. It would be interesting to see how the tank platoons mixed and matched the various models of M4 (or didn't?) and if they brought along some TDs. Again, thanks.

It's been a while since I cracked open a good book that would cover these topics, so I'll ask if anyone can clarify the use of these terms and what they represent in the way of forces... here goes... Combat Command <letter> [A,B,R (R = Reserve?)] <number> Regimental Combat Team Task Force <lastname of OIC>

Something to keep in mind: if your leading squads/teams are SNEAKing through woods, the MMGs and light mortars following them in the woods on MOVE are actually going to overtake them rather quickly! I was rather suprised to discover this, so it pays to enforce peroidic pauses lest your mortarmen and machineguners accidently become your point! (DOH!!)

As far as the possibilities of suprise being limited to the number of bridges and fords in the scenario: what about the attacker bringing up boats or amphibious vehicles (gotta love DUKWs BTW!) and going for a lightly or undefended unfordable section of the river? It may not pay to make the amphib crossing a main effort due to the time and effort involved in comparison to the number of troops you can get across, but it could bring a true element of suprise back into the game. Has anyone tried this approach? (EDIT) OK, I goofed, DUKW isn't in CMBO (it IS in West Front; try out the "Get a Bridge" scenario if you have it, you'll wish you had more of them!). Can the assault boat be towed or ported by truck or does it always start the game deployed on water? [ July 13, 2002, 11:06 AM: Message edited by: Shosties4th ]